The 3,000-mile exit route from North Korea

The rocket fuel that propelled the Arab uprising? Well most would credit the internet with that.

It worked on two different levels. The citizens of Tunisia and Egypt were able to organise as individuals, make appointments, discuss their grievances – find solidarity and community with others who shared the same beliefs. This happened despite the internal police infrastructure. It was empowering stuff.

It also worked at a group level – as an irrepressible, comparison machine. People in Bahrain and Syria know what is on offer on the outside. They know that people in the west are better off – have more educational opportunities – suffer less from internal policemen and stifling bureaucrats. Most importantly perhaps, they know that we “westerners” can sack our leaders at election time, if we so choose. Surely this is the cornerstone of democracy.

Let’s move to North Korea, run by the elusive Kim Jong-il. He doesn’t say much. In fact most people in North Korea have never heard him mutter a word (pictures of him on television are run mute). But then again, he doesn’t have much to boast about.

This ultra-nationalist, Stalinist paradise is an economic basket case. North Korea can’t feed its own people. Mass starvation has gripped the nation – the worst famine since the early 1990s. The situation intensified by the decision by South Korea and the United States to stop providing food aid (after a series of provocations that included the sinking of a South Korean Navy vessel the Cheonan). Last month, the United Nations warned that 6million people are in desperate need of urgent assistance.

If any country was due for a serious uprising – for a bit of revolutionary fervour – it has got to be North Korea. But North Koreans are not sticking around. What they are doing is leaving the place. Unprecedented numbers are now willing to risk a forbidding 3,000-mile trek south to the Mekong River in Thailand.

In 2004, 46 North Koreans made their way to Thailand. Last year 2,500 made the trip.

In 2004, 46 North Koreans made their way to Thailand. Last year 2,500 made the trip – although one Thai official told me that the number is probably far higher. If they do make it (and the journey is a perilous one), they know the Thais will hand them over to the South Korean government, which will equip them with entry papers, house and feed them and get them started in their new capitalist surrounds.

Why do they make a run for it – instead of agitating from within? This is a question I put to a man who helps North Koreans escape their homeland; a people trafficker in fact, although he preferred the term “broker”.

The answer was simple, he said. Too dangerous to protest at home – and they know how we live on the outside: “(South Korean) church groups smuggle in DVD players with DVDs and CDs. They watch the movies. They see the good life and they want it for their families.”

This is the “comparison machine” in action – old technology yes – but it does the same thing as the internet.

What North Koreans can’t do – because they don’t have the internet (and barely enough electricity to run their DVD players it must be said) is log on and get in touch, bitch and moan and conspire from the seclusion of their own homes. As individuals, North Koreans remain highly isolated.

And changing that, of course, is far beyond the South Korean church groups.