PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — A private delegation to North Korea that includes Google’s executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, is urging North Korea to allow more open Internet access and cellphones, although it is unclear how that message is being heard by a leadership that has long depended on a near-total ban on outside information to maintain its totalitarian rule.
Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor leading the delegation, said Wednesday in an interview in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, that his nine-member group had also called on North Korea to put a moratorium on missile launchings and nuclear tests that have prompted United Nations sanctions.
He said the group had also asked for “fair and humane treatment” for Kenneth Bae, a naturalized American citizen born in South Korea who was detained by the North in November and charged with unspecified “hostile acts.”
The delegation’s visit has been criticized as appearing to hijack United States diplomacy and bolster North Korea’s profile after its latest, widely condemned rocket launching less than a month ago.
The State Department characterized the trip as unhelpful at a time when the United States is rallying support for sanctions by the United Nations Security Council as a response to the launching.
North Korea has shown no inclination to back off its nuclear program or to stop the launchings that it depicts as needed to send satellites into orbit, but that Western countries believe are tests for technology to create missiles that could eventually be used to deliver nuclear weapons.
Mr. Schmidt is the highest-profile American business executive to visit North Korea since Kim Jong-un took power a year ago. A vocal proponent of Internet freedom and openness, Mr. Schmidt has not said publicly what he hopes to get out of the visit. On Wednesday, he toured the frigid brick building in central Pyongyang that was presented as the heart of North Korea’s computer industry, at one point briefly donning a pair of 3-D goggles.
Mr. Kim has emphasized the importance of computerizing factories, many of which have fallen into disrepair in the years since the collapse of the former Soviet Union deprived the country of its main provider of technology. But he also has vowed in recent weeks to crack down on the “enemy’s ideological and cultural infiltration,” apparently a reference to the growing flow of information over the border with China.
That flow has been driven in part by North Koreans who sneak into China to bring much-needed food and goods back home, but who also bring back news of the outside world and sometimes DVDs and thumb drives containing banned South Korean dramas.
Mr. Richardson, who has described the delegation as a private humanitarian mission, said the members were bringing a message that more openness would benefit North Korea. Almost no one in the impoverished country owns computers, and even many of the computers that are allowed are not hooked up to the Internet, according to analysts who study the North. They say that even the small number of North Koreans allowed onto the Web — a group said to include party loyalists and computer science students — are severely restricted in what they can access.
On Tuesday, Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Richardson and other delegation members chatted with students who have permission to access the Internet for research at the elite Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang.
On Wednesday, the group toured the main library in Pyongyang, the Grand People’s Study House, where people were crowded into drafty, unheated halls at computers with intranet access to the library’s archive of books, documents and newspapers.
Later, the delegation visited the Korea Computer Center, the hub of North Korea’s efforts to develop software, where a quote from the current leader’s father and predecessor as leader, Kim Jong-il, reads: “Now is the era for science and technology. It is the era of computers.”
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Delegation to North Korea Urges More Access to Internet and Cellphones
