North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Balazs Szalontai: North Korea’s calculated diplomacy in the Middle East

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

This week, Balazs Szalontai returns to the podcast to explore the overlooked history of North Korea’s relationship with countries across the Middle East and North Africa. The expert discusses how Pyongyang navigated ideological contradictions, opportunistic diplomacy and shifting global alliances throughout the Cold War, touching on the DPRK’s ties with Iran, Egypt, Algeria, Iraq and […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private dash feed. Hello, listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jack Oswetsu, and this episode was recorded on Friday, the 11th of April, 2025 here in the NK News podcast studio. And joining me today is a returning guest, Dr. Balazs Chalantai who is a historian and professor at Korea University in the Division of Public Sociology and Korean Unification. He was

last on this podcast all the way back in December 2019, quite a while ago. Today we're going to talk about North Korea's relationship with countries in the Middle East and North Africa. This is a theme we haven't covered before so I think it'll be of great interest to our listeners. And particularly this week, it feels very timely as this is the week that South Korea has normalized relations for the first time with Syria, which had been a staunch ally of North Korea for decades. So welcome back on the show Balazs. Thank you so much for the invitation. So let's start with a rare and strange moment. Twenty years ago, in March 2005, in Pyongyang, the Iranian football team wins a World Cup

qualifying match and the North Korean crowd erupts in a way we almost never see in the DPRK. Water bottles are thrown, there is a pitch invasion, North Korean football fans are visibly angry. What do you make of that event? It seems to be that the North Koreans were extremely frustrated at that time because this was their third defeat in a row and it totally blocked their way to progress further. And then they were angry because a territory who happened to be a Syrian, of all people, did not give up in penalty. And possibly they were influenced by the memory that in two years before 2003, there was a

similar incident in Iran when one North Korean player was injured by a firecracker thrown in by an Iranian player. And then the North Koreans, in a kind of like a sign of protest, they left the pitch to like finish the match here and there. So possibly the North Korean fans also remember that and now they kind of paid back the Iranians. Did you say the firecracker was thrown by an Iranian player? Exactly. The injury was not very serious, but the Iranian authorities tried to do something and they arrested a couple of people in the crowd, but still the North Koreans felt that it was something unacceptable and they wanted to protest against it.

Right. And two years later we had this pitch invasion and violence, almost a small-scale riot, I guess, in March 2005. Do you see this public unrest against Iran, no less, as having any symbolic continuity with the diplomatic ambivalence that existed between North Korea and Iran over the decades? It's very difficult to see because sometimes the way how people react to an event may be very much unrelated to the actual political course at that time, but it may be based on some deeper memory. Like, for example, there was a similar event in China in 1974 in Tianjin when a North Korean team, actually the team of the Minister of Public Security. Oh, the Ministry of Public Security has its own football team. Exactly. And it played internationally against China.

Okay. Yes. So actually, it's Hong Yong-cha who would know it much better than me. But the point is that they had a match in Tianjin against Chinese players and among the local fans, there were a lot of local Koreans, ethnic Koreans from Yanbian and other areas. And so I don't know exactly what was the reason, but again a riot happened. And the Chinese fans were rather radical because they would first beating up the Chinese-Korean fans and then they extended it to the DPRK players who were also beaten up. And the incident degenerated to such an extent that eventually the Chinese leadership had to apologize to North Korea.

And that was at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution period. Now this is an interesting point that apparently in the popular memory, it was much deeper that in the years before, especially in the late 1960s, the relationship was extremely bad. And even though relations did start to improve very much in 1970, and in

1974 was actually rather high level of good cooperation, but apparently people still remember that a few years ago the Koreans were called revisionists and all that and persecuted in the same way like Inner Mongols. So probably this kind of new course of now being friends with North Korea was not enough to make people forget this kind of accumulated dislike for Koreans. All right. Do you see this 1974 incident as having any similarity with the 2005 riot in that it involved violence and ill feeling between two ideological allies? Yeah, quite so.

One case was done by Chinese fans, the other by North Korean fans, but it was remarkably similar. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's broaden the scope a little bit. Let's look at North Korea's relationship with Egypt, Algeria, and the Arab world. So across your work, Balazs, especially the articles that you've written for NKPRO about North Korea's relationship with places like Egypt, Algeria, and other Arab countries, we see a tension emerging between North Korea's image of itself

as a militant anti-imperialist power and the very pragmatic, even cynical choices that it sometimes makes. So to take one example, how did that tension play out in the Sadat era relationship with Egypt? This is exactly a very interesting story because from the perspective of like any kind of serious radical, Sadat was doing exactly the worst thing possible, because he made official peace treaty with Israel, he reoriented foreign policy toward the United States, he declared the Soviet Union as no longer an ally but actually a sort of enemy. So in any possible way he was not fitting into the image of an anti-imperialist policy. But in the very same time when many of the other Arab states

like Syria and Algeria and Libya, they condemned him in the harshest terms possible. And the Soviet bloc also declared that he was doing some sort of very criminal thing in the very period when all these countries, especially of course, the Arab countries started pushing North Korea to declare that Camp David is a very wrong thing. That's referring to the Camp David Accords of September 1978. Exactly, between Egypt and Israel. So during this period, the North Koreans consistently rejected any sort of pushing. In fact, they were being pushed from both sides by Egypt that they should approve it

and by the Syrians and Algerians and Libyans, they should disapprove it. So they kind of very tacitly expressed some sort of approval, but not too explicit. So in the end, they were effectively closer to Egypt than to the others, probably on the ground that Egypt was always some sort of center in the Arab world and they simply did not want to have like take the risk of alienating him because so that was a very furious person whenever anybody like made him angry and the North Koreans could absolutely expect him to throw them out of the country and turn towards South Korea completely. So they decided to be very careful and tiptoeing around.

And when many other radical states would condense Sada, they would still try to cooperate with him as possible. A. Was this a turning point in how Pyongyang approached the question of ideological purity in its foreign relations? When it comes to the Middle East, ideological purity is probably a bit difficult to apply. Probably in the 1950s, when North Korea knew so little about the whole area that it was kind of suspicious of any sort of like unusual attitude. But by the approximately early 1960s, they started developing an attitude that whomever is willing to work with us, we are willing to like ready to work with them. is willing to work with us, we are ready to work with them. So for example, in 1963, there was a coup d'etat in Baghdad, in Iraq, and the previously

rather friendly regime of Khasim was overthrown and killed by the Ba'ath party. And the North Koreans first reacted negatively, but not so aggressively critical like the Soviets. And then after a few months, they toned it down. And a little bit later, they tried to make peace with the Bas on the logic that we should keep a foothold. And then the Bas was overthrown. And then they tried to make peace with the next regime. And then the next regime was overthrown and the bus came back. So each time there is a turn in Baghdad, they do rather intensive efforts to keep on good terms with whomever is in charge now. Right.

Now in northwest Africa, also known as the Maghreb, Algeria received lots of praise from Pyongyang, while Tunisia and Morocco were largely sidelined. Was that because of ideology or were there more strategic factors at play? Curious to hear the rest? Become an NK News subscriber today for access to the full episode. Head to nknews.org slash join for more information. If you're already a subscriber to NK News, you can listen to full episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast Feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org

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