North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Jerome Sauvage on North Korea’s crises, contradictions and quiet moments

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Former U.N. official Jerome Sauvage joins this week’s podcast to discuss his new book, Witness to North Korea: Three Years on the Ground in the DPRK, which recounts his posting in Pyongyang from late 2009 to early 2013. He explains why he accepted one of the U.N.’s most difficult assignments and what it took to […]

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Early-Byr tickets are now open with discount for NK Pro and NK News members. Space is limited to just 80 paying guests, so claim your seat. claim your seat soon. Hello listeners and welcome back to the NK News podcast. Most accounts of North Korea are written from the outside, but from late 2009 to early 2013, Jerome Savage lived in Pyongyang as the United Nations resident coordinator and the head of the United Nations Development Program, or UNDP.

He arrived to reopen an office that had closed amid controversy and ended up witnessing a failed currency reform, the thinking of the Chunan, the shelling of Yampong Island and the death of Kim Jong-il. His new book, Witness to North Korea, three years on the ground in the DPRK, is part memoir and part account of what international engagement actually looks like inside one of the world's most restricted countries.

Jerome Savage joins me today July 29th from New York. Jerome, thank you so much for your time and welcome back to the NK News podcast. Thanks very much for having me, Alana. Before we get to Pyongyang, I want to begin with why you went there at all. So you write in your new book that near the end of your previous assignment in India that you had begun questioning whether the UN was really making a difference. And then North Korea offered you a posting where the international community was clearly needed, but where achieving anything would be extraordinarily difficult.

Jerome, what made you say yes? Two reasons. One, I was always a bit of a student of Asian communist authoritarian regimes. I spent two years with my wife Carolyn in Vietnam, eight years after the Vietnam War, when Vietnam was still a fully closed country. And also Carolyn and I spent a lot of time in China. Carolyn actually spent time in China just after Mao's death. So we've really had a perspective. So why not complete the trifecta and do the DPRA? That was one. So we had an interest in those Northeast Asian socialist countries. The second reason was that, indeed, I've always felt that UNDP, the United Nations,

is best in those countries where the big players are not there. the World Banks, the Asian Development Banks, IMF and USAID, the big ones, and where we can really play a role that is not necessarily commensurate with our size, but more with the nature of our mandate. Jerome, your description of arising in Pyongyang, it feels almost cinematic. And I want to give our listeners a little taste because you write about the man sitting beside you on the plane to Pyongyang carefully pinning a Kim Il-sung badge onto his lapel and officials confiscating your iPhone,

you wonder whether a mirror is two-way, and then you're collected in a surprisingly luxurious Audi. Do you remember a specific moment during those very first few hours when you arrived, when you thought, what exactly have I signed up for here? Actually, it's a very good question because I did. clearly the DPRK was not the Vietnam I had left earlier or the China I had left two hours before.

It was a whole different country. And what I thought was going to happen, my expectations were immediately put aside and I had to be ready for a very different place. So yes, for a minute I did wonder what was it doing, What had I done? And what were your first impressions of Pyongyang? As I described in my book, Pianang is an interesting city

because it was back then already the beginning of a fairly nice downtown with the tall buildings and modern streets. And for a minute, I thought, oh, we're having a modern city. But because I have lived abroad quite a bit, I've learned to look behind. And as I described in my book, I was a little. I was struck by how much, how few people were walking the streets, I don't know, sitting at cafes, entering stores, the kind of everyday life that we're used to when you enter a city and you get a first impression, people doing stuff. That was not really the case. And it was kind of a facade.

And that sensation of a facade has never really left me. And so that's, that was the first impression when I arrived in Pyongyang. And you were not arriving to a functioning office. You had been sent to basically rebuild the UNDP's presence after it had suspended its operations in 2007 amid allegations involving financial controls and North Korean misuse of its banking channels. For listeners who may not remember that controversy, what had happened before your arrival?

So UNDP decided to close its office in 2007. because it has having difficulties going to the bottom of exactly what had happened and under intense pressure from the United States government, which claimed more than what really happened. But it is true that in this opaque environment, there were allegations of transfer of funds using UNDP accounts to circumvene the sanctions. And as a result, those and some of those funds went to companies in Macau and elsewhere,

which later on were established having been involved in acquiring weapon systems. So it all was construction, perhaps, but your NDP needed to take the time to go to the bottom of it. And it did. But as a result, for that, they just preferred for two years. They did close the office. And the reopening was under much stricter control systems. them. And because of that, Jerome, how much suspicion did you face from both sides, from North Korean officials who probably resented the closure and then also from maybe governments, donor governments

that had concerns the UNDP might again lose control of its operations? That's a very good question. There was an agreement that we would reopen the office. The North Korean side was informed that there would be different modalities of operation. But They said, yes, come in. That doesn't mean that they were agreeing with it. They did not agree with the closing of the office. They certainly did not. So on the side of the North Koreans, there was plenty of suspicion, and they wanted to resume the program quickly.

And they wanted to resume the program as it was before. And unfortunately, we could not quite do it as it was before. And on the donor side, especially the U.S., but also other countries, Japan, etc., We had to demonstrate that we could keep control and good monitoring of our operations in the country. You've just mentioned how the North Koreans wanted to resume the program quickly and as it was before, because in your book you said almost immediately one of your North Korean counterparts handed you this long list of suspended projects, demanded they all restart, even though several had been excluded under these new rules. And I think that seems to establish one of the book's central tensions.

that you had to build a cooperative relationship with the government while also proving that you were willing to and that you could say no in some cases. How did you learn to compromise and when to hold the line? It took me some time. The first six months were a little hard, to be honest. The North Korean government side really wanted to show results and they wanted them quickly.

But we had to rewrite the projects, totally rethink the approach. We had to hire new people, et cetera. So they were pushing hard. How did I do it? It's all about staying firm, holding your line, being very clear, and at the same time, finding a way to gain the trust of your counterpart, to gain the trust of some credibility. And the credibility, you gain it day after day by partly by being there, being present,

doing what you can, developing the projects. and doing the work that needs to be done. And eventually your credibility, when you have a bit of enough of a capital, you use it. And you say, okay, guys, we need to really work together, or I can leave if you want. But it's this, you've got to build trust. You've got to gain your credibility. And for that, you have to be careful not to say yes too easily. I don't want to give away too much of your book or spoil anything,

but I do want to ask you about your tenter party, who you just mentioned, Mr. Song, who you describe, as something of a nemesis in the book. Would you say that he ever came to respect you, even if maybe he didn't particularly like you? Is that fair to say? I make a bit of a generalisation when I say that in the North Korean government,

we had two type of people, some people who were more felt like they were more worried about the political orthodoxy and the other ones who I felt were more oriented towards competency and results. and really the goal of development. And this interlocutor, whose name is, of course, invented, it's not his real name.

None of the names are the real name. But whatever. He was, I felt, very much the orthodoxy. And he wanted to, whatever, gain whatever I felt, obtain whatever gain from us that didn't have anything to do with projects and with development or humanitarian aid. So, yes, he was of that category. We had not an easy time.

Eventually, he left. He actually didn't say goodbye. He just left one day and he moved abroad. That was a good thing, maybe in the middle of my term. Before you even had the chance to fully reopen the office, North Korea launched its disastrous currency redenomination in November 2009. People rushed to buy anything that might preserve value stores closed and even some of the North Korean officials around you

appeared quite anxious about obtaining food. Jerome, what was it like to watch that unfold from inside the country? It was very interesting. It was literally our first months, and we had to buy items for an apartment that had been closed for two and a half years. There was nothing in there, so we need to buy stuff.

And the redenomination, overnight, if you held 1001, overnight, you ended up having the value was 1-1. So people who had money were rushing to get whatever goods they could to put value for the value to keep. It could be oil, it could be food, it could be spare parts, whatever you had to buy stuff. So the stores very unclear about the way the redenomination was going on shut down. So you had these big padlocks on the doors. And we noticed, as we were trying to find stores that were open for us to also get our stuff,

people with faces are very unhappy. Not the, I haven't seen any riot or anything like this, but people who had some money, some cash, were very unhappy. And finally, yes, it is true that one person in my office asked me to buy bread. That's how bad it was. They just for people to get access. We, as I say in the book, I described how we were able to buy food for ourselves. And finally, in the last, not buy food, we were going to a restaurant.

That was the last one that was open in the diplomatic compound. But for a while, we were wondering how things were going to go. It lasted perhaps a week, not more than that. But it was a shocker to me. And the message was very clear from the regime. You think you're making money through marketization and monetization. Beware, overnight. It can all disappear.

What did the government's partial reversal of that reform teach you about both the reach and the limits of state power? Exactly. The redenomination was not very successful, apparently, and people were unhappy. In the end, the government admitted that they needed the markets, that they could not, and it was official by then, after that it became official from the government that markets had to somehow exist.

And it was interesting to see that, yes, the regime, even that particular regime needed to pay attention to the reaction of their, I would not call them constituents, but of the population. Jerome, I want to ask you a little bit more about your time outside Pyongyang, because once you began traveling outside the capital, you encountered a very different North Korea,

the failing infrastructure, outdated machinery roads that were being repaired by hand and communities with little reliable electricity. But the officials that you are being accompanied by continue to defend the system and resist comparisons to other poorer countries. With access tightly controlled and candid conversation potentially quite dangerous for North Koreans, how did you learn to interpret what you were both hearing and of course seeing. Yes, indeed. When you go to the DPRK, you really have to be very observant and not believe what's right in front of you, but look behind. When you have a conversation, you have to be very, you have to listen very carefully because it's not going to be

a long one. It's going to be very short. It's going to be a few words here and there. My conversations are all reconstituted, of course, 10 years later from what I remember, people told me. But there are the words that are being said. I met people in the provinces, in the district, in the rees, who were, first of all, committed to making the community work. They were the vice chair of a committee of the district, and their job was to try to see how people's life could improve and deal with the folks from Pyongyang or from the nearby provincial capital. But their job was, at the end of the day, was to make things work for themselves and for

their community. That was very interesting. Well, that gap between the official narrative and the conditions that you are observing, it becomes especially important in your discussion about food insecurity. And I think that it's one of the book's most striking themes, that hunger in North Korea was not simply the product of a single bad harvest. You describe a chronic emergency created by weak agriculture, limited imports, inadequate healthcare and government policy.

And you also had access to census data and food security assessments, cooperative farms and the public distribution system. What did that evidence tell you about how ordinary North Koreans were surviving? Yeah, the numbers at the time, the UN was able to put out quality data. which is no longer available, unfortunately now, because there is no presence in North Korea. And the numbers spoke clearly of malnutrition throughout the population. So you have but 16 million of the 24 million North Koreans

depend on the public distribution system. Indeed, agriculture is still stuck in a very productive mode, but there is no tractors. So how does that go? So it is a chronic, chronically deficient agriculture. And for one thing, 80% of the land is mountains. So already to begin with, a bit like Japan, if you want to be more self-sufficient, you're going to have to import food, which they cannot really do.

So you have these chronic factors which make North Korean agriculture essentially not able to cover the needs of the population. And that's not about to change. Jerome, you've briefly touched on this earlier in our conversation. But by that point, how important had markets and private kitchen gardens become compared with that official distribution system? Yeah, I was doing what Haggard calls marketization of the economy. And the various directives of the government at the time admitted the existence.

of those private markets, kitchen gardens. They would even, I remember one directive that allowed workers to leave their work sites and go in the hills to forage for food. So there was a real recognition that they could not allow a return to the famine. The famine of the 1990s was etched into the memory of the persons who had experienced

it not that long ago, 30 years ago, even. And they will not let that happen again, really believe it. And so they did what they had to do. And for that, allow the presence of markets, allow the presence of kitchen garden. Having said that, it was all very hush, hush. And the rules of the game for selling or barter were always changing. I don't know much about how it worked, but I know that people were very careful. very nervous when they were engaging into any kind of commerce.

Let's turn now to the military crises you witnessed during the time in North Korea. When the South Korean warship, Chenan sank in March 2010, killing 46 sailors, you first heard about it through foreign news while life around you in Pyongyang continued almost normally. Just a quick reminder for our listeners, an investigation later concluded that a North Korean torpedo had caused that sinking. This was a finding, of course, that Chongyang denied. Later that year, North Korea shelled Yomchang Island, killing two Marines and two civilians.

What was it like to be living inside North Korea as these attacks dominated headlines outside the country? Yeah, it was a little odd. First, indeed, because you don't hear about it first. You heard from outside. We have the internet. We had good access to radio. We knew quickly what was having.

happening around the world. You certainly understand, or maybe it's too big of a word, but you certainly can imagine the North Korean point of view when you feel you're in the middle and they've just had this military incident and you're wondering whether there's going to be some kind of retaliation and you happen to be in the city. So it could be a little odd feeling about it. The second, And of course, the second thing is that you are really realizing the impact of the international situation on your work, more than in any other country in the world. Something happens with the Chionan, something happened on Yongping Island or whatever, and immediately you hear that there are funding issues, immediately you hear that the sanctions

might be strengthened, et cetera, et cetera. it's as if you were constantly subject yourself to the vagaries of international politics. And that is a little rattling. You wonder when are you going to be able to have a steady work plan and work program, whereas it's constantly being shattered, if you will, by the bigger consideration of international considerations of international politics. On that note, just how quickly did those political tensions begin to affect the humanitarian programs and the people receiving assistance?

Yeah, you're constantly seeking funding and regularly agencies would hear from one donor or another that they could not fund a program that they were interested in. So the response was not within a week or two, but it really happened very fast that you would tell by your headquarters, okay, calm down a little bit and wait because you're going to have to wait for the situation. to settle and we have to move past this.

It was rather direct. Your book is, it's not all diplomatic confrontation and humanitarian statistics. There are dinners, there are bird watching walks, there are ping pong games and family trips and a really memorable meal where your host explained the medicinal properties of almost everything that's on the table. And you've mentioned your wife, Carolyn, who was so much more than an accompanying spouse. She helped to build relationships. She supported deliveries.

She appears throughout the story as someone with her own perspective on the country. And she also took some incredible photos that appear throughout the book. Between the political crises and the difficult negotiations, what did ordinary lives look like for the both of you? At the beginning, we had to set up another apartment. When you have an international career, setting up an apartment is fairly normal in the post when you arrive. but this was exceptionally a bit more difficult.

We were, our house was on the compound. We did not get on one day. We never got at the same time water, electricity, or heat. It was one or the other. And so you have to adjust to make sure that the buckets are filled, take your shower when there is water, that kind of a daily thing. But having said that, we made the apartment a comfortable place.

And we would receive a lot of folks. And it's a kind of life that some people really love. It's quiet. Like you say, you go on walks. You go, you visit France. You have parties. And you get time to read books and to be together. So we thank God.

We enjoy being together and do it. You're also very busy. You have to access things like food, store, of course. But you get to make sure that you are maintaining the place. So, and finally, in the case of Carolyn, she grew a wonderful garden and she built a compost, a very sophisticated compost system

that really worked extremely well and was quite hot during the winter times. Well, that rhythm of ordinary life was abruptly interrupted in December 2011 when Kim Jong-il died and Pyongyang entered a period of public mourning and political uncertainty. Now, foreign audiences often debate

whether the public mourning that we see in North Korea is sincere, or it's coerced or it's a combination of the two. You and your wife, Carlin, you actually attended the official wake. What did it look like and feel like from where you stood? It's a very good question. Certainly the grief of the people that we could observe on the day that the news were given probably was not the same as when Kimmel Sohn passed away. He was truly loved by these people, I think.

I'm not sure. But there was a sense of grief and fear. My impression, that was my own personal impression, was that they were like, okay, now what will happen to us? And an impression that really shocked me and surprised me was that the passing of one person, one leader, can put into question all your, future. To roll in America or in Europe or anywhere else in the world, the leader dies,

it's unfortunate. But unless you're part of what June Baik describes as the elite, your life will probably continue, but not in the DPRK. It's really, that's it. We don't know how you're going to be treated. And then the manifestations of grief elsewhere when we brought those of the flowers on the square. So it's very difficult to ascertain. The combination of true grief, true fear and coercion is not clear. I saw many moments in which he went from one of those three sentiments. And what about hope? As Kim Jong-un emerged as the next leader, could you see any hope among North Koreans

or even among diplomats there that the transition might bring some reform? The hope was all abroad. It was very amazing. We heard everybody was almost everyone. I think John DeLurie wrote a piece early on, say, wait, it's not like that. But many, we would read articles and we'd say, oh, Kim Jong-un was educated in Switzerland, therefore we're going to have reform. And those writers were not completely wrong in that we did observe perhaps a whiff of reform for about six months until it died down.

I want to take a step back now and ask you, amid all these political constraints, what actually worked? Your book highlights practical projects in areas such as rural energy, maternal health, nutrition, environmental protection and sludge relief. Jerome, can you give us one example of a project that genuinely improved people's lives? Yeah, I'll spend a lot of time to get about our rural energy projects. I felt that, so the goal was to address the energy crisis, which is enormous. There is no more grid in North Korea. It's all but gone.

And it would take billions and billions of dollars, as we all know, to fix it. However, if you want to help individual people and communities, there are simple, practical ways that cannot be diverted to help people. And they are the usual range of renewable energies, a small micro turbine that can bring electricity to a small community. And of course, the whole cocktail of windmill, solar panels, gaseifiers and so on, of which I don't know that much about, but which I understand are not expensive. easy to maintain, easy to duplicate, and that each individual person has control over, and that's the important thing.

It's not like that energy is going to be reverted to Pyongyang. It's not. And as I say in the book, when I asked someone and say, what's the difference for you? And the answer is, I can have electricity when I want it, not when they're giving it to me. And I thought it was empowering. These kind of solutions are empowering and truly believe in it.

Is it humanitarian aid? Is it development aid? Whatever. It's just empowering people in a very difficult political environment. And I have to ask you for balance. Was there another initiative maybe that looked promising that didn't work out? Yes, several. We tried to do certain initiatives such as helping markets.

Like literally build physical markets under which people could set up their wares and so on. And those did not work out because it was perceived as too much long-term development and the donors were not supportive. Secondly, there were cases in which we were told not to do them because it was not, as I said, it was too close to strengthening the central capacity of the government. and those were not really allowed. That brings us to maybe the hardest question in the book. Humanitarian organizations argue that vulnerable North Koreans

should not be punished for the government's actions. Critics respond that international engagement can free up state resources, lend legitimacy to the regime, or force aid workers to accept restrictions that would be unacceptable elsewhere. How did you answer that criticism while you were there? Were there compromises that you now believe went too far? Yeah, I think that the aid, first of all, we're talking about very small amounts to begin with, tiny amounts, probably the smallest amount of aid in pretty much per capita in any country in the world. And so we're talking about resources probably less than a dollar per person at its best.

Lessed, $24 million people, $24 million at the very height of our aid. So we're talking about peanut in terms of amount. And yet with that money, individual Koreans and the North Korean government was able to do a lot. The diversion of aid was not easy to do when it came to food. The World Food Program was outstanding in measuring. knowing exactly how much food arrived in the harbor and following those bags to the factories where they were making those cookies for children.

I'm not saying that they may not have been some diversion, but it was very high level of monitoring. There was no, the UN was trying to make aid outside of Pyongyang, therefore already away from the more privileged class. So that's where I fall on, that question. Jerome, the final section of the book is titled Transition Without Change. You arrived in North Korea partly because, as you've mentioned, you'd seen Vietnam move away

from isolation and you believed engagement could help North Korea take steps in the same direction. More than a decade later, the country has expanded its nuclear arsenal, it's closed itself off for years during the pandemic, it's drawn itself closer to Russia. you still believe in the basic case for engagement? I believe that our engagement has been thwarted to a large extent by the need to balance it out with denuclearization constantly and intervening, as I said, all those international incidents were constantly preventing a proper engagement to take place.

I think that, and indeed I'll be clear in saying that, So far, denuclearization of North Korea has not happened and is not likely to happen. And therefore, engagement as it has been, has been done with a huge, I would say a huge burden on its back, which was this obsession with forcing the North Korean to abandon nuclear weapons and failing to do so. So yes, engagement with principles, engagements that links the issue. of human rights that also deals with the empowerment of individual North Koreans, engagement that works with the North Korean government in a dialogue in which we place our

principle and it's tough. As I described in the book, it's really hard to negotiate with the North Korean side, but it's not impossible if you understand what's at stake. That form of engagement, I absolutely think, and I think I show in the book that there are successes about it. And it's just that we need to deal in that obsession around the nuclear weapon and we need to find a way to have a principled engagement which deal with a form of deterrence of North Korea as it is part of a broader. And I think it's absolutely possible right now. Jerome, before we finish, I want to end with a few shorter, quick questions. What was the most

surreal moment of your time in North Korea? Well, certainly parades. And there's so many surreal moments. It's hard for me to say, but certainly parades are pretty surreal, as many people know. And of course, the funeral of Kim Jong-Gale were very surreal moments, for example, as I described them in the book. You waited roughly a decade before beginning the book. What did that distance allow you to understand?

that maybe you couldn't fully see while you were still living in Jiangyen? Yeah, many reasons. First, I was busy, couldn't really do the book. Secondly, I wanted to give time in order to separate also in terms of for safety of names that I bring, I don't bring names, I changed all the names, but still the characters. It's really the closing of the borders that prompted me to do the book. I was thinking about it for a long time, but I've really never really pulled the trigger. but not much has changed in North Korea since I left in 2013. Sure, Pyongyang has bigger buildings, there are more cell phones, there's more money in the economy.

So these are factors. But on the whole, the structure of the country, of the regime, none of that has changed. The poverty, I cannot imagine how the people are today who have not had access. to food, vaccination, although there's some vaccinations going on, et cetera, must be really very serious. And so I felt that with the closing of those borders whereby not a single NGO or a UN agency has returned physically to develop and monitor projects, that's really spelled the end of a 30-year period, in 1990s to now, of international cooperation with North Korea. That's the end.

Even if it was to resume today, it will not resume the same way. So I wanted to say, okay, this is how it was taking place. This is how you interacted with them. These are the kind of work, this is the kind of work that we used to do. This is how it was. Because when people will return next, they'll have to remake new foundation for that form of cooperation. And I wanted to put my two cents into how one should envisage international cooperation with the North Koreans.

That leads me perfectly into my final question, because when people, UN agencies and international aid workers do hopefully return next, what do you think is the single most important lesson that you would want to give people preparing to go back? I would say try to coordinate as much as you can among yourselves so that you have one single voice speaking with the North Korean side. One single vote will strengthen the negotiation power. That would be very important. and coordinate, support each other. As the UN resident coordinator,

I was trying to support other agencies, but also other NGOs, to really try to be together and support. And finally, people-powered development. People-powered development. Empower the people. You have no idea what they can do.

Jerome Sauvage's new book is Witness to North Korea, three years on the ground in the DPRK, and you can find more reporting and analysis on North Korea at Enking News and Enk. Pro. Jerome, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Alana. Great to be here. And that brings us to the end of today's episode. Our thanks to Brian Betts and David Choi for helping make this podcast happen. For more reporting, analysis and expert insight on North Korea, visit NK News for the latest stories and NKPro for deeper analysis, data and research tools.

You can also watch this episode on YouTube and be sure to follow us on social media. for the latest updates, clips and behind the scenes content. I'm Alana Hill. Thank you for listening. And we'll be back next time with more on the stories shaping North Korea.