SEOUL, Oct. 30 (UPI) — Swiss watches and women dancers performing with their navels exposed are not unfamiliar sights in North Korea, according to recent reports.
From January to September 2015, North Korea imported 509 Swiss-made watches, after suspending all Swiss watch imports in 2014, Radio Free Asia reported.
The imported watches were mostly expensive pieces costing $100 or more, making them affordable only to a tiny fraction of North Korea’s mostly impoverished population. Imports of mechanical watches outnumbered electronic pieces, according to the report.
That number, however, is still less than half the number of expensive watches imported in 2012. Three years ago, North Korea imported 1,539 watches, according to the Federation of the Swiss watch industry.
North Korea began importing thousands of Swiss watches in 2005, but after conducting its first nuclear test in 2006, economic sanctions, under United Nations Security Council Resolution No. 1718, limited Pyongyang’s ability to bring in luxury merchandise from the outside world. Radio Free Asia reported North Korea increased its watch purchases possibly to meet the demands of Chinese and other foreign tourists, and were being sold at Pyongyang’s Yanggakdo Hotel.
Other changes are afoot in North Korea, signifying the influence of Kim Jong Un since he fully assumed power in 2012.
South Korean news network MBN reported footage out of North Korea showed a dance performance held during the Oct. 10 anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party. But unlike past performances featuring young women, the dancers were on stage in costumes that exposed their navels, as they performed moves that laid bare their inner garments.
Their attire and choreography would have been unimaginable during the Kim Jong Il regime. Kim Jong Un’s education overseas, at an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland, may have had a role in the new changes, MBN reported.
