North Korea is struggling to free itself from a mountain of debt
the economic basket case incurred mainly from friendly communist
countries during the Cold War. Seoul estimates North Korea's
external debt at about US$20 billion as of this year, borrowed
chiefly from the Soviet Union and East European countries before
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Since its economy
deteriorated in the 1990s, the North has failed to repay the
principal and interest on the loans from almost all creditor
countries. It has borrowed huge amounts of money from European
banks but has not paid off most of the debt, and some of the
banks have put the North on a blacklist and even refuse to
receive fresh savings deposits from the regime. Russia has
reportedly written off some of about $8 billion of North Korean
debt for the sake of better bilateral relations. Since the
2000s, Pyongyang has held negotiations with its creditor nations
on repaying its debts by installments over 30 years. It seems
that Russia wrote off part of the No