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Though its interior was covered with dust built up from neglect, it was clear that life inside the now-shuttered North Korean Embassy in Dakar came with relative comforts.
A swimming pool lay outside the now-ivy-covered windows; specially-printed North Korean calendars decorated the walls of its rooms. A portable TV/DVD player had been left behind.
Life for North Koreans has long been shrouded in mystery, whether for those living inside the country or a select population dispatched to live abroad under the close control of Pyongyang. International sanctions, including a prohibition against North Koreans working outside the country, and the COVID pandemic prompted a deeper withdrawal from the world.
Last year’s closure of the embassy, which RFA Korean visited in May 2024, was just the latest of its many retractions.
But despite a de facto global ban on doing business with North Korean entities or individuals, commerce continues under the table. And as many as 100,000 North Koreans were thought as of December 2023 to be living outside the country as laborers under the control of Kim Jong Un’s regime.
The environment has created an impossible situation for many of these workers, who have not been permitted to return to their homeland.
Caught between sanctions that bar them from being legally employed and a forced exile in which they are still expected to earn income for their dictatorial government, North Korean workers left abroad are forced to make a living on the edges of society, in secret, tenuous existences.
In Africa, where the Kim regime has long-established ties, RFA Korean worked with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP, to find and trace the silhouettes of these laborers’ lives.
A history on the continent
North Korea has had a presence in Africa for generations, establishing the closest links with governments that shared an anti-colonialist ideology and deep suspicion of the West.
North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung – grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong Un – worked to establish ties in Africa largely through arms sales during the Cold War era in the 1960s. He sent military advisers to help support Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda and anti-apartheid forces battling the Western-backed government of South Africa.
From this bloody footprint, North Korea diversified into construction and, less beneficially to the host countries, illegal ivory trade allegedly facilitated by Pyongyang’s diplomats – all with the purpose of raising cash for a government increasingly shut off from the global financial system.
Today, more than a dozen statues in African countries built by the Mansudae Art Studio, a construction and design firm in Pyongyang, North Korea, sit as testaments to this legacy.
From the edge of Dakar, the 170-foot (52 meter) tall African Renaissance sculpture stands as an exemplar of such works with its depiction of a strong African man, holding a baby in one arm and a woman in the other, looking out to the Atlantic Ocean and a brighter future.
‘I can’t go back’
When COVID struck, North Korea prohibited its workers from returning home, lest they spread the disease in a country with little resources to handle the fallout.
In Dakar, a North Korean laborer who works in construction told RFA Korean that he had been stuck in the country for more than six years, separated from his wife and two children.
“It was not supposed to be this long,” the man said. “But I can’t go back because of the coronavirus. The North Korean authorities need to approve my return.”
Workers are required to hand over their passports to security officials upon arriving in their new country, to keep them from defecting and embarrassing the regime. The United Nations’ International Labor Organization has identified the practice as abusive because it leaves workers vulnerable to exploitation and forced labor.
Because North Koreans are prohibited from speaking to South Koreans and would face punishment if they were to speak openly to journalists, RFA reporters represented themselves simply as Koreans interested in business in Senegal to ensure the man’s safety.
“When it comes to work, we North Koreans do what the higher-ups want, and we do what they tell us to do,” the worker said. “If they say, ‘This has to be done today,’ we get it done, no matter what.”
Money for the regime
A March report by a U.N. panel of experts for the U.N. Security Council quoted one unnamed council member estimating there were maybe as many as 100,000 North Koreans laboring overseas.
With as much as 80% of their salaries being sent to their government back home, these workers generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the regime, the report said. North Korean restaurants in at least five countries account for $700 million, according to the report, which anonymously quotes officials from U.N. member countries.
“The typical experience of North Korean laborers amounts to modern slavery,” said T.A. van der Hoog, an assistant professor of international security studies at the Netherlands Defense Academy who is writing a book on North Koreans abroad.
“In all cases, the experience of North Koreans abroad can be summarized by a single word: survival,” he told RFA in an interview.
The vast majority of these workers are thought to reside in neighboring China and Russia, but historically North Koreans spread across the globe have funneled money to successive Kim regimes to pursue weapons programs.
Most North Koreans don’t have freedom of movement, getting shuttled from dorm-like living quarters to job sites and back again. But in some cases, North Koreans sent overseas have greater freedoms.
Choi Myeong-cheon, who worked in Oman for the regime before defecting to South Korea in 2018, told RFA Korean that workers in countries that don’t have embassies tend to have greater independence.
“When I was there, the existing party secretaries’ and state security agents’ terms had expired, so they all went back,” he said.
In some cases North Koreans are able to develop side jobs in order to survive, which appears to be the case with the worker who spoke with RFA. He was introduced to RFA through a local source involved in interior design work.
But in the conversation that developed he acknowledged the hardship of being separated from his family. Asked if he missed his wife and children, his voice trembled when he said, “It’s needless to say.”
The worker was cautious with his answers but was open with advice about operating a business in Senegal. The day after the interview he called with tips on how to avoid being scammed.
“If anything comes up, just call me without hesitation. I will tell you as much as I know,” he said.
Mutual benefit
Experts say North Korea has grown adept at maneuvering around sanctions.
One method is by using subcontracting companies that are signed onto larger, more legitimate ones, according to North Korea experts. The primary contractor gets a cheap source of hardworking labor, while the North Korean-linked firms frequently switch out their names to avoid detection, according to a local source with knowledge of these practices.
For example, one company, known as Corman Construction, was reported to have been signed onto several large projects in Senegal. The firm is a front company for Mansudae, the North Korean state construction and design firm, according to an investigation from the U.N. panel of experts on North Korea.
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In 2019, Senegalese and U.S. media reported a partnership between Corman and Semer, a Senegalese-United Arab Emirates firm to work on a construction project in Diamniadio, a growing industrial area.
A caption underneath a photo accompanying a story in the Senegalese outlet Liberation identified several North Korean workers, despite the sanctions. Senegalese officials told the outlet that they would open an investigation, but the ultimate outcome and current status of this partnership are unknown.
Attempts to reach Semer by phone and at its headquarters were unsuccessful.
The 2021 U.N. panel of experts report also listed Corman as signing at least two contracts with Seneba, a local construction subsidiary of one of Senegal’s largest carmakers, EMG, to build a luxury hotel in Dakar. The contracts were signed in 2017.
A representative from Seneba disclosed in spring 2024 that the company contracts three North Korean engineers after OCCRP and RFA Korean reporters inquired about whether it was feasible to work with Korean speakers.
However, an official with EMG, Ibrahim Diallo, later denied that the company employs North Koreans.
“I talked with the Seneba CEO about it. He said, yes, Seneba had a contract with North Koreans but the U.S. embassy contacted them, told them that they couldn’t do that, and they canceled the contract [in] 2019,” he told RFA Korean in September.
Tracking North Korean employment and exploitation has always been difficult, in part because many African countries aren’t responsive to queries from the United Nations about their compliance with sanctions.
And workers themselves are adept at slipping under the radar, said Benjamin Young, an assistant professor at Dakota State University who wrote a book in 2018 about North Korea and developing countries.
“They understand how to get around the sanctions regime. And fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Africa is ripe for a lot of this kind of stuff,” he told RFA.
The North Korean worker RFA spoke with said he has had difficulty finding work on occasion. He considers every offer an opportunity to learn something new.
“I may not know it at first, but it’s easy to do once I see it,” he said. “If they say, ‘This has to be done today,’ we get it done no matter what. People here like it too.”
He declined to answer questions about how many North Koreans he knew in Dakar or how much money he makes. But he seemed to appreciate meeting other Koreans.
“I’m sure we’ll be thrilled when Korea reunites,” he said.
Edited by Boer Deng and Jim Snyder. This story was reported in partnership with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.