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March 2, 2017

N. Korea, dissent & desertions: as internal control tightens, border control degrades

I haven’t yet had time to read Nat Kretchun’s new report on the circulation of samizdat inside North Korea, but Reuters, The Washington Post, and Sokeel Park helpfully summarize its bleak findings: Kim Jong-un is not a Swiss-educated reformer, is not bringing Glasnost to North Korea, has turned Koryolink into a tool for hunting down dissent and dissenters, and is slowly winning the war to restore thought control. (Still unanswered is whether Syracuse University’s “engagement” program that taught Pyongyang how to do digital watermarking also helped...

Categories Border Control/NK Military/Subversion
January 23, 2017

RFA: North Korean border guard under arrest after killing seven comrades

This blog has closely followed reports of indiscipline within the North Korean military, resistance against the state, strategies for political subversion, and the breakdown of border control. Last week, another report of a mass shooting incident by a North Korean border guard reinforced my belief that morale and discipline within the border guard force are declining. A young North Korean man conscripted to guard a customs post on his country’s border with China in (sic) under arrest for shooting dead...

Categories Border Control/NK Military/Regime Change
September 22, 2016

In North Korea, no disaster is ever entirely natural

With all the news out of North Korea recently, I’ve been saving up links to news reports about the floods in the northeastern provinces until I had a moment to put some thoughts together. According to a U.N. aid coordinator’s assessment, the floods killed 138 people, damaged 30,000 houses, and made 69,000 people homeless. [source] North Korea claims that these are the worst floods since World War II, and some news reports have obligingly reprinted that claim. But OFK has...

Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid
August 26, 2016

To prevent war, talk to North Korea’s soldiers about rice, peace & freedom (updated: it happened again)

When the U.S. Army wants to breach a minefield, it deploys a Mine-Clearing Line Charge to blast a path through it with 1,750 pounds of C-4. The procedure looks like this: Obviously, the North Koreans know this, so they can’t possibly think that planting a few more anti-personnel mines along the DMZ – right where U.S. and ROK forces will be watching and marking them – will do anything to stop an invasion that isn’t coming. I’m mildly surprised, by...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
August 9, 2016

North Korean NCO kills wife, daughter of his company commander (updated)

Via the Daily NK and Yonhap, we have yet another report of fratricidal violence, corruption, and indiscipline among North Korea’s border guards, except this time, the fratricidal intent was redirected at the mother and daughter of an army officer. The incident occurred at the end of July in the Kanggu District of Hyesan City, where the sergeant major’s unit – the 25th Border Security Brigade – was stationed, a source from Ryanggang Province told Daily NK on August 7. “In...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
July 29, 2016

Latest N. Korea defections: 6 soldiers, 3 workers, a top student, a general & slush fund manager

It has been three months since 12 young women and a man defected from that North Korean restaurant in Ningpo, China, and since 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait staged a mass protest against their minders. I’d begun to wonder if the regime had cauterized the wounded cohesion of the very people it needs most desperately to pay its bills and seal its borders, but the drops of fresh blood on the floor tell another story. Let’s begin with the most...

Categories Border Control/Defectors/Human Trafficking/NK Military/Sanctions
July 8, 2016

A blanket trade embargo won’t help us disarm or reform North Korea

In Wednesday’s post, I wrote about Beyond Parallel’s imagery analysis pointing to a decline in cross-border trade between China and North Korea, along with the limitations of that analysis and its great potential if expanded and focused. But I also alluded to a broader policy concern about the error of equating trade volume with sanctions enforcement: that while China’s under-enforcement of sanctions has historically been the greatest impediment to our North Korea policy, sanctions over-enforcement is an equal danger. Recently, I’ve heard...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
June 14, 2016

North Koreans find leaks in Kim Jong-un’s information blockade

Until 2011, the erosion of North Korea’s border control and the infiltration of foreign ideas may have been the only hopeful trends in a country where just about all of the news is bad. When Kim Jong-un came to power, however, he launched an all–out effort to seal North Korea’s leaky border with China. Most of the evidence tells us that that effort has had considerable success. It cut the flow of refugees from North to South Korea in half, and (with...

Categories Border Control/Subversion
March 15, 2016

So far, sanctions are cutting off Pyongyang’s cash while sparing North Korea’s poor.

A month after the President signed the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act and two weeks after the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 2270, enough information has emerged from North Korea to allow for a preliminary assessment of how the sanctions are affecting those they are meant to target, and those they are meant to spare.  Sanctions have begun to hit their intended targets. The Daily NK reports that the donju, the well-connected traders who help finance Pyongyang’s priorities through trade with...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
December 8, 2015

Inter-Korean phone calls can keep the promises of the Sunshine Policy

Twenty years of state-to-state engagement between North and South Korea have not lived up to Kim Dae-Jung’s promises. Pyongyang has taken Seoul’s money, nuked up, and periodically attacked South Korea for good measure. Rather than reforming, it has invested heavily in sealing its borders. Pyongyang sustains itself on foreign hard currency, even as it cuts off the flow of people, goods, and information to its underprivileged classes. It knows that if it fails to do this, members of those classes...

Categories Appeasement/Border Control/Capitalism/Engagement/Refugees/Sunshine
November 2, 2015

Seoul & Pyongyang join forces to fund N. Korea’s rich, starve its poor

Our endlessly unrequited vigil for North Korean reform continues: Hyeonseo Lee is also increasingly worried about her personal security since the July publication of the best-selling memoir about her escape from North Korea, “The Girl with Seven Names”. Defectors living in South Korea contact relatives in the North through Chinese mobile phones that are smuggled across the border. They communicate through transmission towers on the Chinese side of the border. It’s all arranged through brokers on the Chinese side, who...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Refugees
October 13, 2015

The more North Korea trades, the more it reforms, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I questioned the premises of economic engagement with Pyongyang — that Pyongyang is socialist, that trade is capitalism, that capitalism inexorably erodes socialism, and that capitalism (least of all, state capitalism) is inherently liberal and peaceful. I argued that Pyongyang adopted state capitalism decades ago, and that it has grown steadily more menacing and repressive ever since. It feigns socialism to feed our false hopes of reform and arguments against sanctions, to tempt investors, to recruit apologists who embrace its socialist pretenses, and to justify the...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Censorship/Class Warfare/Engagement
July 29, 2015

Must read: Jieun Baek on how North Koreans beat the border blockade

Admittedly, Baek’s explanation of the North Korea’s guerrilla banking system isn’t the first I’ve read, it’s only the best: The next time Kevin talks to his mother, she asks him for $1,000. She gives Kevin a phone number. When he hangs up after about a minute, Kevin then calls that number and tells the stranger on the line that he got a call from someone (he uses a pseudonym to protect his mother’s identity). Every time, the phone number is...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Health & Disease/Subversion
June 19, 2015

Is the North Korean military falling apart?

Last week, a 19 year-old North Korean army private fled “repeated physical abuse at the hands of his superiors” and “the realities of his impoverished country,” walked and rode for a week as a fugitive, crossed the heavily mined DMZ, and fell asleep next to a South Korean guard post.* Surely this young soldier knows that his family will now face terrible retribution for what he has done. We can even speculate that others have tried, and failed, at similar attempts that...

Categories Anju Links/Border Control/NK Military/Resistance
April 16, 2015

N. Korea perestroika watch: “Gunfire must be made to resound”

New Focus International has published an “exclusive” report that “North Korea’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Ministry of People’s Security (MPS)” have begun what amounts to an internal terror campaign against the people, personally ratified by Kim Jong Un in September 2013, and aimed at “the sweeping out of impure and hostile elements.” The campaign consists of a series of crackdowns, collectively known as the “9.8 measures.” According to the report, Kim Jong Un has taken personal oversight* (read: personal responsibility...

Categories Border Control
March 27, 2015

Latest defection of armed North Korean soldiers points to erosion in morale and discipline.

In the eleven years I’ve been writing OFK, I’ve observed a cycle in North Korea’s border security. – In Phase One, the lure of capitalism coopts and corrupts the men (and they are mostly men) who guard the borders. Most, but not all, of the corruption is financial, but it is also chemical and sensual. – In Phase Two, the corrupt practices gain acceptance. The norms of accepted illegality change the de facto rules of border security, the rules of...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
February 17, 2015

N. Korea Perestroika Watch: Woman sent to firing squad for “gambling and drug use”

Did you hear the one about how Amerikkka’s prisons are filled with small-time drug offenders? Well, the workers’ paradise has solved that problem: In mid-November 2014 in Sinuiju, North Pyongan Province, a woman in her 50s considered part of the donju [new affluent middle class] was publicly executed for “gambling and drug use,” Daily NK has recently learned. According to Daily NK’s source in North Pyongan Province, the woman was “the wife of a North Korean trader in Dandong who...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Drugs & N Korea