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November 15, 2006

Scarlet Fever Outbreak Spreads in N. Korea

South Korea’s official Yonhap news agency is now picking up the story that the Daily NK first reported, and the news isn’t good. Scarlet fever has been spreading fast in North Korea for nearly a month and is showing signs of becoming a full-blown pandemic despite efforts by North Korean authorities to contain the disease, a source close to the North said Wednesday. The disease first broke out in the communist state’s northern Yanggang Province last month, but is quickly...

Categories Human Rights/Inside NK
November 9, 2006

A Protest in North Korea?

That’s what the Daily NK is reporting: On Tuesday, a number of residents in Hoiryeong, North Hamkyong Province mass-protested in front of the Nammun (a south gate) market for “compensation of market refurbishment payment” and against the merger of Hoiryeong markets, according to a North Korean source. The inside source told the Daily NK through a telephone interview that evening ,”From this morning, more than a hundred shopkeepers, their families and the residents of Nammun district rushed to the market...

Categories Inside NK/Resistance
October 30, 2006

Epidemic in North Korea?

Several days ago, a well-informed contact asked me whether I had heard rumors of a new disease spreading rapidly in northeastern North Korea, in the vicinity of Camp 22.  I hadn’t.  The rumor — I emphasize it was unverified and described to me as such — was that this was a made-in-the-lab germ  that had spread from one of the concentration camps in the vicinity to the  population on the outside.  It all sounded a bit conspiratorial to me, until...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
October 21, 2006

Fractured Monolith

The quality and quantity of the Daily NK’s reports from inside the North just seem to get better. This week, two new reports fill in gaps in our knowledge about economic and social conditions; both are absolute must-reads. The first is filled with pictures of gritty scenes of daily life in the North. It’s astonishing to see the extent to which the blockade has eroded when pictures like these come out. On this day, the brawl began as 2 young...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Korean Society
September 20, 2006

Another Public Execution Video

The guerrilla cameras of the North Korean resistance have brought out another video of a public execution. Like the most recent video releases, showing border guards hauling away South Korean food aid and the display of a dissident banner, it’s from South Hamgyeong Province. The Daily NK has stills and audio, although the images, for understandable reasons, are not clear. The headline says the video depicts a woman being executed for stealing corn from another woman’s home. Later on, however,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Resistance
September 19, 2006

North Korea’s Growth Industry: Train Wrecks

Question: What self-respecting tyrannical mass-murderer would admit that he rules a country that’s completely broken? Answer: one that really, really needs the insurance money, even if it’s from a spate of horrific and previously undisclosed disasters: One of the incidents was the sinking of a passenger ship traveling between Wonsan and Heungnam, both east-coast ports. Half of the ship’s 200 passengers lost their lives, Minjok reportedly told its reinsurers. Industry officials here estimated that the insurance payment would be in...

Categories Inside NK/NK Economics
September 15, 2006

Inside North Korea

From the invaluable Daily NK come two new reports. One is an account of flood damage from South Pyongan, and it sounds like it’s severe enough that it won’t be repaired anytime soon. They even have pictures, which shows impressive progress in the penetration of the Daily NK’s tentacles into the North Korean interior. According to another report, the North Korean authorities are punishing ordinary citizens for eating foreign food aid. Apparently, it’s considered property of the state. Read it...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
July 11, 2006

More Bad Economic News in North Korea

The Daily NK reports that the Kimchaek Iron and Steel Plant in Chongjin, North Korea’s fourth-largest city, has stopped producing: In a recent newsletter, Good Friends, a support organization for North Korea explained that “Equipment had severely deteriorated and original resources such as coal and coxtan are not supplied. …. Kim Cheak Iron and Steel Complex Operations has approximately 50,000 workers and is a special complex where people are stationed for 3 months for discipline and reform. However as factory...

Categories Inside NK/NK Economics
June 1, 2006

The Great Famine Has Begun; Discontent Rises

At least since 2000 when we began providing assistance to the North, no one there has been starving to death. — UniFiction Minister Lee Jong-Seok The first reports have emerged from North Korea of food refugees on the move due to a sudden deterioration in food supplies. Several of the reports are accompanied by remarkable photographs, including this one, which shows one man bringing food back into North Korea from China. Mr. Lee Hyun Soo (46) who crossed the Tumen...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
May 16, 2006

Korea Diary, 17 May 06

If you need an even better illustration of the idiocy of the Tokdo distraction, read this moving story about the families of two hostages, one Japanese and one South Korean, who married during their captivity in North Korea. Yokota expressed gratitude that his son-in-law was a South Korean. “I am so lucky to have a South Korean son-in-law, not a North Korean. I am so happy that I can hope that our families may meet one another again. He said...

Categories Abductions/Activism/An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Inside NK/Islam/Japan/Japan & Korea/Korean Politics/News Links/NK Economics/Proliferation/Refugees/Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/Uncategorized/WMD
May 10, 2006

Review: ‘Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea,’ by Guy DeLisle

Please — not another travelogue of tyranny tourism in North Korea. In the last several years, dozens of con-men, apologists, and petty tyrants have described North Korea as a great place to golf, bowl, get rich quick, or profit by displaying the misery of others. Three U.N. aid workers published a fine dining guide, just as the last mass graves of the Great Famine were filled. A UNICEF worker recently lamented that North Korea was unfairly stereotyped. A Korean-American unificationista...

Categories Books & Films/Inside NK/North Korea
April 30, 2006

‘Barrel of a Gun’

During my recent trip to Korea, I was fortunate to have dinner and moderate quantities of alcohol with several other K-bloggers, including The Marmot, The Flying Yangban, Oranckay, The Drambuie Man (also a S. Dakota native), and Professor Andrei Lankov, who is working on a book on the Korean War, based on material from old Soviet archives. Oranckay picked a restaurant where I had some of the best kalbi I’ve ever eaten, and Robert knew of a beautifully restored old...

Categories Diplomacy/Inside NK/Korean Society/North Korea/Six-Party Talks/WMD
April 29, 2006

Corruption and Malnutrition Sap NK Military’s Morale and Readiness

Required reading for DPRK military watchers, via the Daily NK: The most serious problem is malnutrition spreading in the North Korean military. Before the food shortage, 800g of rice, 200g of meat was the official amount provided for one day, the soldiers have not been receiving the official amount for more than 10 years. It does not seem to be improving either. Rice has been replaced with corn or potato, and meat is only provided for holidays. Military bases try...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/NK Military
April 29, 2006

Daily NK: Gov’t Not Delivering Food Rations

Last fall, when the North Korean government ordered the World Food Program out of the country, I wrote a series of alarmist posts based on the simple syllogism that, since 6.5 million North Koreans depended on WFP aid as of last August, and that the aid was cut off as of last December, that millions of North Koreans were going to go hungry in the months to follow. Last week’s North Korea Freedom Week events gave me the opportunity to...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Media Criticism
April 10, 2006

Charles Jenkins in OhMyNews

This one is a must-read. The portrait you get is of a man broken in every way possible, yet almost inexplicably, alive. I’ll give you two quotes and let you read the rest yourself: He believes there are more Americans in the country. “I know they’re there but can’t prove it. They’re left from the Korean and Vietnam wars. There is a place there where they got Americans farming.” . . . . Jenkins secretly indulged his love of American...

Categories Abductions/Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Japan/Japan & Korea/U.S. Military/Uncategorized
February 28, 2006

Korea’s ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ Bubble

This week, several new reports, chiefly those from the New York Times and the LA Times, describe a journalists’ group tour of the Kaesong Industrial Park, possibly the only place on earth where the spirits of P.T. Barnum(*) and Lavrenti Beria cohabitate. A Paradise Within a (Worker’s) Paradise In North Korea, a nation that is essentially one vast open-air prison, Kaesong is the new prison laundry — a relatively cushier, marginally less despotic part of the institution into which you...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Inside NK/NK Economics/North Korea
February 21, 2006

Anti-Kim Jong Il Leaflets Reported at Onsong

Via the refugee-run DailyNK: Feb 10, Onsung-gun, North Hamkyung province, anti-Kim Jong Il flyers were found, reported North Korean internal source on Feb 17. The source said the flyers read, “Stand Kim Jong Il Upside Down” and tens of them were found near the Wangje Mt. Grand Monument and the Security Agency along with other government agencies. Read the rest here.

Categories Defectors/Inside NK/North Korea/Refugees/Resistance