Home  >  

Monthly Archive: June, 2007

June 6, 2007

Army Life in North Korea

My favorite e-mails are the ones I get from readers, and  among  even these, the best are those that send links or new information I hadn’t seen before.  One reader today sent  this Google Earth image (click to enlarge; coordinates along the bottom of the image):   He wondered whether the label on the placemark was accurate.  I opined that it  probably was not, because of the absence of a fence line or guard posts, the location just east of...

Categories Google Earth/NK Military
June 5, 2007

Anju Links for June 5th

*   Richardson has some interesting updates on the North Korean family that defected by sailing  hundreds of  miles to Japan in an open boat.  The possession of “personal use” amounts of methamphetamine by one family member suggests that what we’ve heard is true — that drugs are increasingly available to ordinary North Koreans.  What I don’t know is whether the son was a user, or whether the meth was part of their elaborate preparations, in this case,  to help...

Categories Anju Links/Uncategorized
June 3, 2007

How to Leave North Korea, and How Not To

*   There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything.  See also related posts at DPRK Studies. *   As much as I’d like to see this Yonhap story as evidence of more cultural infiltration of North Korea by the South, it seems more like an example of the opposite.  In what must have been a very carefully guided and choreographed tour of a P’yang department store, a clerk is wearing earphones, is predictably asked why, and...

Categories Defectors/Media Criticism/Refugees
June 2, 2007

U.S. to Hand Over Nine Army Posts to S. Korea, Including Sears, Edwards, and Essayons

The U.S. and ROK governments have agreed on the handover of nine more U.S. bases, further reducing our footprint in South Korea. The process was concluded Thursday as a joint committee under the South Korea-United States status of forces agreement (SOFA) approved and signed the agreement on the relocation of the bases, the ministry said. …. The relocation of the bases are part of a long-term, multi-billion dollar project to realign and move the U.S. forces in South Korea further...

Categories An Alliance?/Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. Military
June 1, 2007

‘[W]e believed the United Nations could save us.’

I wonder how many mass graves could be marked with those words.    That quote — it would be funny, though epitaphs  seldom are — comes from this testimonial of a Yodok survivor, via the International Herald Tribune.  In 1999, a group of seven North Koreans fleeing their country was intercepted in Russia. The Russian authorities, rejecting appeals from the United Nations and human rights groups, sent them to China. China returned them to North Korea. In the ensuing uproar...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/Refugees