27 April 2010

South Korea is considering cutting aid to, and trade with North Korea in response to the North’s seizure of assets at Kumgang:

The government is reportedly considering limiting the volume of agricultural and marine products from North Korea or tightening regulation of imports in other ways. Certain North Korean items, such as sand, hard coal and mushrooms, already require the unification minister’s approval each time someone wants to bring them into the South. Seoul could expand the number of such items, making the import process more troublesome.

Currently, South Korean materials going into the joint industrial park in the North’s border town of Gaeseong and products rolled out from factories there account for more than 60 percent of inter-Korean trade. Last month’s inter-Korean trade volume amounted to $202 million, 63 percent of which were goods going in and out of the Gaeseong park.

If that’s so, it suggests that the South may have something else in mind as a response to the sinking of the Cheonan, which looks more like a deliberate North Korean attack with each day’s revelations. If military options are widely acknowledged to be risky and impractical, then perhaps President Lee is thinking in terms of political subversion. That would be good.

Affirmative action for North Korean defectors?

Just when I think nothing I hear about North Korea’s prison camps can shock me anymore, something does:

Women at the event wore dark glasses to conceal their identities but were unable to hide their tears. One recalled how she languished at the Kaechon political prison camp for 28 years after being taken into custody at 13 for guilt by association with a crime committed by one of her relatives. She said, “I saw a starving woman eat the flesh of her son who had died of a disease.”

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The regime complains bitterly when stories like these are told outside North Korea, but its survival depends on these stories spreading inside North Korea, at least to a degree. If word didn’t get around about the camps and the horrors within, the regime couldn’t keep its subjects in a state of terror, too afraid to contemplate opposing the system:

Oh Gyeung Seob, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute, was just one of the speakers in a symposium, “Anti-Human Rights in North Korean Political Prison Camps,” hosted by Korean Peninsula Forum and sponsored by the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (NKNet) at the National Human Rights Commission of Korea. According to Oh, North Korean prison camps are “the core institution in the reign of terror which maintains totalitarian social control”.

Oh continued, “Violence is the method North Korean regime mostly depends on to maintain its power. They use the National Security Agency and prison camps to create a climate of fear among the governing elite and citizens, and to induce obedience through that fear.

“The National Security Agency conducts surveillance to generate fear during the process of uncovering, investigating, punishing and purging political prisoners. Prison camps create more fear by treating existing political prisoners inhumanly,” he explained, connecting the security forces and prison camp roles in totalitarian North Korea.

Particularly, he explained, “The North Korean system is structured around the fear spread by the existence of political prison camps, meaning that public political opposition from citizens is impossible. Every person and the people around them are harmed by the system of guilt by association; therefore they suppress their political opposition of their own accord. [Daily NK]