Open Sources, 26 June 2012
I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING AGAINST being provocative to achieve some diplomatic or political purpose, but what exactly is the purpose we achieve by using the North Korean flag as a live fire target? This looks like a case of the South Koreans involving our forces in their childish tit-for-tat. Take this principle to its logical conclusion and you can see one of the reasons I’ve wanted our Army out of South Korea ever since I was a part of it.
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IF YOU’RE NOT TROUBLED BY THE RISE to global influence of a power that places no value on innocent life, your hierarchy of fears may be out of balance:
North Korea has publicly executed four refugees who were repatriated by China and sent 40 others to its notorious prison camps, a South Korean activist said Monday.
China has repatriated 44 fugitives from its communist neighbour in recent months, said Kim Heung-Kwang, who heads NK Intellectuals Solidarity, a Seoul-based defectors’ group.
Four of them were executed and 40 sent to camps for political prisoners, he told a seminar. South Korean rights groups say there are six political prison camps in the North holding around 200,000 detainees.
Kim said he had obtained his information from a source inside the North, but gave no details. The South’s unification ministry, which is in charge of cross-border affairs, declined to comment. [AFP]
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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAY CHOOSE TO BELIEVE that North Korea has “thumbed its nose” at China, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Times that it’s really China that’s thumbing its nose at us, having done substantially less to pressure North Korea than it says it has. Certainly China’s repeated and willful violations of Security Council sanctions against North Korea instruct us why China’s assurances shouldn’t be taken at face value. But then, the Times has traditionally printed the least insightful North Korea coverage of any major U.S. newspaper, and some of the op-eds it has printed in recent years, such as those by Christine Ahn and Donald Gregg, have been positively zany.
I don’t go so far as to say that China isn’t pressuring North Korea at all; North Korea did go through with its missile test, but it did not go through with a nuke test that certainly seemed to be in the offing. Your guess as to why not is as good as mine, but my best guess is that the Chinese would prefer not to let North Korea become an election-year issue, and exerted some temporary pressure to see that that doesn’t happen. Regardless of who wins the next election, I expect North Korea will revert to form no later then the end of this calendar year.
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ANOTHER SURVIVOR TELLS HER STORY:
“I met my mother for the first time in five years at a prison camp. I couldn’t recognize her at first. She looked thin and just like a beggar dressed in filthy clothes that I saw in old movies, a sign of how hard her life had been there,” she told The Korea Herald.
“Her looks and two other raw-boned siblings ? born in a tumbledown house in the camp ? left me speechless. Although I was too young to get a full grasp of what was going on, I knew (that we are in trouble).” [Korea Herald]
If only this country had an MOU with some incorruptible media watchdogs, they’d never get away with murder this way.
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I GUESS IT’S OBVIOUS THAT THEY COULD USE THE HELP: A Ukrainian court has sentenced two North Koreans to eight years in a Ukrainian prison for trying to steal technology to use in its Undeniably Peaceful and Therefore Not Sanctioned Satellite Launch Vehicle Development Program:
Sources said the North Koreans identified as Ryu Song-chul and Lee Tae-kil were arrested for spying in July after they tried to steal classified technology from the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in Dnipropetrovsk. The sentence was handed down by a Ukrainian court late last month.
Yuzhnoye’s Dnipropetrovsk bureau is in charge of rocket and satellite development and was responsible for making the 11,000-kilometer range R-36M multi-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile during the Soviet era.
Security Service of Ukraine, which carried out the arrest, said the two worked at North Korea’s trade representative office in Minsk, Belarus, but had made contact with a researcher at Yuzhnoye.
It said the researcher had notified authorities of the contact and helped set up a trap where the two were apprehended as they took photos of the classified data.
The technology that the two North Korean sought was centered on rocket vehicles and in particular liquid fuel engine systems that could greatly increase the range of a rocket. [Korea Herald]
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IT’S A SAD COMMENT THAT a defector’s sketch may be a more accurate portrayal of life in North Korea than an AP photograph, particularly one that originates with KCNA. I’m not sure how new these drawings are, but they generated enough interest to go viral over the weekend and generate over 30,000 hits for this site in just one day.
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SOMEONE PLEASE PASS ME a hit of whatever Shane Smith is smoking these days.