Open Sources, July 31, 2014

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NORTH KOREA FIRES four more of those 300-millimeter rockets, about which I’ll have more to say one day, if I ever finish a rather long post I’m working on. The point of that post will be that those rockets could be a game-changer because (1) South Korea has no practical defense against them, and (2) they can probably hit the U.S. installations at Osan and Camp Humphreys.

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HORRIBLE:

On May 24th, 50 students from the prestigious “Pyongyang No.1 Middle School” died in an accident on the way to Songdowon on the East Sea coast of North Korea, Dong-A Ilbo reported on July 29th. The students were traveling through the mountainous Masik Pass in Gangwon Province when their bus overturned, killing all those aboard.

Please keep the families in your thoughts. The report cites a lack of seat belts as a cause, but school buses in this state don’t require the kids to wear seat belts, either. I think this is just a terrible, terrible accident that could have happened anywhere.

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WHY DID KIM JONG UN’S premier money launderer (now its Foreign Minister) make an unscheduled, one-week stopover in Switzerland? “Ri is a former ambassador to Switzerland, where he managed former leader Kim Jong-il’s slush fund and served as a guardian for Kim Jong-un.” I’m sure he just withdrew some petty cash for those underfunded food aid programs.

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DONOR FATIGUE: “Citing the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Washington-based Voice of America said North Korea received US$19.6 million of humanitarian aid in the January-June period, down 45 percent from the same period last year.” 

All I can say is, thank goodness “Kim Jong-un has stashed away some US$4-5 billion in bank accounts in other people’s names in Austria, China, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Russia, Singapore and Switzerland,” because help must surely be on the way now, right?

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FRIDA GHITIS WRITES INSIGHTFULLY about the temptation to laugh at North Korea, and wonders when the laughter is appropriate:

Those are two sides of North Korea — deliberately frightening and inadvertently comical. Then there’s a third side — the part that makes us gasp in horror.

A yearlong investigation conducted by the United Nations found that North Korea is a country whose depth of brutality “does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

According to the report, North Korea engages in murder, torture, slavery and mass starvation to terrorize the population into submission. Stories from refugees who have escaped from North Korea are a chilling reminder that the regime is not just a military threat, it is causing a terrible humanitarian crisis. [CNN.com]

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SEVERAL NKPA COMMANDERS HAVE BEEN SACKED over a shooting incident that killed an member of Kim Jong Un’s protective detail, according to Radio Free Asia.

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ATTENTION, DUTCH PEOPLE: STAY OFF THE BEACH AT NIGHT! “Radio Free Asia (FRA) reported that North Korea is searching for a native Dutch speaker to teach children in North Korea. They believe that North Korea students educated in Dutch will be able to guide European tourists in the future.”

All of this is part of some new scheme to court foreign sympathizers and profiteers. And among a certain constituency, the supply of foreign sympathizers and profiteers is inexplicably limitless.

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RIMJIN-GANG IS OUT WITH A NEW REPORT on the booming illegal housing market in North Korea. I wonder how the collapse of that apartment building has affected the housing market in Pyongyang. Outside of Pyongyang, small single family homes — with room for a garden — are in the greatest demand.

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NK NEWS HAS A REPORT WITH SOME FASCINATING PHOTOGRAPHS about redneck radios built by North Koreans to listen to illegal broadcasts. Even the snaggletoothed, rheumy-eyed old Trotskyites at The Guardian agree that this is a must-see.

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DENNIS HALPIN REVIEWS THE STATE OF RELATIONS between North Korea and China, and points to signs of strain, but contrasts them with the interests that cause Beijing to prop up Pyongyang, and admirably resists the temptation of wishful thinking. For anyone who wants a primer on why China props North Korea up, this would be a good primer from a very learned source.

The Chosun Ilbo, on the other hand, bases its own analysis of that question on sketchy facts — alleging that China has cut off North Korea’s fuel supply (no, it didn’t), and that China-North Korea trade has fallen off (also questionable; bilateral trade hit a record high in 2013).