Search Results for: perestroika watch

April 16, 2015

N. Korea perestroika watch: “Gunfire must be made to resound”

New Focus International has published an “exclusive” report that “North Korea’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Ministry of People’s Security (MPS)” have begun what amounts to an internal terror campaign against the people, personally ratified by Kim Jong Un in September 2013, and aimed at “the sweeping out of impure and hostile elements.” The campaign consists of a series of crackdowns, collectively known as the “9.8 measures.” According to the report, Kim Jong Un has taken personal oversight* (read: personal responsibility...

Categories Border Control
February 17, 2015

N. Korea Perestroika Watch: Woman sent to firing squad for “gambling and drug use”

Did you hear the one about how Amerikkka’s prisons are filled with small-time drug offenders? Well, the workers’ paradise has solved that problem: In mid-November 2014 in Sinuiju, North Pyongan Province, a woman in her 50s considered part of the donju [new affluent middle class] was publicly executed for “gambling and drug use,” Daily NK has recently learned. According to Daily NK’s source in North Pyongan Province, the woman was “the wife of a North Korean trader in Dandong who...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Drugs & N Korea
January 14, 2015

N. Korea Perestroika watch: crackdown forces border guards to become robbers

Last week, China filed an official protest with North Korea over the December killing of four Chinese civilians by a rogue North Korean border guard who had turned to robbery. A Bloomberg reporter researches this further, in search of a pattern, and finds one: A spate of murders by North Koreans inside China’s border is prompting some residents to abandon their homes, testing China’s ability to manage both the 1400-kilometre shared frontier and its relationship with the reclusive nation. The...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
January 6, 2015

N. Korea perestroika watch

Following North Korea’s expansive crackdown on illegal mobile phone calls being placed to other countries – namely South Korea and China – some 30 residents of North Hamkyung Province’s Musan County have been arrested. “One or two minutes after you switch on your phone and start talking, security agents with detectors show up. So you’re putting your life at risk when you make calls to other countries,” a source based in North Hamkyung Province told the Daily NK on Wednesday....

Categories Border Control/Capitalism
December 23, 2014

N. Korea perestroika watch: corruption defeats information crackdown

I’ve previously reported on Kim Jong Un’s efforts to crack down on illegal cell phones, memory sticks, DVDs, and other subversive information flows, even as some wishful observers clung to sketchy evidence to argue that Kim Jong Un was a reformer. The good news is that after an initial period in which smuggled DVDs became hard to find, they are making their way back into circulation. “People caught for watching South Korean dramas aren’t being punished that harshly anymore,” a source based in Pyongyang...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Censorship
November 19, 2014

N. Korea perestroika watch: regime installs German-made cell phone trackers

If and when the Security Council takes up North Korea human rights sanctions, I hope they’ll start by ordering the public flogging of whomever sold these to Pyongyang: The North Korean authorities have installed a series of German-produced radio wave detectors along the border areas to monitor and block residents from making phone calls with people in other countries. The Daily NK has learned that by using the new devices near borders areas where phone reception can be detected, the authorities have been...

Categories Border Control/Censorship/Subversion
November 17, 2014

North Korea perestroika watch

Two new reports from The Daily NK update us on Kim Jong Un’s efforts to (as Don Gregg put it) “change the nature of his country.” Certain areas bordering China in Yangkang Province have been labeled “danger zones” as the latest effort by the North Korean authorities to beef up surveillance and inspections in the region. This move, in conjunction with the installation of new radio wave detectors to track down those making international calls, is the latest measure aimed at preventing...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Refugees
October 28, 2014

Associated Press perestroika watch

The AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Eric Talmadge, has managed to coax the AP’s business partners at KCNA into letting him and photographer David Guttenfelder travel from Pyongyang to Mt. Paektu in the far north, by car. Having been duly warned not to got lost—or “you will be shot”—Talmadge and his minder stocked up on fuel coupons, Evian, and Skippy, and headed off toward Wonsan. Even on the loneliest of lonely highways, we would never be without a “minder,” whose job was...

Categories AP Watch
October 24, 2014

North Korea perestroika watch

The Daily NK reports that North Korean security forces in the bleak border province of North Hamgyeong are “shaking down” smugglers to make them rat out the identities of those who’ve escaped to South Korea. They’re identifying the smugglers by intercepting the cell phone signals of money-smugglers, who in turn are forced to rat out goods and people smugglers, who rat out the refugees, whose families are then vulnerable to shake-downs and collective punishment. For many of the stay-behinds, what...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Human Rights/Subversion
June 30, 2014

N. Korea Perestroika Watch: 2 U.S. tourists to face “trial” for petty heresies

One of the core arguments of the Sunshine Policy and its “engagement”-based derivative theories is that more people-to-people contact between Americans and North Koreas will reduce tensions, stimulate economic and political reforms, and eventually, improve inter-governmental relations.* The last two decades have been unkind to this theory, but today, North Korea made an announcement suggesting that its opposite may be closer to the truth. SEOUL—North Korea said Monday it will charge two Americans in its custody with unspecified crimes, a move that may signal...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
June 23, 2014

North Korea Perestroika Watch: Crackdowns on food, information, borders intensify

OFK readers likely have offered a diverse spectrum of adjectives to describe the views expressed on this site, but one that most of them would probably affirm is “contrarian.” After Kim Jong Un’s coronation, it was briefly fashionable to perceive him as a reformer. I argued that little substantive evidence supported this theory, and cited evidence that His Porcine Majesty was closing down the border, statistical evidence that refugee flows to the South had fallen dramatically as a result, and...

Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Subversion
May 22, 2014

N. Korea Perestroika Watch: Man executed for calling China

The Daily NK provides us some updates on Kim Jong Un’s ongoing crackdown on unauthorized contact with the outside world, via sources in North Hamgyeong Province, in the far northeast: The North Korean authorities recently added five extra clauses to Article 60 of the country’s criminal code, which pertains to attempts to overthrow the state. The additional clauses codify harsh punishments for acts including illicit communication with the outside world, which could in principle now incur the death penalty. [….] The...

Categories Border Control/Inside NK/NK Economics
January 9, 2012

North Korea Perestroika Watch

Here’s something else the consumers of Selig Harrison’s next op-ed should try not to remember: North Korea on Wednesday upped its rhetoric against South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, branding him as a “pro-U.S. fascist maniac” and “chieftain of evils without an equal in the world” in view of measures his government took last month in the wake of the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The virulent name-calling came in a report released by the secretariat of...

Categories Anju Links
March 19, 2013

Open Sources, March 17, 2013: Plan B Watch Edition

WHACK-A-MOLE:  The news that Treasury has designated North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank under Executive Order 13382 leaves me underwhelmed.  This executive order provides for the blocking of assets of entities involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and restricts transactions with those entities, assuming we can reach them.  I’m dubious about how many assets or transactions are within our reach, but the pin-pricky targeting suggests that this approach is far less comprehensive than what’s needed to defang North Korea....

Categories Anju Links/Money Laundering/Sanctions
January 14, 2013

North Korea Glasnost Watch: Kim Jong Un’s Border Crackdown Is Working

The most superficial things you’ve probably heard about Kim Jong Un are the closely related ideas that he is, or must be, a latent reformer because he (a) appreciates aspects of Western culture, (b) has a fashionable wife, and (c) had a Swiss education. As examples, I’ll cite this report by Jean Lee, this and this from Joohee Cho of ABC, and this exercise in straw-grasping by John DeLury. The problem with this theory is that it isn’t supported by...

Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Refugees