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February 25, 2007

Conditions Worsen in Pyongyang

[Update:   The Daily NK  also has an  interesting new  Pyongyang photo gallery from a Russian visitor with a real talent for  furtive photography.  I’m not sure how new this is; some of the pics look vaguely familiar.]   The Emerald City, where only the privileged live and where food has always been relatively plentiful,  is losing is hue: “Nowadays, it is even hard for people in Pyongyang to live. Although rations are given, it is not enough to live...

Categories Inside NK
February 22, 2007

Two Jailbreaks Reported in Hoeryong

As North Korea tries to enforce a crackdown on cross-border smuggling of people and subversive items, it finds that control isn’t as easy to maintain as it once was. Both incidents involved suspected (cross-border?) smugglers: The source said that in the evening, around 10 PM, unknown arsonist set fire on armory that caused confusion. Amid fire, two smugglers broke the prison bars and escaped. Although the Manghyang district security guards declared state of emergency over Hoiryeong and tried to catch...

Categories Inside NK/Resistance
February 21, 2007

Kim Jong Il Loses North Korean Soccer Mom Demographic

According to the Daily NK’s various sources, Kim Jong Il has  banned  either some or all Japanese cars, after one of them broke down on the road and blocked his path. So far, most of the middle-class North Koreans or low-ranking party officials have been using Japanese cars, whereas the richest riding Mercedes. Also, Korean-Japanese who immigrated into the North are fond of the cars they used to drive in Japan. So the number of Japanese-built cars is more than...

Categories Inside NK/Kim Jong Il
February 14, 2007

Japanese TV Interviews Two of the North Korean Border Guards Who Deserted at Hoeryong

A remarkable new report, with video, strongly corroborates recent reports that 20  North Korean border guards defected, en masse, and fled into China.  On the 12th, Japan’s Asahi TV interviewed two North Korean border guards who successfully defected from North Korea to a neighboring village in China. On the 4th, the DailyNK reported that 1 platoon of border guards from the district of Hoiryeong had defected to China, and that secret agents had been sent to China in search of...

Categories Google Earth/Inside NK/NK Military
February 13, 2007

Mysterious Pits in a North Korean Field, 39.944 N, 125.471 E : Image Analysts Wanted

[Update: Coordinates corrected.] [Update 2:Digg the story here.] Reader “kdehead” dropped a comment on another post below, with a link to a Google Earth image of a field near of the “ghost cities” I’d described in this post. Here is part of the image he links (click for full size): Here is his comment: ::Here is : slightly OT”¦ but what is this? [link to image] are they trenches/pits with prisoners? note the bottom one – half full. the one...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Inside NK
February 8, 2007

Watching Porn in Pyongyang

Question: How much can you get for a smuggled DVD of a South Korean soap opera in Pyongyang these days? Answer: Ten years in Camp 15. Still, in the latest of a flurry of signs that the Thought Police aren’t what they used to be, the DVD’s are wildly popular anyway (hat tip to Ampontan). “This year, North Korean authorities waged what they call ‘psychological warfare’ against ‘exotic lifestyles’ by cracking down on South Korean pop culture,” a senior government...

Categories Deprogramming/Inside NK/Korean Society
February 7, 2007

Also Translates to ‘Cleanse’

Hoeryong, North Korea,  labors under  some unenviable distinctions:  it is one of the worst, most blighted places in arguably the world’s worst, most blighted country; it sits near Camp 22, almost certainly the very worst place to be on this earth; it is a hot spot in  North Korea’s  spreading mystery-pandemic; it is a major transit point for people who are trying to sneak out of North Korea; and it contains some of North Korea’s most discontented and potentially rebellious...

Categories Inside NK/Refugees
February 6, 2007

Mass Escape at N. Korean Concentration Camp; 120 Escape

[For images of North Korea’s nuclear sites, click here; for updates and commentary on North Korea’s latest nuclear test, click here; for images of other concentration camps, click here and here; for more Google Earth imagery of North Korea, click here.] [Update 11 Feb 07:   North Korea denies it] The Daily NK reports: Sources residing in the district of Chongjin, North Hamkyung informed on the 1st and 5th “On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the...

Categories Google Earth/Human Rights/Inside NK/Resistance/The Camps
February 5, 2007

Disciplinary Erosion Hits N. Korean Border Guards

The Daily NK reports that two border guards were caught taking money to allow refugees to cross the border and will be executed.  Although the state can’t decide whether to hang or shoot the two unfortunates, or how to schedule it around the Dear Leader’s birthday,  past history suggests that  the deed  will be carried out publicly to make an example of the men.  Consider the  example set.  Of the two reported consequences, only one seems to have been intended: ...

Categories Inside NK/NK Military/Refugees
January 18, 2007

Things Not to Say in North Korea

 Ju Tong-il, minister of power and coal industries, was fired late last year by the leaders of the impoverished Communist state, the evening edition of the Mainichi Shimbun daily said in a story from Beijing.  “Our country’s energy situation is extremely severe,” Ju told a meeting of energy-related officials last spring, according to the daily, quoting unnamed sources close to the North Korean government.  “Or better yet, why don’t we get back electricity fed to the guesthouses of our general?”...

Categories Inside NK/Kremlinology
January 18, 2007

Caught on Tape: Drug Smuggling in North Korea

The footage also captured the North Korean drug dealers sniffing the drugs as well as the dealers talking about the transaction. Of the dealers, one person was a worker managing the level of humidity at a manufacturing factory and seemingly the intermediary supplier who obtained the drugs. It seems that the 3~4 people sitting in a circle are personally testing the quality of the drugs before purchase. Although the dealer’s child has entered the room, the buyers continue to inhale...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Inside NK
January 16, 2007

Pandemic Strikes Chongjin, North Korea’s Fourth-Largest City

Previous posts on the spreading pandemic here, beginning last October.  Yonhap, quoting unnamed sources and the NGO Good Friends, tells us that things have gotten worse, and that the largest city in North Korea’s northeast faces outbreaks of several deadly diseases: Four infectious diseases have stricken a North Korean city on the east coast, affecting up to 4,000 people, a source claimed Monday. “Chongjin is overrun by scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus and paratyphoid. About 3,000 to 4,000 are suffering from...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
January 7, 2007

You Can’t Eat Plutonium

The Daily NK previously reported that Pyongyang’s patrician class had swallowed the whole “barrel of a gun” spin after North Korea’s nuclear test.  It didn’t surprise me to hear that.  I’d even predicted it. I’m equally unsurprised that North Korea’s proles, and some of its urban youth, are less impressed and seem completely disillusioned with the course of things. Young adults in Pyongyang commonly call Kim Jong Il as “that guy,” whereas in the province of Hamkyung, Kim Jong Il...

Categories Deprogramming/Inside NK/Resistance
December 12, 2006

Bracing for Catastrophe

The Daily NK has more bleak reports from the North.  The first deals with how the regime’s block committees are feeling the strain of the people’s desperation to survive: More specifically, “Requests were made to be cautious of any act of anti-socialism such as secretly watching or spreading news of video tapes, anyone who uses a car to sell goods, any act of offering accommodation or receiving money for lease of accommodation and acts of brewing home-wine. In particular, in...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
December 3, 2006

N. Korea Arrests Hoeryong Protest Leaders

You will recall my post regarding the merchants’ protest in Hoeryong, against the closure of a market for which the merchants had already rented stall space from the authorities.  The Daily NK reported that a hundred people protested the decision at the market management office.  Since then, a subsequent report suggested that the authorities might cave.  Any such hope has proven premature.  It’s still North Korea up there. The Daily NK now reports how the chapter closed:  one dead, 20...

Categories Inside NK/Resistance
November 27, 2006

CNN Reports from the Yalu River

The Daily NK provides this link to the video of the broadcast (which worked fine for me).  They show scenes from across the river and interview a refugee woman on the Chinese side. It’s nothing new, really, although it bears constant repetition that North Koreans aren’t brainwashed automatons.  Increasingly, they’re willing to say just what they think of the Dear Leader’s bounty … even to foreign journalists. On a related note, don’t miss the Daily NK’s follow-up to the protest...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Refugees/Resistance
November 23, 2006

Score One for the ‘Barrel of a Gun’ Theory

Look what the Partei is telling the proles: At a people’s meeting in Hoiryeong, citizens were educated on the justice of North Korea’s nuke experiment and the economic aftereffects of the nuke experiment. An organizer of the people’s meeting in Hoiryeong said “The nuclear experiment has broken all of U.S. North Korea pressure policies and we have successfully shown the whole world that our socialism is good. Now, beginning from the nations of the six-party talks, countries around the world...

Categories Inside NK/Kremlinology