Category: Miscellaneous

Another reason not to hike the DMZ these days: NORTH Korea has completed deployment of about 50,000 special forces along the border with South Korea, a report said on Wednesday, amid high tensions over the sinking of a Seoul warship. The deployment began two or three years ago and seven 7,000-strong divisions are now in place, an unidentified senior government official told Yonhap news agency. __________________ North Korea’s “unofficial spokesman” Kim Myong Chol has constructed an elaborate theory blaming the...

The Wall Street Journal rips into W.H.O. Director-General and useful idiot Margaret Chan. The fact of Ms. Chan’s origins in Hong Kong raise the obvious suspicion that she’d never have gotten her current job without the backing of the China’s oligarchy in Beijing. And given the vast gulf between China’s views on health and human rights and ours, this is a good illustration of why the United Nations will never be united by a common purpose or outlook. Instead, some...

Must Read No. 1: Nicholas Eberstadt on the importance of striving for unification. North Korea’s present leadership will surely wish to ratchet up its threat to America and the Western alliance in the years ahead. It is entirely reasonable to anticipate Pyongyang’s eventual sale of nukes to hostile powers or international terror networks. The regime has already marketed abroad practically everything in its nuclear warehouse short of user-ready bombs. Even worse, there are troubling signs–repeated nuclear tests, continuing missile tests,...

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...

The North Korean authorities are hunting for those clandestine correspondents who give us those independent reports about events in North Korea as if the regime’s very existence depends on it: A radio broadcaster run by North Korean defectors here reported this week that security guards in Hoeryeong, North Hamgyeong Province, directed its residents to turn in photos of their family members who have been missing from 2005. If the families say that these photos have been lost, security guards pay...

Professor Sung-Yoon Lee, writing a lengthy Outlook piece for the American Enterprise Institute, predicts that history will be unkind to Kim Dae Jung (and if you read Don Kirk’s book, already is to a degree). I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but Lee is an all-time OFK favorite, and I’ve read enough to see that it’s up to Lee’s high standards of writing. What’s more, this article has fired up spittle-flecked fulmination from a lot of the right people...

Things You Can’t Eat: “North Korea spent more than US$5.4 million on fireworks displays along the banks of the Taedong River in Pyongyang on Wednesday to celebrate former leader Kim Il-sung’s 98th birthday the following day. And President Lee Myung Bak, sounding more like an OFK guest blogger than ever, asks, “How much corn could you have bought with that money?” It’s on. _______________________ Is North Korea expanding its army again? _______________________ Did Kim Jong Il cancel his trip to...

On Kim Il Sung’s birthday, North Korean defectors defied the threats of their former masters and launched leaflet balloons: In a South Korean town just south of the heavily armed border, about 150 activists floated balloons containing leaflets denouncing the Kim dynasty, a thousand U.S. dollar notes and DVDs showing life in the more affluent South. The move came after North Korea threatened last week to take unspecified “decisive measures” if the South does not stop the activists from flying...

You know, until I was introduced to KCNA, I did not fully realize that living under the “dignified” Juche system was the human right that replaced all the rest of them: There exists no such issue as “human rights issue” in the DPRK nor can it exist there as it provides full legal and institutional guarantees to the independence of human being and the equal rights of the popular masses guided by the Juche idea. The south Korean puppet group...

Are you happy to see me, or is that just a cargo train? _______________________ Make that two officials executed over The Great Confiscation. Just to show that North Korea hasn’t lost its flair, it forced a crowd of economic officials to observe the proceedings. How many executions does it take to make this officially a purge? _______________________ Some surprisingly interesting observations from Hwang Jang Yop, via Don Kirk. _______________________ The collapse of North Korea’s educational system is creating a lost...

Sounds like the perfect time for a coup: Kim Jong Il, and possibly his son Jong-Eun, are rumored to be in China. ______________________________ North Korea has accused South Korean soldiers of firing on a police post on the North Korean side of the DMZ. ______________________________ Vitit Muntarbhorn calls for the U.N. to set up a commission of inquiry into North Korea’s crimes against humanity. If only someone at the U.N. really understood and cared about the history, suffering, and han...

Nearly a year after voting for UNSCR 1874, Russia gets around to implementing anti-proliferation sanctions. Let’s hope that Russia takes enforcement more seriously than China, though I’m not particularly optimistic. ________________________ Projection: “The south Korean conservative regime is no more than a marionette as it acts according to the script written by outsiders, bereft of any independence. This reactionary ruling group is bound to go to a ruin any moment as it goes against the requirements of the times and...

Writing in the Asia Times, Andray Abrahamian, a doctoral candidate at a small South Korean university, finally gets around to publishing — apparently unedited — the term paper that’s been on his hard drive for the last three years: At present, goods from Kaesong are excluded [from the U.S.-Korea FTA] but could be used as enticement for North Korean reform. The requirements for Kaesong-produced goods to be included in the FTA are deliberately vague: they are dependent on US interpretations...

The Chosun Ilbo calls on South Korea to treat human rights like a serious issue, after years of the opposite: It is time to make things extremely difficult for North Korea unless it takes at least some steps to improve the human rights situation. “It is time for the highest level of the UN, the Security Council, to step up,” Muntarbhorn said. The Security Council members — the U.S., China, the U.K., France and Russia — must tackle North Korea’s...

Must-read: Writing at the Daily NK, Andrei Lankov proposes a hydroponic growth program for a class of intellectual leaders for North Korea: While it is important to help North Korean elites, however, it is more important to pursue the formation of a new North Korean elite group. Intellectuals who were educated in North Korea know well about the reality of the country, but they face a lot of obstacles in learning modern knowledge. On the contrary, young North Koreans can...

Collective Spirit Update: Open News reports a rising number of kkotjaebi (homeless orphans) in North Korea, even as the elite continue to snap up expensive luxury goods imported from China. And this: “According to sources, Pyongyang has more than 1,000 millionaires.” Those sources may or may not be wrong, but what more evidence do you need than this that North Korea has a profound economic imbalance? You know, if Christine Ahn really hurries, she might be able to arrange a...

I regret that work obligations prevented me from meeting Lee Ae Ran during her recent visit to Washington, but the Mainichi Shimbun has a nice article about her here. ________________________ An Asian casino magnate with a multitude of sleazy associations has been denied a gaming license in Atlantic City: A March 2003 e-mail from a private investigation firm hired by MGM Mirage that found that “Stanley Ho was linked closely to the two major triads operating in Macau, the 14K...