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March 17, 2007

‘Abduction’ Film Updates

This beautifully produced film, created by two National Geographic alumni, will air on BBC 4’s “Storyville” series  on March 22nd at 10:30 p.m.  I’d add that since absolutely nothing is open at that time in Britain, there’s no excuse not to watch. The film is also coming to DVD in May, with digitally remastered sound and subtitles in eight languages.  More at AbductionFilm.com.

Categories Abductions/Activism/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/Japan & Korea/Terrorism (NK)
March 15, 2007

North Korea’s Blood Gold

Question: How can a banker and investor in overseas gold mines get sympathetic innocent-victim treatment from the International Herald Tribune? Answer: Go into business with this man. That’s the upshot of this IHT story on Colin McAskill, successor to Nigel Cowie as the new primary foreign stakeholder in the Pyongyang-based Daedong Credit Bank. Reporter Donald Greenless writes that among McAskill’s other functions, he is “helping to operate North Korea’s foreign gold sales.” McAskill offers “dossiers” of proof to disprove any...

Categories Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/The Camps
March 14, 2007

See Also: Links for March 14th

[Update:   Apparently, some of you want to see someone put the hurt on Lim Won Hyuk,  although I have  neither the time to do it nor the  inspiration to re-argue things I’ve already said here a thousand times.  Sperwer may come through, and I look forward to those efforts and promise to link them.  Meanwhile,  Prof. Sung Yoon-Lee e-mails obligingly with this link to his PBS News Hour debate with Lim.  Just between the headline and the top of...

Categories An Alliance?/China/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/U.S. & Korea
March 10, 2007

Eight Questions Our Shenyang Consul General Won’t Answer

About a week ago,  I published  this post,  relaying Adrian Hong’s assertion that the U.S. Consulate in Shenyang,  in direct contravention  U.S. law,  stood by and refused entry to six North Korean refugees who where just feet from the  Consulate’s front gate.   Shortly thereafter, the refugees, Hong and other LiNK activists were arrested by the Chinese authorities.    After I published that post, a reader supplied me with the e-mail addresses of the Stephen Wickman, the U.S. Consul General in...

Categories Appeasement/China/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Refugees
March 4, 2007

How a U.S. Consul Helped Send Six North Korean Refugees to Kim Jong Il’s Gulag

[Update: The Shenyang Six were freed from a Chinese jail in August 2007.] The Secretary of State shall undertake to facilitate the submission of applications [] by citizens of North Korea seeking protection as refugees …. (Title 22, United States Code, Section 7843) Back in January, I told you the story of the Shenyang Six, a group of six North Korean refugees who sought refuge from persecution and starvation in their homeland, and how the Chinese authorities, following their long-standing...

Categories China/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Human Rights/Refugees/Washington Views
February 28, 2007

RFA Interviews North Korean Comfort Women

Paek Sun-Joo was an 18-year-old street child when she was sold to a 38- year-old Chinese man more than two years ago. “[The traffickers] would gather people wearing rags, appearing to be compassionate and pity them, giving them something to eat and telling them that in China they would be able to feed and clothe themselves adequately,” Paek told RFA reporter Han Min. “It is easy to be tricked when you are starving, and somebody gives you some food, telling...

Categories China & Korea/Human Trafficking
February 20, 2007

10,000th N. Korean Refugee Arrives in S. Korea

[Update:   No, this can’t be right.  Compare it to Andrei Lankov’s figures on Page 54 of this study.  I suspect that the total number of defectors living in the South has just exceeded the 10,000 mark, and that the reporter is misinterpreting that figure.] The arrival of 10 North Koreans here late last week heralds an era of 10,000 defectors a year arriving from the Stalinist country. Until the early 1990s, only a few dozen North Koreans fled the...

Categories Defectors/Refugees
February 19, 2007

It’s Time for Jay Lefkowitz to Resign

I recently wrote a piece for publication on North Korea’s finances, the rumors of the then-prospective deal with North Korea,  and how to increase the pressure so that we could get a truly verifiable dismantlement of their nuclear program and a real and fundamental movement toward transparency.   If no favorable agreement could be achieved,  our financial strategy  showed real promise in  collapsing  the regime’s palace economy, and maybe even the regime  itself, something for which my aspiration is no secret. ...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/Refugees/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
February 11, 2007

¿Plata o Plomo?

That title, btw, is a  tip of my  sombrero to my many  Spanish readers today.  As I write, the latest efforts to talk North Korea out of its nukes appear to be making exactly as much progress as they’ve made for the last 15 years.  It’s at least comforting to see our government  moving forward with  other options.  Most of those come in the forms of long-overdue appropriations for  budget authorizations from the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004:...

Categories Counterfeiting/Deprogramming/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Refugees
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 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
February 5, 2007

Wobble Watch: Kaesong

In a one-hour meeting with Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung, U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said that while it is unrealistic to recognize the goods made in the border city of Kaesong as South Korean, there is room left to negotiate within the proposed free trade agreement (FTA) between the two countries, Unification Ministry officials said. “Lee stressed that U.S. recognition of the goods produced in Kaesong as South Korean will contribute to bringing about a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula....

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Economics
February 1, 2007

Czechs End N. Korea Slave Trade

Czech authorities have decided to end the practice of having North Koreans work in Czech factories under what one human rights organization has described as “slave” conditions. “We have decided not to offer new work visas to North Korean citizens and not to prolong the existing visas,” the Interior Ministry official responsible for asylum and migration policy, Tomas Haisman, said in an interview. The ministry announced the decision, citing October’s U.N. resolution condemning and imposing sanctions on Pyongyang because of...

Categories Europe/Human Rights/Human Trafficking
February 1, 2007

Remarkable Sky News Video of the Underground Railroad

Hundreds of refugees are risking their lives attempting to escape a brutal existence in North Korea. Sky News Asia correspondent Peter Sharp reports from China’s northern border where a savage winter is providing an impetus for an exodus of the weak and vulnerable: Hunger is stalking the bleak, windswept hills of North Korea. And for some of  the long-suffering residents of Kim Jong-il’s hermit kingdom it has  proved the final straw.  [read the rest] You can see the video here;...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Refugees
January 29, 2007

Vaporize the Messenger

“People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.”   — George Orwell, 1984 Today, the Dong-A Ilbo reports a surprising defection, and an unsurprising, yet on some level, rather  remarkable result: Recently, rumors have been spreading in North Korea that Jeong Ha Cheol (74-year-old), the propaganda...

Categories Defectors/Kremlinology
January 26, 2007

If He’d Just Thrown His Medals Across the Fence, He’d Be a Senator Today

Sixty Minutes will broadast a long-anticipated interview with traitor  Joe  Dresnok this Sunday, and one thing’s apparent:  he’s eating well enough. From the CBS promo story: The last American defector still living in North Korea says a billion dollars in gold couldn’t entice him to leave the country he ran to 44 years ago.  In the first communication from Joe Dresnok since he defected in 1962, the former G.I. also says his fellow defector, Charles Jenkins, who was permitted to leave...

Categories Abductions/Defectors/U.S. Military