Category: Regime Change

September 29, 2009

Good Friends Reports Strike in N. Hamgyeong Province

Interesting if true: One day one of supervisors got drunk and cursed at some laborers taking a break. It caused an explosion of suppressed anger on the part of the laborers. A laborer named Cho Dong-Soo (alias) challenged the supervisor, “How come you people fill your stomachs with alcoholic beverage and pork while idling away time and yet shout at us? We feel so hungry and weak in this hot weather. Don’t we deserve some rest?” The supervisor’s response was,...

Categories Resistance

September 10, 2009

Open Radio: China Prepares N. Korea Occupation Force

Open Radio, one of the broadcasting services that edits the reports of North Koreans and broadcasts them back into their homeland, claims that the force is being composed from ethnic Koreans in China: According to the source, Shenyang and Jangchoon districts have special force with a size of a brigade. There is also a force composed only of Korean-Chinese, while the size of this force has not been confirmed. These forces were created in order to respond to any sudden...

Categories China & Korea/Reconstruction

August 30, 2009

Daily NK Reports Uprisings in Labor Camps, Factory

Recently, the North Korean regime decided that its emaciated slaves hadn’t worked hard enough and declared a “150-day battle,” sending more of them to labor in the countryside and in the factories. The “battle,” however, appears to have taken a turn the authorities didn’t anticipate, according to an exile organization called North Korean Intellectuals Solidarity: It reported, “In a provincial labor-training camp located in Dongheung-district, Hamheung, South Hamkyung Province, a camp inspector, who was also a manager in the Department...

Categories Resistance/The Camps

August 27, 2009

Preventing Another “Three Kingdoms” Era

In The National Interest, Michael Green, the NSC’s primary Asia advisor during President Bush’s first term outlines a series of scary stages that he thinks are approaching rapidly as Kim Jong Il withers away and North Korea dies with him. The lines of fracture in such an opaque regime are extremely difficult to predict, of course, but most of Green’s analysis makes sense to me. First, Green says the current regime can’t be stabilized in the long term, and that...

Categories Kremlinology/Reconstruction/Regime Change

July 14, 2009

Suzanne Scholte: A War Crimes Tribunal for North Korea

With the mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il won’t burden this world for long, the civilized world faces the prospect of inheriting jurisdiction over people who’ve done some pretty awful things: On a recent trip to Seoul, a North Korean mother told me she and her 14-year-old daughter fled North Korea but were separated in China. The mother waited in China to reunite with her daughter only to discover that Chinese security agents had forced the girl back to North...

Categories Human Rights/Reconstruction

July 8, 2009

High-Level Defector Describes Regime’s Illicit Income

I’d previously mentioned that I recently had the opportunity to meet Kim Kwang Jin, a high-level North Korean defector with detailed knowledge of North Korea’s illicit financing and money laundering.  Now, Kim adds much to our understanding of how North Korea pays for all those Mercedes-Benzes and missiles.  Having guessed that most of the cash came from flipping houses and the inventing some of the novel kitchen applicances I’d seen Billy Mays selling on my TV, this was a cruel...

Categories Deprogramming/Money Laundering/NK Military/North Korea/Refugees/Regime Change/Religion/Uncategorized

July 3, 2009

After the Collapse

Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings, who (imho) did his best work on Iraq, refocuses on what happens after Kim Jong Il goes off to meet Saddam. Unlike me, O’Hanlon thinks a major U.S. troop presence in North Korea is inevitable. I think it’s just about the last thing we need: The notion that the United States could somehow outsource most of this DPRK stabilization mission to its South Korean ally falls apart the minute one begins to consider the immediate stakes...

Categories Reconstruction

June 28, 2009

In the case of a DPRK regime collapse, what power would South Korea have?

Had an interesting conversation this weekend with a North Korea watcher where for the first time, the idea of reunification seems realistic and within reach, yet at the same time, also at risk. It all has to do with the current health of Kim Jong Il who appears to be hanging on by a thread, the relatively short grooming period of his son to succeed him, and of course, China and the U.S. But not South Korea interestingly…

Categories China/North Korea/Regime Change

May 30, 2009

Korean War 2, Day 4: Everyone, Take a Deep Breath

I’m the last one to downplay the danger that North Korea really represents.  I’ve said all along that there is no purely diplomatic solution to that danger, and I’ve spent the last five years arguing for a combination of economic strangulation, political subversion, and strong conventional deterrence with the specific purpose of overthrowing Kim Jong Il.  By showing you Kim Jong Il’s death camps and the vast fields of graves that surround North Korea’s cities, I hope I’ve helped to...

Categories Regime Change/U.S. Military

May 18, 2009

Does North Korea’s “Combative Behavior” Signal the Beginning of the End?

For years, I have heard predictions about the fall of North Korea. During my second year in Korea, a South Korean government official told me he thought the Kim Jong Il regime would crumble within two years and reunification would follow. That was in 2003. Since then, I have heard numerous predictions from Koreans and the international community alike regarding the state of the DPRK and how much longer it has to survive. With the Kaesong project in the dumps,...

Categories Regime Change

March 25, 2009

The Weekly Standard on North Korea’s Changing Food Supply System

The article, with the provocative title “Kim’s Crumbling Regime,” discusses trends in bottom-up marketization of the food supply and the regime’s failure — a potentially fatal one — to stop that trend and regain control over the food supply. I’m not plush for time today, so I’ll just throw out a link and recommend you read it on your own. I’ve discussed the same tends a great deal here recently, because a growing body of evidence suggests that they’re accelerating.

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change

February 16, 2009

20% of Arriving N. Korean Refugees Need Psychological Treatment

It’s because of statistics like these that no one should underestimate the difficulty of Korean reunification: The most common ailments among North Korean refugees are dental disease followed by tuberculosis, according to Hanawon, the government-run institution for North Korean refugees. [….] Some 20 percent of inmates also need psychological treatment after leaving the institution, Hanawon said. Many also still owe money to brokers who arranged their defection to the South and experience discrimination. Here’s this week’s “we are one” moment:...

Categories Reconstruction/Refugees

January 24, 2009

A Smaller Army, in More Ways Than One

Chronic food shortages will considerably reduce North Korea’s pool of military recruits in the coming years, with nearly a quarter of young adults unfit for service due to malnutrition-related mental disabilities, a U.S. intelligence report said. [Yonhap] Malnutrition may also be taking an intellectual toll on North Koreans: The famine of the 1990s has caused severe cognitive deficiencies among young North Koreans, said the report by the National Intelligence Council that used studies from several U.S. intelligence agencies. I doubt...

Categories NK Military/Reconstruction

January 18, 2009

North Korea Fails to Stamp Out Private Markets

I wonder how long it will take for a North Korea “expert” in some South Korean university to call this a sign of reform: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il slapped restrictions on farmers’ markets last year, but his writ does not appear to run there. The North Korean regime said permitting the markets to operate had been “a transitional step taken under difficult economic conditions,” and according to a notice posted at Haeju Market, South Hwanghae Province that the Chosun...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Resistance

November 18, 2008

Who Needs a Contingency Plan? Everyone Near North Korea

The most persuasive evidence I’ve yet seen that there is a real danger of instability in North Korea comes from the people who probably have the best intelligence about events in Pyongyang: The Chinese military has boosted troop numbers along the border with North Korea since September amid mounting concerns about the health of Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, according to US officials. Beijing has declined to discuss contingency plans with Washington, but the US officials said the Peoples’...

Categories Reconstruction/Regime Change

October 25, 2008

Mystery Solved? Senior N.K. Diplomat Reportedly Defects

We may now know why North Korean diplomats were told to stand by for an important announcement on Monday: The United States declined Thursday to confirm or deny a report that a senior North Korean diplomat has defected and seeks shelter in the United States. “We have no information on that,” said Melanie Higgins, spokesperson for the State Department’s East Asian Affairs Bureau. Reports said that the defection of a senior North Korean diplomat led the Pyongyang regime to order...

Categories Defectors/Regime Change

October 24, 2008

Domestic State Terrorism: North Korea Expands Use of Public Executions

[Updated below] A few weeks ago, the Chosun Ilbo, quoting NGO’s that in turn cite interviews with recent defectors, reported that North Korea carried out 901 public executions in 2007.  This figure, of course, does not include summary executions or those carried out in secrecy, or the ordinary toll of starvation, disease, and torture in the North Korea’s vast concentration camp system.When a society is as opaque as North Korea’s, I originally thought it strained to suggest, as some newspapers...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Inside NK/Regime Change

October 3, 2008

If only America was watching ….

Or, to put it another way, if the media had reported other aspects of George W. Bush’s presidency the way they’ve mischaracterized his failed North Korea deal as a “rare triumph of diplomacy,” or so says the cliche-o-meter, Bush would probably have a 60% approval rating right now.* The Weekly Standard blog also digs at Chris Hill’s “choreography” and links to Mike Chinoy’s unintentionally damning description of just how chummy Hill has become with the Heydrichs and Eichmanns of Pyongyang...

Categories Appeasement/Regime Change/Six-Party Talks