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Category: South Korea

November 7, 2014

NIS agent gets prison time for framing defector

A Seoul court sentenced Tuesday a mid-ranking state intelligence agent to two and a half years in prison for instructing other agents to forge documents to frame a North Korean defector as a spy. The 48-year-old National Intelligence Service (NIS) agent, surnamed Kim, was convicted of instructing other agents to fabricate the Chinese immigration records of Yoo Woo-seong, a 34-year-old defector who was then an employee of the Seoul municipal government, to charge him with espionage. “Kim routinely made excuses...

Categories Korean Law/Refugees
October 10, 2014

Seoul finally decides it needs a missile defense plan

South Korea and the United States are drawing up a joint contingency plan to employ Washington’s missile defense (MD) system against growing threats from North Korea’s ballistic missiles, a government source here said Tuesday. The joint contingency plan would employ not only missiles and surveillance equipment the U.S. Forces Korea and South Korea have been developing under their Korean Air and Missile Defense (KAMD) project, but also key assets of the U.S. MD system, according to the source. The U.S....

Categories An Alliance?/Missiles/U.S. & Korea
September 19, 2014

The Daily NK looks back on the Il Shim Hue scandal, the investigation of which …

stopped suddenly when it reached the door of Roh Moo Hyun’s Blue House. See also my post from the time of the conviction, and follow the links if you care to read more. I heard somewhere that Michael Jang, the group’s convicted ringleader and a former USFK soldier, has completed his sentence and is now a “unification” activist in L.A. Can anyone confirm that?

Categories The Fifth Column
September 19, 2014

So, you really, really don’t like North Korea, do you?

I’m just glad to have done my small part: North Korea has topped the list of countries that the American people feel most unfavorable toward, a biennial survey showed Monday, amid the communist nation’s prolonged detention of three U.S. citizens. North Korea received a favorability rating of 23 points out of 100 in the Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey conducted on 2,108 adults from May 6-29. The North was followed by Iran with a rating of 27 points, Iraq...

Categories America/An Alliance?
September 13, 2014

On Think Tanks, Propaganda, the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act, and Korea

Washington is a marvelous city for someone like me. Where else could a foreigner, an outsider like myself, do the things I was able to do? – Tongsun Park, to the House Ethics Committee, April 1978 A detailed story in The New York Times, examining grants and gifts by foreign governments to U.S. think tanks — and how those gifts influence scholars (and through them), voters, policymakers, and Congress — has caused much controversy and discussion in Washington this week....

Categories U.S. & Korea/U.S. Law/Washington Views
September 9, 2014

Are South Koreans always the last to learn facts about North Korea or

… does it just seem that way? Years after Google Earth made North Korea’s gulags visible to any American with an internet connection, Daum is launching a Korean-language map service covering North Korea. It’s not clear what new information this will provide for English speakers, other than helping us with those pesky problems of spelling North Korean place names in English. Separately, South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission says “it plans to open a permanent exhibition hall on North Korea’s...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society
September 2, 2014

Does this mean we’re paying for THAAD for South Korea?

The United States has wrapped up its survey of candidate sites for its advanced missile defense (MD) system to be deployed in South Korea, with a final decision likely to be made before their annual defense ministers’ meeting in October, sources said Monday. Washington has made no secret that it is considering deploying a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery, an integral part of its MD system, to South Korea, citing evolving threats from North Korea. [Yonhap] Does the “it”...

Categories An Alliance?/Anju Links/Missiles/ROK Military
September 2, 2014

Left-wing priest justifies N. Korean shelling of Yeonpyeong-do

On Nov. 22, a day before the third anniversary of North Korea’s shelling of the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong, the Rev. Park Chang-shin made comments during a Mass while criticizing President Park Geun-hye that it was natural for Pyongyang to attack the island because the South and the U.S. held military exercises near its sea border. [Yonhap] This was followed by a helping of Cheonan conspiracy theory. I don’t agree with summoning people for police questioning over political speech....

Categories The Fifth Column
August 28, 2014

I love watching North Korean refugees emerging as a cultural force …

to inform the world about life, such as it was, in their homeland. The South China Morning Post covers a North Korean human rights film festival in Hong Kong, and The Washington Post’s new Seoul correspondent, Anna Fifield, covers a young North Korean rapper who doesn’t quite share my taste in music, but does share my outlook about food distribution north of the no-smile line.

Categories Books & Films/Korean Society/Refugees
August 21, 2014

Those who’ve been assigned to Yongsan, or who sometimes went to Itaewon, …

will appreciate this well-researched history of the neighborhood’s sleazy past and present gentrification, although sleaze has been a difficult thing to extinguish from the places where it has put down its roots. During my last visit to Seoul, the brothel district near the former Yongsan Station, now a massive E-Mart, was still plying its trade, just a bit more sedately, and just around the corner from a police precinct. Judging from the link, Hooker Hill still features hookers, despite the new development two...

Categories Korean Society/U.S. Military
August 20, 2014

South Korea’s missile problem, and ours

For the last year, the South Korean government has been saying that it considers a North Korean attack a very real risk, and it has also said that if attacked, its retaliation will be swift and severe. Its President, Park Geun-Hye, recently expressed concern about a North Korean “misjudgment,” and touted the U.S.-ROK military alliance as the best deterrent against that. As recently as this week, she has been warning her army of the dangers of “complacency.” I don’t have...

Categories Missiles/NK Military/ROK Military
August 6, 2014

Insiders debate North Korea’s EMP capability

The simplest electro-magnetic pulse or EMP weapons are, put simply, nuclear weapons detonated at high altitude. A high-altitude nuclear blast would overload and destroy electrical circuits and infrastructure, and create blackouts over wide areas for extended periods of time. Imagine your life without the internet, telephone, electricity, or cars — in short, being part of a 21st Century population trying to sustain itself with Colonial Williamsburg technology — and you get the idea. Without the means to recover from that sort of attack...

Categories NK Military/ROK Military/WMD
August 1, 2014

Election result throws Korean left into chaos, me happy

Wow. This has to be really painful: In Wednesday’s parliamentary by-elections, the ruling conservative Saenuri Party scored an thumping victory, winning 11 out of 15 seats and increasing its majority to 158 of 300 National Assembly seats. The major opposition party, New Politics Alliance for Democracy, won in only 4 districts and now has 130 seats in parliament. The most surprising result was a conservative win in the Jeolla region in the southwest of the country, a traditional staunch stronghold...

Categories Korean Politics
June 5, 2014

Park Geun Hye didn’t lose. That means she won. (updated)

Ruling parties are supposed to lose mid-term elections, especially when they look incompetent, uninspiring, visionless, and scandalous. I expected Park Geun Hye’s Saenuri Party to lose, and frankly, it deserved to. Despite all of this, it didn’t lose, which means it won. Saenuri’s opposition was the New Politics Alliance for Democracy, formerly known as the Democratic Party, the Uri Party, the Millennium Democratic Party, and before that, Prince. It has not weathered Korea’s modest political realignment well. At the moment, it...

Categories Korean Politics
April 29, 2014

Just test the damn thing already.

So the news this week is that the Obama Administration, which for the last five years has stayed its hand from sanctioning North Korea because of Chinese sensitivities, has just blocked the assets of top members of Vladimir Putin’s government over their seizure of the Crimea. That sounds like an effective way to piss them off, but I can’t see how it poses a serious threat to Russia’s economy or Putin’s domestic support, or how it will deter his next...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. & Korea/WMD