Home  >  South Korea

Category: South Korea

February 8, 2010

North Korean Gulag Survivors Tell Their Survival Stories to Bored South Korean Soldiers

As it turns out, inviting a North Korean gulag survivor to speak to South Korean troops is a lot like inviting Elie Wiesel to speak at a Pat Buchanan rally: After speaking recently to a group of young South Korean soldiers about North Korea’s harsh labor camps, former prisoner Jung Gyoung Il — himself once a soldier in North Korea’s massive army — was stunned by the questions from the audience. One soldier asked how many days of leave North...

Categories Human Rights/Korean Society/ROK Military/The Camps
February 2, 2010

Rand: South Korea Still a Military Parasite

Years ago, I quoted extensively from a Rand report on then-President Roh Moo Hyun’s plans to cut the ROK military budget and settle into a cozy military and economic parasitism on the country Roh’s supporters loved to hate. But now that Roh is a fading bad memory, the alliance stands on firm ground again, right? Wrong: The ROK has become one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with a strong economy. Yet despite this economic strength, the ROK still...

Categories An Alliance?/Reconstruction/ROK Military
February 2, 2010

Christopher Hitchens on Brian Myers’s “The Cleanest Race”

Hitchens writes: All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? The conundrum has several obscene corollaries. The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with the lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that–to judge by the standard of care and nutrition in the “wider” society–must be a living hell excusable only...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Books & Films/Korean Society/Propaganda/Racism
January 28, 2010

Equality Begins Where Dependence Ends

South Korea, which spent the better part of the last two decades bitching that it wanted to be treated like America’s equal, has been bitching ever since the Pentagon decided that Korea was just about ready to take over wartime operational control of its own military, you know … for its own defense. Needless to say, and largely as a result of having served in the USFK myself for four years, I’m neither as sympathetic nor as diplomatic as our...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/UCMJ & SOFA
January 27, 2010

Bang Bang, Splash Splash

When I first heard that North Korea had declared a no-sail zone off its West Coast, I really wanted to believe that it was because they read this, but I suspected that they’d actually launch some anti-ship missiles from Cho-Do. Instead, we have this: North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire near their disputed sea border on Wednesday, highlighting instability along a heavily armed frontier for the second time in three months. North Korea warned the South that more rounds...

Categories NK Military/North-South/ROK Military
December 21, 2009

South Korea Clears Mines from the DMZ (and Why I Think That’s a Shrewd Decision)

You say you want reunification? Fine, then. Dig up the mines along the DMZ and open the border. No, I’m not kidding: The South Korean military said Monday it has removed some 1,300 land mines this year from the country’s rural areas bordering North Korea, a reminder of the tense 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a truce. In the operations that lasted from April to November, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) mobilized 3,300 personnel to remove mines from...

Categories NK Military/North-South/Refugees/ROK Military/Subversion
December 10, 2009

Picture of the Day: ROK Defense Minister Decorates Sailors After Battle with North Korean Ship

The crew of the Chamsuri 325, who fought off a North Korean incursion across the Northern Limit Line, are decorated by the Defense Minister for courage under fire. Here is the vessel’s skipper, Lieutenant Kim Sang-Hun: “I could literally see the shells flying at us. Some skidded off the water and slammed into the side of our boat,” he said, speaking aboard the Chamsuri 325, the very boat that engaged with the North Korean Navy a decade ago. No South...

Categories NK Military/North-South/ROK Military
November 19, 2009

An FTA After All?

On balance, it’s more likely that President Obama’s surprising shift in tone is about keeping up appearances on the one issue that matters most to the South Korean government. Still, you can’t deny that this is a breathtaking shift: U.S. President Barack Obama pledged Thursday morning to ratify a free-trade agreement with South Korea that has been stuck for two years, challenging the U.S. Congress to separate South Korea from other Asian nations enjoying vast trade surpluses with the U.S....

Categories U.S. & Korea
November 18, 2009

Press Conference on NK Human Rights Several Hours Before Obama’s Arrival in Seoul

Updated below with videos, etc. The Association of North Korean Human Rights Organizations (ANKHRO / 북한인권단체얰합회) held a press conference today at 2 p.m. near the US Embassy in Seoul. Member groups Helping Hands Korea, Justice for North Korea, Unify Korea 2009 (which also held another event in the evening -Update: BBC–), and Christians for Social Responsibility all participated. Several North Korean defectors joined the other activists, though I wasn’t sure which individual organization(s) they came with or represented. The...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/U.S. & Korea
November 17, 2009

If He Has to Deny It, It Must Be True

While we still aren’t sure whether our Blood Allies © paid the Taliban $2 million or $20 million in ransom, or how many American soldiers or Afghan civilians the Taliban used that money to kill, the South Korean government wants you to know that despite its refusal thus far to do more good than harm there, it did not promise the Taliban that it would keep its troops out of Afghanistan: South Korea did not offer to refrain from redeploying...

Categories An Alliance?/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea
November 13, 2009

North Korea Accuses South of Provoking Naval Clash

As predicted, North Korea’s account of this week’s Yellow Sea battle is jarringly at odds with what the South reports: When the [North Korean] patrol boat was sailing back after confirming the object at about 11: 20 a group of warships of the south Korean forces chased it and perpetrated such a grave provocation as firing at it. The patrol boat of the north side, which has been always combat-ready, lost no time to deal a prompt retaliatory blow at...

Categories NK Military/North-South/ROK Military
November 10, 2009

North Korean Ship “Wrapped in Flames” After Battle; No South Korean Sailors Hurt

The North Korean navy appears to have gotten the worst of it after an apparently calculated provocation along the Northern Limit Line, the Koreas’ maritime boundary in the Yellow Sea: According to Joint Chiefs of Staff officials in Seoul, a North Korean patrol boat crossed the NLL at 11:27 a.m. and attacked a South Korean one after ignoring several warning shots. The South Korean side suffered no casualties in the clash that erupted shortly after the crossing and lasted about...

Categories NK Military/North-South/ROK Military
October 30, 2009

Another South Korean Professor Caught Spying for the North

A South Korean university lecturer accused of spying for North Korea since the early 1990s has been indicted on espionage charges, prosecutors said Thursday. The suspect, identified by the surname Lee, was charged with giving North Korea confidential information, including the locations of key South Korean military facilities and an army operations manual, prosecutors in Suwon, south of Seoul, said in a statement. [MacLeans] They could have waited a few years and gotten it all from Google Earth. Anyway, if...

Categories An Alliance?/The Fifth Column
October 30, 2009

Daily NK: Rising Divorce Rates in North Korea

Iif there is any element of Korean society that I’d have thought indestructible even to Kim Jong Il, it’s the strength of Korean families. Korean society strongly encourages marriage, children, and family loyalty. Divorce and out-of-wedlock births are strongly discouraged. The single exception is its traditional tolerance for male promiscuity, whether by single or married men (who are nonetheless expected to keep their dalliances casual and remain with their wives and children). With that being said, South Korean society is...

Categories Korean Society/NK Military
October 27, 2009

Defector: Naver Infiltrated by NorkBots!

Hmmm. I wonder if we’ve seen some of those types around here? Writer Jang Shin-Jung (former employee of the United Front Department), a North Korean refugee, testified that North Korea’s United Front Department has adopted a new propaganda strategy against South Korea by operating a new internet commenting team to reflect South Korea’s change in media culture. [….] Jang conjectured that about 30 team members at contact station 101 were cultural experts of South Korea. He described their proficiency in...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion/The Fifth Column
October 14, 2009

Two years from now, carpet-bagging traders from Chongjin could be buying up real estate in Kangnam

… if Jasper Kim is correct that Korea’s housing bubble is about to burst. There are some eerie echoes of the U.S. subprime mania as well. The first sign of trouble is the general consumer confidence that real-estate prices will go up. A recent Bank of Korea consumer survey index for housing found the highest level of optimism since the survey started a year ago. Purchasers of Korean real estate have a sense that a broader economic recovery is underway....

Categories South Korea
September 20, 2009

North Korea Closes Largest Unofficial Market

But it can’t be! Victor Cha, Selig Harrison, Keith Luse, Frank Januzzi, and every Peace Studies professor in South Korea can’t all be wrong! North Korea has shut down its largest unofficial market in a sign that the Communist government was intent on quashing, or at least better controlling, market activities that it had tolerated for years, Seoul-based organizations monitoring the country said last week. The market, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, was closed sometime in June and vendors were...

Categories An Alliance?/NK Economics