Search Results for: Czech

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
November 9, 2006

The Czech Republic’s ‘Peculiar Institution’

“If someone calls it slavery …, I’m not the person responsible for that.” The IHT looks at the conditions in which North Korean women labor in the Czech Republic.  Some will  say  — and I will agree —  that the women certainly look better fed and clothed than their counterparts at home.  One could say the same for workers at Kaesong, to  a lesser extent,  who probably also eat better than their peers.  Like those meeting the classical definition of...

Categories Appeasement/Europe/Human Rights
April 20, 2015

RFA: North Korea tells overseas workers to attack journalists

Ever since the U.N. Commission of Inquiry issued its report last year, North Korea has been particularly sensitive to accusations of human rights violations. It shouldn’t surprise us that this sensitivity is especially keen when the scrutiny threatens to cut off a growing source of hard currency — its export of what amounts to slave labor to places like Russia, Malaysia, and Qatar. Press reports on the working conditions of these workers, and the regime’s spotty history of paying their (paltry) wages, have embarrassed the regime, embarrassed companies...

Categories Human Trafficking/Terrorism (NK)
November 11, 2014

Daniel Drezner, on the fall of the Berlin Wall

The thing about the collapse of the East German regime is how sudden it was. I was in East Berlin in the fall of 1989, and there was no inkling of a regime in trouble. Compared to other Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, East Germany’s civil society movement was much smaller and more fragmented.  East Germany’s protests grew out of a weekly prayer vigil in Leipzig in the fall of 1989, but according to Sarotte, the Stasi...

Categories Regime Change
January 9, 2013

Welcome, Reuters and N.Y. Times Readers Entire World

Well, thank you, Reuters Asia Correspondent Paul Eckert.  That was a very nice story, and I’m glad to see that the Times picked it up. This story needs to be told, and unfortunately, right now, only a few of us are telling it.  My hope is that one day, reporters will work directly with defectors and professional imagery analysts to tell it instead, and I can find a new hobby. Update: Overnight, the Reuters story was picked up by news...

Categories Google Earth/The Camps
May 9, 2012

Anju, May 9, 2012

OH KIL NAM’S WIFE, Shin Suk Ja, has died after reportedly being imprisoned in Camp 15 with her daughter. It was Oh’s idea to defect to North Korea, and it’s a grievous moral (and Darwinian) injustice that Shin, who opposed the idea from the start, died for Oh’s stupidity.___________________________________ DELECTABLE IRONY OF THE YEAR: A Japanese human rights activist searches his country’s archives and finds evidence that one of Kim Jong-Un’s grandparents was a collaborator.___________________________________ HUMAN RIGHTS WITHOUT FRONTIERS publishes...

Categories Anju Links
December 18, 2011

December 18, 2011

There are a few things I can’t let pass without comment this weekend. The defection of a squad of armed North Korean soldiers — if true, as the compulsory caveat goes — could open a new chapter in the Kim Dynasty’s erosive dialectic. This sort of defection can’t happen on a mass scale despite the forceful suppression of the two fascist regimes that border the Yalu, but it does suggest that when North Korea eventually devolves into something like what...

Categories Anju Links
May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 —...

Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
July 6, 2009

State Dep’t: NK Trades in Slave Labor

What the State Department is saying about North Korea’s use of forced labor is at least as strident as anything we heard during George W. Bush’s second term.  I suspect we’re seeing a combination of two things here — first, the State Department has internal politics of its own, and the bureaus that deal with labor and refugee issues tend to subscribe less to the diplomacy of connivance than the East Asia Bureau.  Second, with North Korea’s recent behavior pushing...

Categories Human Trafficking
October 10, 2008

Rumor: Bush will de-list N. Korea as a terror sponsor today.

I heard the rumor yesterday afternoon, but now I see the AP is reporting it.  According to the Financial Times, the only thing holding up the announcement is notifying / strong-arming the Japanese, and perhaps the South Koreans.  You can see Condi and her mouthpiece not answer questions about this below the fold, if you’re interested. There’s nothing quite like giving right in to extortion.  Somewhere on the troposphere of Kim Jong Il’s clot-riddled, misshapen, hideously coiffed cranium, a drooly...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
October 1, 2008

CHRNK Updates “Failure to Protect”

Recall that I characterized the original report as “the ultimate must-read” on human rights in North Korea.  The report was “sponsored” by Vaclav Havel, Kjell Magne Bondevik, and Elie Wiesel, but actually written by the law firm DLA Piper, in close cooperation with scholars from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.  The original 2006 report called for the U.N. to impose Chapter VII sanctions if the regime did not progress toward ending the mass murder and starvation of...

Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Human Rights
August 12, 2008

Anju Links for 12 August 2008

NO JUCHE FOR YOU: The South Korean government has refused permission for delegations from an unnamed  “local youth group” and the infamously extremist Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union to visit North Korea.   The decision has reportedly caused a spike in the  prices of invisible ink, pen-shaped transmitters,  and cyanide capsules in college dormitories, faculty lounges, and union halls across South Korea. A SECOND SHIPMENT OF AMERICAN FOOD AID has arrived to feed North Korea’s needy army. FIVE NORTH KOREAN...

Categories Anju Links
January 11, 2007

Lefkowitz on Kaesong: ‘Material support for a rogue government, its nuclear ambitions, and its human rights atrocities.’

[Updates Below; and a big welcome to everyone coming in from Gateway Pundit.] Ambassador Jay Lefkowitz, the U.S. Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, has an excellent new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (thanks to a reader!) that will provoke an absolute Category 5 sh*tstorm between the United States and South Korea, and for the best of reasons. Without question, the State Department and the Administration have not always lived up the high ideals the Special Envoy...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
January 2, 2007

KBS Confirms It: N. Korean Workers in Europe Are Slaves

Thanks to Mingi Hyun for forwarding, and to my wife for translation assistance.  Report, with video, here. KBS has confirmed that North Korean workers’ pay in East Europe is sent to a North Korean government account.  The Czech government learned that most of the workers’ pay was sent to the North Korean government and has stopped issuing work visas for North Korean workers. . . . The underwear factory is in the small village of Zebrac (phonetic), in the Czech...

Categories Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Economics
December 13, 2006

Fun With Konglish

Although history may eventually record that the Daily NK was the most important Korean newspaper of this century, I sometimes wish I had the time to help them out with their English edition: The newspaper also reported that while N. Korea has screwed most of salaries of its workers recently dispatched in Czech and Poland, it has seemed to actively export their workers to the Middle-East areas. Somehow, I don’t think that came out quite as meant.  It’s an interesting...

Categories Media Criticism/Unintended Humor
December 4, 2006

EU Investigating Forced N. Korean Labor

Update:   More at the Daily NK.   You may recall my previous post (and R. Elgin’s) about the use of female North Korean slave laborers to stitch upholstery for German luxury sedans, which certainly brings back a few memories about the golden age of German business ethics.  It looks like that source of income will soon come to an end, as the European Parliament is now investigating the conditions under which North Koreans labor in the Czech Republic and...

Categories Europe/Human Rights/Human Trafficking