Search Results for: Kim Won Hong

March 29, 2010

29 March 2010: The Relevance of Human Rights

The Chosun Ilbo calls on South Korea to treat human rights like a serious issue, after years of the opposite: It is time to make things extremely difficult for North Korea unless it takes at least some steps to improve the human rights situation. “It is time for the highest level of the UN, the Security Council, to step up,” Muntarbhorn said. The Security Council members — the U.S., China, the U.K., France and Russia — must tackle North Korea’s...

Categories Anju Links
March 26, 2010

ROK Navy Ship Sinks Near NLL; Updates: 46 Sailors Missing, ROK Gov’t Downplays Initial Reports of North Korean Attack

Original Post, 26 March 2010, ~0800: This from Yonhap. It’s not clear if the ship is sinking or has already sunk: A South Korean Navy ship with 104 crew members on board was sinking off the Seoul-controlled island of Baengnyeong in the Yellow Sea, near North Korea, Navy officials said Friday. The 1,500-ton ship sank between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. near the island, but the cause of the accident was unknown, the officials said. A rescue operation was underway,...

Categories Cheonan Incident/NK Military/North-South/ROK Military
March 23, 2010

Fear and Loathing Across the Tumen, Part 1

The Times of London sent correspondent Jane Macartney to China’s border with North Korea and found that the refugees there are reporting a rapidly deteriorating food situation, deepening discontent with the regime, and more willingness than ever to express that discontent openly. The editors of the Times are shocked enough by the report to write these cogent words in an editorial: Of all the atrocities of modern history, famine is the least commemorated. It is an agonising mass death sentence...

Categories NK Economics/Refugees/Resistance
March 6, 2010

Food Riot Reported Near Camp 12, North Korea

North Koreans, it seems, didn’t really feel much like celebrating on February 16th: One person was killed by armed guards on Feb. 16 when a group of people attempted to rob a food train at Komusan Railway Station in Puryong-gun, North Hamgyong Province, defector group North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said. The attack came on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s birthday after a disastrous currency reform sent food prices skyrocketing. The train was loaded with rice imported from China, the group...

Categories Resistance/The Camps
January 21, 2010

Benefit Concert for Stateless Orphans in China

Last Saturday night, January 16th, friend Lauren Walker put together an intimate evening of music at Yogiga Gallery in the Hongdae area of Seoul. Though by “intimate” I do not mean quiet. “A Night for North Koreans: Stateless Orphan Benefit Concert” raised over 700,000 won (~US$617) for an orphanage in China. Possibly 10,000 or more children of North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers are stateless, because they cannot be registered with the Chinese authorities, lest the mothers be caught and...

Categories Activism/China/Human Rights/Refugees
January 8, 2010

Where Is Robert King?

The short answer is that King, President Obama’s Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, is headed for South Korea and Japan. Here’s the entire State Department news release: Ambassador Robert King, Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, will visit South Korea from January 11-14 and Japan on January 15. This will be Ambassador King’s first visit to the region since being confirmed by the Senate in November 2009. Ambassador King will meet with South Korean and...

Categories Uncategorized
January 7, 2010

North Korea Descending Into Economic Chaos

I’ve long believed that functionally, there were two North Korean economies — a mostly capitalist (and to the U.N., illicit) “palace” economy that funds Kim Jong Il’s regime, and an increasingly capitalist (and to Kim Jong Il, illicit) “peoples’ economy” that rose from the ashes of the failed Public Distribution System. Some say that international food aid ended the Great Famine, a famine that may have killed millions of North Koreans. There is some truth in this, but international food...

Categories NK Economics/Uncategorized
January 6, 2010

6 January 2010: The Peoples’ Army Descends on the People

Next time you read a KCNA report about G.I.’s behaving badly in Itaewon or Hongdae, ponder this: According to the source, soldiers under Brigade #2 in PyungSan District, North HwangHae Province took away coals from the town residents. The soldiers commited the theft during daylight. These soldiers drove a Chinese 5-ton truck, Dong-Bang, and took away 8 tons of coals from three houses. They did not stop at stealing coals. Within the last month, soldiers stole radish from tens of...

Categories Anju Links
December 15, 2009

Chosun Ilbo: North Korea Executes 12 After Currency Riot in Hamhung

Now that many North Koreans have burned the savings that the regime suddenly declared worthless this month, the Chosun Ilbo reports that public outrage has forced Kim Jong Il to raise the exchange limit to 500,000 won. The decision coincides with the first report of a significant outbreak of anti-regime violence, followed by a brutal reaction: The announcements came after rioting by market traders in the Hamhung region was reported on Dec. 5-6 amid sympathy from ordinary people, sources said....

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/NK Economics/Resistance
December 10, 2009

My, How Times Have Changed: Human Rights Edition

South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission made itself infamous during the Roh years for the tangled logic by which it condemned America for overthrowing the genocidal Saddam Hussein, yet concluded that North Korea’s concentration camps, infanticides, smothering repression, and starvation of its subject were none of its concern. To the few of us who were then paying attention to any of this, the HRC became an international laughingstock and a symbol of the Korean left’s hypocritical anti-Americanism, its easy collaboration...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Useful Idiocy
December 9, 2009

North Korea’s Ajumma Rebellion

[Originally published at The New Ledger, Dec. 9, 2009] A sort of tea party movement may be breaking out today in the least likely of all places. The unseen pillars of Korean society are its ajummas. “Ajumma” — literally “aunt” — is one of those wonderfully untranslatable Korean words — more colorful than “hausfrau,” less derogatory than “fishwife,” and probably not too far from “yenta.” In South Korea, “ajumma” is an inglorious term most associate with gargantuan red sun visors,...

Categories Anju Links
December 6, 2009

North Korea Completes Great Confiscation (Upated)

[Updated below.] By now, it is December 7th in Pyongyang, and the period for exchanging old currency for new has passed. By filling the streets with troops and police, the regime has, for the moment, managed to contain the “fury and frustration” of people who, robbed of their savings and deprived of food rations, no longer know how they’re going to make it through the winter. For now, only isolated outbreaks of dissent are reported. The people know that this...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
November 18, 2009

Human Rights Watch: Raise Human Rights in Bilateral Talks with North Korea

Kay Seok of Human Rights Watch is one of the few people doing laudable work in an industry so invested in defending terrorists of late that it’s often too distracted to address the worst atrocities since the fall of the Khmer Rouge. This time, however, HRW’s letter, addressed to Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth, is a useful contribution to the policy discussion about North Korea: For too long has the world sidelined human rights in North Korea while single-mindedly focusing on...

Categories Activism/Diplomacy/Human Rights
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 4, 2009

Christine Ahn: Above Criticism! (Or, “Help! Help! I’m Being Repressed!”)

Christine Ahn is feeling picked on, reports the Oakland East Bay Express, an alt-lefty rag with a room-temperature circulation.  Writer Kathleen Wentz informs us that Ms. Ahn guards the privacy of her views jealously when she’s not on CNN, a book tour, the lecture circuit, or hectoring congressional staffers: As a longtime peace activist and progressive, Christine Ahn was used to being on the ideological fringe. But even she wasn’t prepared to be red-baited and called a supporter of dictatorship....

Categories Media Criticism/Useful Idiocy
October 29, 2009

Survivor Confirms Location of Camp 12

As I have noted before, I recently began working closely with the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) on the identification of North Korea’s concentration and labor camps through satellite imagery. That work has now expanded beyond its beginnings on Google Earth to other sources of imagery, including Digital Globe. This has become a close collaboration and friendship with Chuck Downs, HRNK’s Executive Director, and researcher David Hawk, the author of The Hidden Gulag and a former Executive...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps
September 12, 2009

Lisa Ling to Appear at LiNK Benefit Gala Tonight

[Liveblogging below. Paul Song is speaking, and Laura Ling will appear at the gala.] Wonderful. And you can watch it all here, live at 6 p.m. Eastern. For all the understandable criticism of Laura Ling, Euna Lee, and Mitch Koss for crossing into North Korea, a sentiment I’ve never understood has been the hostility by some toward Lisa Ling, whom to my eyes is guilty of nothing whatsoever here. Some have even appeared to criticize her for using her access...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Ling/Lee Incident/Media Criticism