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March 30, 2010

Cheonan Incident Updates (More Below)

The Cheonan incident has claimed another victim, a diver who died in the recovery effort. That effort — Yonhap has a detailed report on it — can hardly be considered a rescue effort now, but one hopes that something can be learned from this disaster so that someone might be saved if something like this happens again. With so much uneducated speculation about the cause of the explosion aboard the Cheonan — here, I include myself — I’ve been waiting...

Cheonan Incident

March 30, 2010

Lankov on the New North Korean Elite, Part 2

Alternative elite members who can apply the knowledge they learned in South Korea well in the North Korean reality could be doctors, technicians, CEOs and scholars of a post-Kim age. Re-education could cultivate specialists in the new North Korea. Despite the very low economic level, North Korea provides a fairly good basic education. Therefore, when carrying out the rehabilitation of North Korea, re-education based on the knowledge they already have is more reasonable than educating North Korean specialists such as...

Reconstruction/Refugees/Regime Change

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...

Anju Links

March 29, 2010

Latest North Korean Threat Directed at DMZ Tours

North Korea warned on Monday of unpredictable disaster unless the South and the United States stop allowing tourists inside a heavily armed border buffer that is one of the most visited spots on the peninsula. President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 as a reward for giving up its nuclear weapons program. On February 3, 2010, President Obama decided not to restore North Korea to the list. An unnamed army...

North-South

March 28, 2010

Video of the ROKS Cheonan Suggests External Explosion; Plus, John Feffer Already Knows North Korea Didn’t Do It (Update: A North Korean Mine?)

Via this CNN report, which carries video from YTN, we get our first brief glimpse of the hull of the ROKS Cheonan (see also here). It’s just a glimpse of a small piece of the keel from the half of the ship — the bow, apparently — still floating on the surface, but at 2:59, you can see that the metal next to the break appears to be dented inward, lending support to theories that some sort of external explosion...

Cheonan Incident/Useful Idiocy

March 28, 2010

28 March 2010: Lankov on Educating North Korea’s Next Leaders

Must-read: Writing at the Daily NK, Andrei Lankov proposes a hydroponic growth program for a class of intellectual leaders for North Korea: While it is important to help North Korean elites, however, it is more important to pursue the formation of a new North Korean elite group. Intellectuals who were educated in North Korea know well about the reality of the country, but they face a lot of obstacles in learning modern knowledge. On the contrary, young North Koreans can...

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,...

Cheonan Incident/NK Military/North-South/ROK Military

March 26, 2010

Don’t Know Much About History

Just the latest example of historical myopia from the kids in South Korea. As the university was announcing the plans, the Chosun Ilbo reported a Gallup poll in Korea that showed 62.9 percent of teens and 58.2 percent in their 20s did not know when the Korean War broke out. Also, only 43.9 percent of those surveyed said North Korea is to blame for starting the Korean War, with the figure among teenagers 38 percent and 36 percent for 20-somethings....

Anti-Americanism/Korean Education/Korean History/Korean War/U.S. & Korea

March 26, 2010

Hooray for Google

John Bolton writes in the Wall Street Journal: Google’s decision to stop censoring searches on its China-based servers, rerouting search requests instead to its uncensored Hong Kong facilities, is historic. Google has shown itself unwilling simply to be on the receiving end of whatever Beijing dishes out–and highlighted the growing importance of Hong Kong and Taiwan in shaping the decisions that foreign businesses in China must make. When an enterprise of Google’s global dimensions and visibility reverses course in China...

China

March 26, 2010

North Korea Threatens “Unprecedented Nuclear Strikes,”

I wonder whether, if Jimmy Carter read KCNA more often, he’d be less woebegone about North Korea’s lack of avenues to dispel misunderstandings, seek out common ground, and show us all its softer side: North Korea’s military warned South Korea and the United States on Friday of “unprecedented nuclear strikes” as it expressed anger over a report the two countries plan to prepare for possible instability in the totalitarian country, a scenario it dismissed as a “pipe dream.” The North...

Terrorism (NK)

March 25, 2010

25 March 2010

Kushibo has posted his much-anticipated response to Lisa Ling. ___________________ Kim Jong Il Death Watch: Mike Madden has the latest rumors in our grim vigil. ___________________ Fears that Russia is preparing to repatriate that North Korean logger who tried to make a break for freedom. ___________________ If famine, cannibalism, child labor, songbun, lousy education, and the risk of becoming a homeless orphan aren’t enough worries for a lifetime, North Korean kids also have to worry about child molesters. ___________________ For...

Anju Links/Uncategorized

March 25, 2010

Aijalon Gomes Doesn’t Sound Much Like a Defector After All

Update, 24 March 2010: Well, KCJ’s first guess turns out to have been right. A Boston man detained in North Korea is a quiet, devout Christian so concerned about an American missionary held in Pyongyang that he was moved to tears at rallies protesting the communist regime, fellow activists said Wednesday. North Korea announced Monday that Aijalon Mahli Gomes, 30, would stand trial after entering the country illegally. The trial date was not mentioned in a brief report in state...

Aijalon Gomes/WTF?

March 25, 2010

Karmic Justice for Kumgang Investors

North Korea’s threats to confiscate South Korean property at Kumgang are having predictable consequences for its investment climate: In an interview with The Dong-A Ilbo yesterday, Ahn said the head of a conference member company recently died of a heart attack due to severe stress from his business in North Korea. The suspension of the inter-Korean tours caused the late chairman’s company to teeter on the verge of bankruptcy, causing his death at age 55, Ahn said. Ilyeon’s prospects are...

Appeasement/North-South/Sunshine

March 24, 2010

Fear and Loathing Across the Tumen, Part 2

Two new reports today describe the accelerating outing of dissent in North Korea. The first, from the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, cites this new study by Marcus Noland based on surveys of refugees from 2008, this study by the International Crisis Group, which I’d previously blogged, and more recent reports since The Great Confiscation: There is mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il is losing the propaganda war inside North Korea, with more than half the population now listening to foreign...

NK Economics/Resistance

March 24, 2010

23 March 2010

Collective Spirit Update: Open News reports a rising number of kkotjaebi (homeless orphans) in North Korea, even as the elite continue to snap up expensive luxury goods imported from China. And this: “According to sources, Pyongyang has more than 1,000 millionaires.” Those sources may or may not be wrong, but what more evidence do you need than this that North Korea has a profound economic imbalance? You know, if Christine Ahn really hurries, she might be able to arrange a...

Anju Links

March 24, 2010

The Daily NK on OFK

As a member of the U.S. military almost ten years ago, he was surprised by what he saw as the obvious contradiction between the public reaction to the deaths of two young South Korean schoolgirls in an accident involving a U.S. military vehicle and what he calls “the nearly unanimous apathy about the millions of North Koreans being starved by Kim Jong Il, or the hundreds of thousands of dead and dying in his political prison camps. Thanks to the...

Blogs & Blogging

March 24, 2010

Radio Free North Korea Issues Satellite Phones to Its Correspondents

For a long time, I’d wondered if there was some way North Korea’s clandestine journalists could free themselves from the restrictions imposed by short-range Chinese cell phone networks. The only options I could think of were signal repeaters hidden on remote mountain tops, or satellite phones. I’d presumed the latter option to be too expensive, but I may have been wrong. Free North Korea Radio, which broadcasts to the North on shortwave as well as running an Internet service, said...

Inside NK

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...

NK Economics/Refugees/Resistance