Search Results for: Kim Won Hong

July 27, 2009

Yachting the River Styx and the Lies of Christine Ahn

Several of you e-mailed me about the story of the luxury yachts that North Korea had attempted to purchase from the Italian manufacturer Azimuth-Benetti.  I started a post and didn’t finish it, partially because that post became something long-winded, disjointed, and unpublishable.  Meanwhile, a few more details have trickled in about the boats and the purchase.  Contrary to doubts expressed in earlier reports, Italian authorities have concluded that the boats were indeed for His Withering Majesty, although you have to...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
July 7, 2009

North Korea’s Great Leap Backward

It’s not just on this blog where the ill-informed and the self-deluded continue to defy years of bitter experience and advocate “engagement” with the North Korean regime as a way to encourage economic reform. You can still hear academics in Washington cite the potential for economic reform in North Korea as a reason not to impose sanctions after North Korea’s nuke and missile tests. Some day, we must make a point of tabulating the amount of money spent on this...

Categories China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
June 30, 2009

Plan B Watch

A year ago, who would have suspected that we’d be celebrating the replacement of a liberal accommodationist named George W. Bush with a hard line neocon named Barack Obama, who would finally show signs of grasping not just the reality of North Korea’s bad faith, but some of the very best tools for breaking it? Christine Ahn’s misery (and Selig Harrison’s, and Leon Sigal’s) is my pleasure: The Treasury Department’s 2005 blacklisting of Macau’s Banco Delta Asia, which held a...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Washington Views
June 22, 2009

North and South Korea According to the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report

While I was gone, the U.S. State Department released the 2009 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, revealing few surprises in terms of North Korea’s record on the issue. The DPRK remains a Tier 3 country meaning “the government does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. Furthermore, in 2009 “[t]he North Korean government made no significant efforts to prevent human trafficking. It did not acknowledge the...

Categories Human Rights
May 28, 2009

Memories of an African Student Forced to Study in North Korea During the 1980s

Aliou Niane was born in Guinea West Africa, but due to decisions he had no control over, he found himself in North Korea from 1982-87. He is currently writing his memoir in French about the years he spent there and generously agreed to an email interview. Niane’s story is interesting, if not for the insider’s look he can give into what life was like for a foreigner living in North Korea during the 1980s, but also for the information he...

Categories Africa/Inside NK
May 28, 2009

Selected North Korea Commentary

The most depressing thing about North Korea’s April missile test wasn’t the test itself; it was the vacuousness of most of the reactions to it.  Many of the writers seemed poorly read on the facts, and conservatives and liberals had both stretched their credibility to defend the Bush and Clinton administrations, respectively, despite the general consistency of the policy through both administrations.  Recent events prove that both policies failed. This time around, the commentary seems smarter and better informed.  Part...

Categories Proliferation/Washington Views/WMD
May 26, 2009

And Now, the Fallout

Kim Jong Il has followed yesterday’s nuke test by firing two more short-range missiles, as a rudderless world tries to decide how to respond.  When you consider each of these developments, ask yourself whether Kim Jong Il could reasonably have anticipated that it would happen.  So far, everything I see happening fits within the range of Kim Jong Il’s calculation of “acceptable consequences.” FOR ONE THING, KIM JONG IL IS PROBABLY BETTING that John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi don’t possess...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Proliferation/WMD

Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22

Those who have lived to tell us about Camp 22, located in the bleak northeastern tip of North Korea, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and all of them are former guards or staff. Of all of North Korea’s numerous labor camps and detention facilities, large and small, Camp 22 is one of the largest, and almost certainly the most terrible, if only for the inhuman experiments witnesses say were done to the men, women, children, and...

Comments: 55
September 11, 2008

Wake Me Up When There’s an Unscheduled Military ‘Parade’

The latest report on Kim Jong Il’s condition — for what it’s worth — is that he is recovering but partially paralyzed on his left side. Foreign doctors, possibly from China and France, performed the operation after Kim, 66, collapsed about Aug. 15, the newspapers Dong-a Ilbo and JoongAng Ilbo reported, citing unidentified government officials. Kim’s condition has improved and he is not suffering from slurred speech, a disability often associated with a stroke, the reports said. [AP, Jae Soon...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
August 24, 2008

Anju Links for 23 August 2008

NEXT SURRENDER, VERIFICATION?  Sung Kim has been in talks with the North Koreans in New York to break the latest impasse, which could only mean one thing.  I hope he brought enough lubricant. HERE’S AUDIO OF ADRIAN HONG on the Hugh Hewitt Show. THE WORLD FOOD PROGRAM HAS ASKED South Korea to provide $60 million in emergency food aid.  No word on when the U.N. will tender a similar request to the Ryugyong Hotel Building Fund. IN 1997, NORTH KOREAN...

Categories Anju Links
July 29, 2008

The Continuum: Down Range

From the Oct. 8, 1945 edition of Time: The autumn air was brisk and clear. Eagles wheeled overhead against the white clouds, their shadows crossing palaces and hovels, crumbling temples and Western buildings. The city of Seoul (pronounced soul), home of a million people, was 550 years old. Yet the Americans felt like discoverers last week as they explored Korea’s mountain-ringed capital. On the broad boulevards their jeeps competed with oxcarts, with bicycles thick as gnats. Tooting streetcars fairly bulged...

Categories History/Korean History/U.S. Military
July 8, 2008

History, Through Charles Hanley’s Soda Straw

[Update: See also GI Korea’s post. Neither Hanley nor Syngman Rhee comes out of this one looking good, nor do U.S. officials and officers who had the breathtakingly poor judgment to attend Lee’s killings. Clearly, however, Hanley has told us nothing we didn’t already know.] Professional atrocity monger Charles Hanley is back again, faithful to his rigid 13-month schedule, to report breaking news from 1948 that contains no relevations for Korea-watchers: Syngman Rhee turns out to have been an evil,...

Categories Korean War/Media Criticism
June 9, 2008

Leaked to OFK: Lugar Will Go to Pyongyang

Or intends to, anyway (the road to Pyongyang is paved with unrealized intentions).  Maybe when he’s there he can clarify Kim Jong Il’s intention not to disarm, or he can help  the State Department boys write Kim Jong Il’s nuclear declaration for  him (which should make it easy to disavow). Sen. Lugar, one the the Senate’s most liberal Republicans, is memorable for his failure to get John Bolton’s confirmation through the committee he formerly chaired.  Lugar is advised by staffer...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
May 29, 2008

NK Hints More Japanese Abductees May Be Freed

The Japanese NGO ReACH, which advocates on behalf of the families of Japanese abducted by the North Korean regime, is active in Washington D.C. and sometimes sends me e-mails with interesting information.  Today, they inform me that the award-winning “Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story” will air on the PBS program Independent Lens on Tuesday, June 19th, at 10 p.m. Eastern.  (If anyone can find links for listings in their local areas, I’d appreciate it if you’d post them in the...

Categories Abductions/Japan & Korea
May 26, 2008

Good Friends: As Famine Worsens, Soldiers Go Hungry, Disease Spreads

Good Friends has released two more newsletters, numbered 129 and 130. No. 129 is partially made up of material I had passed along here yesterday, but picks up from there with some interesting reports about the food supply to the military. The reports are from Kangwan Province, which lies just north of the DMZ’s eastern sector. According to one soldier in Keumkang County, the soldiers in this county are experiencing a food shortage as well. They are fed with less...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 7, 2008

The Venerable Pomnyun, the New Famine, and the Regime’s Stability

Update: SAIS just cancelled Friday’s presentation. Sorry. It is not the nature of famines to make heroes of men, but if a hero emerged from North Korea’s last Great Famine, it is the Buddhist monk the Venerable Pomnyun. I first heard of this man’s humanitarian work in Andrew Natsios’s “The Great North Korean Famine,” a book that, sadly, is must-reading once again. The Ven. Pomnyun, who leads the charity Good Friends, was one of the few South Koreans to speak...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 1, 2008

Must Read: Marcus Noland Reports N. Korea “Headed Toward Outright Famine”

This is from a new paper released by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and one of OFK’s all-time favorite North Korea experts (and have you read his book yet?): North Korea is once again headed toward widespread food shortage, hunger, and risk of outright famine. According to Peterson Institute Senior Fellow Marcus Noland, “The country is in its most precarious situation since the end of the famine a decade ago. Calculations by Noland and Stephan Haggard, University of California,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Refugees
April 10, 2008

Good Friends: Rations Suspended in Pyongyang; Population Survives on Savings, Markets

A new Good Friends dispatch is up on the Web.  The obvious caveats apply:  it’s 100% hearsay. Good Friends reports that  the traders who feed the northeastern city of Chongjin  are now wandering from town to town  to find food.  Many are going to Sinuiju and finding nothing; the place is in the middle of a major crackdown on markets.  Although Good  Friends does not say so explicitly,  protests in Chongjin appear to have ended, possibly with the dissenting  female...

Categories Famine & Food Aid