October 8, 2009

Your Money or Your Life: WaPo on North Korea’s Gulag Shake Down

The Washington Post’s terrific Blaine Harden has written a must-read story, based in large part on the research of Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, about an ugly new turn of events in North Korea’s gulag system. North Korea’s infamous penal system, which for decades has silenced political dissent with slave labor camps, has evolved into a mechanism for extorting money from citizens trading in private markets, according to surveys of more than 1,600 North Korean refugees. Reacting to an explosive...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps
October 7, 2009

NKDB Event at SAIS Tomorrow

I apologize for the last-minute notice, but the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) will be holding an event at the US-Korea Institute at SAIS in Washington, D.C., from 12 to 2 p.m. tomorrow (Oct. 8th). The topic will be the Center’s 2009 White Paper on North Korean Human Rights; NED is also a sponsor of the event. It looks like they want you to RSVP, but lunch is provided. And for anyone looking to “get involved,” I...

Categories Human Rights
October 7, 2009

The Health Care Crisis (in North Korea)

Open Radio reports new outbreaks of diseases — including malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and hepatitis — throughout North Korea, save Pyongyang. Meanwhile, in a country that somehow manages to to raise hard currency for the regime, ordinary people can’t afford basic pharmaceuticals like penicillin and aspirin. As a result, a black market has arisen to supply those basic needs. Unfortunately, the makers often add toxic impurities to the drugs. Sure, you say, just import them from Canada. Unfortunately, the Inner Party...

Categories Inside NK
October 6, 2009

More North Korean Cargo Searched

South Korean authorities seized in September four cargo containers belonging to North Korea under U.N. sanctions imposed on the communist state for its defiant missile and nuclear tests, a newspaper reported on Monday. The reported seizure at the South’s port of Busan comes at a sensitive point as Seoul and the international community attempt finely choreographed diplomacy to bring Pyongyang back to stalled nuclear disarmament talks.  [Reuters, Jack Kim] According to the Joongang Ilbo, South Korean authorities are confirming the...

Categories Sanctions
October 5, 2009

State Dep’t: North Korea Will Return to Six-Party Talks

There is a catch:  North Korea’s willingness depends on the outcome of bilateral talks, meaning that North Korea will demand (and probably get) bilateral concessions before it returns to demand multilateral concessions … in exchange for a lot of dry air. A friendly reminder:  we’re no closer to actual North Korean disarmament than we were in December 2006, the last time this cycle began.  I’ll boldly predict that these talks won’t end any differently. Hat tip to a friend; link...

Categories Six-Party Talks
October 5, 2009

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick

Barbara Demick, the L.A. Times’s excellent correspondent covering North Korea, has written a book about the people that most big media correspondents have dedicated their careers to ignoring. Yet every town in North Korea, no matter how small, has a movie theater, thanks to Kim Jong Il’s conviction that film is an indispensable tool for instilling loyalty in the masses. When Mi-ran was growing up, Hollywood films were banned from North Korea, as were virtually all other foreign films, with...

Categories Books & Films
October 4, 2009

Till Death Do Us Part

North Korea has given us its official reaction to the defection of 11 of its proles in a creaky open wooden boat across at least a hundred miles of freezing cold ocean: it’s demanding that they be sent back (link in Korean; hat tip to Mrs. Stanton). Is it possible that any South Korean government official could be stupid, amoral, corrupt, or naive (your choice) enough to do that to human beings — including children — under such circumstances? Yes,...

Categories Refugees
October 4, 2009

Brian Myers on the New North Korean Constitution

My thanks to one reader and one commenter who have drawn my attention to Brian Myers’s latest piece in the Wall Street Journal. Here, summed up, is Myers’s central thesis: These changes do not reflect a sudden shift in policy. Despite the world media’s tradition of referring to North Korea as a “hardline communist” or “Stalinist” state, it has never been anything of the sort. From its beginnings in 1945 the regime has espoused–to its subjects if not to its...

Categories Kremlinology/Propaganda/Racism
October 3, 2009

We Are All Neocons

Don Kirk, writing in the Asia Times, concludes that however North Korea behaves toward its neighbors at any given moment, it is determined to get our money and keep its nukes. That’s not an astonishing conclusion for any intelligent analyst of North Korean behavior, but Don’s writing is always worth a read. I try to refrain from predicting whether North Korea’s next move will be provocation or the North Korean equivalent of a “charm offensive,” since the options aren’t mutually...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
October 1, 2009

Eleven North Koreans Vote Against Kim Jong Il

… by climbing into a boat on North Korea’s east coast and sailing to the South. Two of them are children. South Korean authorities are questioning them now. (Link is in Korean.) Hat tip to Mrs. Stanton. Update: Here’s the boat they went south in: Jesus wept. So they obviously came from just north of the DMZ, then? This post is dedicated to every idiot who ever took a guided tour of Pyongyang and came back talking about how “normal”...

Categories Refugees
September 30, 2009

Must Read: North Korea Contingency Planning and U.S.-ROK Cooperation

Although it seems to have genetic origins in plenty of other things I’ve read by Lankov, Noland, etc., combining and updating some already excellent works only makes the Asia Society’s / U.S.-Korea Institute’s final product even better. I’ll quote the executive summary and let you read the rest on your own: – Current internal dynamics in North Korea suggest a growing need for international cooperation on contingency planning, led by policy coordination between South Korea and the United States. –...

Categories Reconstruction/Regime Change
September 29, 2009

I Am Still Haunted by the Fact that I Didn’t Warn You. Oh, Right ….

American insiders in Baghdad say the relationship between the top U.S. commander there, Gen. Raymond Odierno, and the top civilian official there, Amb. Christopher Hill, is deteriorating rapidly. Old hands say the chill between the two brings to the bad old days of Sanchez vs. Bremer, when those two unfortunates barely would speak to each other as the American position fell apart in early 2004, along with Iraq itself. What I am hearing is that Odierno is profoundly frustrated with...

Categories Terrorism/Iraq
September 29, 2009

Obama Administration Says First Words About Human Rights in North Korea

Eight months, a missile test, and a nuclear test after President Obama’s inauguration, he has finally gotten around to nominating Bob King to be Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, a move mandated by the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 and the North Korean Human Rights Reauthorization Act of 2008. The United States said Friday it was “very concerned” about human rights violations in North Korea, as President Barack Obama named an envoy to focus on...

Categories Activism/Diplomacy/Human Rights/U.S. Politics