September 29, 2009

Kang Chol Hwan on the Concentration Camps

Kang makes a compelling argument for understanding the “root cause” of all of our problems with North Korea: The silence of the international community on the barbaric massacres in the concentration camps committed by Kim Jong-il borders on the criminal. Some 17,000 North Korean defectors in the South are complaining about the atrocity, but no country pays any attention. Even the South Korean government and people do not realize how serious the problem is. As a surgeon may kill a...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps
September 29, 2009

Good Friends Reports Strike in N. Hamgyeong Province

Interesting if true: One day one of supervisors got drunk and cursed at some laborers taking a break. It caused an explosion of suppressed anger on the part of the laborers. A laborer named Cho Dong-Soo (alias) challenged the supervisor, “How come you people fill your stomachs with alcoholic beverage and pork while idling away time and yet shout at us? We feel so hungry and weak in this hot weather. Don’t we deserve some rest?” The supervisor’s response was,...

Categories Resistance
September 28, 2009

Which, Technically Speaking, Makes All North Korean Citizens Hostages

… but when you pay a ransom, don’t you expect the hostage to be released? North Korea is an exception to every rule not written by Isaac Newton or Galileo, which is to say, every rule from which diplomats can’t grant exemptions: North Korea wants South Korea to reward it for resuming reunions of families separated by the Korean War, an official said Sunday after the communist nation hosted the first such meetings in two years. Hundreds of Korean families...

Categories North-South
September 28, 2009

L.A. Times on Rimjingang

Rimjingang was recently established in Japan, and trains and equips North Koreans as journalists to go back into their homeland to cover the news that other media can’t: The footage, taken surreptitiously from a speeding motorcycle, was jarring: It showed the Soonchun Vinylon factory, which many defectors claim has been secretly used to produce lethal chemicals, including nerve gas. But the video showed a deserted complex slouching forlornly on a weed-strewn stretch of countryside. The experts sat wide-eyed. They had...

Categories Inside NK/Media Criticism
September 27, 2009

Here in America, We Are Still Very Far from 150-Day Battles, But Close to Mid-Term Elections

KCJ’s comment here, on the fawning Songs of Obama sung in a New Jersey classroom, inspired me to write a response that may warrant its own post. Here is the video KCJ is talking about: This is creepy stuff, and I’d be livid if my kids ever come home singing something like this. Now, where is the evidence that this is the work of the Obama Administration, as opposed to that of one unintelligent Kool-Aid drinking teacher? WSJ blogger James...

Categories U.S. Politics
September 24, 2009

Unfortunately, This May Mean He’ll Stay in Washington Instead

John Kerry has no immediate plans to go to Pyongyang, despite months of rumors that he was trying to invite himself there. One can only hope that the Obama Administration sent a young White House staffer to sew Kerry’s trousers to his chair. You might question whether helping a foreign enemy advance its tyrannical world view and sideline the U.S. government in negotiations is smart diplomacy, but for Kerry, it’s a well established practice. It could have been just like...

Categories Useful Idiocy
September 24, 2009

Demonstrations Around the World Today Against PRC’s Repatriation of NK Refugees

A little before 1 p.m. today across the street from the Chinese embassy in Seoul 40+ people gathered to remind the Chinese government of a commitment it made 27 years ago today.  On September 24, 1982, the PRC signed the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, the major international agreements which lay out how signatory governments say they will handle refugees. Today’s demonstration in Seoul was one of approximately a dozen scheduled for...

Categories Activism/China/Human Rights/Refugees
September 23, 2009

China Stabs Obama (and America) in the Back on North Korea

I’ve been skeptical of reports, most of them directly from the ChiCom propaganda mill, that China was cooperating with U.N. sanctions against North Korea. So after a brief flurry of displays of cooperation, here is what the statistical record tells us: North Korea’s trade with China declined slightly during the first half of this year, likely due to falling prices of crude oil, a South Korean agency and officials said Wednesday. Trade volume during the January-June period totaled US$1.1 billion,...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions
September 23, 2009

Pictures of the North Korean Countryside Show a Lean Year Unfolding

The photos are worth seeing, though I see no other evidence to support the photographer’s contention that the regime is relaxing its suppression of religion. A photograph of what are probably Peoples’ Safety Agency agents “praying” at a sham church in Pyongyang is not evidence that supports that contention. On the other hand, there are numerous reports emerging from North Korea which support the contention that this year’s harvest will be way down from recent years, which themselves have been...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
September 22, 2009

Clinton: Kim Jong Il Looked Healthy to Me

Interestingly, Jimmy Carter observed the same thing about Kim Il Sung in June of 1994, when he thought he’d brought back Peace In Our Time and prevented North Korea from going nuclear. Wrong and wrong, Jimmy. It would take a few more years of Carterian presidential drift before North Korea tested its first nuke, but it wasn’t even a month before all that sam-gyop-sal and child-flesh finally got The Great Leader wheeled off to the Great Meat Locker. But then,...

Categories Kim Jong Il
September 22, 2009

North Korea’s Foreclosure Crisis (No, Really.)

I have to say, this came as a surprise to me: He noted, “Since 2000, new kotjebi have been people who have gone to ruin and lost their homes to loan sharks. These days their numbers are drastically increasing, so the authorities cannot stand by indifferently. According to one source, a Korean-Chinese loan shark called Cho Jung Cheol was recently caught by the PSA on suspicion of taking a total of seven houses from defaulters. North Korean people usually offer...

Categories Inside NK/NK Economics
September 21, 2009

The Comfort Women of Our Time: North Korean Women Are Turning to Prostitution to Survive

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Laura Ling and Euna Lee went to China to tell the story of what it means to be a North Korean woman today. What it means, increasingly, is having no future, and often, having no means to keep body and soul united but sacrificing the latter to preserve whatever remains of the former. If the historically weighty term “comfort woman” means a woman coerced into prostitution by the actions of an oppressive government, the women...

Categories Human Trafficking/Inside NK
September 20, 2009

Hostile Policy Update

Scores of North Korean trawlers fishing for blue crab crossed the Northern Limit Line near Yeonpyeong Island in the West Sea for three consecutive days from Sunday to Tuesday. Military authorities are at a loss how to respond. A government source on Tuesday said between 20 and 50 North Korean fishing boats crossed the de-facto sea border in waters northwest of Yeonpyeong Island for three straight days since Sunday. “They returned north after fishing for three to four hours until...

Categories North-South
September 20, 2009

North Korea Closes Largest Unofficial Market

But it can’t be! Victor Cha, Selig Harrison, Keith Luse, Frank Januzzi, and every Peace Studies professor in South Korea can’t all be wrong! North Korea has shut down its largest unofficial market in a sign that the Communist government was intent on quashing, or at least better controlling, market activities that it had tolerated for years, Seoul-based organizations monitoring the country said last week. The market, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, was closed sometime in June and vendors were...

Categories An Alliance?/NK Economics
September 19, 2009

Sanctions Are Good for Diplomacy, But Diplomacy Won’t Disarm North Korea

Despite warnings from the foreign policy establishment (most notably, Selig Harrison and Ralph Cossa, among many others) that sanctioning North Korea would drive North Korea away from disarmament talks, the opposite seems to be happening — the election of a seemingly liberal administration brought only provocations from North Korea, while tough sanctions are forcing them to feign interest in disarming: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il told a visiting Chinese envoy he will work to end his country’s nuclear arms programme...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
September 19, 2009

Bill Clinton: “What I Was Trying to Do Was Not Smile and Not Scowl”

So he said on the Daily Show yesterday, on his photo op with Kim Jong Il. The Puffington Host has video here. Of greater interest to me personally is whether a medical professional will ever get around to diagnosing Bubba as a sociopath. I once had a lengthy discussion about this subject with a psychologist whom I was considering as an expert for my defense team. Similar musings on Kim Jong Il, here.

Categories Diplomacy/Useful Idiocy
September 16, 2009

A Few Thoughts on North Korea’s Travel Pass System

Open Radio has a good primer on the system North Korea uses to keep people in their home provinces. The effect, intended I suppose, is to make North Korean society like an ice cube tray, where in theory, each area is isolated from the others, and from any news, rumors, grumbles, woes, and potential expressions of dissent that might emanate from there. It also serves to limit trade that could challenge the government’s control over the distribution of things the...

Categories Inside NK