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November 29, 2008

The Propaganda Signs of North Korea

One of the great ironies of North Korea is that while it is, without much question, the world’s most closed society, one can literally read it from the distance of geosynchronous orbit. I’ve created a new page on North Korea’s propaganda signs. A big hat tip here to Curtis Melvin of NK Econ Watch, who found most of these and put them into their own subdirectory on this in his incredible “North Korea uncovered.”

Google Earth

November 26, 2008

Tokdoheit 451: Let’s have an essay contest!

There appears to be no end to Korea’s passion for insignificant, isolated scraps of land. Some 85.5 percent of the 451 islets in the Apnok (or Yalu) and Duman (or Tumen) rivers on the border between North Korea and China properly belong to the North, an academic claims. Prof. Suh Kil-soo of Seokyeong University makes the claim in a study of the border along Mt. Baekdu and the two rivers, which will be released in a seminar of the Koguryo...

China & Korea/Korean Society/Unintended Humor

November 26, 2008

Activists to Resume Leaflet Balloon Campaign

A wave of free publicity, courtesy of the governments of North and South Korea, has made the leaflet balloon campaign has been a great success. Why quit now? Activists for human rights in North Korea on Tuesday vowed to keep sending propaganda leaflets to the North even though the government has asked them to desist. The announcement was made by Park Sang-hak, head of Fighters for Free North Korea and Choi Sung-yong, president of Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea....

Activism/Appeasement/Deprogramming/NK Economics

November 26, 2008

Obama Cabinet Watch: Someone is going to be very disappointed

We still don’t have a very clear picture of what Obama’s North Korea policy is going to be, but the North Koreans apparently have high expectations, as does one of its most prominent U.S. sympathizers, Professor Han S. Park. Park, writing in the Korea Times, says Team Obama met with the North Koreans recently and promised a “dramatic stride toward diplomatic normalization.” Oh, and the Americans will also demand that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. Some day. This...

Appeasement

November 26, 2008

Like North Korea, Only Further South

I wonder if this article by the Chosun Ilbo’s Washington Correspondent, Lee Ha Won, pissed you off as much as it did me: [U.S. Ambassador Kathleen] Stephens should inform her government of the very real problems facing Korea’s automotive market, since the issue has the potential to fray ties between the Lee and Obama administrations. Korea has no regulations discriminating against U.S. automobiles. What is not widely known in the United States is that last year alone, 50,000 Japanese and...

U.S. & Korea

November 25, 2008

Because if it’s counterintuitive and groundless, it must be true!

I think the headline of this New York Times story by Choe Sang Hun ought to give you the idea: “Latest Threats May Mean North Korea Wants to Talk” Right. North Korea is serially flicking all of switches on the Sunshine machine to the “off” position, snipping the hotlines, storming out of talks, typing up eviction notices for the fools and scoundrels who inhabit Kaesong, and shooting the occasional housewife. Yet “experts” are found to conclude that this means that...

Appeasement/Uncategorized

November 25, 2008

The Daily NK on Camp 18

As North Korean concentration camps go, Camp 18 has a reputation for being less terrible than most. The Daily NK helps to keep that in perspective by publishing an interview with a survivor. He says prisoners there were branded on their stomachs to better identify them. He also testified that at the political prison, “15~20 are publicly executed around this time of the year. Lim also noted, regarding life at the camp, “The teachers try to instill animosity towards parents...

Human Rights/The Camps

November 24, 2008

Calling Jay Lefkowitz

According to some fragmentary reports passed along by Human Rights Frontiers, Son Jung Nam — or rather, what’s left of Son Jung Nam after more than a year of torture in a dungeon in Pyongyang — is about to be stood up against a firing squad … if he still lives, that is. (No link on the latest report, which come to me via e-mail). I previously posted on Son’s case here. In China, a group of 11 refugees between...

Appeasement/Human Rights/Refugees

November 24, 2008

So I Can Keep the Masthead for a While, I See

Blackouts frequently interrupted a four-day stay in Pyongyang for South Koreans attending a rare joint seminar between the Cold War rivals, with the North’s showcase city often plunged into pitch darkness by power outages. ‘What is going on here?’ a North Korean border control officer said when computer terminals lost power and the lights went out at the Soviet-era Sunan Airport terminal, which serves Pyongyang, while he was processing the documents of the visiting South Koreans. One of his colleagues...

Inside NK/NK Economics

November 24, 2008

Video of the Pleasure Squad?

So suggest the Japanese broadcasters of this video. While I’m not personally persuaded of its authenticity, you may find that it has some measure of aesthetic appeal. Kenji Fujimoto, who was Kim Jong Il’s exclusive sushi chef before escaping to write a book about it, claimed that Kim kept girls who danced for his entertainment, but who were not to be touched by anyone (even including Kim himself?). In his book “Rogue Regime,” Jasper Becker explains that there were actually...

Kim Jong Il

November 23, 2008

Monthly Chosun: ROK Intelligence Intercepted Kim Jong Il’s Brain Scan

No, I am not making this up. There’s no permlink to the story, but if you read Korean, you can read it here. The Monthly Chosun, quoting the South Korean intel leak ticker, is claiming that the Korean National Intelligence service, while doing electronic eavesdropping on North Korea last August, intercepted several encrypted electronic files being transmitted from Pyongyang to one Doctor Francois-Xavier Roux in France. It took three days to crack the encryption, at which point the intelligence officers...

Kim Jong Il

November 23, 2008

Some Human Rights Updates

The Korea Times reports that a joint committee of the U.S. Congress has recommended that the government establish a special task force aimed at persuading the Chinese to stop repatriating North Korean refugees. On the less hopeful side, we still don’t have a clear idea of how much priority the executive branch is going to give this issue, and to phrase this gently, I don’t expect Hillary Clinton’s policies to be unduly influenced by sentimental considerations. The commission recommends appropriating...

China & Korea/Refugees/U.S. Politics

November 22, 2008

The Power of Truth

Freedom rises over Korea, into the air over the most oppressed and darkened place on earth. The video clips that follow are from the BBC, Al Jazzeera, the Voice of America, and New Tang Dynasty Television. The people who are launching these balloons are, in large part, North Koreans who could not live — or stand living — in their homeland, and who can find no other means to connect with those they left behind. Others are South Koreans whose...

Abductions/Activism/Defectors/Deprogramming/Human Rights/Human Trafficking

November 21, 2008

You Don’t Say

The U.N. is beginning to suspect that those Syrians and North Koreans may have been up to something suspicious after all. “It cannot be excluded” that the Syrian facility “was intended for non-nuclear use,” the IAEA report says.However, it continues, “The features of the building . . . along with the connectivity of the site to adequate pumping capacity of cooling water, are similar to what may be found in connection with a reactor site.” Pre-attack photographs show a “containment...

Proliferation/WMD

November 21, 2008

Obama Cabinet Looking Surprisingly Centrist and Responsible

The L.A. Times reports that Obama is seriously considering either Hillary Clinton or Richard Holbrooke for State and retaining the effective Robert Gates at Defense. We are already hearing the first sorrowful wailing from those for whom the highest form of patriotism is the emotional investment in America’s defeat and dimunition, in a way that is only coincidentally similar to the patriotism of its enemies. At least one of them had the deficiency of judgment to actually believe that Dennis...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics

November 20, 2008

The Safety Dance

In my scrapbook from my Army days in Korea, I still have a leaflet, courtesy of “the protector of our race’s destiny,” declaring that “North and South shall bask together in the glow of General Kim Jong Il’s embrace.” That leaflet was given to me by a sergeant in my unit, who found it outside Gate 7 of Yongsan Garrison in Seoul found one day after morning PT formation. Where in the Armistice agreement does it say that only one...

Activism/Censorship/Deprogramming

November 19, 2008

Can we finally dispense with the whole “no gay in Korea” myth … ?

… now that the Korean Supreme Court is considering the case of a certain “Sergeant A?” A sergeant identified only as “A” was initially booked on a charge of making a sexual attack on a private in a platoon that he led, but the suit against him was dropped with the victim’s consent. However, the sergeant has been newly charged for violation of Clause 92 of military criminal law. [Joongang Ilbo] In the American system, cases very rarely become “test...

Korean Law/Korean Society/ROK Military

November 18, 2008

Who Needs a Contingency Plan? Everyone Near North Korea

The most persuasive evidence I’ve yet seen that there is a real danger of instability in North Korea comes from the people who probably have the best intelligence about events in Pyongyang: The Chinese military has boosted troop numbers along the border with North Korea since September amid mounting concerns about the health of Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, according to US officials. Beijing has declined to discuss contingency plans with Washington, but the US officials said the Peoples’...

Reconstruction/Regime Change