Search Results for: Christine Hong

April 6, 2017

When North Korean agitprop backfires: A film about a peasant uprising is sowing dangerous ideas

What passes for a feel-good story in one of the world’s bleakest corners? Evidence that the seeds of class warfare are sprouting within a state that has fooled so many gullible leftists into believing that it’s a paradise of socialism. The Daily NK reports that an old agitprop film is inspiring exactly the kind of revolutionary consciousness that Kim Jong-un sees in his cognac-sodden nightmares. The film, “Im Kkoek Jung,” reminds North Koreans that their society has become the very thing the state’s propaganda...

Categories Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Propaganda/Resistance/Subversion
March 24, 2017

Only North Korea’s government can end hunger in North Korea

Although I have many, many unanswered questions about how the U.N. is able to fully assess exactly how many North Koreans are going hungry, let’s just stipulate that it’s a majority of those living outside Pyongyang: Nearly 70 percent of the North Korean population, roughly seven in 10 people, is undernourished, a U.S. broadcaster reported Wednesday, citing a U.N. report on the need for humanitarian aid to North Korea. According to the report released the previous day by the U.N....

Categories Famine & Food Aid
September 22, 2016

In North Korea, no disaster is ever entirely natural

With all the news out of North Korea recently, I’ve been saving up links to news reports about the floods in the northeastern provinces until I had a moment to put some thoughts together. According to a U.N. aid coordinator’s assessment, the floods killed 138 people, damaged 30,000 houses, and made 69,000 people homeless. [source] North Korea claims that these are the worst floods since World War II, and some news reports have obligingly reprinted that claim. But OFK has...

Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid
August 24, 2016

If North Korea can make fake Viagra for export, why can’t it make TB drugs for sick North Koreans?

Since the collapse of North Korea’s nominally free public health system, contagious diseases have spread widely, but only a lucky few North Koreans have been able to find medicine and medical care. Most of its people get by on whatever health care they can afford and whatever drugs they can find. A lucky few use retired doctors or doctors who moonlight after regular working hours. Some pay steep bribes to get access to care and medicine in state hospitals and...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Health & Disease/Media Criticism
July 8, 2016

A blanket trade embargo won’t help us disarm or reform North Korea

In Wednesday’s post, I wrote about Beyond Parallel’s imagery analysis pointing to a decline in cross-border trade between China and North Korea, along with the limitations of that analysis and its great potential if expanded and focused. But I also alluded to a broader policy concern about the error of equating trade volume with sanctions enforcement: that while China’s under-enforcement of sanctions has historically been the greatest impediment to our North Korea policy, sanctions over-enforcement is an equal danger. Recently, I’ve heard...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
June 21, 2016

U.N. aid isn’t solving North Korea’s hunger problem

Two years ago, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry cited estimates that North Korea’s Great Famine of 1993 to 1999 killed up to 2 million people.* All of those deaths were needless — the regime spent those years wasting more than enough money to feed everyone who starved. By 1995, when Kim Jong-il finally let U.N. aid agencies in, hundreds of thousands (or more) had already died. The aid agencies, most prominently the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
January 17, 2016

If S. Korea won’t close Kaesong, let it pay N. Korea in food.

The bad news from North Korea’s nuclear test is that its yield exceeded those of its 2006, 2009, and 2013 tests. The good news is that while the blast wasn’t thermonuclear, it was still hot enough to burn away plenty of policy fog. In Congress, sanctions legislation has sailed through the House, and seems to have good prospects in the Senate. Opinions are shifting among Korea scholars here, too. This morning, I had a chance to finish reading last week’s testimony before the...

Categories Kaesong/Sunshine
September 28, 2015

A guerrilla health care system for North Korea’s poor

Gullible leftists and U.N. nincompoops who take North Korea’s claims of socialist equality at face value love to bleat about the wonders of its free universal health care, but those bleats have little basis in reality. A 2010 study by Amnesty International found that Pyongyang provides less for the care of its non-elite citizens per capita than almost any other nation on earth: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address the country’s ongoing food shortages since the 1990s....

Categories Health & Disease
September 25, 2015

Twenty women Senators do what @GloriaSteinem and @WomenCrossDMZ won’t: Stand up for women in N. Korea’s gulag

With the possible exceptions of Mosul and Raqqa, there may be no worse place on earth to be a woman today than inside North Korea’s prison camps. There, according to a U.N. Commission of Inquiry, “the conditions of subjugation of inmates, coupled with the general climate of impunity, creates an environment, in which rape perpetrated by guards and prisoners in privileged positions is common.” The Commission found that “[w]ithout exception, pregnant victims are subject to abortion or their child is killed at birth.”...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps/Useful Idiocy
May 1, 2015

The North Korean army’s rape problem, “Kangan” Province, and Gloria Steinem

It has been four whole days since I said I was done talking about Women Cross DMZ for a year. How foolish it was of me to write that. For one thing, I did not anticipate having this detailed history of Christine Ahn’s pro-North Korean views, which outdoes my own, to graf for you: In late April, WomenCrossDMZ held a press conference in New York City. Ahn was not in attendance to respond to our question of why the group omits...

Categories Human Rights/NK Military/Useful Idiocy
February 10, 2015

Ten questions Gloria Steinem should ask the N. Koreans about women’s rights (but probably won’t dare to)

This week, I read that North Korea has granted permission for a group of women, including Gloria Steinem, and led by outspoken North Korean regime sympathizer Christine Ahn, to do a “peace march” across the DMZ. The group also intends to “hold international peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul,” where Ahn will probably repeat one of her favorite falsehoods, that “crippling sanctions against the government make it difficult for ordinary people to access the basics needed for survival.” It’s a statement that could...

Categories Anju Links/Human Rights/Useful Idiocy
November 8, 2014

How to write like an expert on sanctions: Step 1, read the sanctions.

I don’t doubt that Stanford scholar Yong Suk Lee’s minor premise—that Pyongyang shifts economic pain to the proles and peasants—is correct. To extend this into a convincing policy argument, however, that Pyongyang would only shift the pain of sanctions to the North Korean people, requires a more convincing case for his major premise–that the deprivation of the North Korean people is a function of sanctions, rather than state policies that willfully impose that deprivation. It’s a case that Lee fails to make, in part because...

Categories Sanctions
October 28, 2014

On Europe, the U.N., luxury goods, and the ethical limits of engagement.

The latest rant from Professor Lee and me is published here, on CNN International, in the hope that it will catch the eyes of European audiences (and maybe even give Felix Abt a migraine). Mind you, I think the EU’s leadership of the U.N. response to the Commission of Inquiry report has been commendable, but Europe has to do a better job of enforcing U.N. sanctions, and curbing the actions of unethical profiteers who would sell Kim Jong Un cigarette-making...

Categories Europe/Luxury Goods
September 30, 2014

Kurt Campbell: We need tougher sanctions on North Korea.

Kurt Campbell, President Obama’s former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs and now CEO of The Asia Group, continues to debunk the pair of academic urban legends that North Korea sanctions (a) are maxed out, and (b) therefore, not a promising policy alternative. At a forum in Seoul last week, Campbell called on his former boss to “further toughen financial sanctions against North Korea” if it continues to refuse to give up its nuclear program and continues its military...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions/Six-Party Talks
May 29, 2014

The Parallelograms of Pyongyang, Sewol, and Accountability

When that apartment building crumbled into the earth in Pyongyang last week–thus becoming the probable tomb of several hundred wives, children, and parents of the elite salarymen who lived in them–I linked to a series of remarkable reports from a guerrilla journalist for Rimjingang, who was willing to risk torture and execution to practice journalism about his homeland. The reports, accompanied by photographs and video, described the shoddy construction methods being used there, and foretold the tragedy to come. Now,...

Categories Anju Links/Kim Jong Un/Media Criticism
April 15, 2014

Inspector General finds flaws in WFP monitoring in N. Korea (and I find a bigger one)

A reader (thank you) directs my attention to this Fox News report covering a new report by the U.N. World Food Program’s Office of Inspector General, finding major loopholes in the WFP’s controls to prevent the North Korean government from stealing food aid and diverting it to regime loyalists and the military. The report is so cryptic that it’s almost unreadable, so I’ll summarize: – The WFP failed to meet its targets for monitoring visits to ensure that aid was...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
January 7, 2014

Lifestyles of the Deeply Stupid, Pyongyang Edition (or, Dennis Rodman, the accidental activist)

Despite the loss of his sponsor, Dennis Rodman is back in Pyongyang with several other NBA has-beens for what Rodman calls a “birthday present” basketball exhibition game for Kim Jong Un. Rodman appears to be taking his talking points directly from KCNA: “The marshal is actually trying to change this country in a great way,” Rodman said of Kim, using the leader’s official title. “I think that people thought that this was a joke, and Dennis Rodman is just doing...

Categories Sports/Useful Idiocy
November 19, 2010

U.N. Shocker! China Helps North Korea Cheat on Sanctions

A new report by a panel of U.N.-appointed experts confirms what we’ve really known all along — that China is acting in bad faith by helping North Korea violate three U.N. resolutions China’s U.N. Ambassador voted for. With many thanks to a few good friends of mine, you can read the whole thing yourself here … un-north-korea-proliferation-report-11052010.pdf … or you can simply read the fair and balanced analysis that follows, beginning with these quotes to give you some idea of...

Categories Uncategorized