Search Results for: soldier defect

November 25, 2009

Defector: Growing Corruption in North Korean Military

Corruption is now so entrenched in North Korea that military officers will even give away information on nuclear test sites, according to an elite defector. This, according to high-level defector Kim Su Jong (an alias), who is in Washington this week, speaking to congressional staff and reporters. Rampant corruption, collapse of the state-controlled ration distribution system, the opening of local markets, the breaking of laws to obtain food, and the under-funding of the military and local government units has led...

Categories NK Military
November 18, 2009

Defector Describes Construction of DMZ Weapons Bunkers

The defector, who goes by the alias Kim Ju Song, is visiting Washington and attending closed-door sessions with congressional members and staffers, but he found time to tell Radio Free Asia about the construction of hundreds of weapons-storage bunkers along the DMZ at the height of the Sunshine Policy: Pyongyang built at least 800 bunkers, including an unknown number of decoys, to prepare for a possible invasion of South Korea while the late South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun was...

Categories NK Military/North Korea
January 12, 2009

Defections from North Korea to South Rose in 2008

The Chosun Ilbo reports that defections from North Korea rose 10% in 2008 compared to 2007. This may or may not tell us anything about economic or political conditions in the North as opposed to last year. The number of new arrivals in South Korea is a small trickle from a vast reserve of North Koreans hiding in China — estimates vary from 50,000 to 300,000. Not all of the new arrivals in the South are necessarily recent escapees, given...

Categories Defectors/NK Military/Refugees
September 19, 2008

Starving Soldiers Deplete North Korea’s Meager Harvest

I got too busy to keep an eye on Good Friends’ updates for a while,  but on my commute home last night, I managed to eke out the time to read some items that caught my interest.  Overall,  people continue to die by the dozens, though not yet by the hundreds or thousands.  The starvation seems localized, yet those localities are distributed across the country, including the regions surrounding Pyongyang.  But what I’m watching for most keenly is a sign...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Military/Regime Change
December 11, 2006

Two N. Korean Soldiers Rescued from Raft in the Sea of Japan*

The wooden raft was simply drifting, off Sokcho. When the two were discovered, they were wearing dark green that looked to be a military uniform and one of the men was suffering from hypothermia to the point that he had lost consciousness. No word on whether the soldiers plan to defect, although I can’t think of another reason why two soldiers (presuming they are soldiers) would go AWOL and take to an unpowered wooden raft in December. (*Take that, you...

Categories Defectors/NK Military/Refugees
May 27, 2006

Two North Korean Soldiers Cross the MDL

Could this have been a deliberate provocation, a defection attempt, or neither? Two North Korean soldiers crossed a stream some 20-30 m into the South in Hwacheon, Gangwon Province at around 12:47 p.m. on Friday but returned to the North when South Korean troops fired warning shots. This is the first time in five years the South Korean military has had to fire over the heads of North Korean soldiers crossing the Military Demarcation Line (MDL). The last time was...

Categories Uncategorized
February 16, 2006

Defector: NK Cheerleaders Sent to Gulag

Who recalls the days when South Korea’s faith in reunification bordered on an obession – a religion, perhaps?  Nothing was more telling of the North Korean regime’s success at self-popularization in the South than the public swooning over a  squad of North Korean cheerleaders,  despite all the procrustean, regimented eeriness surrounding them.  Let’s look back at that time: This bustling South Korean port bid an emotional farewell Tuesday to a North Korean cheering squad whose presence at the Asian Games,...

Categories Appeasement/Defectors/Human Rights/Inside NK/Korean Politics/Korean Society/North Korea
July 7, 2005

Defectors as Reporters

Probably the most exciting new source of information about North Korea today is DailyNK, for which I’m honored to be a Correspondent in Washington (I take no credit for making up that title, and of course, it’s unpaid, like all of my activities on North Korea). Information from defectors, of course, comes with special cautions about biases as well as special insight. For all of its occasionally clumsy English (including my own), Daily NK is breaking new ground–by putting North...

Categories Uncategorized
January 27, 2005

North Korean Soldiers Purged for Taking Bribes from Smugglers

According to this report (from a defecting NK soldier, via DailyNK), 681 North Korean soldiers in Hoeryong received dishonorable discharges for taking bribes from smugglers and illegal border-crossers. One could assume that their next stop will be a very bad place. The hot contraband? American, South Korean, and Chinese music, and VCRs. Hoeryong was also the location for the North Korean dissenters’ video from last week. Sounds like someone in Pyongyang decided to send an inspection team up there. Factor...

Categories Uncategorized
January 26, 2005

North Korean Soldiers Purged for Taking Bribes from Smugglers

According to this report (from a defecting NK soldier, via DailyNK), 681 North Korean soldiers in Hoeryong received dishonorable discharges for taking bribes from smugglers and illegal border-crossers. One could assume that their next stop will be a very bad place. The hot contraband? American, South Korean, and Chinese music, and VCRs. Hoeryong was also the location for the North Korean dissenters’ video from last week. Sounds like someone in Pyongyang decided to send an inspection team up there. Factor...

Categories Uncategorized
December 14, 2004

Group Interview of North Korean Defectors

One of my regular readers is a teacher in Seoul who has visited North Korea and now volunteers his time to assist and teach English to North Korean defectors. Several weeks ago, I asked him if he would pose some questions to his students, contingent on them being comfortable answering. My correspondent asked me to be patient while he found the right circumstances to pose the question to the group. Today, I am pleased to report the responses of the...

Categories Uncategorized
December 13, 2004

Group Interview of North Korean Defectors

One of my regular readers is a teacher in Seoul who has visited North Korea and now volunteers his time to assist and teach English to North Korean defectors. Several weeks ago, I asked him if he would pose some questions to his students, contingent on them being comfortable answering. My correspondent asked me to be patient while he found the right circumstances to pose the question to the group. Today, I am pleased to report the responses of the...

Categories Uncategorized
August 22, 2022

No, North Korea did not “manage” COVID. It piled famine on plague.

The editors of 38 North are smart, well-informed people, and so I’m puzzled by their decision to publish this submission by Heeje Lee and Samuel S. Han, a dentist and a research assistant, declaring Kim Jong-un’s victory over COVID. Unlike the usual suspects, Lee and Han don’t avoid all criticism of the North Korean system, its leaders, or its policies. They acknowledge “the weak state of the country’s health care system,” concede its widespread malnutrition, and lack of a COVID...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Fiskings/Health & Disease
June 8, 2020

The N.Y. Times, the Ningpo 12, Minbyun & Yoon Mee-hyang: The Story Behind the Story

Warning: This one is a long read. There are a lot of threads to pull together. In the end, I believe the implications for South Korea’s democracy, the human rights of North Koreans, and the accuracy of the news you read are grave enough to justify the effort to write (and hopefully, to read) it. ~ ~ ~ Since the announcement of their group defection in April 2016, this blog has paid close attention to the case of the Ningpo...

Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Refugees/Subversion/The Fifth Column
December 16, 2019

Review: Sandra Fahy, “Dying for Rights,” Columbia University Press, 2019

“In a penicillin bottle I wrote her date of birth, the day she died, and her name. I hung the bottle around her neck. I tied her hair. [The other prisoners and I] tied her legs. Her arms. We wrapped her body in a plastic bag. This is what happens in a prison camp in North Korea. That’s how we wrapped the dead bodies. When the warehouse has twenty dead bodies, we take those bodies to a place called the...

Categories Books & Films
April 23, 2019

The “experts” were wrong. The sanctions are working.

The fact that even the New York Times says so didn’t make it so; it just made it harder for people who trust the New York Times to deny it. But for those of us who’ve always put more stock in the Daily NK and Rimjin-gang, the evidence has been piling up for more than a year. Our chronology begins in March 2016, two months after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test and one month after Congress passed the North Korea Sanctions...

Categories Sanctions
March 18, 2019

Chollima Civil Defense just became a serious threat to Kim Jong-un’s misrule (Update: No, it didn’t.)

Update: As of today, it looks like most of what we’ve read about this story was untrue — starting with the lack of evidence that any of the people involved were even North Koreans. They appear to have been U.S., South Korean, and Mexican nationals instead. They aren’t going to publish what they found on the computers, either. They just handed them over to the FBI, which potentially puts the FBI in the difficult position of holding property stolen from...

Categories Resistance
December 10, 2018

Rape, revenge, sanctions & North Korea’s hated Ministry of Love

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, Machiavelli mulled the question of whether a tyrant should seek to be feared or loved. The Ministry of State Security or MSS is North Korea’s analog to Orwell’s Ministry of Love,1 but in reality, it is Kim Jong-un’s most feared and hated enforcer. It targets “spies, subversive elements, and political criminals” — the people the state fears most. It runs North Korea’s most horrific prison camps, of which one North Korean woman interviewed secretly by the BBC said, “It is...

Categories Human Rights/Resistance/Sanctions