February 12, 2007

Assume Crash Position

The Camp 16 Google Earth post keeps giving, and it looks like traffic is pouring in from another big link.  Brace yourself to lose access to this site for a  few [sarcasm tag]  agonizing hours, and many thanks to all of you who have gotten this story into chatroom circulation.  The proliferation of this story in chatrooms absolutely dwarfs the circulation it can get in blogs.  Truly stunning. Anyway, welcome ehowa (may not be safe for work) readers.  First time...

Categories Blogs & Blogging
February 12, 2007

Buried Under the Margin of Error

Park Seok-jin is a devoted human rights activist in Seoul, one who is not afraid to complain bitingly about infringements of basic civil rights in Korea or elsewhere. Mr. Park’s Sarangbang Group for Human Rights runs a Web site that deals with a wide range of concerns from Palestine to trans-gender issues. But there is one area where he is notably silent: infringements on human rights by the government of North Korea. He is one of many liberal or left-wing...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Human Rights/The Fifth Column
February 12, 2007

N. Korea Still Hasn’t Caught Border Guards Who Deserted

You will recall that 20 of them dropped their weapons,  deserted,  and crossed over to China.  It looks like they’ve been successful in evading capture so far: A North Korean source from the district of Onsung said on the 8th “20 or so people who looked like secret agents formed a group at Sambong Customs. These people and a soldier which looked like their captain had received orders and were preparing to cross over to China. He said “It seems...

Categories China & Korea/Google Earth/NK Military
February 12, 2007

Acting Out

Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, appeared in Beijing on Sunday. Immigration officials at Shoudu Airport in Beijing said that Kim Jong-nam was included on a list of VIPs who arrived in the Chinese capital that day. Kim, wearing a cap, sunglasses, and blue jeans, was first spotted in the afternoon by Japanese television crews at the airport. He stopped briefly in front of a hotel in Beijing to answer reporters’ questions. “I have nothing...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
February 11, 2007

¿Plata o Plomo?

That title, btw, is a  tip of my  sombrero to my many  Spanish readers today.  As I write, the latest efforts to talk North Korea out of its nukes appear to be making exactly as much progress as they’ve made for the last 15 years.  It’s at least comforting to see our government  moving forward with  other options.  Most of those come in the forms of long-overdue appropriations for  budget authorizations from the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004:...

Categories Counterfeiting/Deprogramming/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Refugees
February 11, 2007

Curb Your Enthusiasm

See if you can spot any patterns here.  Let’s begin on a very high note: McClatchy News, Feb. 7:   The U.S. envoy to international talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis said Thursday that he was optimistic negotiators were nearing a breakthrough. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Feb. 7,  Headline:   North Korea:  A Breakthrough at hand as talks resume today?  [OFK note:  at least they didn’t say “peace is at hand.”] NY Times, Feb. 7:   The long-stalled six-way talks on...

Categories Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks/WMD
February 10, 2007

Ghost City: 39.75N, 126.31E

By the green river, there is a grey city.  The city, I  infer from this map, is called  Tokchon, and it lies on the headwaters of the Taedong, above Pyongyang, and above the slave-worked coal mines of Camps 14 and 18.  The city is coated in soot, a deathly blanket reminiscent of scenes we haven’t seen since the fall of Ceausescu’s Romania.    Click for a full-size image. Search the streets for signs of life, and you will find few. ...

Categories Google Earth
February 9, 2007

Negotiating With Terror

I normally don’t really give a rat’s ass what al-Qaeda says in its videotapes, but this does seem more than mildly newsworthy: And in yet another gambit that smacks of desperation, [al-Qaeda in Iraq leader  Abu Omar] al-Baghdadi tries to rile up the French and the Chinese against American global hegemony, and addresses those nations as “the freemen of the world.” Not only that, but he adopts a scolding tone with North Korea, essentially invoking the “sharing is caring” line,...

Categories Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)/WMD
February 9, 2007

Thanks for Your Patience

[Update:   What happened?  I discovered the extraordinary power of Digg.com.  Someone liked this post and put it on Digg, and  the entry  ended up getting 1900 diggs, even making it to Page One.  Other chatrooms in France, Spain, Japan, and elsewhere picked it up next.  I ended up getting over 50,000 hits on that one post over the course of about 4 days (by comparison, an Instalanche is usually worth between 2,500 and 3,500).  All I can say —...

Categories Blogs & Blogging
February 8, 2007

Wiesenthal Center Condemns Anti-Semitic ‘Monnara Iunnara’ Comic Book

A few initial observations before I relate the rest of this story.  First, I predict that no embassies will be burned and no riots will ensue as a result of these comics. Second is a story that I may never have told here, but will tell now.  In February of 2004, when British newspapers first reported that North Korea was killing men, women, and kids in a gas chamber at Camp 22, near Hoeryong, North  Hamgyeong Province,  I (and others)...

Categories Korean Society/Racism
February 8, 2007

Watching Porn in Pyongyang

Question: How much can you get for a smuggled DVD of a South Korean soap opera in Pyongyang these days? Answer: Ten years in Camp 15. Still, in the latest of a flurry of signs that the Thought Police aren’t what they used to be, the DVD’s are wildly popular anyway (hat tip to Ampontan). “This year, North Korean authorities waged what they call ‘psychological warfare’ against ‘exotic lifestyles’ by cracking down on South Korean pop culture,” a senior government...

Categories Deprogramming/Inside NK/Korean Society
February 8, 2007

‘Asia’s Darfur’

The better the words Jay Lefkowitz speaks, the more the rest of this administration seems to be drifting toward appeasing the regime at any cost.  I admire his efforts to attach the plight of the North Korean people to a worthy cause that has received so much attention from the media, Hollywood, and the Human Rights Industry, but I’ve come to the conclusion that  Lefkowitz’s approach is all wrong.  What Lefkowitz and others need to grasp is this:   hatred of...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
February 7, 2007

OK, But in All Fairness, Chomsky Pyschosis Is a Diagnosis, Too

John Feffer could be more accurately described as a  hack  apologist for  its regime than an authority on North Korea.  Feffer recently won  himself a  Bruce Cumings  Prize  for the  year’s  most  spectacularly ill-timed defense of the indefensible.  What the Soviet archives did for Cumings’s academic reputation,  the Havel-Wiesel-Bondevik report  ought to have done for Feffer’s denial of Kim Jong Il’s culpability for the great famine  that sacrificed millions of lives for nukes and missiles,  had anyone actually read what...

Categories Media Criticism/Unintended Humor/WTF?
February 7, 2007

Also Translates to ‘Cleanse’

Hoeryong, North Korea,  labors under  some unenviable distinctions:  it is one of the worst, most blighted places in arguably the world’s worst, most blighted country; it sits near Camp 22, almost certainly the very worst place to be on this earth; it is a hot spot in  North Korea’s  spreading mystery-pandemic; it is a major transit point for people who are trying to sneak out of North Korea; and it contains some of North Korea’s most discontented and potentially rebellious...

Categories Inside NK/Refugees
February 7, 2007

Why Is North Korea Even in the United Nations?

Claudia Rosett asks some very relevant questions about North Koreans, who are very likely regime intelligence assets, being given the U.N. equivalent of civil service examinations.  Successful completion of those examination would bring them into the General Secretariat.  I wonder what unsuccessful completion of those examinations would bring.  But I digress. I suppose that spying on the U.N. would not make North Korea unique, but  giving the world’s most  tyrannical  and belligerent nation  a key to  the Secretariat … now...

Categories "United" Nations