Page 23

May 2, 2016

Preparations for North Korea’s party congress spur anger, resistance, and dissent

Over the last year, this site has closely tracked growing signs that North Korea’s elites are discontented with Kim Jong-un’s leadership and fearful of being purged, and of falling morale and discipline in the North Korean military. More recently, we’ve seen extraordinary outbreaks of dissent among North Korea’s overseas workers, including the group defection of 13 restaurant workers and a reported mutiny by 100 workers in Kuwait. Whether these incidents reflect popular sentiment inside North Korea itself is a harder question to...

Capitalism/Class Warfare/Resistance

April 28, 2016

Claudia Rosett: Shipping sanctions against North Korea are leaking

Unlike my friend, Claudia Rosett, I’d call the new U.N. sanctions against North Korea a qualified success, despite the fact that implementation is still a work in progress. This post, and the other posts it links, summarize the effects of just one aspect of the sanctions — their restrictions on North Korean shipping, which have idled dozens of North Korean ships. Since then, NK News’s Leo Byrne has reported that no North Korean ships have called in the port of Dandong...

Shipping sanctions

April 26, 2016

Report: 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait protest unpaid wages

Because North Korea is so uniquely opaque and repressive, it’s often difficult to gauge the level of dissent against, or popular support for, its regime. That repression follows North Koreans when they’re sent abroad to earn money for the regime, usually through the implied threat to punish the workers’ loved ones back in North Korea if they step out of line. The recent and unprecedented mass defection of 13 restaurant workers from Ningpo, China, is an example of this. In...

Resistance

April 21, 2016

The North Korean Army’s rape epidemic

A few days ago, the Korea Times carried a profile of Lee So-yeon, a native of Hoeryong in North Korea’s far northeast, who defected to the South in 2008, did menial jobs for a few years, later earned her bachelor’s degree in social welfare from Gukje Cyber University based in Suwon, and then founded an NGO called the North Korea Women’s Union. Founded in 2011, the group hosts talks at schools and other groups, and provides job training and psychological...

Activism/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Military

April 20, 2016

Pyongyang’s sanctions are the ones that hurt the North Korean people the most.

Last month, I wrote about one slightly surprising consequence of sanctions against North Korea — sanctions have prevented Kim Jong-un from selling off and exporting resources needed by the North Korean people, which has flooded North Korean markets with cheap coal and seafood. Now, we’re starting to see something like the converse of this, in which restrictions on what North Korea’s donju and purchasing agents can import is forcing them to find other ways to kick up steep “loyalty payments”...

Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

April 18, 2016

Dear President Park: Make Reunification Your Legacy

Last week was a tough week for Park Geun-hye, when her party lost its majority in the National Assembly. The simplest explanation for this is that historically, ruling parties usually take beatings in mid-term elections, particularly when their own voters don’t show up to vote. The ruling party may poll well in the abstract, but a party that enters an election divided is likely to underperform expectations. Republicans, take note. And don’t look so smug, Democrats. Something like this appears...

Korean Politics/Korean Society/Propaganda/Reconstruction/Subversion

April 13, 2016

Dozens of North Korean ships stranded by U.N. sanctions

Since this year’s nuclear test and the rounds of U.S. and U.N. sanctions that followed, I’ve tracked the implementation and enforcement of shipping sanctions closely on this site. For ease of reference, here’s a brief chronology of what I’ve observed since March 2, 2016, when the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 2270, which — required the inspection of all cargo to and from North Korea; banned the reflagging of North Korean ships; banned exports of coal and iron ore (except...

Shipping sanctions

April 12, 2016

Angola may be defying U.N. sanctions against North Korea

A report last month by the U.N. Panel of Experts found that Namibia has been involved in joint projects with KOMID, a designated North Korean entity, to build an arms factory in the African nation. The finding drew a defiant response from the Namibian government, but as a defense to a sanctions violation, it was a blue answer to a red question. In response, I wrote this post — which attracted much attention in Windhoek — rebutting Namibia’s argument and explaining...

Africa/Arms Trafficking

April 12, 2016

If Kim Jong-un can’t trust his own spies and assassins, who can he trust? (updates)

The revelation last weekend that a colonel in North Koreaâ€™s Reconnaissance General Bureau, or RGB, defected to South Korea last year represents a huge potential windfall in uncovering North Korea’s operations in the South. Reuters quotes Yonhap as reporting that the colonel “specialized in anti-South espionage operations before defecting and had divulged the nature of his work to South Korean authorities.” The Korea Herald, also citing Yonhap, reports that he gave â€œdetailed testimonyâ€ on RGB operations in the South. Or...

Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees

April 8, 2016

Why an unprecedented mass defection could be a sign of instability in North Korea

Yonhap is reporting this morning that 13 North Koreans —12 women and a male manager working at one of its overseas restaurants in an unidentified country — have defected and arrived safely in South Korea. The impetus for this unprecedented mass defection? Sanctions — which never work, so we’ve been told. “As the international community has slapped sanctions on the North, North Korean restaurants in foreign countries are known to be feeling the pinch,” Jeong Joon-hee, a ministry spokesman, told...

Sanctions

April 7, 2016

Does our State Department want denuclearization or an exit strategy?

Iâ€™ve long wished that I could attend more ICAS events, but they tend to coincide with busy times in my work schedule. That was also the case when Assistant Secretary of State Danny Russel spoke to ICAS earlier this week. The State Department has since published . A reader (thank you) forwarded it, and asked for my views. Sending a consistent message to North Korea and China is very important at this moment, and it hardly serves that purpose to...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Sanctions

April 6, 2016

The Panama papers, Pyongyang, and Nigel Cowie

Here at OFK, we keep a running list of gullible foreigners who’ve tried to get rich in North Korea, justified their support for its regime as ways to reform and open it to global commerce, and instead met the same fate as Hyundai Asan, Volvo, Yang Bin, David Chang and Robert Torricelli, Chung Mong-Hun, Roh Jeong-ho, and Orascom’s Naguib Sawaris, who I predicted back in 2008 would “eventually meet the same fate.” Regulators should require securities issuers to disclose their investments in North Korea...

Money Laundering/Sanctions

April 5, 2016

Radio Free Asia launches investigation of N. Korean forced labor

Radio Free Asia has launched an investigative reporting project into the use of North Korean labor on three continents, and the dangers those joint ventures pose not only to the North Korean workers, but to their customers abroad. RFA also published this infographic about where the North Korean workers are, doing everything from logging and construction to staffing medical clinics. No doubt, the conditions in which the North Korean workers labor also vary, which causes some to criticize the description...

Anju Links/Human Rights/Sanctions

April 4, 2016

North Korea: Let the (information) war begin (updated).

Itâ€™s still much too early to say that the new campaign to cut off the hard currency that sustains His Corpulencyâ€™s misrule will result in either behavior modification or the termination of that misrule, but we continue to see signs that are consistent with Pyongyang feeling the pressure from sanctions. One of these is its exceptional belligerency of late â€” exceptional even by North Korean standards. Not a week goes by without news of North Korea violating U.N. sanctions by...

Propaganda/Subversion

April 1, 2016

European Union publishes new N. Korea sanctions regulation to implement UNSCR 2270

I’ve previously written about the importance of Europe’s role in enforcing U.N. sanctions against North Korea. On March 5th, the EU designated 16 people and 12 entities under its existing North Korea sanctions program. Yesterday, it finally announced the publication of a new “restrictive measures” regulation to implement UNSCR 2270. Based on the summary, the new regulation follows last month’s Security Council resolution right down the line. The measures extend, inter alia, export and import prohibitions to any item (except food or medicine)...

"United" Nations/Europe/Sanctions

March 31, 2016

In Pyongyang, the ghost of Goebbels haunts the Associated Press

Why won’t the Associated Press release the Memoranda of Understanding it signed with the North Korean regime in 2011, in exchange for permission to set up a bureau in Pyongyang? What is it hiding? Plenty of possibilities come to mind, including the signature block. Imagine the AP’s embarrassment if it turned out that, to save time, someone had just pulled an old MOU out of a filing cabinet, crossed out “Josef Goebbels,” and written “Kim Jong-un” underneath it. Practically speaking,...

AP Watch

March 29, 2016

N. Korea’s restaurants, rumored to be involved in money laundering, are closing down.

North Korea’s overseas restaurants are not a significant percentage of its GNP,* but they are an important source of hard currency for Kim Jong-un. As early as 2008, one writer estimated that each restaurant remitted between $100,000 and $300,000 to Pyongyang each year. As of February of this year, there were 130 of them earning $100 million annually. Since then, the South Korean government has told its citizens to stop patronizing the restaurants, and business has fallen dramatically: On some...

Money Laundering/Sanctions

March 28, 2016

Daily NK: China not taking North Korean coal shipments

Last week, I posted about the conflicting reports about China’s compliance with the new sanctions on North Korea. Just after I posted that, I noticed that the Daily NK had also added a report of its own, suggesting that amid a regime mobilization to expand coal production, coal exports were being refused by Chinese ports. “Recently, we’ve seen a full ban on our [North Korean] ships at the Port of Yingkou in Liaoning Province, where coal trade had been most...

China & Korea/Sanctions