October 31, 2015

Video: N. Korea human rights conference at SAIS, with keynote by Hon. Michael Kirby

On Tuesday, I took a day off from the day job to attend an outstanding conference, organized by the International Bar Association, the Defense Forum Foundation, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, the North Korean Freedom Coalition, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Rather than describe it, I’ll just give you a little weekend viewing and post the whole thing. The first video starts with introductions by Jae Ku of SAIS,...

Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Human Rights
October 29, 2015

Aidan Foster-Carter on Korean “reunions”

Here’s the formula. Pick a small country. Arbitrarily cut it in half. Have the two sides fight a horrible war. Wait many decades to let grief fester. Then bring families who got separated in the chaos of division and war together again. Only not really or properly, just for a lousy three days. Thrust cameras into their faces, to capture the tears and wails as they meet – and again when all too soon they part, never to be allowed...

Categories Abductions/North-South
October 28, 2015

Must read: Andrea Berger calls for U.N. to sanction N. Korea’s 3d-country enablers

When I was a single man, there was a certain magazine that I only read for the interviews (I swear). Now that I’m an older, married man, I console myself with a certain website I mostly just read for the (satellite) pictures. Much of its commentary consists of echoes in the corridor of a hospice of ideas, of things Selig Harrison might have said in 1993, but here and there one finds something fresh, substantial, and useful, including sanctions expert Andrea Berger’s excellent posts....

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
October 27, 2015

Some excerpts from “Dear Leader,” by Jang Jin-Sung

I don’t think Mr. Jang, who presented his book to me with his own hands, would mind me posting a few passages. In this one, Jang relates how, after his unlikely rise from small-town boy to court poet, he went back to his home town of Sariwon in 1994, during the Great Famine, and saw how it had transformed the town and everyone he knew. After a meager meal of rice that his hosts has saved, grain by grain, for weeks,...

Categories Books & Films
October 27, 2015

Was it worth it?

Right now, somewhere in North Korea, agents of the Ministry of People’s Security and State Security Department have just finished reading this article, and are making plans to comb selected areas of His Corpulency’s kingdom for every person who might have had contact with the Christian NGO Humanitarian International Services Group, or HISG, during the years that it operated in North Korea. Yesterday, The Intercept reported that the Pentagon funneled money to HISG, which smuggled Bibles into North Korea in false compartments...

Categories Media Criticism
October 26, 2015

South Korean plastic surgeons heal the broken survivors of North Korea

Via Singapore’s Straits Times comes one of the saddest, most hopeful, things I’ve read for a long time. South Korean plastic surgeons are volunteering to help repair the abused, broken, and scarred bodies of North Korean refugees. Since news of the free surgery programme spread, dozens of defectors have signed up, including a man who cannot breathe through his nose after it was smashed in a logging camp accident. One woman who lost a breast to cancer hoped that reconstructive...

Categories Refugees
October 26, 2015

North Korea versus the media: Any guesses?

Today, I offer you two journalists’ perspectives on North Korea’s most recent efforts to use journalists as unwitting propagandists and image-makers, and how well the journalists resisted it. First, the fiercely independent Don Kirk reports on how North Korea censored journalists who crossed the border to cover the family reunions supervised hostage visitations at Kumgang. The problem exploded as reporters accompanying nearly 400 South Koreans on the first of two sets of reunions entered North Korea at the eastern end...

Categories Media Criticism
October 24, 2015

Tomorrow night in Columbia, Md.: Fundraiser concert for N. Koreans in the U.S.A.

From NKinUSA, a new organization of North Korean refugees in America: Dear Friends: This invitation below is for the 4th Performing Arts Fundraiser Festival Benefiting North Korean Refugees organized by the NKinUSA.  Please forward to folks you know in the DC/VA/MD area — this will be a wonderful evening that will help save more lives of North Koreans trying to escape.  The concert will be 7 pm on Saturday, October 24, 2015 at Gyung Hyang Garden Presbyterian Church, 8665 Old  Annapolis Rd,...

Categories Refugees
October 24, 2015

6 p.m. tonight, Burke, Va.: Korean film “Winter Butterfly” and Q&A with the Director

On this site, I have followed the rise of a dissident culture among North Korean emigres, including poet, author, and public intellectual Jang Jin-Sung; artist Sun Mu; poet Lee Kay-Yeon; and playwright Jung Sung San. If you’re in the Washington, D.C. area, you have a chance to see “Winter Butterfly,” the work of film director Kim Gyu-min, based on his experiences in North Hamgyeong Province, North Korea, tonight. Kim is one of a small number of North Korean emigre film directors active in South Korea....

Categories Books & Films
October 22, 2015

Congress wants answers on N. Korea and terrorism. The State Dep’t doesn’t have any.

As you may have heard somewhere, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Since I collected and published that overwhelming evidence last year, I was looking forward to the day when the State Department would be called to Congress to confront it. Today was...

Categories Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics
October 21, 2015

Ban Ki-Moon on N. Korea: U.N. must “hold perpetrators of crimes accountable” (updated)

The U.S., the EU, South Korea, and other “like-minded” governments are renewing their push for a U.N. Security Council resolution to refer “the highest official responsible” for Pyongyang’s crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court. South Korea, the U.S., Britain and Japan have launched fresh efforts to adopt a similar resolution this year, the high-level source at the U.N. told Yonhap News Agency on condition of anonymity, adding the countries have been drafting a resolution since last weekend. The new...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights/Sanctions
October 19, 2015

Stage Five Watch

Over the last year, this site has carefully tracked reports about the popularity or (more often) the unpopularity of Kim Jong-Un. Throughout the summer and fall of this year, numerous reports have suggested the existence of discontent — however latent, unfocused, spontaneous, and unorganized —  among North Korea’s youth, within the elites, and even inside the military. Three recent reports have added to this evidence. A North Korean defector said Pyongyang’s Workers’ Party is “imploding” due to Kim Jong Un’s inconsistent...

Categories Inside NK/Kim Jong Un/Resistance
October 18, 2015

Congress to hold hearings on N. Korea & terrorism, human rights, nukes this week

The first hearing, entitled, “The Persistent North Korea Denuclearization and Human Rights Challenge,” will be held Tuesday at 10 a.m., before the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The witnesses will be Sung Kim, the State Department’s Special Representative For North Korea Policy And Deputy Assistant Secretary For Korea and Japan, and Robert King, State’s Special Envoy For North Korean Human Rights Issues. The second hearing will be before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, on...

Categories Anju Links/Human Rights/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law/WMD
October 15, 2015

Associated Press holds another N. Korean propaganda exhibit, this time in Pyongyang

In 2011, the AP and the North Korean government’s main mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency, signed two memoranda of understanding. One of these memoranda allowed the AP to set up a bureau in Pyongyang, staffed in part by North Korean “journalists” from KCNA. The other provided for a joint commemorative photo exhibit by the AP and KCNA in a New York art gallery, “Marking 100 Years Since the Birth of Kim Il Sung.” That exhibit portrayed North Korea as a land of cherubic babies,...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
October 14, 2015

U.N.’s 1718 Committee does NADA about N. Korean missile agency; Update: Membership revoked!

NK News is reporting that North Korea’s National Aerospace Development Administration, whose name yields the unfortunate acronym “NADA,” has been accepted as a member of the International Astronautical Federation, a group that describes itself thusly: Founded in 1951, the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) is the world’s leading space advocacy body with 246 members from 62 countries on six continents including all leading agencies, space companies, societies, associations, universities and institutes worldwide. Hat tip to Chad O’Carroll for the link. As...

Categories "United" Nations/Missiles/Sanctions
October 14, 2015

The first time I had to bury a person I was fighting back my tears, but another inmate …

whose name was Bok-soon, who was in charge of herbal medicine, told me to spit and trample on the corpse. I asked her why, and she said it was a kind of ritual to drive out the ghost of the dead person so they would not come after me. It told the ghost that ‘I won’t die here like you’. That day on the way back, I was weeping alone. One of the male inmates, who was making wooden boards...

Categories The Camps
October 13, 2015

The more North Korea trades, the more it reforms, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I questioned the premises of economic engagement with Pyongyang — that Pyongyang is socialist, that trade is capitalism, that capitalism inexorably erodes socialism, and that capitalism (least of all, state capitalism) is inherently liberal and peaceful. I argued that Pyongyang adopted state capitalism decades ago, and that it has grown steadily more menacing and repressive ever since. It feigns socialism to feed our false hopes of reform and arguments against sanctions, to tempt investors, to recruit apologists who embrace its socialist pretenses, and to justify the...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Censorship/Class Warfare/Engagement
October 12, 2015

The Myth of North Korean Socialism: How Pyongyang’s Profiteers Fooled the World

Over this long weekend, I’ve been reading Brian R. Myers’s new book, “North Korea’s Juche Myth,” a copy of which Prof. Myers was kind enough to send. Myers argues that juche, that cryptic ideology reporters often mention but never explain, is a sham ideology that is both overblown and seldom understood, by foreigners as well as North Koreans. Very roughly translated, juche means that man must be the master of his own destiny (in contrast to North Korea’s reality, in...

Categories Class Warfare/Engagement/Propaganda/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy