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November 9, 2015

This isn’t the first purge rumor about Choe Ryong-Hae

Choe Ryong-Hae’s omission from Marshal Ri Ul-Sol’s funeral committee has South Korean experts and officials speculating that Choe, thought by some to be North Korea’s third-ranking official, may have become the latest of many North Korean officials to be purged by Kim Jong-Un: Even if unwell, Choe would normally be on the list and experts said the omission of someone of his stature could not be put down to oversight. “It’s almost impossible that this happened unless Choe … was removed...

Kremlinology

November 3, 2015

China helps N. Korea nuke up & break sanctions, then says sanctions don’t work.

Two weeks ago, the Obama Administration’s point man on North Korea policy told Congress that sanctions are hurting Pyongyang. I must confess to some skepticism. [Ski lift made in China.] Instead, the evidence suggests that North Korea’s rich are getting richer, and its poor are staying poor. Materially speaking, the capital’s elites have never had it better, and openly buy imported consumer goods with dollars. Marcus Noland also sees evidence that, whatever the official statistics tell us, Pyongyang’s palace economy...

Anju Links

November 2, 2015

Tourists put $43M in Kim Jong-Un’s pockets last year

Despite a string of high-profile arrests of foreign tourists recently, Darwin’s light continues to draw slummers — and record hauls of their money — into Pyongyang: North Korea earned tens of millions of dollars from foreign tourists in 2014, around half of the hard currency it won from the lucrative inter-Korean industrial park, a researcher said Sunday. North Korea’s income from foreign tourists is estimated at US$30.6 million to $43.6 million last year, considering about 95,000 Chinese tourists and 5,000...

Engagement/Foreigners in N. Korea

November 2, 2015

Seoul & Pyongyang join forces to fund N. Korea’s rich, starve its poor

Our endlessly unrequited vigil for North Korean reform continues: Hyeonseo Lee is also increasingly worried about her personal security since the July publication of the best-selling memoir about her escape from North Korea, “The Girl with Seven Names”. Defectors living in South Korea contact relatives in the North through Chinese mobile phones that are smuggled across the border. They communicate through transmission towers on the Chinese side of the border. It’s all arranged through brokers on the Chinese side, who...

Border Control/Capitalism/Refugees

November 1, 2015

Sam Pa, 88 Queensway, KKG & Bureau 39: A case study in how China helps N. Korea evade sanctions

Last week, I highlighted Andrea Berger’s excellent post at 38 North, calling for the U.N. Security Council to sanction North Korea’s third-party enablers. Berger named some of those enablers, but I’d like to name another one of the most important ones — the Hong Kong-based 88 Queensway Group, headed by one Sam Pa, also known by his birth name “Xu Jinghua” or any of “at least eight aliases,” each with its own matching passport. According to multiple news reports, Pa has extensive connections to Chinese politicians, and with its intelligence services....

Anju Links/China/Money Laundering/Sanctions

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,...

"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...

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....

"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,...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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....

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...

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...

"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...

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...

Anju Links/Human Rights/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law/WMD