Search Results for: "Daily NK"

Every Korean election year, the political parties’ festering grudges and tribal feuds, catalyzed by ambition, render the entire Korean political party system unstable. Parties shatter into mercurial gobs, collide, and reform. — OFK, 5 January 2006 ============= The Center ============== The first test tube hit the laboratory floor today: Goh Kun made it clear on Thursday that he intended to run for the presidency, and the reaction in political circles has been swift. Especially with the Uri Party in disarray...

The partially defector-run Daily NK takes note of the reported border attacks and interviews the person I was most interested in hearing from: Lim Chun-Young, the former NK Special Forces soldier of whose words I was reminded by Tuesday’s Donga Ilbo report. It also has this great graphic, but nothing to confirm that any attacks actually took place. The Daily NK, which has contacts and reporters in that area, found no one who could verify the attacks, or that any...

Daily NK on Child Slavery Anti-Slavery International’s Norma Kang Muico talks about child slave labor in North Korea in the Daily NK, an online newspaper written and edited primarily by North Korean defectors. _____________ China, Our Strategic Partner, Part I The deputy editor of Chinese newspaper the Taizhou Evening News, Wu Xianghu, has died of a beating allegedly carried out by police, a report said. The 41-year-old was beaten in October when about 50 police officers stormed the newspaper’s offices...

Via the excellent Suburban Dissident blog, here’s the newest detailed report on the food situation in the North. The executive summary is that even accepting North Korean estimates of an improved harvest, it’s dramatically insufficient. . . . North Korea’s grain production rose 5.3 per cent to 4.54 million tonnes in 2005, helped by better harvests and fertilizer shipments from South Korea, South Korean data showed today. The 2005 harvest was still far short of the impoverished country’s annual demand,...

If true, this could be a tangible sign of sincere Chinese annoyance with its North Korean viceroy. Via Daily NK, then Yonhap: SEOUL, Jan. 28 (Yonhap) — A local Internet news site reported Saturday that a top aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was arrested in Macao earlier this month. Citing Japanese diplomatic sources, DailyNK claimed Kang Sang-choon, a secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and chief of staff to Kim, was detained in connection to circulation of...

(by guest blogger Andy Jackson) This a part of a series of posts on the Seoul Summit: Promoting Human Rights in North Korea and related events. The portions in the blockquote were taken from my notes. I apologize for any inaccuracies. The following are small samples of the presentations during the second session of the Seoul Summit on Friday, December 9, 2005: Conference on Strategy for North Korean Human Rights Improvement (more on the session see here). I have provided...

(By guest blogger, Andy Jackson) This is the last in a four-part series on lectures concerning human rights in North Korea delivered at Sogang University in Seoul on November 26, 2005. The text in block quotes were taken from notes of translation of the lecture and supplemented by an article written by Kim on the same topic. Any inaccuracies in the text are strictly my own. Apostates are often the most vehement of critics. Such is the case with Kim...

An Appeal What follows is a status report on the most urgent, compelling human rights issue of all–what increasingly looks like the making of the next Great Famine. The last one, which took place in the 1990’s, killed approximately two million people. If you are in a position to take any kind of action–including something as modest as writing your member of Congress or posting a link on your own blog–this is my urgent appeal to raise public outrage to...

In what has to be the most disappointing story about Korean politics I’ve seen all year, a new group that calls itself The New Right National Alliance has formed in Seoul. As you may have noted from previous posts, I had been looking forward to a realignment of political forces in Korea that might offer the voters something better than the choices the voters have now: Old Right, with its authoritarian history, authoritarian instincts that continue to this very day,...

China Cracks Down: Daily NK is also reporting a new Chinese crackdown on refugees, with a focus on North Korean military deserters. I would not be surprised if the major focus was on the North Korean officer alleged to have taken that beating video. He might be in a position to authenticate it. A Chinese police officer said, “the surveillance intensified in search for a military possessing a gun whose name is Park 00. It seemed as though he is...

The short answer is that I don’t know, and I probably never will know. What’s more, I haven’t seen the tape–Daily NK says it won’t be broadcast until mid-October–so I’m mostly going on what I’ve seen of the stills. I’ve had suspicions about the authenticity of the video (you can see a montage here), allegedly depicting the torture of a repatriated North Korean refugee woman, since it first emerged. I summarized these suspicions in an e-mail to Life Funds for...