Search Results for: lankov

March 28, 2014

North Korea speaker series in Seoul, April and May

At the request of the North Korea Strategy Center (NKSC), a Seoul-based NGO run by “Aquariums of Pyongyang” author Kang Cheol Hwan (nksc.co.kr), I’m passing along this information about a speaker series on North Korea NKSC is holding in Seoul for the international community there. Entitled “Strategies for Change: A Speaker Series on North Korea,” the three month long series features nine speakers talking on a range of topics, from “North Korea basics” (the country’s economy and nuclear issue) and...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
March 3, 2014

Events in Seoul about human rights in North Korea, March 6th and 15th

If you’re in Seoul, there are two upcoming events about human rights in the North. The organizers asked me to get the word out, and I’m glad to oblige. First, Justice for North Korea will hold a special screening of “Apostle,” a film about human rights in North Korea on Thursday, March 6th, at 7:30, to mark the UN COI’s recent report. After the screening, Peter Jung, director of Justice For North Korea, will present his book “Persecution,” which discussed...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
February 11, 2014

Must-read: Myers (again) and Noland on the ethics of engagement

Brian Myers isn’t finished making his argument that “engagement” transforms its foreign participants more than it transforms North Korea. The [Associated Press’s] presence in Pyongyang is a good example, I think. Its staff is too afraid of losing access even to test the limits of what can be said, so the regime gets the image benefit of hosting foreign reporters without having to worry about negative consequences. Whether those contacts are moral or immoral is a much more difficult question to answer...

Categories Capitalism
January 23, 2014

Aid donors give up on North Korea

My friend, Andrei Lankov, is again proclaiming that North Korea has reformed its agricultural sector, which he credits for last year’s improved harvest. I’ve grown comfortable with my pessimism about reform in North Korea, because events have never failed to vindicate it. Regrettably, nothing in my friend’s report dissuades me from adherence to my default view. First, Lankov claims that these reforms have resulted in a 30% increase in last year’s harvest; however, the most reliable data we have show...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
December 4, 2013

In North Korea, hunger isn’t a function of production, but of state policy.

In North Korea, malnutrition remains widespread, crops are being seized in the provinces, women are selling their bodies to survive, NGOs say the country is in a state of humanitarian crisis, and a staggering 84% of households still can’t get enough to eat. So what else is new? The U.N. says North Korea has just had its best harvest in years. North Korea is still struggling with chronic malnutrition with 84 percent of households having borderline or poor food consumption, United Nations agencies said on Thursday,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
August 29, 2013

Open Sources, Aug. 29, 2013

CALL ME OLD FASHIONED–it’s fine, really, I’m used to it–but I fail to see what’s so hard-line about the idea, most recently advanced by John McCain, that restarting six-party talks ought to be contingent on North Korea demonstrating its seriousness about disarming, such as by beginning to disarm. That’s pretty much the same view the Obama Administration had stated publicly, although it seems necessary to clarify it when North Korea has, more times than I could count, said it will never give up its nukes, when...

Categories Anju Links
September 11, 2012

Open Sources, 11 September 2012

LEVI AMMUNDSEN IS BIKING ACROSS NORTH AMERICA to raise awareness about human rights in North Korea. Ammundsen attributes his inspiration to Blaine Harden’s “Escape from Camp 14.” —————————————— MICHAEL TOTTEN watches the ascendancy of the Salafists from Syria’s formerly non-violent, pro-democratic protest movement and concludes, “I’d like to sketch a plausible endgame for Syria that isn’t horrifying, but it gets harder and harder each month.” I’d add that the longer it takes us to identify and empower the least offensive...

Categories Anju Links
August 26, 2012

Open Sources, August 26, 2012

ON THURSDAY, I HAD DINNER WITH ANDREI LANKOV, which gave me the opportunity to rib him personally about his statement that Mickey Mouse shows “are by no means trivial.”  We don’t agree about that, but as usual, we found plenty of other things to agree about.  For one, we agreed that the food supply is a significant tool of control, so significant agricultural reforms would be meaningful to the North Korean people (we agreed to wait until spring to see what evidence...

Categories Anju Links
August 16, 2012

Open Sources, August 15, 2012

WHEN I WAS A KID, I LOVED HIKING IN THE DESERT.  I remember seeing those great pools of blue water on scorching July days and thinking of how good the water would taste and feel, especially as I watched them recede and vanish as I got closer to them.  North Korea watching is another vocation where sensible folk must train themselves not to chase mirages: Many of the changes appear purely symbolic at first glance ? like, for instance, the...

Categories Anju Links
August 9, 2012

Open Sources, August 9, 2012

I’D LIKE TO BELIEVE THIS: An underground, democratic movement is active inside North Korea, a human rights advocate claimed Monday, surprising many observers skeptical that any organized opposition could exist in one of the world’s most secretive, totalitarian states. Kim Young-hwan said he and three other South Korean activists were arrested in Dandong, China, near the North Korean border, on March 29 after they met with North Korean dissidents who had slipped into China. The North Koreans were later deported...

Categories Anju Links
July 19, 2012

A Mickey Mouse Monarchy: Thoughts on the Sacking of Ri Yong Ho (Update: A Gun Battle?)

North Korea watching is an inherently speculative hobby. How could it be otherwise when our most reliable information comes from satellite images and reports from KCNA, the world’s least credible news organization? The problem with having no solid facts to argue is that no one is really an expert, and anyone can pretend to be, present company included. Even “inside” sources are suspect; after all, much of their information is probably disinformation. That’s why you’ll see a lot divergent and...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
July 13, 2012

Open Sources, 13 June 2012

COMMS CHECK:  Some of you are reporting difficulty accessing this site, particularly from South Korea, and my visitors’ log agrees.  I suspect shenanigans, and I’ve been in contact with my ISP, but I’ve just been too busy to pursue the problem.  If you’re reading anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region, I’d be interested in hearing whether you can access this site. —————————————- THIS TIME, THE WOLF IS REAL — HONEST!  I don’t doubt that this is an exceptionally dry year in...

Categories Anju Links
April 15, 2012

Who Else Flubbed N. Korea’s Rocket Launch? The Press, the U.N., and the Obama Administration

By now, everyone knows that the North’s missile test was a fiasco, but North Koreans don’t have this fiasco all to themselves. For example, until the day of the launch, the North had never done a better of job handling of the foreign press. It had successfully co-opted the largest wire service in the United States into a megaphone for its propaganda, and it had so effectively focused much of the rest of the U.S. media on its stage-managed rocket...

Categories "United" Nations/AP Watch/Media Criticism/Missiles
April 6, 2012

North Korean Human Rights Speaker Series in Seoul

For those of you in or near Seoul, NKnet is hosting a lecture series.  We have some extra DVD box sets of the films from last fall’s North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival, so anyone who attends four or more of the six programs will get a free set.  Below I’ve copied the details, or skip straight to the Facebook event page to RSVP.  For those of you who don’t live in Seoul but happen to live in Washington,...

Categories Human Rights
March 13, 2012

AP Editor compares N. Korea’s surveillance of journalists to U.S., Germany

In my lonely critique of the AP’s sketchy relationship with the North Korean government, throughout its recent absorption into North Korea’s official propaganda apparatus, I’ve often observed that its new Pyongyang correspondent, Jean H. Lee, isn’t very good at asking obvious questions. As it turns out, her editors aren’t very good at answering them, either. In a new article in Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish becomes the first actual journalist to question, however gently, this new relationship and its potential...

Categories AP Watch
December 29, 2011

KIm Jong Il’s Funeral Ride Was in an American Made Car

Source: KCNA via NK Leadership Watch Well if this doesn’t take the cake!   I suspected it, but then thought twice about it — surely even the North Korean higher-ups wouldn’t go against their own propaganda for an event to be watched into perpetuity by every one of their subjects.  Yet commenter Thomas was the first here to come out and say it, and now ABC News Radio says it’s true: …But a curious detail was that the boxy black...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Propaganda/WTF?
July 16, 2011

Some Fascinating-if-True Reports from North Korea

Everyone knows that North Korea does a lot of things that we can’t explain without resorting to mostly groundless speculation about its internal power politics. This goes beyond cultural differences. I don’t know any South Koreans who can explain things like the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents, which imposed real (if insufficient) financial and diplomatic costs on the regime. In our conversations, not even Kim Kwang Jin claimed to understand for certain why Kim Jong Il does things that appear to...

Categories Inside NK/Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
January 3, 2011

Open Sources

Several weeks ago, I blogged about the North Korean manager of a restaurant in Nepal who absconded with the till and defected. The Chosun Ilbo has several interesting updates to that story, including the fact this turns out to have been just one of two such restaurants in Kathmandu, that the manager has arrived in South Korea, and that Nepal has released the South Koreans who helped arrange the defection. Then there is this illustration of how small changes in...

Categories Anju Links