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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...

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...

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...

Class Warfare/Engagement/Propaganda/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy

October 8, 2015

U.N. report demands that N. Korean leaders be held accountable through prosecution, sanctions

U.N. Special Rapporteur Marzuki Darusman has issued another report on human rights in North Korea (or more accurately, the lack thereof). The bad news is that the situation hasn’t improved, and North Korea and China are still stonewalling: Regrettably, the situation remains the same, despite the grave concerns reiterated by the international community in different forums. The Special Rapporteur also reflects on issues around accountability for those human rights violations, which should be addressed at an early stage, and on current efforts by the international community...

"United" Nations/Activism/Anju Links/Human Rights/Sanctions

October 7, 2015

Sens. Gardner, Rubio & Risch to introduce new North Korea sanctions bill (updated)

The new bill was revealed in this column by Josh Rogin, and includes a link to the full text. The bill, which still has no number, will be the Senate’s second version of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, following the introduction by Senators Menendez and Graham of S. 1747 in July. Both bills follow the lead of Ed Royce and Elliot Engel, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who introduced H.R. 757 in January. H.R. 757,...

Anju Links/Sanctions

October 6, 2015

How one wafer-thin mint could reform North Korea

Iâ€™ll put it this way: if you were Kim Jong Unâ€™s doctor, would you tell him to cut back on the $300-a-bottle champagne, Kobe beef, and sharkâ€™s fin soup? If you were his cook, would you want to tell him he can’t have his midnight snack? Would you want to be the one to notice that heâ€™s gained some weight? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? North Korean leader Kim Jong-un gained around 30 kg over the last...

Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Un

October 5, 2015

Arsenal of Terror, 2d Edition: N. Korea accused of hacking into Seoul subway control center

North Korea is suspected of hacking into a Seoul subway operator last year for at least five months, a ruling party lawmaker said Monday citing a report submitted by the country’s intelligence agency. After hacking into two operating servers of Seoul Metro, which runs Subway Lines 1 through 4, the hackers allegedly broke into more than 210 employee computers and infected 58 with malicious codes, Rep. Ha Tae-kyung of the ruling Saenuri Party said, quoting a report by the National...

Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)

October 2, 2015

The U.N. will just go on talking about Kim Jong-Un’s crimes against humanity, and that’s still better than nothing

Since July, when the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights opened its new field office in Seoul, the office has hired a six-person staff and gotten to work. Last week, The Wall Street Journal‘s Alastair Gale spoke to the office’s Representative, Ms. Signe Poulsen of Denmark, who clarified that the field office will carry on the work of the UNHCHR’s Commission of Inquiry, investigate new reports of human rights abuses, and keep those reports in the public eye. “We’re looking to bring more...

"United" Nations/Human Rights

October 1, 2015

@GloriaSteinem @ChristineAhn & @WomenCrossDMZ: When will you call on Kim Jong-Un end the rape & murder of women prisoners?

The European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea’s new report on forced labor is rightfully attracting media attention for calling out 18 countries — Algeria, Angola, China, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Malta, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Oman, Poland, Qatar, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates — for using North Korean slave labor. (In fairness, they might have included South Korea on the list, too.) What reporters should not overlook, however, is the section of the report on slave...

Human Trafficking/The Camps/Useful Idiocy

September 30, 2015

Kim Jong-Un’s party yachts aren’t just a joke. They’re a crime.

Starting at Paragraph 493 of its landmark report, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry extensively documented Pyongyang’s denial of the right of its citizens to food, both during and since the Great Famine killed at least hundreds of thousands of people, and possibly millions, in the 1990s. Although there have been reports of microfamines in North Korea as recently as 2012, for the most part, the story of North Korea’s food crisis for the last decade and a half has been one of gross...

Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Un

September 28, 2015

A guerrilla health care system for North Korea’s poor

Gullible leftists and U.N. nincompoops who take North Korea’s claims of socialist equality at face value love to bleat about the wonders of its free universal health care, but those bleats have little basis in reality. A 2010 study by Amnesty International found that Pyongyang provides less for the care of its non-elite citizens per capita than almost any other nation on earth: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address the country’s ongoing food shortages since the 1990s....

Health & Disease

September 25, 2015

Twenty women Senators do what @GloriaSteinem and @WomenCrossDMZ won’t: Stand up for women in N. Korea’s gulag

With the possible exceptions of Mosul and Raqqa, there may be no worse place on earth to be a woman today than inside North Korea’s prison camps. There, according to a U.N. Commission of Inquiry, “the conditions of subjugation of inmates, coupled with the general climate of impunity, creates an environment, in which rape perpetrated by guards and prisoners in privileged positions is common.” The Commission found that “[w]ithout exception, pregnant victims are subject to abortion or their child is killed at birth.”...

Activism/Human Rights/The Camps/Useful Idiocy

September 23, 2015

Sale of cell phone detectors to N. Korea adds to Germany’s debt to history

If there is any justice in our universe, there is a special septic tank in hell reserved for the people who profit by selling these things to Pyongyang: According to local sources, North Korean authorities have recently begun carrying small, German manufactured radar detectors when patrolling near the Chinese border for the purpose of monitoring international phone calls made on Chinese-made cell phones. These intensified measures follow a proliferation of stationary detectors installed in North Hamgyong Province in conjunction with...

Censorship/Europe

September 22, 2015

Kirby denounces Pyongyang’s abductions as “barbarous,” “reunion” lotteries as “extremely cruel”

I wish I could claim authorship of the term “North Korean exceptionalism,” of the civilized world’s tendency to bow to North Korea’s obnoxious cruelty, to the point of excusing it from every obligation of law, treaty, or humanity. I understand the reasoning behind North Korean exceptionalism: North Korea is a special case. Its terrible history of war/occupation/poverty/whatever makes it a special challenge to draw it out of its shell. Therefore, we must take a gradualist approach that compromises our standards...

Abductions

September 21, 2015

Arsenal of Terror, 2d Ed.: China arrests N. Korean kidnap squad

To count as terrorism, an act must be (1) violent, (2) unlawful in the place where it’s committed, (3) carried out by clandestine agents or subnational groups, and (4) with the intent to coerce a government or a civilian population. To be international terrorism, an act of terrorism must also (5) involve the citizens or territory of more than one country. If this report is confirmed, it would appear to meet the definition: Several North Korean agents were caught by Chinese police in March...

Terrorism (NK)

September 17, 2015

Shoot it down.

As some of you may be aware, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, and 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.” Legally and factually, this has long been a difficult view to defend. Although this week’s threat from Pyongyang to nuke the United States (see coverage in The Washington...

Missiles

September 15, 2015

In Foreign Affairs: “North Korea’s Next Dare”

Professor Lee and I have a new piece published in Foreign Affairs, a sequel to his piece, “Pyongyang’s Playbook.” In this today’s contribution, we identify a long-standing historical pattern that few others have noticed — that some of Pyongyang’s most violent attacks against South Korea coincide with its charm offensives, suggesting that talks on civil exchanges and “reunions” are (at best) ineffectual in securing long-term improvements in relations, and (at worst) maskirovka to give Pyongyang plausible deniability. To break the cycle of provocation and payment, the U.S. and...

Korean War II

September 14, 2015

Madman Theory aside, Kim Jong-Un isn’t mad. He’s just evil.

In August, as the most recent skirmish in Korean War II began, I published two posts about the risk that Kim Jong Un would respond to stronger U.S. and South Korean policies with all-out war. Because that risk depends on whether Kim is rational, I used those posts to discuss the implications of answering this question in the affirmative and the negative. In the first post, I argued that if Kim Jong-Un is rational, then his provocations since 2011 would appear to have been calibrated...

Korean War II