Search Results for: Demick

October 2, 2008

Anju Links for 2 October 2008

AS FAMINE STALKS NORTH KOREA, A BUILDING BOOM hits Pyongyang.  So where is the money is coming from, and why are pastel pink apartment blocks and skyscrapers built on mud the best use for it in such times? What is mysterious is that North Korea appears to be as broke as ever. The country’s economy went into a free fall in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and other communist allies, and it has barely recovered....

Categories Anju Links
August 24, 2008

Joe Biden and North Korea Policy (Updated)

“The biggest threat to the US is, right now, North Korea.”  — Joe Biden, South Carolina Primary Democratic Debate, 2007 “I’m not the guy.”  — Joe Biden, Aug. 19, 2008 The Bigger Picture   It is notable that today I find rare probative value in what Kos says.  His first reaction was  far from  enthusiastic,  and that’s  still way more favorable than, “It’s clear his career has dragged on one election cycle too many.”  One Talk Left blogger says, “The...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Military
August 8, 2008

N. Korea Food Crisis Updates

Good Friends was our early warning system.  Now that the famine has begun, the U.N. is sounding an alarm.  North Korea is heading toward its worst food crisis since the 1990s because of flooding, successive crop failures and worldwide inflation for staples such as rice and corn, the United Nations World Food Program said Wednesday. The agency shied away from predicting another famine like the one that killed as many as 2 million people in the 1990s, but said its...

Categories Famine & Food Aid

North Korea’s Largest Concentration Camps on Google Earth

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that North Korea holds as many as 120,000 people in its system of concentration and detention camps, and that 400,000 people have died in these camps from torture, starvation, disease, and execution. These reports, in the context of estimates that North Korea has allowed between 600,000 and 2,500,000 of its people to starve to death while its government squandered the nation’s resources on weapons and luxuries for its ruling elite, suggest that...

Comments: 127
April 15, 2008

Keeping the Pressure on Beijing

South Korean and American  are pushing the issue of North Korean refugees as the Olympics approach, as as other issues focus intense pressure on China.  Here’s what’s happening in Seoul: Onlookers watch as a man tied up in ropes is led down a crowded pedestrian street by a woman holding a plastic assault rifle. Another man holding a megaphone explains that the re-enactment depicts a scene that has become an everyday occurrence in China. A multinational coalition of activists, calling...

Categories Activism/China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees
March 19, 2008

Tibet Updates, and the Images China Doesn’t Want You to See

BARBARA DEMICK IS IN CHINA, filing reports about the spread of the protests beyond Lhasa and the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Tibetan activists said at least 15 more were killed near a remote mountain monastery in Sichuan province when paramilitary troops fired at a crowd of demonstrators who waved the Tibetan flag and chanted, “Free Tibet!” and “Bring back the Dalai Lama!” [L.A. Times] The surviving protestors then attacked a police station and government offices with Molotov cocktails. Guess which incident...

Categories China/Human Rights/Uncategorized
March 10, 2008

Wall Street Journal Video on the N.Y. Phil Visit

The reporter, Evan Ramstad, covers Korea regularly and does a good, balanced report in his narration. Bonus points for anyone who can identify the background music. Update: Keep pedalling! Their plane hasn’t taken off yet! We were feted with multi-course dinners of salmon, crab gratin, lamb and pheasant. Our breakfast buffet was decorated with ice sculptures and included foods meant to cater to American palates. OK, some of it was a little weird, like the banana and tomato sandwich. But...

Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming
March 8, 2008

Hill: Gas Chambers, Concentration Camps, and Refugee Massacres No Impediment to Full Diplomatic Relations After All

Last February, just after Chris Hill rolled out that  landmark achievement called Agreed Framework 2.0 — how is that working out, by the way? —  he went to Congress to defend  his amorphous  cloud of ether  against some obvious questions about how the North Koreans might interpret it and  what laws the agreement might actually break in its application.  You mentioned certain laws of ours that reflect human rights issues and humanitarian law. I can assure you that any agreement...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Six-Party Talks
February 24, 2008

The Olympics, China, and N. Korean Refugees

Update: Another call to boycott the Beijing Olympics: Pro-democracy activists in Myanmar called Monday for the world to boycott this year’s Beijing Olympics over what they said was China’s continuing support of Myanmar’s military dictatorship. The 88 Generation Students group, which was instrumental in last year’s pro-democracy demonstrations in Myanmar, urged “citizens around the world … to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics in response to China’s bankrolling of the military junta that rules our country of Burma with guns and...

Categories Activism/Refugees
March 6, 2007

Can They Do It? A Brief History of Resistance to the North Korean Regime

[Updated March 2007; See new incidents and survey stats at the bottom of the post.]   According to the  image of the North Korean people that their rulers carefully cultivate, North Koreans are brainwashed automatons.  Regime minders, who closely follow foreign camera crews inside North Korea, seldom permit outsiders to see any alternative.  That image  is probably a combination of fear, stage management, brainwashing, and a degree of truth:  few North Koreans have ever known anything else, and extreme nationalism...

Categories Resistance
January 21, 2007

al-Yahoo Watch: News Consumers Need Warning Labels, Too

[Updated, scroll down]   The headline:  25 U.S. troops killed in Iraq Saturday I have my home page set to Yahoo because I use Yahoo e-mail, and there are two things about  Yahoo’s home-page headlines  that I’ve noticed and meant to start picking at  for a long time.  One is the tendency for the headlines to  emphasize only negative developments in  Iraq, chiefly casualties.  This headline, for example, could  just as well have told us  that Mookie Sadr, under pressure...

Categories Media Criticism/Terrorism/Iraq
April 6, 2006

Is Kim Jong Il Bankrupt?

There is more evidence to suggest that North Korea really is in dire financial straits after all. Some would not call this a novel conclusion to make about a country in which 2.5 million people have starved to death, but a careful reading of what NGO workers and refugees tell us of how the food was passed out suggests that the North Korean regime was not unduly upset about that, as long as its elite ate well and never lacked...

Categories China/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/NK Economics/Uncategorized
February 28, 2006

Korea’s ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ Bubble

This week, several new reports, chiefly those from the New York Times and the LA Times, describe a journalists’ group tour of the Kaesong Industrial Park, possibly the only place on earth where the spirits of P.T. Barnum(*) and Lavrenti Beria cohabitate. A Paradise Within a (Worker’s) Paradise In North Korea, a nation that is essentially one vast open-air prison, Kaesong is the new prison laundry — a relatively cushier, marginally less despotic part of the institution into which you...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Inside NK/NK Economics/North Korea
January 18, 2006

LA Times on the Declining US-ROK Alliance

A long an interesting article in the LA Times this week (free registration required) on the decline of the U.S.-Korean alliance. The article was written by several reporters, including OFK favorite Barbara Demick, and suffers from the contradictory biases of several of them as a result. It begins by accusing the United States of neglecting the alliance, only later getting around to the point that the current Korean government has profited from popular hostility to the United States. Fallout from...

Categories Uncategorized
November 21, 2005

It Gives New Meaning to the Term ‘Love-Fest’

The L.A. Times’s Barbara Demick continues the parade of unflattering portraits of Arirang, this time turning her sharp eye on South Korea’s fawning admirers of the Northern system, beginning with some contrasts that ought to have been obvious to those less eager to believe: South Koreans in Pyongyang stood out in their colorful Gor-Tex jackets like exotic birds against the monochromatic North Korean landscape. Almost all carried digital cameras, a rarity in the North. While North Koreans trudged through the...

Categories Uncategorized
October 3, 2005

NK Moves to Control Grain Sales

Either you believed North Korea’s markets and food price hikes represented reform, or you believed they represented the state’s attempt to stay ahead of the disintegration of its own failing system. To the extent there was reform, the L.A. Times reports that the experiment appears to be over: SEOUL — Rolling back some of its economic reforms, North Korea is banning the sale of rice and other grains at private markets and strengthening its old communist-style public distribution system under...

Categories Uncategorized