Search Results for: KIMS

December 22, 2011

He was a god, you know

At times like this, I do wish that the Korean Friendship Association would enable comments: North Korea says a fierce snowstorm paused and the sky began glowing red above sacred Mount Paektu just minutes before leader Kim Jong Il’s death. State media say the ice on volcanic Lake Chon at the mountain in the far north cracked with a load roar.  And in the city of Hamhung, a Manchurian crane circled a statue of Kim’s father, late President Kim Il...

Categories Propaganda
December 4, 2011

December 9th, 2011 – Worldwide Demonstration Protesting Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea

Seoul-based Korean-American activist Kang Hun-Sok, who was introduced to me online by a trusted friend, asks for my assistance in getting the word out about a coordinated series of demonstrations next week. I’m glad to do so, and hope that other bloggers out there will do the same. Mr. Kang’s press release follows: ===================================== This is an international call to protest on December 9th, 2011, 63rd anniversary of the United Nations Genocide Convention which North Korea is violating in every...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
June 10, 2011

Open Sources: The Rason Sell-Off Continues

Here’s more information about China’s growing impatience and frustration with North Korea: They seem to be expressing their frustration with high-profile photo ops and by pouring more cash into the 288-square-mile Rason zone, which is completely surrounded by a fence that may or may not be electrified (but then, pretty much all of North Korea may or may not be electrified). Unlike South Korea, expect China to hold onto whatever real estate it buys from North Korea’s failing regime. KCNA...

Categories Anju Links
June 6, 2011

Sung Kim Through the Retrospectoscope

The announcement that Sung Kim will be our new U.S. Ambassador to South Korea suggests continuity if a comparison of his background to Kathleen Stephens’s tells us anything. Like Stephens, Kim is a protege of Chris Hill* and comes from the State Department’s Korea Desk, which has long favored appeasement, agreed frameworks, and a peace treaty with North Korea, and had previously been caught trying to water down language in the State Department’s annual human rights report. My own fears...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea
November 26, 2010

Before We Start Bombing North Korea, Let’s Try Turning It into Afghanistan

I don’t know about you, but when North Korea decided to shell South Korean homes and kill South Korean civilians in South Korean territory, my balance of risks shifted. We’ve always known that if U.S. and South Korean forces attack North Korea, North Korea would respond by trying to kill as many American and South Korean civilians as possible. Estimates that this would result in hundreds of thousands of casualties are probably worst-case scenarios, but a toll of several thousand...

Categories China & Korea/NK Military/Regime Change/Yeonpyeong Attack
October 18, 2010

A Tale of Two Cities

Why does so much of the American reporting from North Korea make me wince? Because so often, the reporters are content to describe the facade without a peek behind the curtain. Take the case of CNN’s Alina Cho, who, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, tells the Huffington Post how ebullient, well-fed, and prosperous Pyongyang is now that Kim Jong-Eun is ascending daddy’s throne: Even with these constraints, Cho said she noticed seemingly small changes during her four...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Media Criticism
August 19, 2010

That’s funny, I thought North Korea liked the idea of unification. The traitor talked about “unification tax,” sheer nonsense, at a time when the situation prevailing in Korea is so tense that a war may break out any moment. This is no more than sophism let loose by an idiot who knows nothing about reunification, insensitive to what is happening in the world and ignorant of the inter-Korean relations, a profiteer who knows nothing but money and a political imbecile....

Categories Uncategorized
May 27, 2010

State Department Fights N. Korea Terror Re-Listing With Half-Truths

[T]he Obama team is clearly signaling that it does not intend to do what many lawmakers want: put North Korea back on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. The calculation is that the listing, which administration officials see as having been overly politicized during the George W. Bush years, is more trouble than it’s worth. [WaPo, The Cable] Not worth the trouble? Are you joshing me? This, from the same crowd that went all the way to...

Categories Cheonan Incident/Terrorism (NK)
May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 —...

Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
March 29, 2010

29 March 2010: The Relevance of Human Rights

The Chosun Ilbo calls on South Korea to treat human rights like a serious issue, after years of the opposite: It is time to make things extremely difficult for North Korea unless it takes at least some steps to improve the human rights situation. “It is time for the highest level of the UN, the Security Council, to step up,” Muntarbhorn said. The Security Council members — the U.S., China, the U.K., France and Russia — must tackle North Korea’s...

Categories Anju Links
January 11, 2010

We Can’t Trust North Korea, or the People Who Do

What is the objective of negotiating with North Korea at all? How you answer that question may depend on whether you believe North Korea cheated on the first Agreed Framework with Bill Clinton. Even before Clinton left office, the evidence that North Korea cheated by trying to build a uranium bomb was too compelling for any responsible president to ignore, yet during the last decade, true believers in diplomacy with Kim Jong Il invested themselves in denying that evidence and...

Categories Anju Links

Camps 14 and 18, North Korea: Satellite Imagery and Witness Accounts

In central North Korea, along the Taedong River far upstream from Pyongyang, lie two of North Korea’s five largest concentration camps: Camp 14 and Camp 18, which hold an approximate total of 50,000 political prisoners, their spouses, and their children. The camps lie on opposite sides of the river in an area rich in coal, where mines are worked by the mine’s prisoners. For context, here are the boundaries of both camps in relation to the other largest camps —...

Comments: 52
March 11, 2009

David Asher: How to Talk to North Korea

If Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard are the world’s foremost experts on the North Korean economy, David Asher may be the world’s foremost expert on its illicit side — drugs, counterfeiting, arms trafficking, and the recouping of its ill-gotten gains. Asher served as the Coordinator of the State Department’s North Korea Working Group and the NSC’s North Korea Activities Group from 2003-2005. In that capacity, he was a key architect of the financial constriction strategy that briefly forced the North...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
February 18, 2009

Succession Rumors Spread Inside North Korea

There may or may not be any truth to rumors that third son Kim Jong Un will the figurehead successor to His Porcine Majesty, but word seems to have spread inside the kingdom: The source said, “People who have secretly been listening to South Korean radio seem to be circulating these stories but the Party in Pyongyang has not issued a special decree about it. Many people have an interest in the successor issue, so the rumors have been spreading...

Categories Deprogramming
February 8, 2009

Christopher Hill, Obama’s Choice to Be Iraq Ambassador, Showed Poor Judgment and Dishonesty as N. Korea Negotiator

I guess we can add another name to the list of those who have little use for Christopher Hill, the front-runner to be President Obama’s next ambassador to Iraq: General Anthony Zinni, the former top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said the Obama administration offered him the Baghdad job late last month but withdrew the appointment without explanation, apparently in favor of a veteran diplomat, Christopher Hill. With Zinni fuming in undiplomatic fashion about the way he was treated,...

Categories Diplomacy/Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
January 24, 2009

A Smaller Army, in More Ways Than One

Chronic food shortages will considerably reduce North Korea’s pool of military recruits in the coming years, with nearly a quarter of young adults unfit for service due to malnutrition-related mental disabilities, a U.S. intelligence report said. [Yonhap] Malnutrition may also be taking an intellectual toll on North Koreans: The famine of the 1990s has caused severe cognitive deficiencies among young North Koreans, said the report by the National Intelligence Council that used studies from several U.S. intelligence agencies. I doubt...

Categories NK Military/Reconstruction
June 26, 2008

Get Ready for Kim Jong Il’s Incomplete, Incorrect, and Expensive Nuclear Declaration (Updated and Bumped)

[Updated below: Today, President Bush embarks on the process of throwing away most of our diplomatic leverage against North Korea in exchange for a declaration that’s incomplete, incorrect, and unverified. Those who rightly criticized President Clinton for appeasing North Korea after the 1994 Agreed Framework should be honest enough to admit that Bush’s eleventh-hour grasp at a diplomatic legacy is probably even more dangerous.] [Original Post, 24 Jun 08] In a speech at the Heritage Foundation last week, Secretary of...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks