Search Results for: crackdown market

February 12, 2014

Open Sources, February 12, 2014

~  1  ~ HERE COMES THE PARK DOCTRINE: The government plans to announce a set of guidelines on the Park Geun-hye administration’s national security policies next month to better publicize her handling of national security issues, an official said Tuesday. [….] He said the guidelines may also delve into Park’s global push for the unification of South and North Koreas and lay out in details each policy step of Park’s so-called Korea Peninsula Trust Process, aimed at denuclearizing North Korea....

Categories Anju Links
January 14, 2014

N. Korea’s new “reign of terror” stirs fear, flushes out dissent

Rimjingang, the guerrilla news service that brought us the footage we’ll see in Frontline: Secret State of North Korea, has published a spate of reports that give credence to Park Geun-Hye’s prediction that a “reign of terror” would follow the purge of Jang Song-Thaek. The reports clearly rely heavily on third-hand rumor, so I wouldn’t necessarily consider them so much for the truth of the matters asserted as for what they say about the mood on the street. But amid...

Categories Inside NK/Regime Change/Resistance
December 31, 2013

North Korea’s circular firing squad

The reaper has come for two more key North Korean diplomats: South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said that Pak Kwang-Chol, an associate of the young supremo’s uncle and political regent Jang Song-Thaek, was seen returning home after making a brief stopover in Beijing. The envoy and his wife were reportedly escorted by North Korean officials onto a flight to Pyongyang. Sweden is an influential diplomatic player in Pyongyang, AFP said. Since the United States and North Korea have no diplomatic...

Categories Kim Jong Un/NK Economics
December 8, 2013

Breaking: N. Korea announces purge of Jang Song Thaek for “anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts” (Updates below)

KCNA has just published a lengthy denunciation of Jang Song Thaek after an unusual, hastily scheduled meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. In this connection, the Political Bureau of the C.C., the WPK convened its enlarged meeting and discussed the issue related to the anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts committed by Jang Song Thaek. [….] The Jang Song Thaek group, however, committed such anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts as gnawing at the...

Categories Anju Links/Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
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
October 25, 2013

Genius: HRNK’s Project ChocoPie

A Message from HRNK: Join Us for Project Choco Pie Dear Friends, Thank you for supporting HRNK’s mission to promote human rights in North Korea. For 65 years, North Korea has been theheart of darkness, under the three-generation rule of the Kim regime. In the 1990s, as millions starved, North Korea’s leadership spent billions on nukes and ballistic missiles. Despite the regime’s crackdown, small, but resilient markets have since developed, fending off another famine. The smuggled South Korean choco pie has become the symbol of North Korea’s...

Categories Activism
March 13, 2013

Why rising rice prices probably don’t mean that China is enforcing U.N. sanctions.

Hope springs eternal.  I said recently that it wouldn’t surprise me to see China temporarily restrict trade with / aid to North Korea to mislead us into thinking that it’s really pressuring North Korea to disarm, thereby slowing the momentum here to legislate what Glyn Davies calls “national” sanctions.  This trick works so well because so many of us so desperately want to believe that China will give us an easy out.  Witness this report, via Korea Real Time, that...

Categories China & Korea
February 5, 2013

Mansourov praises Kim Jong Un’s “surprisingly good” domestic policies, sees “hope in the air.”

Writing at 38 North, the last fantasyland of Sunshine’s remaining advocates, Alexandre Mansourov argues that “Kim Jong Un’s domestic policy record” so far has been “surprisingly good.” But, by the time 2012 came to a close, one could detect hope in the air, and new positive expectations about the future. There was also plenty of public thirst for new information and foreign experiences, and an especially surprising amount of joy and enthusiasm on the streets of Pyongyang, now illuminated by jumbotrons,...

Categories Fiskings
January 11, 2013

Breaking: North Korea Still Poor, Ignorant, and Run by Narcissistic Assholes

I’ve never expected anything good to come from a Bill Richardson visit to Pyongyang, and this visit fulfilled my expectations. A lot of journalists, bloggers, and academics in Washington and New York made a big deal out of this. (It was good for our traffic.) But in the places that really count — in Chongjin and Hamhung and Uijongbu and even in Pyongyang — it didn’t change a thing. It will not reduce the black market price of corn, it...

Categories Appeasement/Useful Idiocy
August 3, 2012

AP Watch: Columbia Journalism Review Misses the Opportunity to Review Journalism

I’ve been waiting for The Columbia Journalism Review to inquire into the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau, so imagine my disappointment to see them interview Korea (and Pyongyang) Bureau Chief Jean H. Lee and squander that opportunity by lobbing softballs.  I mean, seriously, not one question about this?  Not one probing question about the AP’s MOUs with the North Korean government? (Psst.  They have a comments section.) The AP-KCNA experiment continues to be failure nonetheless.  Seven months later, the AP sits in...

Categories AP Watch
July 23, 2012

North Korea Increases Public Executions and Collective Punish…. Hey, Look! It’s Snoopy!

Writing in The Washington Post, Chico Harlan reports that as North Koreans try to flee its most recent avoidable food crisis, the repressive partnership of North Korea and China has been grimly effective in keeping North Koreans from escaping from their prison of a country: Last year, 2,706 North Koreans came to the South. During the first half of this year, there have been only 751 — a 42 percent decline compared with the same period a year earlier. The...

Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/Refugees
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
April 12, 2012

North Korean Rocket Launch Fails.

This just in: A U.S. official has confirmed that a North Korean long-range missile broke apart in air after launch. U.S. officials say they believe the missile is believed to have crashed into the sea, ABC News reports. South Korea’s Defense Ministry says that North Korea has fired a long-range rocket. Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok told reporters in a nationally televised news conference that the rocket was fired at 7:39 a.m. Feel free to make your own bawdy dysfunction...

Categories Missiles
January 9, 2012

North Korea Perestroika Watch

Here’s something else the consumers of Selig Harrison’s next op-ed should try not to remember: North Korea on Wednesday upped its rhetoric against South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, branding him as a “pro-U.S. fascist maniac” and “chieftain of evils without an equal in the world” in view of measures his government took last month in the wake of the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The virulent name-calling came in a report released by the secretariat of...

Categories Anju Links
January 6, 2012

January 6, 2012

So those North Korean coup rumors probably aren’t true, but when it comes to North Korea, it can be weeks before we know what small grain of truth led to the rumors.  Chico Harlan of the Washington Post must feel at least a little sheepish having to pass along those rumors, and to admit that he has no idea if they’re true, so soon after writing that Kim Jong Eun’s succession was going smoothly.  The conclusion was based entirely on...

Categories Anju Links
July 19, 2011

Reunifying Korea, One Shot at at Time!

You may remember that several years ago, a liquor distributor in the United States tried to introduce North Korean soju into the U.S. market. That effort failed long before President Obama reimposed trade sanctions on North Korea, partially because of the importer’s legal troubles, but probably also because the stuff supposedly tasted awful. Apparently, North Korean consumers share that assessment, because the same brand of South Korean soju that once kept me fully occupied as a prosecutor and defense counsel...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Subversion
May 18, 2011

Open Sources: The Rodney Dangerfield of American Politics

That would be Jimmy Carter, who having recently snubbed by Kim Jong Il and Lee Myung Bak, gets no respect from Hillary Clinton. _____________________________________ So, the North Koreans are unhappy with Fox News for reporting that North Korea is growing more dope than ever, and we get to witness a case study of how North Korea strong-arms foreign journalists (I use the term loosely). Personally, I’m a little hesitant to endorse the conclusion that North Korea is increasing the production...

Categories Anju Links
February 25, 2011

Open Sources: Don Kirk owns Wolf Blitzer; More reports of unrest in N. Korea

In a must-read piece in the Asia Times, Don Kirk ridicules Wolf Blitzer‘s melodramatic reporting from Pyongyang: This flight of fantasy became even more ludicrous as Blitzer sought to give an impression of a “rare” look at the same stuff everyone gets to see on tourist trips to Pyongyang – the Great Study Hall of the People, once described to me by a North Korean minder as “the world’s biggest library”, classrooms of privileged kids studying English, a look at...

Categories Anju Links