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Don Gregg: “I’ve long sensed that Kim Jong-un is going to change the nature of this country.”

“Kim Jong-un is a smart young man, and this was a very smart move,” Donald Gregg, who served terms as a C.I.A. station chief and the U.S. Ambassador in Seoul, said of the release of the detainees. “I’ve long sensed that Kim Jong-un is going to change the nature of this country.” Now retired, Gregg has worked in recent years to promote engagement between the United States and North Korea, including presiding over Ambassador Jang’s appearance at the Council on...

Useful Idiocy

KINU survey: Conditions in N. Korean labor camps worsen

So apparently, that was still possible, then: The heinous conditions faced by malnourished and overworked North Korean inmates in reeducation camps has led to a growing number of deaths, according to a report released on Thursday. Data from the paper reveals that prisoners within these facilities may be living in an environment prone to egregious human rights violations– just as in political prison camps. Findings from the report were announced by Lee Keum Soon, Director of the Center for North...

The Camps

Nate Thayer interviews Matthew Todd Miller

It’s a vivid picture of a poorly adjusted man who is completely detached from reality–that is, the archetype of a certain personality type that’s drawn to North Korea. As long as North Korea is a flame to these fluttering moths, we’ll continue to pay for the cost of flying ex-presidents, ex-governors, and high officials to fetch them back.

Foreigners in N. Korea

Suki Kim recalls a “good student” in Pyongyang

Writing in The New York Times, Kim recalls a young North Korean student who made her uncomfortable with his risky questions about government in America: What I had just described was, more or less, democracy. I could not read his expression, but he thanked me and excused himself. That evening, I discussed my growing fears about the student’s motives with my teaching assistant. There was nowhere we would not be overheard, so we took a walk around campus, hoping it...

Foreigners in N. Korea/Subversion/Sunshine

Source: Megumi Yokota died in a Pyongyang psychiatric ward in 1994

What a sad ending that would be for a 13 year-old girl, guilty of nothing, and taken from a dark street while walking home.

Abductions

Must read: RFK Center calls for a “rights up front” policy toward N. Korea

The report, by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, along with the Executive Director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea,* calls on the U.S. to defer its pursuit of Agreed Framework III, and instead confront the very reason why Pyongyang shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, and why diplomacy with it will continue to fail: Only when North Korea begins to develop a record of improvement on human rights can it engage with the U.S. on other issues, including security, the...

Activism/Human Rights/U.S. Politics

Incompetent translation could cost N. Korean teen his life

The Swedish government has denied the asylum claim of a teenager who claims to be a North Korean from North Hamgyeong Province. The denial is based on a report by a contractor, Sprakab, that failed to identify the teen’s dialect, or the places he named in his interview. A Korean expert hired by Sprakab now claims that the company misquoted her. An appeal is all that stands between the young man’s life and deportation to China, repatriation to North Korea, and almost...

Europe/Refugees

Rev. Kim Dong Shik’s family is appealing the dismissal of its lawsuit against N. Korea

… at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. You can read the appellants’ briefs at this link, and I previously posted the original pleadings here. The District Court dismissed the suit for lack of evidence of torture, despite the fact that at least one North Korean agent was convicted of the kidnapping in a South Korean court. For background information on Kim’s abduction from China and murder in North Korea, see this link. Victims of terrorism and torture are allowed to sue...

Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law

Dennis Halpin: North Korea is the new “sick man of Asia”

Just as a prosperous and powerful Europe grappled for decades, ultimately unsuccessfully, over what to do about its weakest link, the strong and prosperous Pacific powers have faced, so far unsuccessfully, the dilemma of a weak but nuclear-armed North Korea. A series of diplomatic formulae, including the Agreed Framework, the Six-Party Talks, and, most recently, the aborted Leap Day Agreement of 2012, have all come to naught. Pyongyang, like Constantinople, seems on perpetual life support, gasping for air but never...

Diplomacy

FATF and FINCEN again call for “countermeasures” against N. Korean money laundering

If you will permit me to extend a metaphor for North Korea’s stature in the world of global finance, Pyongyang may have been invited to one Boy Scout jamboree, but it’s still on the sex offender registry. If anything, it has reached a co-equal status with Iran: Since June 2014, the DPRK has further engaged directly with the FATF and APG to discuss its AML/CFT deficiencies. The FATF urges the DPRK to continue its cooperation with the FATF and to...

Money Laundering

Claudia Rosett hopes the Obama Administration won’t screw up Iran …

policy with a bad deal the same way the Clinton and Bush Administrations screwed up North Korea policy with their own bad deals. Rosett isn’t the only one making the comparison: “Like North Korea in the 1990s, Iran will use a weak deal as cover to get nuclear weapons,” said Illinois Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, a prominent skeptic of the negotiations. [CNN] The historical record yields little cause for optimism, and the common thread that runs through much of that record is Wendy...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/U.S. Politics

World Food Program won’t quit N. Korea, yet

“We are no longer in danger of closing our operations in DPRK at the end of this year,” [the WFP’s regional spokeswoman] said in an email late last week from her office in Bangkok. “We have received enough donations or promises of donations to enable us to reach the full caseload of 1.1 million women and children per month until the end of March 2015.” North Korea’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. She added, however, that...

Famine & Food Aid