October 25, 2014

Must listen: Suki Kim, on teaching undercover at PUST

Kurt Achin, who hosts a series of outstanding podcasts for NK News, interviews Suki Kim, who went undercover as a teacher at the experimental Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. PUST teaches an elite, hand-picked group of male students, ostensibly as a strategy to open North Korea to the world, but the regime’s restrictions on both Kim and her students were so severe that Kim calls PUST “a five-star prison.” Among other verboten topics, Kim wasn’t allowed to mention the internet. At a...

Categories Anju Links
October 24, 2014

North Korea perestroika watch

The Daily NK reports that North Korean security forces in the bleak border province of North Hamgyeong are “shaking down” smugglers to make them rat out the identities of those who’ve escaped to South Korea. They’re identifying the smugglers by intercepting the cell phone signals of money-smugglers, who in turn are forced to rat out goods and people smugglers, who rat out the refugees, whose families are then vulnerable to shake-downs and collective punishment. For many of the stay-behinds, what...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Human Rights/Subversion
October 24, 2014

N. Korea threatens war over leaflets

North Korea warned Thursday of further military measures against the cross-border scattering of propaganda leaflets by South Korean activists, saying their campaign risked putting inter-Korean ties into an “unrecoverable” state. In a statement, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland sharply criticized the South’s government for doing little to block the leaflets. “As shown in a recent incident, leaflet scattering is an extremely dangerous act that could bring about a war as well as the failure of north-south...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
October 24, 2014

The emperor is the elephant in the room

“Our Marshal must be at least 100 kilograms,” people have said about Kim Jong Eun’s physique, according to the source. “It’s very rare to see anyone who has body type like the leader in this country [North Korea],” the source said. This has caused people to say in public that “our leader has a fine presence,” but in private they say, “what is it that he eats alone to make his body like that.” [Daily NK]

Categories Kim Jong Un
October 23, 2014

Incoherence of N. Korea’s human rights “engagement” betrays its insincerity

Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il could spend the duration of their reigns answering charges of atrocities with flat denials. That hasn’t worked since the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) published its landmark report in February, or during the scrutiny that has followed. Today, Kim Jong Un must deepen his overdraft of diplomatic capital to fend off an indictment before the International Criminal Court. Ambassador Robert King, U.S. Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, describes North Korea’s diplomats as “scrambling” and “fighting...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
October 22, 2014

Kim Il Sung’s creepy quest to live to 100.

The delightfully named Kim So-Yeon was one of Kim Il Sung’s personal physicians before he defected in 1992. The doctor’s team devised many different ways to ensure a longer life. “We did a lot of research,” says Kim. “But we only gave him the treatments he had chosen from our list of options.” One treatment the late leader favored in his later years, according to Kim, was blood transfusions from citizens in their twenties. Those who had been chosen for...

Categories Anju Links
October 22, 2014

30% fewer N. Korean companies exhibiting at trade fair in Dandong

Yonhap attributes this to chillier relations between China and North Korea. That may be, and it may also be that the network of North Korean vendors uprooted by Jang Song Thaek’s purge hasn’t fully recovered. A third possible explanation is that China may prefer to avoid repeating the embarrassment of another revelation by the U.N. Panel of Experts that it was allowing North Korean companies involved in proliferation to exhibit openly at another trade fair last year. The knowledge that...

Categories China & Korea
October 22, 2014

Veto or not, a Security Council vote on N. Korean human rights is a victory

A draft U.N. General Assembly resolution, co-authored by EU and Japanese diplomats, may ask the Security Council “to refer North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to an international court” for his crimes against humanity, as documented extensively by a U.N. Commission of Inquiry. A draft leaked to the press on October 9th called for “effective targeted sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible for crimes against humanity,” possibly including Kim Jong Un himself. The draft also recommended “reporting the country’s...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
October 21, 2014

Sue Terry’s review of Chris Hill’s book was much too kind

Terry’s review isn’t what I’d call favorable, and Terry is a much kinder soul than I am, but it seems too kind to call Hill “one of the most successful diplomats of his generation.” Sure, Hill was one of his generation’s most successful careerists, but as a diplomat, he may have been the greatest human wrecking ball in modern American diplomacy. What I’m really waiting for is a critical appraisal of Hill’s IKEA writing style.

Categories Books & Films
October 21, 2014

Freed, fired Fowle flies to family

North Korea has released Jeffrey Fowle, one of its three American hostages. We learn this from, among other sources, an AP report — filed from Washington, following a State Department announcement. Hey, at least AP Pyongyang got a picture of the Defense Department plane on the runway, next to what looks like one of Air Koryo’s Il-76s in camo paint. In addition to spending five months in North Korea’s gulag lite, Fowle lost his job during his confinement. He can’t sue North Korea because of the...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
October 20, 2014

Another reason North Koreans need an independent cell phone network: online banking

The AP’s Hyung-Jin Kim reports on how the 25,000 North Korean refugees in the South use Chinese cell phones, which reach across the border into North Korea, to send remittances to their families at home, and to keep food in their bellies. Once Lee was certain she was talking to her sister, a broker took the phone on the North Korean end. Lee transferred 2 million won ($1,880) to a South Korean bank account belonging to a Korean-Chinese who was...

Categories Capitalism/Refugees
October 20, 2014

Yeonmi Park appeals to the conscience of Europe

It is her first time in Ireland and, indeed, Europe. But at the age of just 21, this sweetly-confident, intelligent and tiny-framed young woman, who managed to flee the famine-torn country at the age of 13, is already a global spokesperson for her own people – a people terrorised into submission and silence while the wider world ignores what she describes as a “holocaust”. [Irish Independent] Miss Park’s life went from latent terror to a living hell when her parents...

Categories Activism/Europe/Refugees
October 16, 2014

Podcast interview with me on Kim Jong Un

I hope Brad Jackson wasn’t too disappointed, not only by all the ways I found to say, “I don’t know,” but also by my questioning of much of the nonsense stories that so many “news” and listicle sites have propagated about North Korea lately. If you “know” less by the end of the interview than at the beginning, I’ll feel that I’ve done some good. The proliferation of so much superficial nonsense must be more than a function of its inexhaustible supply....

Categories Kim Jong Un/Media Criticism
October 16, 2014

Swiss sold N. Korea $180K in cigarette-making machinery as aid agencies begged for donations

The communist country’s imports of Swiss tobacco machinery components reached US$180,000 in the January-June period, far more than the $24,000 worth of imports recorded for all of 2013, according to the report by the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA). [….] The country imported $65.28 million of tobacco in 2013, about 77.8 times what the country sold overseas, the report showed. [Yonhap] On the plus side, the trade statistics also show that during the first six months of this year, North Korea...

Categories Europe/Famine & Food Aid