Search Results for: Executed

December 9, 2013

China not sounding so happy about N. Korean purge (Update: Park warns of “reign of terror,” unstable relations)

[If you haven’t read yesterday’s post on the purge in Pyongyang, start there.] China has summoned Kim Jong Un to Beijing “as soon as possible” to kowtow and offer tribute discuss what Yonhap describes as “the North’s long-term stability and bilateral relations.” China seems displeased with Jang’s ouster, and in case that message was too subtle, China also staged a 5,000-man night landing exercise on the Yellow Sea coast near North Korea (ht: Adam Cathcart). Kim Jong Un now faces a...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
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 5, 2013

Former Camp 16 Guard: Prisoners forced to dig their own graves, killed with hammers

A new report by Amnesty International is providing our first eyewitness account of conditions at Camp 16, images of which were first published at this very blog back in February of 2007, using clues provided in David Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag. In April 2012, I followed up with an extensive analysis of Camp 16 imagery, in an attempt to collect and publish all of the open-source information about this largest and least-understood of all of North Korea’s prison camps. Even...

Categories The Camps
December 3, 2013

N. Korean security forces shooting each others’ officers, and Jang Song Thaek reportedly removed

Three weeks ago, the Joongang Ilbo reported that North Korea had publicly executed 80 people in seven provincial cities for such “crimes” as Bible possession and watching porn. Norkromancers took note at the time that the Daily NK, with its formidable network of informants inside North Korea, had abstained from corroborating the reports. A new Daily NK report, however, belatedly (sort of) corroborates them now, and the venue for the reported executions has a significance unto itself: A number of...

Categories Human Rights/Inside NK
October 16, 2013

AP’s new Bureau Chief should tell us: Are these kids dead or alive?*

Last night, a reader forwarded me AP’s announcement that it had replaced Jean Lee as Bureau Chief in both Seoul and Pyongyang. The new Bureau Chief in Pyongyang will be Eric Talmadge, whose name is absent from the vast OFK archives, and whose reputation is thus a blank slate. The AP has also caught up with the spirit of ’45 by appointing a separate Bureau Chief for Seoul, Foster Klug. Klug’s name is one of the best known in Korea...

Categories AP Watch/Refugees
September 25, 2013

N. Korea threatens S. Korean media over Ri Sol Ju sex tape report

As Kim Jong Un’s reign approaches its second anniversary, it’s becoming more difficult to draw the line between truth and parody. Radio Australia offers some tantalizing details about that dubious-sounding, thinly sourced report that a North Korea executed a group of entertainers for making sex tapes: Asahi said the rare execution of state performers, including a singer rumoured to be Kim’s ex-girlfriend, had been ordered to squash rumours of Ri’s decadent lifestyle while she was an entertainer. It said police had secretly recorded conversations...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Terrorism (NK)
August 30, 2013

Open Sources, Aug. 30, 2013

THREE MILLION DEATHS IS A STATISTIC, BUT A DEAD PORN STAR IS A HEADLINE! Sure, I guess the nominal leader of a regime that starved 2.5 million people to death and killed another 400,000 in concentration camps is capable of having his ex and a bunch of her musician friends machine-gunned. I can even believe that North Koreans can buy video cameras and make porn, although I incline more to the view that, if any part of this story is...

Categories Anju Links
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
July 2, 2012

No Pyongyang Spring

You may not believe that Kim Jong Un learned to drive at age three, but he has managed to perform one miracle — making North Koreans long for the libertine halcyon era of Kim Jong Il: The ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il’s sudden death in December of last year brought a tighter grip across the border.  Going even further, Kim Jong Un ordered a “guilt by association” system, which is a collective execution system which aims to terminate the entire...

Categories Human Rights/Inside NK/Refugees
June 26, 2012

Open Sources, 26 June 2012

I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING AGAINST being provocative to achieve some diplomatic or political purpose, but what exactly is the purpose we achieve by using the North Korean flag as a live fire target?  This looks like a case of the South Koreans involving our forces in their childish tit-for-tat.  Take this principle to its logical conclusion and you can see one of the reasons I’ve wanted our Army out of South Korea ever since I was a part of it....

Categories Anju Links
June 5, 2012

Journo-Terrorism Gives Us a Reason to Take KCNA Seriously

On October 11, 2008, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism as a preemptive reward for North Korea’s agreement to give up its nuclear weapons programs. Since that date, North Korea has steadily escalated its use of words and actions that are — to quote the statutory definition of “international terrorism” — “intended … to intimidate or coerce a civilian population [or] to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” A...

Categories AP Watch/Terrorism (NK)
May 14, 2012

North Korea Executes Three (We Know About) for Cannibalism

My first reaction to these reports years ago was skepticism, but if you hear enough people say the same thing (see here and here), you start to think they can’t all be lying: North Korea has held public executions of at least three people on charges of cannibalism in recent years, a South Korean state-run institute said Thursday, the latest development that could support what has long been rumored in the isolated country. There have been accounts among North Korean...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 2, 2012

Kim Jong Il’s Testament Leaked?

Say it with me: this report could not be verified independently. This document could easily be as fake as the Hitler diaries, but it does make for interesting reading: These instructions casually referred to Kim family business, indicating that ‘the teachings should be executed by Kim Kyong-Hui’ (Kim Jong-Il’s sister), that ‘Kim Kyong-Hui and Kim Jong-Un should take care of the family,’ and that ‘Kim Kyong-Hui should handle management of all assets inside and outside the country.’ Foreign media often...

Categories Anju Links/Kremlinology
March 29, 2012

Anju, March 29, 2012

REVERSED POLARITY: North Korea is still denying to the world that it sank the Cheonan, but according to one recent defector, it’s proudly proclaiming its responsibility at home. On the other hand, former Ambassador Donald Gregg, who as far as I know hasn’t actually defected in the geographic sense, nonetheless is still getting ink from KCNA for his Cheonan conspiracy theorizing. Maybe one of the AP’s new North Korean “correspondents” should interview him. ____________________________________ MISSILE SATELLITE LAUNCH UPDATE: Despite the...

Categories Anju Links
February 19, 2012

North Korean Refugees in China in Grave Danger of Repatriation

Update 2 (2/20): In addition to the letter to the Chinese government in the original post below that you can email, fax, or mail, there’s an online petition to the UNHCR and the UN Special Rapporteur that you can sign that’s rapidly collected almost 25,000 signatures. I also just read a related email sent on behalf of several groups saying that a) they’re on Twitter @savemyfriend (in Korean and English) and Facebook and b) are gathering across from the Chinese...

Categories Activism/China/Human Rights/Refugees
February 15, 2012

Calling Bob King

I haven’t seen any news coverage about Korean-Americans protesting against Xi Jinping over China’s policy of sending North Korean refugees to gulags and firing squads.  China has never been known for its great sensitivity to public opinion, of course, so I also have to wonder if Vice President Biden’s “frank discussions” with Xi, during the latter’s visit, included any mention of a large group of North Korean refugees — various reports number them at 21, 29, or 33 souls —...

Categories China/Diplomacy/Human Rights
January 25, 2012

North Koreans killing secret police?

So says the Daily NK of recent events in the northeastern city of Chongjin, a frequent venue for reports of anti-government sentiment: A source in North Hamgyung Province told Daily NK on January 19, “During the mourning period, one official from the provincial NSA, one from the prosecutor’s office and two from the People’s Safety Agency were murdered in Cheongjin. The source added, “There was a note found lying next to the body of the executed NSA official which said...

Categories Resistance
January 13, 2012

Why they weep

This video ostensibly depicts North Koreans hysterically mourning a monster who terrorized, starved, and murdered millions of his subjects. This particular clip has accumulated more than seven million YouTube views. Videos like it have produced reels of bemused speculation in America. The near-universal reaction found this in roughly equal parts disturbing and amusing. I’m certain that I have, at times, found amusement in some aspects of North Korea that were, on closer examination, much more horrid than they were funny....

Categories Inside NK