Search Results for: information crackdown

June 12, 2012

North Korean Engagement Strategy Transforms the Associated Press

For nearly 20 years now, proponents of “engagement” with North Korea have promised that commerce, aid, and economic interdependence would expose the North to new ideas and transform it into a more open society.  The reality has been much closer to the opposite of this.  Buoyed by a stream of regime-sustaining hard currency, North Korea became (if anything) more belligerent toward its benefactors, more brazen in its proliferation, and more brutal and exploitative toward its own people. Meanwhile, those in...

Categories AP Watch
June 4, 2012

China Targets North Korean Refugees and the Activists Who Help Them

So those reports that China would stop repatriating North Korean refugees were probably disinformation after all. Instead, China is launching yet another pogrom against North Korean refugees, which coincides with a wider sweep against foreigners that got its impetus (or pretext) from one drunken Brit. China is also targeting foreigners who are helping North Korean refugees: “I heard that police and security staff are in every nook of the streets. All defectors must take shelter and cannot come out of...

Categories China & Korea/Human Trafficking/Refugees
May 31, 2012

North Korea’s Political Prison Camps Can’t Be Denied or Ignored Anymore

North Korea says they don’t exist. For years, South Korea didn’t want anyone to talk about them, and even now, it seldom does, at least directly. Our President, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has never said a word about them in public. A few years ago, a foreign service officer was reviewing a draft of State’s annual human rights report on North Korea and asked its author to “sacrifice a few adjectives for the cause” of appeasing the...

Categories The Camps
January 21, 2012

Anju: January 21, 2012

The Daily NK writes about “The High Price of Idolatry:” We should perhaps remember with great concern the time when Kim Jong Il used $900 million to both permanently preserve Kim Il Sung’s body and then create Keumsusan Memorial Palace to keep it in. It is no simple task to erect a statue of anybody, let alone someone who presumably requires a large statue such as Kim Jong Il. In the South Korean city of Gumi, a mere 5m statue...

Categories Anju Links
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 10, 2011

Open Sources

Update: So if you saw a sneak preview of a longer post this morning, well, that was an unfinished draft that I published by accident. I hope you can be patient until all of the ideas interweave and are in final form. Apologies. _____________________________ Nothing says “responsible rising power” like giving billions to despots who shell nearby fishing villages: China has proposed a huge investment deal to revive North Korea’s faltering economy, a report said Friday, amid an international drive...

Categories Anju Links
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

Camp 12, Chongo-ri, North Korea

Recently, Chosun Ilbo reporter and North Korean gulag survivor Kang Chol Hwan published this story about a remote labor camp in North Korea, its recent expansion to support a crackdown on defectors, and the horrific conditions there: The Chongori reeducation center in North Hamgyong Province that went through the greatest change. The center has been reorganized as a concentration camp exclusively for arrested defectors. It has reportedly turned into a living hell, where labor is much heavier than at ordinary...

Comments: 6
December 9, 2009

North Korea’s Ajumma Rebellion

[Originally published at The New Ledger, Dec. 9, 2009] A sort of tea party movement may be breaking out today in the least likely of all places. The unseen pillars of Korean society are its ajummas. “Ajumma” — literally “aunt” — is one of those wonderfully untranslatable Korean words — more colorful than “hausfrau,” less derogatory than “fishwife,” and probably not too far from “yenta.” In South Korea, “ajumma” is an inglorious term most associate with gargantuan red sun visors,...

Categories Anju Links
November 3, 2009

Ban Ki Moon Is to Human Rights What Roman Polanski Is to Child Welfare

It was a horror that came from within, that consumed and devastated entire communities and families. It was a horror that left you as survivors of a trauma which to the world beyond your borders was unimaginable, even though we all now know it happened.We will not pretend to know how you must overcome the unimaginable. We can only offer, in humility, the hope and the prayer that you will overcome — and the pledge that we stand prepared to...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
August 24, 2009

Lisa Ling’s Husband Expresses Concern for Refugees; Mitch Koss, Laura Ling, and Euna Lee Remain Silent

The Wall Street Journal has published its own report on the scandal that is becoming a serious threat to (among other things) Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s public image as newsworthy victims. The Journal’s story adds fuel to suspicions that Ling, Lee, and producer Mitch Koss recklessly endangered the lives of refugees and activists by carrying video of them into North Korean territory, or otherwise failed to take measures to prevent that video from falling into Chinese and North Korean...

Categories China & Korea/Ling/Lee Incident/Media Criticism
August 13, 2009

China Finally Enforcing N. Korea Sanctions, Kinda?

To say the very least, I remain deeply skeptical that China’s effort will be sustained, complete, or in good faith, but here are two stories that suggest to some degree, China is restricting trade with North Korea.  The first (as the reader who sent the link notes) comes directly from the ChiCom state media, so take it with a tablespoon of salt. Shan, who has run the corporation for 16 years, said he has forged close relations with officials in...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Kremlinology/Sanctions
March 10, 2009

안주 Links for 10 March 2009

NORTH KOREA has serial killers? EVERYONE ACT SURPRISED: Kim Jong Il is reelected with 100% of the vote — which even beats Obama’s margin in Takoma Park. But whereas free elections are noted for saturating voters with information, North Korea’s election was accompanied by a crackdown on illegal cell phones. More here. KIM JONG IL AND I MAY AGREE ON ONE THING: Can I infer that he detests Vista, too? THE LEAKY BLOCKADE: Open Radio has more on the proliferation...

Categories Anju Links
February 4, 2009

New Reports Accuse N. Korea of Starving and Exploiting Kids

Barring a few privileged exceptions, the lives of children are dirt cheap north of the DMZ. Last year, UNICEF and the World Food Program reported that 40% of North Korea’s children are chronically malnourished. The children in this video are mostly orphans; they’re homless kids known as “kotjaebi.” They began to appear on the streets of North Korean cities after the Great Famine killed or displaced many of their parents. They live by begging, stealing, foraging on trash, or getting...

Categories Uncategorized
May 24, 2008

Murder, Plain and Simple: North Korean Snipers Killing Refugees Along the Chinese Border

[Updated below with photographs; Digg it here.] Helping Hands Korea, one of the most intrepid and trustworthy organizations that assists North Korean refugees escape from their repressive, famine-plagued homeland, has written to me with a detailed account of how the North Korean and Chinese militaries have joined forces to prevent North Koreans from escaping their homeland, one where large numbers are people are now starving to death once again because the government won’t feed them and won’t let them fend...

Categories Activism/Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Refugees
April 30, 2008

Better Them Than Us: Korean Nationalism Turns on China

As I suspected, the China’s censorship-by-thug on the streets of  Seoul is not proving popular among Koreans.  The Chinese  government seems to be coming to grips with the P.R. disaster it has made for itself.  Its diplomats, though not quite in a full kowtow position, are offering either an apology or whatever it is that  Asian diplomats  offer when national pride prevents one:  South Korea’s Foreign Ministry expressed regret Monday to China’s ambassador to Seoul, Ning Fukui, over the incident,...

Categories Censorship/China & Korea/Democracy/Korean Law
April 4, 2008

N. Korea Food Situation Continues to Worsen: Protests Continue in Chongjin; Food Prices Skyrocket; Kim Jong Il Asks China for ‘Massive’ Food Aid

[Update: A reader — one you and I both respect — writes to warn that we shouldn’t rely too heavily on the reports of Good Friends. Well, yes, the obvious caveats apply here: this being North Korea, we tend to treat third-hand rumors and hearsay, possibly further garbled by translation, as news. What I try to do here that news sites don’t do is to put each report in the context of other facts reported by other sources, either previously...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change/Resistance