Search Results for “soldier defect”

April 12, 2016

If Kim Jong-un can’t trust his own spies and assassins, who can he trust? (updates)

The revelation last weekend that a colonel in North Koreaâ€™s Reconnaissance General Bureau, or RGB, defected to South Korea last year represents a huge potential windfall in uncovering North Korea’s operations in the South. Reuters quotes Yonhap as reporting that the colonel “specialized in anti-South espionage operations before defecting and had divulged the nature of his work to South Korean authorities.” The Korea Herald, also citing Yonhap, reports that he gave â€œdetailed testimonyâ€ on RGB operations in the South. Or...

Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees

April 4, 2016

North Korea: Let the (information) war begin (updated).

Itâ€™s still much too early to say that the new campaign to cut off the hard currency that sustains His Corpulencyâ€™s misrule will result in either behavior modification or the termination of that misrule, but we continue to see signs that are consistent with Pyongyang feeling the pressure from sanctions. One of these is its exceptional belligerency of late â€” exceptional even by North Korean standards. Not a week goes by without news of North Korea violating U.N. sanctions by...

Propaganda/Subversion

March 31, 2016

In Pyongyang, the ghost of Goebbels haunts the Associated Press

Why won’t the Associated Press release the Memoranda of Understanding it signed with the North Korean regime in 2011, in exchange for permission to set up a bureau in Pyongyang? What is it hiding? Plenty of possibilities come to mind, including the signature block. Imagine the AP’s embarrassment if it turned out that, to save time, someone had just pulled an old MOU out of a filing cabinet, crossed out “Josef Goebbels,” and written “Kim Jong-un” underneath it. Practically speaking,...

AP Watch

January 27, 2016

Meet the assassin/killer/hacker/terrorist Kim Jong-un just put in charge of relations with S. Korea

With all recent movement on sanctions legislation in the House and Senate, I’ve skimmed over the developments in North Korean Kremlinology, reports about which often read like the dossiers in a lost, bad-acid fueled manuscript for a “High Castle” sequel. If you believe that personnel is policy, however, Kim Jong-un’s choice of a replacement for Kim Yang-gon, who ran Pyongyang’s so-called United Front Department until he died in a car-maybe-not-accident recently, is a dark omen about Kim Jong-un’s policy instincts....

Cyberwar/North-South/Terrorism (NK)

January 10, 2016

South Korea’s loudspeaking needs a strategic objective

Barely four months ago, Park Geun-hye’s negotiating team exchanged high-fives and backslaps with its North Korean counterparts, and came home having secured either peace in our time, or (as I called it) an agreement to fight another day. Today, South Korea says the North’s nuke test was “a grave violation” of the August agreement, the loudspeakers are blaring on both sides of the DMZ, and North Korea says the noise is pushing the two Koreas to “the brink of war.”...

Anju Links

December 31, 2015

On His Corpulency’s Secret Service: N. Korea has had a lot of car not-accidents (updated)

Kim Yang-gon, the head of the North’s United Front Department, has become the latest top North Korean official to assume ambient temperature. As head of the UFD, Kim was North Korea’s nearest analogue to the South’s Unification Minister, but he was also responsible for North Korea’s influence and subversion operations inside South Korea. It is one of my ruder habits to point out that the UFD has a rather substantial fifth column at its service in the South. For more...

Anju Links

December 30, 2015

Robert Koehler, the Dean of Korea bloggers, retires

One day in 2006, I took a few hours off from work to attend a hearing of what was then called the House International Relations Committee, one of many hearings to ponder the then-awful state of the U.S.-South Korean alliance without calling it awful. One of the witnesses that day was Richard Lawless, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Asia-Pacific Affairs, who had to squeeze past my chair to get to his. Lawless is a large man, but I can’t say...

Blogs & Blogging

October 26, 2015

South Korean plastic surgeons heal the broken survivors of North Korea

Via Singapore’s Straits Times comes one of the saddest, most hopeful, things I’ve read for a long time. South Korean plastic surgeons are volunteering to help repair the abused, broken, and scarred bodies of North Korean refugees. Since news of the free surgery programme spread, dozens of defectors have signed up, including a man who cannot breathe through his nose after it was smashed in a logging camp accident. One woman who lost a breast to cancer hoped that reconstructive...

Refugees

September 28, 2015

A guerrilla health care system for North Korea’s poor

Gullible leftists and U.N. nincompoops who take North Korea’s claims of socialist equality at face value love to bleat about the wonders of its free universal health care, but those bleats have little basis in reality. A 2010 study by Amnesty International found that Pyongyang provides less for the care of its non-elite citizens per capita than almost any other nation on earth: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address the country’s ongoing food shortages since the 1990s....

Health & Disease

August 25, 2015

Koreas agree to fight another day

They came, they talked, and they signed, but they solved nothing. Plus or minus one piece of paper, three severed legs, and an implicit promise of payment, we are where we were on the morning of August 4th, when Staff Sergeant Kim Jung-Won and Sergeant Ha Jae-Heon embarked on their fateful patrol. As I predicted hours before the deal was announced, Pyongyang didn’t apologize, and Seoul will continue to pay. The loudspeakers will be switched off. There will not be...

Korean War II

August 11, 2015

North Korean Men Cross DMZ (and plant land mines)

By now, you’ve read that South Korea’s government has accused the North Korean military of sending soldiers across the DMZ to plant mines near South Korean guard posts, an act that blew the legs off two South Korean soldiers last week. The two South Koreans, both staff sergeants, triggered the mines last Tuesday just outside their post, within the South Korean half of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer separating the two Korean armies. One lost both legs in the...

Appeasement/Kaesong/Korean War II/North-South/Propaganda/ROK Military/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy

July 1, 2015

Daily NK: Massive brawl in Musan market after traders resist confiscations

This may be the most significant known incident of anti-regime resistance by North Korean civilians since the Ajumma Rebellion that followed the 2009 currency confiscation: A massive brawl between Ministry of People’s Security [MPS] agents and vendors at a marketplace in Musan County last Friday has led to an urgent dispatch of county security and safety agents along with the complete shuttering of the market. The clash occurred after angry vendors tried to resist the confiscation of their goods by market...

Capitalism/Resistance

June 19, 2015

Is the North Korean military falling apart?

Last week, a 19 year-old North Korean army private fled “repeated physical abuse at the hands of his superiors” and “the realities of his impoverished country,” walked and rode for a week as a fugitive, crossed the heavily mined DMZ, and fell asleep next to a South Korean guard post.* Surely this young soldier knows that his family will now face terrible retribution for what he has done. We can even speculate that others have tried, and failed, at similar attempts that...

Anju Links/Border Control/NK Military/Resistance

June 8, 2015

Guerrilla Engagement: A strategy for regime replacement and reconstruction in North Korea

~ 1 ~ One day, either this President or the next one will awaken to the realization that the regime in Pyongyang is collapsing, and that he has just inherited the costliest, messiest, and riskiest nation-building project since the Marshall Plan. The collapse of North Korea will present South Korea – and by extension, its principal treaty ally, the United States – with a nation-building challenge unlike any in recent history. After all, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria all had some...

Capitalism/Reconstruction/Regime Change/Resistance/Subversion

April 16, 2015

N. Korea perestroika watch: “Gunfire must be made to resound”

New Focus International has published an “exclusive” report that “North Korea’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Ministry of People’s Security (MPS)” have begun what amounts to an internal terror campaign against the people, personally ratified by Kim Jong Un in September 2013, and aimed at “the sweeping out of impure and hostile elements.” The campaign consists of a series of crackdowns, collectively known as the “9.8 measures.” According to the report, Kim Jong Un has taken personal oversight* (read: personal responsibility...

Border Control

April 10, 2015

Help! Help! I’m being repressed! (Part 2)

Christine Ahn’s pursuit of global fame is having unintended consequences, mostly for Gloria Steinem. At Hot Air, Noah Rothman writes, “If women’s rights are also human rights, then North Korea is no friend to either.” He accuses Ahn and Steinem (and other “progressives”) of turning “a blind eye toward real abuses in order to support the cause of totalitarian statism.” In The Daily Beast, Lizzie Crocker writes that Ahn “has long been uncritical of North Korea, a country that has some committed...

Useful Idiocy

March 26, 2015

Kim Jong Un’s censorship knows no limits or borders. To submit to it is to forfeit freedom.

If Kim Jong Un is weighing whether to answer leaflets from South Korea with artillery, it won’t discourage him that many on South Korea’s illiberal left have already begun to excuse him for it. Within this confused, transpatriated constituency, there is much “anxiety” lately about “inter-Korean tensions.” Those tensions have risen since North Korea has begun threatening to shell the North Korean defectors who send leaflets critical of Kim’s misrule across the DMZ. But then, any rational mind can see...

Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Propaganda/Subversion/Terrorism (NK)

February 25, 2015

Kim Jong Un seeks friends and funds abroad as he isolates his people.

In the three years that he has been in power, His Porcine Majesty has found plenty of time for Dennis Rodman, but none for meetings with foreign leaders. Suddenly, in the last two months, he has flirted with (1) a summit with South Korean leader Park Geun-Hye, (2) inviting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Pyongyang, (3) and a visit to Vladimir Putin in Moscow in May. His central bank even “committed itself to implementing the action plan of ‘international...

Capitalism/China & Korea/Class Warfare/Diplomacy/Russia & Korea/Sanctions

Search Results for: soldier defect