September 23, 2014

North Korean Gulag survivors call on Switzerland to freeze Kim Jong Un’s slush funds (Alternate title: Cursed are the Cheesemakers).

Switzerland has always been there for North Korea. When North Koreans were starving to death in heaps, Switzerland was there to receive Kim Jong Il’s personal shopper and sell him millions of dollars’ worth of its finest timepieces. When North Korea needed creative new ways to make money – literally! – Switzerland sold it the very same intaglio presses and optically variable ink our Bureau of Engraving and Printing uses to make money. When Kim Jong Un needed a place...

Categories Activism/Anju Links/Europe/Money Laundering/Refugees/Sanctions
September 23, 2014

Park Sang Hak is a very brave man.

Park and the Fighters for a Free North Korea, most of whom are North Korean refugees, ignored a letter from Pyongyang to the office of South Korea’s President that, according to Yonhap, “alluded to retaliation” against their next leaflet balloon launch: Defying the warning, 10 activists from Fighters for Free North Korea launched 10 big balloons carrying 200,000 anti-North Korea leaflets into the sky in Paju, north of Seoul. The waterproof leaflets contain messages denouncing the three-generation power transfer in...

Categories Activism/Propaganda/Refugees/Subversion/Terrorism (NK)
September 22, 2014

North Korea ranks 197th out of 197 countries for press freedom this year,

… according to Freedom House. Remember 2011, when Pyongyang’s deal with the Associated Press was supposed to usher in a new era of press freedom in North Korea? Wouldn’t it be great if one of the AP’s editors or correspondents would sit for an interview, review how that’s worked out, and answer hard questions about the North Korean regime’s restrictions on the access and coverage? I don’t mean softball interviews like this; I mean the kind of hard questions that make...

Categories AP Watch/Censorship/Media Criticism
September 22, 2014

The Japan-North Korea deal will self-destruct in 3, 2, 1 ….

It could have been predicted from the moment of its revelation — and was — that Pyongyang would renege on its ransom deal with Tokyo. And so, as surely as the sun rises, Pyongyang has reinterpreted its “reinvestigation” of its abductions of Japanese so as to reveal approximately nothing, slowly. Tokyo says it will reject Pyongyang’s report: Pyongyang said the report would include only information on missing persons who are not on Tokyo’s official list, which totals 17 Japanese. Instead, the North’s...

Categories Abductions/Japan
September 21, 2014

Jeffrey Fowle just lost his job for being in a North Korean prison instead of at work.

“We had hoped this action would not be necessary,” states a letter dated Sept. 16 from Moraine City Manager David Hicks, “but in light of your continued incarceration in North Korea resulting from your (a) unilateral decision to travel to North Korea against the advice of your family and acquaintances; and (b) running afoul of North Korean restrictions on ‘anti-government’ activities, and as stated, the exhaustion of your accrued vacation time, we have to act in the best interests of...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
September 21, 2014

Whether or not this is true of President Obama, it’s an insightful analysis.

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal: His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment. And we don’t say this because he’s so famously bright—academically credentialed, smooth, facile with words, quick with concepts. (That’s the sort of intelligence the press and popular historians most prize and celebrate, because it’s exactly the sort they possess.) But brightness is not the same as judgment, which has to do with discernment, instinct, the ability to see the big picture, wisdom...

Categories Anju Links/Diplomacy
September 20, 2014

NKPW: North Korea cracks down on remittances from refugees to their families

Our latest edition of North Korea Perestroika Watch comes via the Chosun Ilbo, which quotes North Korean insiders as saying that the tolerance of markets is temporary, and that a crackdown will come in due course: Hyun Dong-il at Yanbian University said, “Major changes are taking place in North Korea, but the ruling elite says it is still intent on adhering to the planned, socialist economic model.” North Korean academics studying at Yanbian University apparently say that the changes are “temporary”...

Categories Capitalism
September 19, 2014

The Daily NK looks back on the Il Shim Hue scandal, the investigation of which …

stopped suddenly when it reached the door of Roh Moo Hyun’s Blue House. See also my post from the time of the conviction, and follow the links if you care to read more. I heard somewhere that Michael Jang, the group’s convicted ringleader and a former USFK soldier, has completed his sentence and is now a “unification” activist in L.A. Can anyone confirm that?

Categories The Fifth Column
September 19, 2014

LiNK Fundraiser in Long Beach on Oct. 25: 5K for Freedom

From LiNK’s site: 5K for FREEDOM is an all ages event raising funds for Liberty in North Korea. You are welcome to walk, run, bike, rollerblade, jog, push a stroller, or whatever you’d like! This is a non-competitive 5K designed to encourage fun while raising money for a good cause. Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) is a non-profit working with North Korean refugees in hiding in China. These are families, grandmothers, children, daughters, etc. They risked their lives escaping North...

Categories Activism/Anju Links
September 19, 2014

So, you really, really don’t like North Korea, do you?

I’m just glad to have done my small part: North Korea has topped the list of countries that the American people feel most unfavorable toward, a biennial survey showed Monday, amid the communist nation’s prolonged detention of three U.S. citizens. North Korea received a favorability rating of 23 points out of 100 in the Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey conducted on 2,108 adults from May 6-29. The North was followed by Iran with a rating of 27 points, Iraq...

Categories America/An Alliance?
September 18, 2014

Matthew Todd Miller sure does sound like a weird person.

James Pearson and Ju-Min Park of Reuters have unearthed the fact that Miller lived in South Korea for several months, pretending to be a British person named “Preston Somerset,” and working on his magnum opus — an “Alice In Wonderland” anime project. I guess “Sir Trevor Biggleswade-Duxbury, CBE” was already taken by a comic store clerk from Rancho Cucamonga. Since then, Suspected British Person James Pearson and Confirmed British Person Chad O’Carroll of NK News have published some of Miller’s pictures. Your reaction to those pictures...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
September 18, 2014

What Bob King should have said about travel to North Korea.

Ambassador Robert King, whose title is Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, has written to The Washington Post in response to Anna Fifield’s reporting on North Korea’s efforts to market itself as a tourist destination (which may be more accurately described as the efforts of foreign collaborators to sell North Korea as a fine place to go slumming). King wishes that Fifield had given more emphasis to what should be obvious to anyone with good sense — that “[t]ravel to...

Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Foreigners in N. Korea
September 17, 2014

Must Read: Bruce Klingner on North Korea sanctions

Writing at the blog of the (cough, cough) Korea Economic Institute, Klingner, a former CIA analyst and a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, hammers home the weakness of our North Korea sanctions and their enforcement. While still at the State Department, Campbell realized that “Burma had much more in the way of sanctions” than North Korea and correctly, if belatedly, concluded that “Clearly we have not been successful at putting substantial pressure on North Korea [and] it would be possible for us...

Categories Sanctions
September 17, 2014

Adam Johnson: “Everyone who deals with them eventually gets burned.”

Somewhere, the world’s smallest violin is playing a Samuel Barber adagio for Walter Keats, who whines, not about the North Koreans who shut down his tour business after he spent years coddling and enriching them, but about Adam Johnson for writing a Pulitzer Prize winning novel: Between 2006 and 2012, Walter Keats led dozens of tours as president of Asia Pacific Travel. By 2012, after building trust with North Korean officials, Keats and his wife were permitted to lead groups year-round. Then, without explanation, Keats and his wife...

Categories Books & Films/Foreigners in N. Korea/Useful Idiocy