Search Results for: camp 22

July 2, 2015

N. Korean biowar researcher defects, will testify about human experimentation

[Update, 4 Aug 2015: I inquired with well-connected friends in Europe about when this testimony was likely to take place. Those friends instead questioned the accuracy of Yonhap’s report. Last week, I wrote to a Yonhap correspondent, and asked whether Yonhap stands by the story. Although the correspondent passed my question along to the author of this report, I have not heard back from Yonhap. The lack of a response is further reason to question the accuracy of Yonhap’s story.]...

Categories Europe/Human Rights/The Camps/WMD
June 25, 2015

Stephens didn’t call for isolation, he called for objectivity and full disclosure (updated).

The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield has written an opinion piece in response to Bret Stephen’s column yesterday, on which I commented in yesterday’s post: If we can’t report from the gulag without a guide, by Stephens’s logic, then we shouldn’t be reporting from North Korea at all. Or from Iran, or Syria, or Gaddafi’s Libya or probably present-day China, where journalists are closely monitored. Certainly not from the Soviet Union before the Iron Curtain came down. Whenever we journalists go...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
November 6, 2014

Donald Gregg’s weird, surreal, sad spectacle

In all the stages of North Korea’s reaction to U.N. action on the Commission of Inquiry report, none was quite so surreal as an event held on Monday, October 20th, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. There, former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea and Cheonan conspiracy theorist Donald Gregg moderated a “conversation” about human rights with North Korean diplomat (I use the term advisedly) Jang Il Hun. If that seems about as wise as inviting Larry Flynt...

Categories Anju Links
April 15, 2014

Inspector General finds flaws in WFP monitoring in N. Korea (and I find a bigger one)

A reader (thank you) directs my attention to this Fox News report covering a new report by the U.N. World Food Program’s Office of Inspector General, finding major loopholes in the WFP’s controls to prevent the North Korean government from stealing food aid and diverting it to regime loyalists and the military. The report is so cryptic that it’s almost unreadable, so I’ll summarize: – The WFP failed to meet its targets for monitoring visits to ensure that aid was...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
March 27, 2014

Open Sources, March 27, 2014

~  1  ~ CONSEQUENCES: The State Department sends a strong hint that it’s mulling more sanctions on North Korea in response to the North’s recent missile tests, including two medium-range missiles fired toward Japan, but offered no details on the type of sanction or whether they would be unilateral or at the U.N. This separate report, however, says that our U.N. ambassador is talking with other members of the Security Council. If State does press for U.N. sanctions, that would...

Categories Anju Links
January 30, 2014

An unlikely convergence of views

What a difference the last six weeks have made. Since the December purge of Jang Song Thaek, the consensus about North Korea’s ruler has moved from “undecided” to “negative.” Maybe I should have said “strongly negative.” It’s rare that I make this observation, but for once, I believe that this can be said of the prevailing views in all five of the cities where it matters most — in Beijing, Washington, Seoul, Pyongyang, and Chongjin. In each case, this is...

Categories Kim Jong Un
January 3, 2014

In case this isn’t self-evident, all analysis of North Korean New Year’s speeches is crap.*

In this year’s annual New Year’s Day message, Kim Jong Un boasted about his squalid little kingdom’s “brilliant successes in building a thriving socialist country and defending socialism,” its “upsurge … in production in several sectors and units of the national economy,” its “brilliant victory in the acute showdown with the imperialists,” and its “policies of respecting the people and loving them.” It’s crap like this that makes me proud of how little I’ve contributed to the torrent of junk...

Categories Anju Links/Fiskings/Media Criticism
December 18, 2013

Kim Jong Un is “reckless,” “dangerous, unpredictable, prone to violence and … delusions of grandeur,” and nuked up. Is that all?

North Korea, which was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, has showered Baekryeong Island, a disputed South Korean-held Island in the Yellow Sea, and the site of the 2010 ROKS Cheonan attack, with leaflets threatening to turn the island into “a huge tomb.” [Screen grab from MBC, via the Chosun Ilbo] The leaflets did not explain why Kim Jong Un is not content to keep killing off his unwanted relatives, but a China-based,...

Categories Anju Links/Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
September 9, 2013

Cartmanland, The Country (Or, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea and the End of Juche)

Maybe I’ve learned something from Dennis Rodman’s visit to North Korea after all, which is that I was probably incorrect when I denied that Kim Jong Un had enough power to make decisions that affect North Korea’s national priorities. Unbelievable as I find it to be, he really does seem to be in charge of something, and quite probably, everything. What causes me to reverse my thinking on this important question? The fact that Rodman has made a ridiculous and...

Categories Kim Jong Un
September 7, 2013

Open Sources, Sept. 7, 2013

PRAISE BE TO ZEUS, I DON’T HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THAT IMBECILE DENNIS RODMAN again, because Sung Yoon Lee has already done it so much better than I could. It’s not an easy thing to write a fat joke with the subtlety a respected academic must use to get invited back on the PBS News Hour to (polemically speaking) deflower those paired with him–or to the Oval Office. Lee not only manages this, he begins with a silly-yet-tragic story about...

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
January 30, 2013

The Whole World Is Watching

Since I started this blog nearly ten years ago, I’ve had one primary objective — to do my small part to make it impossible for people with more influence than me to ignore North Korea’s crimes against humanity.  This week, for the first time, this quixotic campaign does not seem like such an exercise in futility.  Today, everyone on earth seems to be talking about Google maps and satellite imagery of concentration camps in North Korea, even posting fake “reviews”...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps
January 18, 2013

AP VP denies N. Korean censorship, says he’s being treated well, confesses to “brigandish madcap war crimes.”

“KIM JONG” BILL RICHARDSON’S FIXER, TONY NAMKUNG, is one of those people who is so thoroughly despised by some North Korea watchers that they hesitate to express their views without consulting their lawyers. I know I should explain, but I haven’t consulted my lawyer. Instead, I’ll again refer you to this piece by Nir Rosen that paints Namkung in an unflattering light (without even seeming to try to do so).  This week, Don Kirk convinces me that I don’t care much for Tony Namkung, either:...

Categories AP Watch
January 14, 2013

North Korea Glasnost Watch: Kim Jong Un’s Border Crackdown Is Working

The most superficial things you’ve probably heard about Kim Jong Un are the closely related ideas that he is, or must be, a latent reformer because he (a) appreciates aspects of Western culture, (b) has a fashionable wife, and (c) had a Swiss education. As examples, I’ll cite this report by Jean Lee, this and this from Joohee Cho of ABC, and this exercise in straw-grasping by John DeLury. The problem with this theory is that it isn’t supported by...

Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Refugees
January 11, 2013

Breaking: North Korea Still Poor, Ignorant, and Run by Narcissistic Assholes

I’ve never expected anything good to come from a Bill Richardson visit to Pyongyang, and this visit fulfilled my expectations. A lot of journalists, bloggers, and academics in Washington and New York made a big deal out of this. (It was good for our traffic.) But in the places that really count — in Chongjin and Hamhung and Uijongbu and even in Pyongyang — it didn’t change a thing. It will not reduce the black market price of corn, it...

Categories Appeasement/Useful Idiocy
December 28, 2012

Open Sources, Dec. 28, 2012: Special Schadenfreude Edition

PSY BOMBS:  Good.  South Korea’s America-hating, North Korea-sympathizing fad really needed a poster child to tell the world just how repellent it really was. ———————————————————— KORYO TOURS’ MOST RECENT venture into tasteless exploitation bombs.  Also good.  One day, Treasury really needs to get around to freezing their assets. ———————————————————— THE MOONIES’ NORTH KOREAN INVESTMENT BOMBS:  Also good.  Hat tip and nice Hemingway reference there, Marcus. ———————————————————— KIM JONG IL IS STILL DEAD, also good.  Evan Ramstad posts on the newest...

Categories Anju Links
November 20, 2012

Open Sources, November 20, 2012

CAMP 22 UPDATE:  Radio Free Asia is doubling down on its report of the liquidation and re-purposing of the camp, but after reviewing the satellite imagery and seeing Joe Bermudez’s interpretations reenforce my own conclusions, I find this very difficult to believe.  The truth we can more-or-less prove is horrible enough. ——————————————— HITCHENS HASN’T BEEN DEAD A YEAR and I miss him already: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is, as Christopher Hitchens once described the occluded realm ruled by the Kim family in Pyongyang, a...

Categories Anju Links
October 26, 2012

Open Sources, October 26, 2012

I THINK THIS SAYS IT ALL: “This story may or may not be true.” ——————————————————- CAMP 22 UPDATE: The Daily NK reports on who it believes now occupies the camp, but I still have questions. ——————————————————- USFK TRIES TO REJOIN U.S. ARMY by expressing interest in joining off-peninsula exercises. And in other USFK news, I’m glad to see that Leon Panetta and Kim Kwang-Jin are putting some thought into how to respond to limited North Korean provocations, more than two...

Categories Anju Links