Search Results for: soldier defect

January 14, 2015

N. Korea Perestroika watch: crackdown forces border guards to become robbers

Last week, China filed an official protest with North Korea over the December killing of four Chinese civilians by a rogue North Korean border guard who had turned to robbery. A Bloomberg reporter researches this further, in search of a pattern, and finds one: A spate of murders by North Koreans inside China’s border is prompting some residents to abandon their homes, testing China’s ability to manage both the 1400-kilometre shared frontier and its relationship with the reclusive nation. The...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
October 11, 2014

Silencing Park Sang-Hak won’t end North Korea’s threats (updated)

For the first time since 2010, North Korea has fired across the border into South Korean territory, this time with 14.5-millimeter anti-aircraft guns. The North Koreans were shooting at the second of two launches of balloons carrying a total of 1.5 million leaflets, by North Korean refugee Park Sang-Hak and the Fighters for a Free North Korea. The North Koreans didn’t respond to the first launch of 10 balloons at noon, but at around 4:00 in the afternoon, they fired...

Categories Activism/Censorship/Korean War II/North-South/Terrorism (NK)
August 3, 2014

U.S. urges Japan to rejoin coalition against N. Korea

When Japan’s ransom deal with North Korea threatened to fracture the regional coalition pressuring Pyongyang to end its nuclear programs, I was critical of the Obama Administration for failing to use its influence to prevent Japan’s defection. As leaks to the Japanese press have since confirmed, however, someone in the White House subsequently arrived a similar conclusion. Soon thereafter, the administration began some desperate behind-the-scenes diplomacy to press Japan to get back on the team: A senior White House official said the...

Categories Abductions/Japan & Korea
May 15, 2014

Open Sources, May 15, 2014

~   1   ~ LiNK WILL HOLD ITS ANNUAL SUMMIT from June 12th through 15th, at Pepperdine University, in Malibu, California. Here’s the agenda and list of speakers. You have just over two weeks to register. ~   2   ~ IF YOU’RE READING THIS FROM SEOUL, THE FREEDOM FACTORY, under the able leadership of Casey Lartigue, has a full schedule of events in your area for the next few months. On May 14th, it will screen, “North Korea: Life Inside...

Categories Anju Links
May 13, 2014

Open Sources, May 13, 2014

~   1   ~ GOVERNMENT SPOKESMAN TELLS TRUTH, WORLD GASPS IN HORROR: In a rare direct attack on the North Korean regime, South Korean Ministry of Defense spokesman Kim Min-seok said the North’s statement was “deeply regrettable” and that Pyongyang regularly lies so deserves to be discredited. “North Korea isn’t a real country is it? It doesn’t have human rights or freedom. It exists solely to prop up a single person,” Kim said at a briefing in Seoul. “It...

Categories Anju Links
January 27, 2014

Open Sources, January 27, 2014

~ 1 ~ NORTH KOREA PLANNED AN ATTACK ON INCHEON AIRPORT? If Park Geun Hye seems “skeptical about North Korea’s recent conciliatory proposals” and suspects that they could be “a prelude to an attack on South Korea” this may be why: North Korea secretly carried out military exercises simulating an attack on a civilian airport in South Korea, mobilizing special jet fighters designed to infiltrate Southern territory, a source told the JoongAng Ilbo. A South Korean government official who is...

Categories Anju Links
January 23, 2014

Aid donors give up on North Korea

My friend, Andrei Lankov, is again proclaiming that North Korea has reformed its agricultural sector, which he credits for last year’s improved harvest. I’ve grown comfortable with my pessimism about reform in North Korea, because events have never failed to vindicate it. Regrettably, nothing in my friend’s report dissuades me from adherence to my default view. First, Lankov claims that these reforms have resulted in a 30% increase in last year’s harvest; however, the most reliable data we have show...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
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 31, 2013

North Korea’s circular firing squad

The reaper has come for two more key North Korean diplomats: South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said that Pak Kwang-Chol, an associate of the young supremo’s uncle and political regent Jang Song-Thaek, was seen returning home after making a brief stopover in Beijing. The envoy and his wife were reportedly escorted by North Korean officials onto a flight to Pyongyang. Sweden is an influential diplomatic player in Pyongyang, AFP said. Since the United States and North Korea have no diplomatic...

Categories Kim Jong Un/NK Economics
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
November 24, 2013

Was Kim Jong Un behind the plot to smuggle meth into New York?

Last week, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York released an indictment of five men for conspiring to smuggle North Korean methamphetamine to New York. The meth was of exceptionally high quality — between 96% and 99% pure, depending on the source — and in large amounts. An initial “dry run” transaction consisted of 30 kilograms, later seized by Thai and Filipino authorities. The next shipment would have weighed in at 100 kilograms, for which the dealers...

Categories Anju Links/Drugs & N Korea
November 6, 2013

N. Korean military looking pretty decrepit these days.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons development is blazing ahead, but series of reports from North Korea suggest that its conventional forces are decaying, ill-disciplined, and even underfunded. First, a Hainan Class submarine chaser and a patrol boat sank in separate incidents off the coast of Wonsan (or, maybe the two ships collided; hey, it’s North Korea — who knows?). North Korea admits the loss of the 60s-vintage sub chaser. The North hasn’t given a casualty count, but showed Kim Jong un...

Categories NK Military
September 21, 2013

Democracies don’t shoot their own people for trying to leave

The ROK Army has given its explanation for why its soldiers shot a would-be South-to-North defector, and that explanation is completely unsatisfactory: Asked if the soldiers’ response was excessive, Brigadier General Cho Jong-sul at the briefing said: “It was legitimate. In a combat area like this, anyone who ignores our soldiers’ repeated warnings and tries to run away to North Korea will get shot.” The ministry said Mr. Nam was carrying a South Korean passport, which showed that he had...

Categories Democracy/ROK Military
September 16, 2013

ROK Army shoots, kills man attempting to swim to N. Korea

I’ll withhold my criticism until I know a few more facts, but I can’t immediately understand why South Korean troops had to shoot and kill a South Korean man who was swimming the Imjin toward North Korea. This would not be the first South-to-North defection, but I don’t know why one the loss of one more nut or fugitive would be a great loss to the South. If the South doesn’t address the appropriateness of the use of force, it will weaken calls...

Categories Defectors/North-South/ROK Military
January 4, 2013

Can Tim Sullivan Save the Associated Press from KCNA?

If anything comes of the Richardson-Schmidt visit to Pyongyang, Jean Lee will be the first foreign journalist to break the story of the visit.  Huzzah for her, then, because Ms. Lee desperately needs to show that AP can report anything from Pyongyang that is (a) true, (b) newsworthy, and (c) exclusive to justify the existence of her new bureau.  Still, I’d nominate Lee’s exclusive coverage of the opening of Kim Jong Il’s mausoleum as her magnum opus, apparently filed from some...

Categories AP Watch
November 7, 2012

Escape from North Korea: An Incremental Review

Nov. 7, 2012. Early in Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Korea, you start to find powerful phrases that stay with you — phrases that make you stop reading and chew on them, to extract the full significance of some aspect of life in another reality. I couldn’t help quoting two of them. The first is illuminating: So accustomed are North Koreans to the lack of light that when I asked a North Korean who had settled in an American city...

Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/Useful Idiocy