December 17, 2013

Open Sources, Special Purge Edition

Today’s big news from North Korea is that Kim Jong Un didn’t kill his wife after all. Dark rumors had been swirling in the South Korean press — the kind of apocryphal rumor that’s more significant for the very fact of its circulation than anything else — that Kim Jong Un had purged Jang Song-Thaek over an affair with Ri “when she was a singer for the Unhasu Orchestra.” Ri has since appeared at a ceremony marking the second anniversary...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
December 16, 2013

North Korea’s overseas money men, called home, go to ground instead

After the news broke that Jang Song Thaek has been purged, The Daily NK reported that the regime was summoning party cadres from other parts of North Korea to Pyongyang. Now, new reports tell us that North Koreans in China are also being called back, possibly to be purged themselves. The Joongang Ilbo carries a fascinating interview with Lee Keum-Ryong, a defector and Free North Korea Radio correspondent, and obviously a very brave man. Lee defied the risk of abduction,...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology/NK Economics
December 13, 2013

AP protests “propaganda” photos of Obama after sponsoring propaganda photos of Kim Il Sung.

[UPDATE: Welcome, Weekly Standard readers.] The Associated Press, which in 2012 co-sponsored “A Joint Exhibition by the Associated Press and the Korean Central News Agency Marking 100 Years Since the Birth of Kim Il Sung,” is furious at the White House for using official photographers (rather than independent photojournalists) to “propagate an idealized portrayal of events on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Writing in the pages of The New York Times, Santiago Lyon, Vice President and Director of Photography at The Associated Press, assails...

Categories AP Watch
December 12, 2013

KCNA: Jang Song Thaek executed for plotting coup against Kim Jong Un (Update: Also, vaporized)

KCNA has just announced that Jang Song Thaek was executed shortly after this party meeting, after confessing to “attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods.” It also released this picture of him, possibly the last of his life. Such a nice, clean suit, too. [via Yonhap] As they say around these parts, sic semper tyrannis. As I noted this morning, Jang had many victims of his own in the camps. Most of them left...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
December 12, 2013

Open Sources, December 12, 2013

~ 1 ~ DON’T CRY FOR JANG. With all the talk about Jang Song Thaek being a “reformer,” I thought I should remind you that Jang was in charge of the Kuk-Ga Anjeon Bowi-Bu (roughly, National Security Protection Bureau), the secret police organization that runs the North’s prison camps and arrests people for political crimes. If Jang and others associated with this organization wind up before a firing squad, personally, I’d only regret that they didn’t face a more legitimate...

Categories Anju Links
December 11, 2013

Open Sources, December 11, 2013

~ 1 ~ THIS COULD BE BIG, even if the conclusion seems exaggerated: Yonhap reports that North Korea is dumping gold in China, and calls it a sign of “imminent economic collapse.” Yonhap says the last time that happened was when Kim Jong Il died, but to me, it’s reminiscent of North Korea’s behavior after the Banco Delta Asia action froze their money. I wonder if this is because the purge of Jang disrupted their financial network. If so, it...

Categories Anju Links
December 10, 2013

Why Merrill Newman came home and Ken Bae didn’t.

By now, everyone knows that Merrill Newman has come home, but hardly anyone knows that Ken Bae is in the hospital after losing 50 pounds in a North Korean prison. What accounts for the difference in outcomes? One reason, I’m afraid, is the cultural tendency of Koreans to feel that they have a certain ethnic “jurisdiction” over other ethnic Koreans — a tendency I’ve certainly observed in South Korea, too. Korean-American friends of mine, who were culturally just as American as...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
December 9, 2013

China not sounding so happy about N. Korean purge (Update: Park warns of “reign of terror,” unstable relations)

[If you haven’t read yesterday’s post on the purge in Pyongyang, start there.] China has summoned Kim Jong Un to Beijing “as soon as possible” to kowtow and offer tribute discuss what Yonhap describes as “the North’s long-term stability and bilateral relations.” China seems displeased with Jang’s ouster, and in case that message was too subtle, China also staged a 5,000-man night landing exercise on the Yellow Sea coast near North Korea (ht: Adam Cathcart). Kim Jong Un now faces a...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
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
December 6, 2013

KCNA: Newman deported from North Korea

Via KNCA (ht Yonhap), Merrill Newman has won the grand prize in North Korea’s national lottery. Pyongyang, December 7 (KCNA) — As already reported, a relevant institution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) detained and investigated U.S. citizen Merrill Edward Newman who entered the DPRK under the guise of a tourist to confirm the whereabouts of the spies and terrorists who had been trained and dispatched by him, an intelligence officer, during the last Korean War. According to the investigation,...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
December 6, 2013

Open Sources, December 6, 2013

~ 1 ~ NOT THAT “AXIS OF EVIL” NONSENSE AGAIN: New reports claim that “the U.S. intelligence community has determined that Iran and North Korea continue to develop” an ICBM together. Plaintive cries about starving babies in Iran notwithstanding, the mullahs are “financing much of the North Korean missile program in exchange for the transfer of technology, expertise and components.” More here, and much more here, in Bruce Bechtol’s new book. I’ll leave the commentary on the Iran deal to...

Categories Anju Links
December 5, 2013

Former Camp 16 Guard: Prisoners forced to dig their own graves, killed with hammers

A new report by Amnesty International is providing our first eyewitness account of conditions at Camp 16, images of which were first published at this very blog back in February of 2007, using clues provided in David Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag. In April 2012, I followed up with an extensive analysis of Camp 16 imagery, in an attempt to collect and publish all of the open-source information about this largest and least-understood of all of North Korea’s prison camps. Even...

Categories The Camps
December 4, 2013

In North Korea, hunger isn’t a function of production, but of state policy.

In North Korea, malnutrition remains widespread, crops are being seized in the provinces, women are selling their bodies to survive, NGOs say the country is in a state of humanitarian crisis, and a staggering 84% of households still can’t get enough to eat. So what else is new? The U.N. says North Korea has just had its best harvest in years. North Korea is still struggling with chronic malnutrition with 84 percent of households having borderline or poor food consumption, United Nations agencies said on Thursday,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
December 4, 2013

Upcoming Events: “The Defector” Screenings, and EAHR’s online round table

I’D PREVIOUSLY POSTED ABOUT two new documentaries about how the real North Korea — the one behind the facade — is changing. One of these, The Defector, will be screened this week at two separate events in Washington. If you’re in the area, I hope you can make it. I OWE AN APOLOGY to the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea, which asked me to post about their online seminar on advocating for human rights in North Korea,...

Categories Activism/Books & Films
December 3, 2013

N. Korean security forces shooting each others’ officers, and Jang Song Thaek reportedly removed

Three weeks ago, the Joongang Ilbo reported that North Korea had publicly executed 80 people in seven provincial cities for such “crimes” as Bible possession and watching porn. Norkromancers took note at the time that the Daily NK, with its formidable network of informants inside North Korea, had abstained from corroborating the reports. A new Daily NK report, however, belatedly (sort of) corroborates them now, and the venue for the reported executions has a significance unto itself: A number of...

Categories Human Rights/Inside NK
December 2, 2013

Merrill Newman’s real “offensive” was booking a tour of North Korea in the first place.

Just last week, I predicted that we were entering the provocation phase of North Korea’s mood cycle. The day after I wrote that we’d soon read of “satellite theater” and steam coming from reactors, the IAEA said that North Korea had restarted Yongbyon. The day after that, North Korea released a hostage video of an 85-year old tourist with a heart condition, after forcing him to sign a “confession” to war crimes that he’d allegedly committed 60 years ago. Or at least,...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
November 27, 2013

North Korea approaching provocation phase of its “vicious cycle”

North Korea’s bipolar cycle is now familiar to most Korea watchers, including the President of South Korea. The North pursues its nuclear weapons capability with consistent determination in all phases of that cycle, but not always with consistent ostentation. There are periodic acts of satellite theater — a new excavation here, a new launch pad there, or steam from a cooling tower. Words vacillate between conciliation (often cryptic) and belligerence (but mostly, belligerence). You can’t really time North Korea’s cycles...

Categories Propaganda/WMD