Search Results for: Executed

March 4, 2010

North Korea Publicly Executes Clandestine Citizen Journalist

In a world in which the word “martyr” has been profaned by those who do not even value life, word comes today of the death of a martyr for freedom. His name was “Chong,” and he worked in a factory in the miserable coastal city of Hamheung. You may well have read some of his reporting at this very site. That is about all we know about him, except for the manner of his death: A North Korean firing squad...

Categories Human Rights/Inside NK
February 11, 2010

North Korean Premier Apologizes for Great Confiscation

If absolute power is never having to say you’re sorry, what could this possibly mean? On Friday, Premier Kim Yong Il apologized for the aftermath in a meeting with government officials and local village leaders, the mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported, citing an unidentified source in North Korea. “Regarding the currency reform, I sincerely apologize as we pushed ahead with it without a sufficient preparation so that it caused a big pain to the people,” Kim read a statement during...

Categories Kremlinology/NK Economics/Resistance
January 30, 2010

Eagerly Awaiting Eric Sirotkin’s Fact Check

A year after President Obama’s inauguration, North Koreans continue to step forward to slander the Workers’ Paradise and act as willing agents of neocon propaganda about North Korea’s political rehabilitation system: Life under the regime took its toll on Kim’s family. Her parents died of hunger at Yodok, she said. One son accidentally drowned there. Another was executed in 1989 while trying to escape from North Korea. Kim’s husband was taken to a separate camp, which she calls “a place...

Categories Human Rights/Useful Idiocy
January 26, 2010

Kim Jong-il Ordered Shooting of Defectors

In May of 2008, this site was the first to publish reports, attributed to the NGO Helping Hands Korea, that North Korea had issued orders to its border guards to shoot fleeing refugees, notwithstanding its failure to provide them with the basic necessities of life and its draconian treatment of those who try to provide for themselves. The Times of London later picked up those reports. Other reports suggest that the shoot-to-kill policy was hardly new. According to one previous...

Categories Human Rights/Refugees

Camp 25, Chongjin, North Korea

In October 2009, I was studying Google Earth imagery of the city of Chongjin in North Korea’s far Northeast, in awe of the acres upon acres of idled, rusted, collapsed factories, the ruins, and the sludge heaps. Around the same time, I was still reading the Korean Bar Association’s 2008 White Paper on Human Rights (KBA White Paper), for which I will always be grateful to the Voice of America’s Seoul correspondent, Kurt Achin. The report described a kwan-li-so, a...

Comments: 10
January 22, 2010

North Korea Liquidates Family for Trying to Escape

Via the Daily NK comes a terrible report about the fate of the Jeong family from the town of Hyesan, near the Chinese border. At some point, the Jeongs decided that they’d had enough stultifying propaganda and grass porridge for a lifetime, so they decided to make a break for it. Early in July last year Jeong escaped from North Korea to Changbai in China along with his mother, wife and three- and seven-year old daughters. However, in August the...

Categories Human Rights/Inside NK/Refugees
January 18, 2010

A Tribal Strategy for Winning in Afghanistan

With a problem as complex as Afghanistan, I have felt some justifiable trepidation to enter an overcrowded field of underqualified experts and opine on what should be done there. The real experts are the Afghans themselves, though many of the Afghans with the best access to foreign audiences have their own agendas. The few Americans who speak with credibility are those with experience living and fighting there — men like Major Jim Gant, who embedded a team of half a...

Categories Afghanistan
January 11, 2010

We Can’t Trust North Korea, or the People Who Do

What is the objective of negotiating with North Korea at all? How you answer that question may depend on whether you believe North Korea cheated on the first Agreed Framework with Bill Clinton. Even before Clinton left office, the evidence that North Korea cheated by trying to build a uranium bomb was too compelling for any responsible president to ignore, yet during the last decade, true believers in diplomacy with Kim Jong Il invested themselves in denying that evidence and...

Categories Anju Links
December 16, 2009

Great Confiscation Updates: North Korea Bans All Foreigners

[Update: The Daily NK thinks the ban is “not news.”] So how worried is North Korea about the potential for more unrest and rioting? As of yesterday, it will ban all foreigners from entering the country until at least February to make sure there won’t be any foreign witnesses to any demonstrations or massacres. North Korea reportedly plans to ban foreigners from the country from Sunday until early February, apparently to allow unrest caused by this month’s shock currency reform...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
December 15, 2009

Chosun Ilbo: North Korea Executes 12 After Currency Riot in Hamhung

Now that many North Koreans have burned the savings that the regime suddenly declared worthless this month, the Chosun Ilbo reports that public outrage has forced Kim Jong Il to raise the exchange limit to 500,000 won. The decision coincides with the first report of a significant outbreak of anti-regime violence, followed by a brutal reaction: The announcements came after rioting by market traders in the Hamhung region was reported on Dec. 5-6 amid sympathy from ordinary people, sources said....

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/NK Economics/Resistance
December 9, 2009

North Korea’s Ajumma Rebellion

[Originally published at The New Ledger, Dec. 9, 2009] A sort of tea party movement may be breaking out today in the least likely of all places. The unseen pillars of Korean society are its ajummas. “Ajumma” — literally “aunt” — is one of those wonderfully untranslatable Korean words — more colorful than “hausfrau,” less derogatory than “fishwife,” and probably not too far from “yenta.” In South Korea, “ajumma” is an inglorious term most associate with gargantuan red sun visors,...

Categories Anju Links
December 8, 2009

In Geneva, North Korea Answers Atrocity Accusations with Bluster, Denials, and a Concession

For the most part, it’s what you’d have expected: Lies, all lies! A U.S. plot (with the EU) to overthrow us! The POW issue is resolved. There are no more Japanese abductees in North Korea, and there is no need for a U.N. Special Envoy to visit. Some of the denials almost must be seen to be believed. On the starvation of the North Korean people, particularly those in the lower political castes: According to The Independent, North Korean ambassador...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/The Camps
November 8, 2009

Photos from Saturday’s March and Demonstration for NK Human Rights

I would love to write more, but at least for now, here are some photos from Saturday’s March from near City Hall (actually, just to the right of the Deoksu Palace) to Seoul Station, where we joined a somewhat larger collection of groups assembled to call for freedom for North Koreans and meant to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. The woman pictured speaking below is a North Korean survivor of sexual trafficking —...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Refugees
September 21, 2009

The Comfort Women of Our Time: North Korean Women Are Turning to Prostitution to Survive

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Laura Ling and Euna Lee went to China to tell the story of what it means to be a North Korean woman today. What it means, increasingly, is having no future, and often, having no means to keep body and soul united but sacrificing the latter to preserve whatever remains of the former. If the historically weighty term “comfort woman” means a woman coerced into prostitution by the actions of an oppressive government, the women...

Categories Human Trafficking/Inside NK

Camps 14 and 18, North Korea: Satellite Imagery and Witness Accounts

In central North Korea, along the Taedong River far upstream from Pyongyang, lie two of North Korea’s five largest concentration camps: Camp 14 and Camp 18, which hold an approximate total of 50,000 political prisoners, their spouses, and their children. The camps lie on opposite sides of the river in an area rich in coal, where mines are worked by the mine’s prisoners. For context, here are the boundaries of both camps in relation to the other largest camps —...

Comments: 52
July 22, 2009

John Kerry Tries, Fails to Stop Amendment Calling for N. Korea to be Re-Listed as Terror Sponsor (Update: Dems Defeat Amendment, 54-43)

Progress on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is always tenuous and remains incomplete. But the regime’s nuclear declaration is the latest reminder that, despite President Bush’s once bellicose rhetoric, engaging our enemies can pay dividends…. Now the president must not prematurely close the books on North Korea’s alleged uranium enrichment activities and nuclear exports. We must ensure there are credible verification and monitoring procedures to ensure North Korea is out of the nuclear business for the long term. —...

Categories Appeasement/Ling/Lee Incident/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics