Search Results for: border crackdown

July 23, 2012

North Korea Increases Public Executions and Collective Punish…. Hey, Look! It’s Snoopy!

Writing in The Washington Post, Chico Harlan reports that as North Koreans try to flee its most recent avoidable food crisis, the repressive partnership of North Korea and China has been grimly effective in keeping North Koreans from escaping from their prison of a country: Last year, 2,706 North Koreans came to the South. During the first half of this year, there have been only 751 — a 42 percent decline compared with the same period a year earlier. The...

Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/Refugees
July 19, 2012

A Mickey Mouse Monarchy: Thoughts on the Sacking of Ri Yong Ho (Update: A Gun Battle?)

North Korea watching is an inherently speculative hobby. How could it be otherwise when our most reliable information comes from satellite images and reports from KCNA, the world’s least credible news organization? The problem with having no solid facts to argue is that no one is really an expert, and anyone can pretend to be, present company included. Even “inside” sources are suspect; after all, much of their information is probably disinformation. That’s why you’ll see a lot divergent and...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
June 12, 2012

North Korean Engagement Strategy Transforms the Associated Press

For nearly 20 years now, proponents of “engagement” with North Korea have promised that commerce, aid, and economic interdependence would expose the North to new ideas and transform it into a more open society.  The reality has been much closer to the opposite of this.  Buoyed by a stream of regime-sustaining hard currency, North Korea became (if anything) more belligerent toward its benefactors, more brazen in its proliferation, and more brutal and exploitative toward its own people. Meanwhile, those in...

Categories AP Watch
June 4, 2012

China Targets North Korean Refugees and the Activists Who Help Them

So those reports that China would stop repatriating North Korean refugees were probably disinformation after all. Instead, China is launching yet another pogrom against North Korean refugees, which coincides with a wider sweep against foreigners that got its impetus (or pretext) from one drunken Brit. China is also targeting foreigners who are helping North Korean refugees: “I heard that police and security staff are in every nook of the streets. All defectors must take shelter and cannot come out of...

Categories China & Korea/Human Trafficking/Refugees
April 12, 2012

North Korean Rocket Launch Fails.

This just in: A U.S. official has confirmed that a North Korean long-range missile broke apart in air after launch. U.S. officials say they believe the missile is believed to have crashed into the sea, ABC News reports. South Korea’s Defense Ministry says that North Korea has fired a long-range rocket. Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok told reporters in a nationally televised news conference that the rocket was fired at 7:39 a.m. Feel free to make your own bawdy dysfunction...

Categories Missiles
January 21, 2012

Anju: January 21, 2012

The Daily NK writes about “The High Price of Idolatry:” We should perhaps remember with great concern the time when Kim Jong Il used $900 million to both permanently preserve Kim Il Sung’s body and then create Keumsusan Memorial Palace to keep it in. It is no simple task to erect a statue of anybody, let alone someone who presumably requires a large statue such as Kim Jong Il. In the South Korean city of Gumi, a mere 5m statue...

Categories Anju Links
January 9, 2012

North Korea Perestroika Watch

Here’s something else the consumers of Selig Harrison’s next op-ed should try not to remember: North Korea on Wednesday upped its rhetoric against South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, branding him as a “pro-U.S. fascist maniac” and “chieftain of evils without an equal in the world” in view of measures his government took last month in the wake of the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The virulent name-calling came in a report released by the secretariat of...

Categories Anju Links
January 6, 2012

January 6, 2012

So those North Korean coup rumors probably aren’t true, but when it comes to North Korea, it can be weeks before we know what small grain of truth led to the rumors.  Chico Harlan of the Washington Post must feel at least a little sheepish having to pass along those rumors, and to admit that he has no idea if they’re true, so soon after writing that Kim Jong Eun’s succession was going smoothly.  The conclusion was based entirely on...

Categories Anju Links
July 19, 2011

Reunifying Korea, One Shot at at Time!

You may remember that several years ago, a liquor distributor in the United States tried to introduce North Korean soju into the U.S. market. That effort failed long before President Obama reimposed trade sanctions on North Korea, partially because of the importer’s legal troubles, but probably also because the stuff supposedly tasted awful. Apparently, North Korean consumers share that assessment, because the same brand of South Korean soju that once kept me fully occupied as a prosecutor and defense counsel...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Subversion
February 25, 2011

Open Sources: Don Kirk owns Wolf Blitzer; More reports of unrest in N. Korea

In a must-read piece in the Asia Times, Don Kirk ridicules Wolf Blitzer‘s melodramatic reporting from Pyongyang: This flight of fantasy became even more ludicrous as Blitzer sought to give an impression of a “rare” look at the same stuff everyone gets to see on tourist trips to Pyongyang – the Great Study Hall of the People, once described to me by a North Korean minder as “the world’s biggest library”, classrooms of privileged kids studying English, a look at...

Categories Anju Links
January 13, 2011

Or, Maybe It’s Just the Same Old “Reign of Terror”

The other day, Adam found fault with a Chosun Ilbo report that claimed that North Korea’s cross-border slaughter of five refugees represented an escalation of its shoot-to-kill policy. I found the criticism rather pedantic and pointless, although the evidence on the whole suggests that crossing borders and shooting escapees are part of a long-standing pattern of North Korean atrocities. It’s too bad Adam didn’t wait a few days, because the Chosun Ilbo has presented him with a much softer target...

Categories Human Rights/Refugees
January 10, 2011

North Korea Murders Five Refugees Inside Chinese Territory

My God: Five North Koreans were shot dead and two others wounded by North Korean border guards on the Chinese side of the border when they tried to flee the Stalinist country, a source said Sunday. The high-level source in Changbai in the Chinese province of Jilin said the seven had left Hyesan, Yanggang Province and walked across the frozen Apnok (or Yalu) River and reached the Chinese side on Dec. 14. But five of them died instantly under intensive...

Categories China & Korea/Refugees
January 10, 2011

Open Sources

Update: So if you saw a sneak preview of a longer post this morning, well, that was an unfinished draft that I published by accident. I hope you can be patient until all of the ideas interweave and are in final form. Apologies. _____________________________ Nothing says “responsible rising power” like giving billions to despots who shell nearby fishing villages: China has proposed a huge investment deal to revive North Korea’s faltering economy, a report said Friday, amid an international drive...

Categories Anju Links
November 20, 2010

Is Kim Jong Eun Already the Most Hated Man in North Korea?

More reports from Open News claim that the deification of Kim Jong-Eun is causing a backlash of discontent among the North Korean people: The source explained that “The punishment for attacking the government within North Korea is execution, so instead there have been outbreaks of criticism through graffiti across train stations, apartment walls, market places, and public buildings”¦according to others the graffiti expresses very strong discontent with Kim Jeong-Eun’s appointment as successor. The last time there were multiple reports of...

Categories Kim Jong Un
October 12, 2010

China’s Cleansing Campaign

I want to begin this post by congratulating the Nobel Committee for awarding the Peace Prize, for once, to a person who has actually made sacrifices to improve the lives of others in a way that is likely to frustrate a belligerent state and prevent war. More precisely, by selecting someone who is not a terrorist, an unaccomplished politician, or a proven failure at making peace, Nobel may have extended its residual relevance a while longer. Better, it has returned...

Categories Uncategorized
May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 —...

Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
March 12, 2010

North Korea Sanctions Itself

Reuters, citing a study by the Korea Development Institute (KDI), reports that “North Korea’s international trade dropped last year for the first time in more than a decade.” The report suggests that this was mostly the consequence of sanctions, but a closer look at the evidence it was The Great Confiscation that really brought trade across the Chinese border to a standstill by paralyzing the economy, markets, and trade, and banning the use of foreign currency in the final months...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
March 10, 2010

Bleak Signs for North Korea’s Food Situation (Updated)

Original Post, 10 March 2010: This week’s papers have several disturbing indicators suggesting that a sudden deterioration of the food situation is in the works. First was this report that even shops and hotels for foreigners in Pyongyang had run out of food; then, Robert linked to a report that kids can now seen begging even in Pyongyang. Depending on what you choose to believe, however, this may not be an entirely new development. Our friend Christine Ahn, no less,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid