Search Results for “Executed”

July 21, 2009

An Inside Look at Hanawon

It is rare to be granted a look inside Hanawon, the first stop for North Korean defectors arriving in the South, but this summer the center opened its doors to international media in recognition of its 10 year anniversary, allowing journalists (and readers/viewers) a rare glimpse into the facility. As a result of the media invite, the L.A. Times ran a story about the rehabilitation center earlier this month and just recently VOA released a video story about Hanawon and...

Defectors/Refugees

June 3, 2009

Must Read: New Details Leaked on North Korea’s Counterfeiting

Say it with me: thank goodness Christopher Hill got the North Koreans promise never, ever to counterfeit our currency ever again — cross my heart and hope to be executed before a crowd of bused-in schoolchildren! A North Korean general who is a confidant of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, has been identified by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies as a key figure in the covert production and distribution of high-quality counterfeit $100 bills called supernotes, according to documents and...

Counterfeiting/Kremlinology/Media Criticism/Money Laundering/Sanctions

May 31, 2009

Unsung Misery

From the London Telegraph comes the story of Hyok Kang, a resident of Onsong, quite possibly the most miserable quarter of North Korea that isn’t a concentration camp, in its extreme northeast. Kang speaks of a hellish everyday life in which people were publicly executed for stealing copper wire to sell: When the time came, the condemned man was displayed in the streets before being led to the place of execution, where he was...

Google Earth/Human Rights/Refugees

May 28, 2009

Memories of an African Student Forced to Study in North Korea During the 1980s

Aliou Niane was born in Guinea West Africa, but due to decisions he had no control over, he found himself in North Korea from 1982-87. He is currently writing his memoir in French about the years he spent there and generously agreed to an email interview. Niane’s story is interesting, if not for the insider’s look he can give into what life was like for a foreigner living in North Korea during the 1980s, but also for the information he...

Africa/Inside NK

May 19, 2009

North Korea Shoots a Messenger

Surely there is some sensible middle ground between these two extremes of personnel management — in America, diplomats who push for policies that fail get promoted. We learn today that pressing for bold diplomatic initiatives turns out to be less career-enhancing in the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea: North Korea executed its pointman on South Korea last year, holding him responsible for wrong predictions about Seoul’s new conservative government that has ditched a decade of engagement...

Diplomacy/Inside NK/Kremlinology/NK Economics

February 26, 2009

State Dept. Releases Annual Human Rights Report

The State Department has released its 2008 country reports on human rights. The North Korea report is here, and it reflects no improvements in the abysmal state of life, such as it is, in North Korea. It features this litany of arbitrary murders by the state’s agents: During the year the South Korean nongovernmental research organization North Korean Human Rights Infringement Record Center reported that North Korea carried out 901 public executions in 2007. North Korea also reportedly carried out...

Human Rights

January 7, 2009

Pueblo Crew Gives North Korea the Middle Finger Again

In these times, terrorists, whose training manuals teach them to fabricate claims of torture, can sue law enforcement officers for damages in our courts for having the temerity to interrupt their plans. If we’ve dispensed with the idea of keeping disputes between individuals and states out of the courts, it’s at least just to allow American victims of torture to seek compensation against those — including foreign states — who wronged them. A few years ago, Congress removed an impediment...

Uncategorized

November 25, 2008

The Daily NK on Camp 18

As North Korean concentration camps go, Camp 18 has a reputation for being less terrible than most. The Daily NK helps to keep that in perspective by publishing an interview with a survivor. He says prisoners there were branded on their stomachs to better identify them. He also testified that at the political prison, “15~20 are publicly executed around this time of the year. Lim also noted, regarding life at the camp, “The teachers try to instill animosity towards parents...

Human Rights/The Camps

November 24, 2008

Calling Jay Lefkowitz

According to some fragmentary reports passed along by Human Rights Frontiers, Son Jung Nam — or rather, what’s left of Son Jung Nam after more than a year of torture in a dungeon in Pyongyang — is about to be stood up against a firing squad … if he still lives, that is. (No link on the latest report, which come to me via e-mail). I previously posted on Son’s case here. In China, a group of 11 refugees between...

Appeasement/Human Rights/Refugees

November 16, 2008

New Media Lead the Way in Covering North Korea

Interestingly, this tacit admission comes from the L.A. Times, no less. [Defector Zhu Sung-Ha, now a journalist] criticized South Korean intelligence for not getting inside the Pyongyang government. “The two Koreas have been at war for 60 years,” Zhu said, in reference to the state of war that has officially existed since the Korean War. “During that time they should have placed someone close to Kim. I am surprised their intelligence is so weak.” As a result, much of the...

Inside NK/Media Criticism

October 26, 2008

Once Again, Kim Jong Il Starves the People; Once Again, World Doesn’t Know How to Respond

Recently, I was arguing with an influential supporter of a soft-line approach to North Korea about food aid. Generally, we both supported the provision of food aid, and both of us acknowledged that the regime would use every means at its disposal to divert that aid to loyalists, high-ranking cadres, and the military. We agreed that Kim Jong Il doesn’t see the lives of all North Koreans as having equal value. We diverged when it came to what U.S. policy...

Famine & Food Aid

October 24, 2008

Domestic State Terrorism: North Korea Expands Use of Public Executions

[Updated below] A few weeks ago, the Chosun Ilbo, quoting NGO’s that in turn cite interviews with recent defectors, reported that North Korea carried out 901 public executions in 2007. This figure, of course, does not include summary executions or those carried out in secrecy, or the ordinary toll of starvation, disease, and torture in the North Korea’s vast concentration camp system.When a society is as opaque as North Korea’s, I originally thought it strained to suggest, as some newspapers...

Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Inside NK/Regime Change

September 25, 2008

War on Prostitution Not Working So Well in North Korea, Either

As with their southern bretheren, the North Koreans are being reminded of the persistence of the oldest profession, largely because of the traditional confluence of state power and corruptable masculine hydraulics. The Daily NK reports that some twenty North Korean officials in the city of Hamhung were removed from power — and several senior military officers were shot — over a whorehouse patronage scandal: The Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (NKnet) reported in its journal “NK In...

Kremlinology/NK Military

September 23, 2008

The Continuum: The Origins of Korean Politics

Before the allies arrived in Korea in September 1945, Korean politics existed only undergound and in exile, among feuding factions of various brands of radicals. A search of Time’s fascinating archives, which are completely free, shows that the American press paid little attention to events in Korea until American missionaries began reporting on Japan’s oppression. This attention increased in the 1930’s as hostility rose between Japan and the United States, but exile politics received almost none of that attention. Less...

Korean History

September 22, 2008

Grim Vindication: Predictably, Appeasement Fails to Disarm North Korea … Again

[Update: Now they’re asking the IAEA to remove the seals and cameras. More here.] There are some who can look back on decades of failure and learn nothing, while some of us looked into the future two years ago and foresaw everything. One Agreed Framework should have been enough for any observer possessed of an average ration of common sense. Crediting myself with that much, in March of 2007, I wrote a post in the form of news reports...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks

August 24, 2008

Anju Links for 23 August 2008

NEXT SURRENDER, VERIFICATION? Sung Kim has been in talks with the North Koreans in New York to break the latest impasse, which could only mean one thing. I hope he brought enough lubricant. HERE’S AUDIO OF ADRIAN HONG on the Hugh Hewitt Show. THE WORLD FOOD PROGRAM HAS ASKED South Korea to provide $60 million in emergency food aid. No word on when the U.N. will tender a similar request to the Ryugyong Hotel Building Fund. IN 1997, NORTH KOREAN...

Anju Links

July 31, 2008

The Continuum: Birth of a Nation

The restoration of Korea’s nationhood seemed to begin so harmoniously: It is their purpose that Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since 1914, and that all territories stolen from China shall be restored. Japan will be expelled from all other territories taken by violence and greed. In due course Korea shall become free and independent. With these objects in view, the three Allies, in harmony with those of the...

History/Korean History/U.S. Military

July 8, 2008

History, Through Charles Hanley’s Soda Straw

[Update: See also GI Korea’s post. Neither Hanley nor Syngman Rhee comes out of this one looking good, nor do U.S. officials and officers who had the breathtakingly poor judgment to attend Lee’s killings. Clearly, however, Hanley has told us nothing we didn’t already know.] Professional atrocity monger Charles Hanley is back again, faithful to his rigid 13-month schedule, to report breaking news from 1948 that contains no relevations for Korea-watchers: Syngman Rhee turns out to have been an evil,...

Korean War/Media Criticism

Search Results for: Executed