June 18, 2012

Talking the Talk on Human Rights

After nearly four years of near-complete silence about North Korea’s human rights atrocities, Hillary Clinton is speaking truth to power: Clinton called on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons and related programs and put the welfare of its people first. “Only under these circumstances will North Korea be able to end its isolation from the international community and alleviate the suffering of its people,” she said. A coalition of 40 human rights organizations and activists in April submitted a...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights
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 6, 2012

New Report Details North Korea’s Political Apartheid System

Today at 2 p.m., the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will formally release its new report, “Marked for life: Songbun, North Korea’s Social Classification System.” Here is an extended excerpt: The songbun system in some ways resembles the apartheid race-based classification system of South Africa. Songbun subdivides the population of the country into 51 categories or ranks of trustworthiness and loyalty to the Kim family and North Korean state. These many categories are grouped into three broad castes:...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
June 6, 2012

Open Sources, June 6, 2012

BRIGADIER GENERAL NEIL TOLLEY, whose poor choice of words led to a myriad of (almost certainly) untrue reports that U.S. Army special forces were parachuting into North Korea, has been canned. ____________________________________ I’M NOT OPPOSED TO THE IDEA THAT THE United States should help its allies who seek to check China’s regional expansionism, but rather than asking whether America is serious about defending its allies in Asia, we ought to be asking just how serious our Asian allies are about...

Categories Anju Links
June 5, 2012

Journo-Terrorism Gives Us a Reason to Take KCNA Seriously

On October 11, 2008, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism as a preemptive reward for North Korea’s agreement to give up its nuclear weapons programs. Since that date, North Korea has steadily escalated its use of words and actions that are — to quote the statutory definition of “international terrorism” — “intended … to intimidate or coerce a civilian population [or] to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” A...

Categories AP Watch/Terrorism (NK)
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
June 1, 2012

State Department’s New Country Report on Human Rights in North Korea Disappoints

The main development I take from the report it is that the regime seems to be moving in the direction of decentralizing its political detention system, opening up more smaller (and less visible) detention centers and possibly closing down one of the largest camps. The same NGO reported the police began to dismantle the sixth facility, Bukchang (Camp 18) in South Pyongan Province, in 2006 and it was unclear if the camp remained in operation in 2011. The NGO is...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps
May 31, 2012

North Korea’s Political Prison Camps Can’t Be Denied or Ignored Anymore

North Korea says they don’t exist. For years, South Korea didn’t want anyone to talk about them, and even now, it seldom does, at least directly. Our President, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has never said a word about them in public. A few years ago, a foreign service officer was reviewing a draft of State’s annual human rights report on North Korea and asked its author to “sacrifice a few adjectives for the cause” of appeasing the...

Categories The Camps
May 30, 2012

Fifth Column Watch

I haven’t really had time to follow the story of the United Progressive Party as carefully as I’d have liked; South Koreans who are avowedly pro-North are a constant source of fascination to me. In South Korea, political parties break up, re-form, and re-brand every election season. During the most recent National Assembly election, the far left was represented by the UPP, which occupies approximately the same position as the former Democratic Labor Party. The largest UPP faction is openly...

Categories Korean Politics/The Fifth Column
May 28, 2012

Really? A U.S. General Said Our Special Forces “Have Been Parachuting into North Korea?” (Update: No, Not Really)

What could possibly go wrong with this? US and South Korean special forces have been parachuting into North Korea to gather intelligence about underground military installations, a US officer has said in comments carried in US media. Army Brigadier General Neil Tolley, commander of US special forces in South Korea, told a conference held in Florida last week that Pyongyang had built thousands of tunnels since the Korean war, The Diplomat reported. “The entire tunnel infrastructure is hidden from our...

Categories NK Military/U.S. Military
May 28, 2012

Open Sources, May 28, 2012

NO ONE SHOULD EVER SAY “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY,” but everyone ought to be able to enjoy this day without feeling that it’s wrong or ungrateful to do so. This country exists to elevate the individual over the state, to be a safe place for the pursuit of individual happiness. Our obligation is simply this — to reflect on the fact that our happiness was secured by a few, who were willing to give everything away for our sake. ______________________________________ YES,...

Categories Anju Links
May 27, 2012

Wall Street Journal Prints Edited AP Response to My Op-Ed

The Wall Street Journal has printed an edited version of AP flack Paul Colford’s letter to the editor. You might think that reading and writing would be core competencies for a news service media-relations type, but Colford still seems not to have read the op-ed carefully, and his writing has all the clarity of a back-page legal notice. Here’s a link to the letter and my response. I continue to believe that the op-ed was accurate, and the failure of...

Categories AP Watch
May 27, 2012

AP President, Execs Bow to Kim Il Sung Statue in North Korean Propaganda Video

Well, if this doesn’t symbolize everything, I don’t know what else does. AP President Tom Curley does the “honors,” if that’s quite the right word here. Some of them look slightly uncomfortable about it, to be sure. It’s de rigeur for visitors to North Korea to have to lay flowers and bow at these statues, as a first conditioning act of self-subordination. What’s less clear is that it’s de rigeur to agree to do this on camera. North Korea’s own...

Categories AP Watch
May 25, 2012

Nuke Test Watch: One Disease, Many Symptoms

OK, I admit it — I’m disappointed in the North Koreans for wimping out: North Korea on Tuesday ruled out an imminent nuclear weapon test, but vowed to expand and bolster its nuclear deterrence as well as its sovereign right to launch satellites, while slamming the Group of Eight nations’ condemnation of its failed long-range rocket launch in April. In a remark given to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said that the North...

Categories Appeasement/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Missiles/Proliferation/WMD
May 24, 2012

If Ever so Briefly, China Picks a Public Fight with North Korea

Not that it matters much to the Chinese government, but North Korea’s seizure of those 28 or 29 fishermen has pissed off a lot of Chinese netizens. No, the Chinese government isn’t about to bow to the demands of Weibo commenters, but the other side of this cause-and-effect relationship is interesting. This outrage, as temporary as it’s sure to be, has to be a consequence of a deliberate decision by the Chinese government to make a public issue of this...

Categories China & Korea
May 23, 2012

In South Hwanghae, Echoes of the Holodomor

The Daily NK asks, fittingly, how there can be famine in the “breadbasket” — the rice bowl — of North Korea today, and adds that the reports of starvation are not easily attributed to natural causes. To North Korean defectors, it is clear that the civilian starvation is a direct result of the decision to prioritize the military under the military-first policy and the subsequent obligation on the part of cooperative farms to provide rice for soldiers, coupled to controls...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 22, 2012

I Have Had an Op-Ed in the Asia Wall Street Journal Today (Updated)

… about the AP’s North Korea coverage. See it before it vanishes behind the pay wall. Click the image to go there. The title is cute; I wish I could take credit for it. UPDATE: The empire has struck back. I will let the e-mails tell the story, omitting names because I’m not interested in dragging the AWSJ or WSJ people into this individually, as pretextual and cowardly as I think their actions were. I’m fairly certain this email exchange...

Categories AP Watch