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April 5, 2012

Bad assassin! Bad, bad, bad!

The man at the center of a Cold War-style plot to kill a prominent defector with a poisoned needle was jailed for four years by a South Korean court today. The man, a defector named Ahn, was found guilty of plotting to murder a second defector, Park Sang Hak, in September last year. Park, who heads Fighters for Free North Korea, is one of the leading lights in the floating of anti-Kim regime leaflets across the DMZ by balloon. “Severe...

Terrorism (NK)

April 4, 2012

Anju, April 4, 2012

FAIR AND BALANCED! See? The Associated Press doesn’t only fawn over mass-murdering despots, it’s capable of fawning over elected leaders, too — just slightly less enthusiastically. ___________________________________ WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR Hugh Restall thinks we should shoot down North Korea’s missile. Had you asked me about this before March 26, 2010, I’ve have been categorically opposed. Now, I incline to the view that we need to demonstrate that we have limits, and this would not cross the line...

Anju Links

April 3, 2012

Rising attention on North Korea’s prison camps

A few years ago, I spent what felt like an hour or two on Skype with The Washington Post‘s Blaine Harden, sharing and explaining satellite imagery of North Korea’s prison camp system. No doubt, Harden talked to plenty of other people, too, and the result was an excellent report and interactive graphic about the camps. A few months later, Harden turned over the Post‘s North Korea coverage to Chico Harlan, and now we know why. Harden went on sabbatical to...

Activism/Human Rights/The Camps

April 2, 2012

AP Exclusive = Re-Gifted Commercial Satellite Photography!

You’re kidding me. After all those ethical compromises, the AP can’t even get the North Korean minders journalists in its Pyongyang Bureau to bring it within a half-mile of the rocket and launch pad His Porcine Majesty starved so damn many kids to build? So the AP’s latest “exclusive” is a story by Foster Klug, who is based in Washington, writing about commercial satellite photographs shown to him by a local think tank, which probably purchased them commercially. Why, Digital...

AP Watch

March 31, 2012

And now, for something completely different

WTF?

March 29, 2012

Anju, March 29, 2012

REVERSED POLARITY: North Korea is still denying to the world that it sank the Cheonan, but according to one recent defector, it’s proudly proclaiming its responsibility at home. On the other hand, former Ambassador Donald Gregg, who as far as I know hasn’t actually defected in the geographic sense, nonetheless is still getting ink from KCNA for his Cheonan conspiracy theorizing. Maybe one of the AP’s new North Korean “correspondents” should interview him. ____________________________________ MISSILE SATELLITE LAUNCH UPDATE: Despite the...

Anju Links

March 27, 2012

Anju, March 27, 2012

NO ONE REALLY KNOWS what the population of North Korea is, so I’m not sure how anyone can really claim to know that life expectancy in North Korea is 11 years less than in South Korea, or that two-thirds of its children are malnourished (and one-third of them stunted as a result). I do think it’s safe to say, however, that North Korea compares unfavorably to all of its neighbors with respect to the welfare and happiness of its people,...

Anju Links

March 26, 2012

Remember Them.

Has it really been just two years?

Anju Links

March 26, 2012

Obama Intercepts North Korean Missile with Experimental Laser-Guided Words

So President Obama’s visit to Seoul, the nuclear terrorism summit, and the DMZ has concluded without anything especially newsworthy taking place. Obama challenged North Korea to change its behavior and China to help coerce North Korea to change its behavior, but with relatively mild language that won’t deter North Korea from launching the thing. I had wondered whether the dynamic of this being an election year might tempt the President to show a little more spine than he or his...

China/Japan/Missiles

March 25, 2012

Anju, March 25, 2012

CASEY LARTIGUE EVOKES the memory of Frederick Douglass in support of North Korean refugees. I think the comparison isn’t just apt, but overdue. _____________________________________ CHRIST! DID JOHN FEFFER REALLY SAY THIS? Although such a two-tiered society is not uncommon in the developing world, North Korea once prided itself on breaking free from this model of stratified development. True, the regime traditionally maintained a rather complex political hierarchy based on perceived loyalty to the system, but this neo-Confucian system is giving...

Anju Links

March 24, 2012

Told you so: Now that the FTA is in effect, South Korea wants to use it to put North Korean-made products on your store shelves

So now that the Free-Trade Agreement between the U.S. and South Korea is officially in effect, the supposedly conservative South Korean government is pulling a bait-and-switch, reviving the demand of its leftist predecessor to include products made by the virtual slave laborers in Kaesong, North Korea in the deal: South Korea is pushing to include the Gaeseong industrial zone in North Korea in its free-trade deals with the U.S. and Europe, a step that would deepen cross- border ties after...

NK Economics/Sunshine

March 22, 2012

Irony Alert: North Korea Reveals the Truth about the Associated Press and Human Rights Watch (Updated)

I’d like to interrupt my advocacy of the violent overthrow of the North Korean government to thank the Korea Central News Agency, North Korea’s official “news” service, for being so much more transparent than the Associated Press has been about the new relationship between the two agencies. For the last few weeks, I’ve made a personal jihad of obtaining photographic proof that the joint photo exhibit by the AP and KCNA, which opened this week in New York, is not...

AP Watch/Media Criticism

March 20, 2012

Demonstrations Today at the White House & Chinese Embassy

It’s probably too late to save 31 North Korean men, women, and children whom China is believed to have repatriated to North Korea this month, in flagrant violation of the U.N. Refugee Convention and its 1968 Protocol, both of which China signed. China committed this crime against humanity with malice aforethought and with characteristic arrogance, and despite a modest but rising protest movement in South Korea against the repatriations. We can only speculate as to the fate of these 31...

Activism/Human Rights/Refugees

March 19, 2012

The Associated Press Sends Birthday Greetings to Eternal Great Leader Kim Il Sung!

So far, the profession of journalism has reacted to the AP’s North Korean propaganda amplification project with more bemused professional courtesy than ethical introspection. Still, we’re seeing a small trickle of mildly curious reporting on this arrangement, whose details the AP continues to protect from the eyes of its readers. Here and there, however, that trickle carries us a few more facts the AP never told us, in this case, about one of the two “journalists” embedded in the AP’s...

AP Watch

March 16, 2012

And now, the painful burning sensation: N. Korea announces long-range missile launch

I have to admit it — even I’m surprised by how quickly the North Koreans reneged on this one: North Korea announced plans Friday to blast a satellite into space on the back of a long-range rocket, a provocative move that could jeopardize a weeks-old agreement with the U.S. exchanging food aid for nuclear concessions. The North agreed to a moratorium on long-range launches as part of the deal with Washington, but it argues that its satellite launches are part...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Missiles

March 15, 2012

WaPo Editors, Andrew Natsios on the Post-Groundhog Day Agreement

I’d say it’s more than slightly significant to see the editorial page of the Washington Post accusing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of (as Robert Gates put it) buying the same horse all over again: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was careful not to oversell the agreement, calling it “a modest first step in the right direction. Officials said it would allow inspectors to get a first look at the uranium enrichment facility constructed at Yongbyon while letting the...

Diplomacy/Famine & Food Aid

March 14, 2012

Fisticuffs now officially more likely to save innocent life than appealing to the U.N.

Sure, we can complain that the United Nations has become a farce, but hey, we all elected for ’em, right? So you’ve heard that there are lives to be saved, and international conventions that would save them, if only some effective international body was capable of enforcing those conventions. Enter a group of members of the South Korean National Assembly, who flew to Geneva to make an appeal to the U.N. Human Rights Council to save about 30 North Korean...

"United" Nations/Human Rights/Refugees

March 13, 2012

AP Editor compares N. Korea’s surveillance of journalists to U.S., Germany

In my lonely critique of the AP’s sketchy relationship with the North Korean government, throughout its recent absorption into North Korea’s official propaganda apparatus, I’ve often observed that its new Pyongyang correspondent, Jean H. Lee, isn’t very good at asking obvious questions. As it turns out, her editors aren’t very good at answering them, either. In a new article in Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish becomes the first actual journalist to question, however gently, this new relationship and its potential...

AP Watch