Search Results for: Executed

May 28, 2008

Equality, Fraternity, Atrocity

A group of lawmakers plans to submit a bill to the Diet mandating government financial compensation for Korean and Taiwanese former Class B and Class C war criminals and their surviving families.  The move, led by Kenta Izumi, a Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan) Lower House member, could come as early as the current Diet session. At issue are those who worked as guards of POWs for the Imperial Japanese military during World War II. The non-Japanese were later denied...

Categories History/Japan/Japan & Korea

North Korea’s Largest Concentration Camps on Google Earth

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that North Korea holds as many as 120,000 people in its system of concentration and detention camps, and that 400,000 people have died in these camps from torture, starvation, disease, and execution. These reports, in the context of estimates that North Korea has allowed between 600,000 and 2,500,000 of its people to starve to death while its government squandered the nation’s resources on weapons and luxuries for its ruling elite, suggest that...

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May 2, 2008

Pick Up ROK, Drop On Foot

[Scroll down for updates.] The Korean Church Coalition passes along this press release on Chinese efforts to stop a North Korean human rights demonstration in Seoul, how those efforts backfired, and how the Chinese response since then has exacerbated the reaction. kcc-press-release.pdf Officially, the best China can offer is something that’s not widely perceived as an apology by South Koreans (who can be fairly reluctant to interpret apologies as such once offended). Unofficially, Chinese “netizens” continue to propagate asinine denials...

Categories Activism/China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees
April 7, 2008

China Steps Up Efforts to Undermine U.S. and U.N. Sanctions Against N. Korea

The single most important provision of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, for which China cast a disingenuous “yes” vote, is the provision that requires member states to “ensure” that funds flowing into North Korea are not used for its WMD programs. Similarly, Resolution 1695 requires states to “exercise vigilance” against efforts to fund U.N. sanctions. Now, in the wake of U.S. Treasury sanctions that have put the North Korean regime under unprecedented pressure to meet its disarmament obligations, China is...

Categories China/China & Korea/Money Laundering/NK Crime/NK Economics/Proliferation/WMD
April 7, 2008

Another Public Execution in North Korea

On the March 30, in Hyesan, Yangkang Province, three residents were publicly executed and 30 households were forcibly expelled after a public trial. Aggravated uneasiness and growing horror spread among residents. “Three residents were executed for human trafficking at a vacant lot in the Hyesan Airport while a crowd watched,” a source from Yangkang Province told Daily NK. [Daily NK] If the people of North Korea were better armed, the Chinese and North Korean authorities might have to consider alternatives...

Categories Human Rights/Inside NK
April 4, 2008

N. Korea Food Situation Continues to Worsen: Protests Continue in Chongjin; Food Prices Skyrocket; Kim Jong Il Asks China for ‘Massive’ Food Aid

[Update: A reader — one you and I both respect — writes to warn that we shouldn’t rely too heavily on the reports of Good Friends. Well, yes, the obvious caveats apply here: this being North Korea, we tend to treat third-hand rumors and hearsay, possibly further garbled by translation, as news. What I try to do here that news sites don’t do is to put each report in the context of other facts reported by other sources, either previously...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change/Resistance
March 25, 2008

S. Korean Human Rights Commission Will Investigate Atrocities in N. Korea

South Korea’s human rights agency said yesterday it would launch a probe into abuses in North Korea by interviewing defectors from the communist state.  The National Human Rights Commission has included investigating its neighbor ¡ ¯s record as one of its major tasks this year. “We will conduct a survey on the overall human rights conditions in North Korea this year by hearing from defectors, said commission spokesman Lee Myung-jae.  The number of defectors to be interviewed could be in...

Categories Appeasement/Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees/The Camps
March 25, 2008

Anju Links for 25 March 2008

HOW MANY PEOPLE DO YOU HAVE TO KILL to get noticed by Amnesty International?  My theory is that it depends on how much you tell people you hate America, but it looks like North Korea may have exceeded Amnesty’s limit.  Let’s hope this turns out to be something sustained. NAMIBIAN HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST DENOUNCES North Korea’s human rights record  on the occasion of Kim Yong Nam’s visit: Just about a week or two ago about 15 people were executed publicly...

Categories Anju Links
March 25, 2008

Defector Newspaper Reports Food Protests in North Korea

Amid reports  that North Hamgyeong Province (among others) totters on the brink of famine,  the  North Korean regime is desperately trying to shut down markets and regain state control of the food supply.  The regime has long used food to sustain those it trusts and control those it doesn’t.  I’ve written about  North Korea’s accelerating food  crisis  in some detail recently.   Map of protest locations (click to enlarge) This year, food shortages are reported even in elite Pyongyang, a...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change/Resistance
March 13, 2008

China Arrests 5 N.K. Refugees; Protest in Seoul This Friday

I’ve been receiving e-mails from a number of NGO’s about this incident, although I haven’t seen published reports about it. I’ll reprint the letter from the North Korean Freedom Coalition in full below. The protest will take place this Friday, March 14, at 10 a.m., in front of the Chinese Embassy in Seoul, near Exit No. 3 of Gyeongbokgung Station, subway Line No. 3. The group organizing the protest is called Christian Assembly. I haven’t heard of this group previously,...

Categories Activism/China & Korea/Refugees
March 9, 2008

N. Korean Freedom Coalition Writes to Lee Myung Bak, Demands Inquiry into Massacre of 22 Refugees

If you haven’t heard of this yet, the background is here, here, and here. Now, the North Korean Freedom Coalition has written to South Korea’s new President to ask him to look into why this happened. I should say that I had nothing to do with the writing of their excellent letter. Not to be confused with this more recent massacre, in case you’re keeping track. If you’d like to join or contribute to the North Korean Freedom Coalition —...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
March 8, 2008

Who Would Let This Child Die?

The Chosun Ilbo’s Korean edition is reporting on the heartbreaking and maddening story of Kim Seong-Ryong, a 7 year-old* boy who finds himself caught between the gears of four governments that don’t care if he lives or dies. The story began as a rare exception to the terrible fate most North Korean women suffer in China. Most find themselves raped and enslaved, or end up like this woman did. (I’ll note here that most of their South Korean sisters know...

Categories Refugees
March 7, 2008

Can Kim Jong Il Outlive “Military First?”

In the last two months, I’ve come to believe that the decay of Kim Jong Il’s control of North Korea is accelerating. I’m not quite on board with Jane’s, which predicts imminent collapse, because regime collapse is not proceeding at equal rates in all areas of North Korea, and history tells us that there’s been plenty of dissent in North Korea that the regime was able to contain, localize, and suppress. There are, however, clear signs that chaos is taking...

Categories Kremlinology/Regime Change
March 2, 2008

North Korea Has a Meth Problem

North Korea’s government has long been suspected of producing illicit drugs for export. In 2003, a high-level defector testified that the goverment is deeply involved in producing and exporting opiates, including heroin, and amphetamines. North Korea’s official ideology, really “crude, race-based nationalism” thinly veiled in socialism, would have had no problem justifying the poisoning of Japanese and Australian kids, but it was just a matter of time before North Korean drugs found their way into North Korean society. Until recently,...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Inside NK/Regime Change
February 17, 2008

Yonhap: N. Korea Executes 22 Who “Drifted” into S. Korean Waters

Public execution in Hoeryong, North Korea, 2005 Just one week remains in leftist President Roh Moo Hyun’s disgraceful term of office, yet his Sunshine Policy is still killing North Koreans. That policy was generous to the man who lives in this palace, but for the rest of North Korea’s people, it has always meant “die in place” and “you are not welcome.” And while there’s much we still don’t know about this incident, I didn’t believe the official story from...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Refugees
February 12, 2008

I Wonder How Much $4 Million Can Buy in Gitmo

There’s yet more news on our South Korea-Taliban ransom story. Last September, I told you that Mullah Abdallah Jan, one of the leaders in the kidnapping and murder of South Korean hostages, had an unexpected meeting with an American J-Dam and shortly thereafter, 72 virgin prepubescent boys. This week, when I heard that Mansoor Dadullah had been captured, it occurred to me that the name was familiar, but the Chosun Ilbo makes the connection: Pakistani authorities said that Mansoor Dadullah...

Categories An Alliance?/Terrorism (NK)
February 11, 2008

S. Korea Still Denies Paying Ransom to Taliban; Larry Craig Still Not Gay

After months of wildly inconsistent estimates ($2 million? $20 million?) of just how much ransom the South Koreans paid for their two dozen-odd hostages in Afghanistan, the Taliban is saying the actual amount was “at least” $4 million. This final, authoritative answer is brought to you by an unidentified “senior Taliban commander,” so we need not ever speak of this again. Until the next time it happens: If we were going to free them without any payment, [the hostage taking]...

Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/Terrorism (NK)
January 28, 2008

Anju Links for 28 Jan 08

OUR  FIFTEEN SECONDS:  I’m extremely pleased to see reader and friend CPT Jon Stafford getting great circulation for his must-read article, “Finding America’s Role in  a Collapsed North Korean State.”  Richardson had previously linked to a  video  discussion between the online editors of The Weekly Standard and Foreign Policy that scratched the surface of the problem, just.  Today, Bradley Martin, author of “Under the Loving  Care of the Fatherly Leader” has an article discussing it in somewhat greater depth at...

Categories Anju Links