Search Results for: border crackdown

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
September 24, 2007

The Rangoon Autumn

Updates below: 9/21:   Original post, background of the protests.  9/22:  Monks  march to  Aung San Suu Syi’s home in record downpour; 10,000 protest in Mandalay. 9/23:  Protests hit 8 cities; Rangoon turnout at 20,000; World leaders speak out against use of force to quell protests, but the U.N. is silent. 9/24:  Rangoon protests draw 100,000; Their hold on power seriously threatened, junta generals threaten to use force; Bush  to announce new sanctions  before U.N. General Assembly; Burmese entertainers join the opposition....

Categories Democracy/Southeast Asia
September 14, 2007

My Kind of Spy Scandal

Tired of hearing about South Korean officials leaking our secrets and technology, or about North Korean agents gradually pulling  a smothering blanket of juche over the South?  Had enough Robert Kim already?  Take heart.  The bad guys have troubles of their own: For years, Ambassador Li Bin was China’s  go-to diplomat for the tense Korean Peninsula. After studies in North Korea, Li had served several tours in the Chinese embassies in Pyongyang and Seoul. Fluent in Korean and gregarious in...

Categories China/China & Korea/Diplomacy
September 11, 2007

Noland and Haggard: Kim Jong Il’s Palace Economy Is Broken

North Korea is a land made in the vision of John Edwards:  to a greater extent than almost anywhere, there are two North Koreas.  That division is even preserved by a semi-official, hereditary caste system.  That’s why it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say  that North Korea’s economy is near collapse; one of the North Korean economies — the peoples’ economy — collapsed  a dozen  years ago.  What was left of it was severely disrupted by the Great Famine, when...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Economics
August 27, 2007

North Korea Calls Off “Arirang”

No Arirang  for you.  North Korea has suspended its large-scale gymnastic and artistic performance due to damage from recent heavy rains, the country’s state media reported Monday. “It has now become hard to continue the performance as working people in different parts of the country are all out to recover from the flood damage these days,” the Korean Central News Agency said. “The performance is expected to be staged again after the flood damage is cleared away.” The “Arirang” festival,...

Categories NK Economics/North Korea
April 30, 2007

Anju Links for 30 April 2007

1 It has now been 16 days since North Korea violated every single pledge it made in the course of the February 13th agreement, notwithstanding our return of $25 million in proceeds of crime, no strings attached, in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718. Latest word has North Korea’s demand for the return of the money — which was not part of the February 13th deal — evolving into a demand that the United States grant a general amnesty...

Categories Anju Links
March 7, 2007

Food Crisis Update

It may be the first good news I’ve ever reported on the subject:  rice prices have actually fallen slightly in some of  North Korea’s most vulnerable areas, as the Daily NK reports in persuasive detail.  There’s even a city-by-city price chart.  The price drop is modest — roughly 25 to 30% — but this is the time of year when you’d expect food to be in very short supply, with rapid price increases,  if we were  headed for an imminent...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
March 6, 2007

Can They Do It? A Brief History of Resistance to the North Korean Regime

[Updated March 2007; See new incidents and survey stats at the bottom of the post.]   According to the  image of the North Korean people that their rulers carefully cultivate, North Koreans are brainwashed automatons.  Regime minders, who closely follow foreign camera crews inside North Korea, seldom permit outsiders to see any alternative.  That image  is probably a combination of fear, stage management, brainwashing, and a degree of truth:  few North Koreans have ever known anything else, and extreme nationalism...

Categories Resistance
February 22, 2007

Two Jailbreaks Reported in Hoeryong

As North Korea tries to enforce a crackdown on cross-border smuggling of people and subversive items, it finds that control isn’t as easy to maintain as it once was. Both incidents involved suspected (cross-border?) smugglers: The source said that in the evening, around 10 PM, unknown arsonist set fire on armory that caused confusion. Amid fire, two smugglers broke the prison bars and escaped. Although the Manghyang district security guards declared state of emergency over Hoiryeong and tried to catch...

Categories Inside NK/Resistance
January 7, 2007

Chinese Police Raid LiNK Refuge, Arrest Three U.S. Activists and Six Refugees

Update 1: I’m going to bump this post up a few times. Meanwhile, I second Kyochan’s advice: Digg the story. I didn’t have an account, but it only took a few seconds to sign up. And I see that Reporters Without Borders is e-mailing half the world over … Saddam Hussein’s execution! Well, here, here! Let’s exhume the old bus-bombing rapist. Scroll down to see my response, and RSF’s reply to that. They claim not to have an opinion on...

Categories Activism/China/China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees
December 19, 2006

If I Were a Member of the North Korean Elite, I, Too Would Be Buying Up Gold and Chinese Real Estate

One of the least recognized moral responsibilities assumed by authoritarian states is the responsibility for misspent words and wealth they choose to get into the business of controlling. For example, when the South Korean government dabbles in the control of objectionable speech, whether for political or nationalistic reasons, it assumes responsibility for the decision to license, by omission, (and sometimes, even to subsidize) other objectionable or controversial speech. To a much greater extent, North Korea, which aspires to a higher...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
September 18, 2006

Seven N. Korean Refugee Women Turn Themselves in to Thai Authorities

Update: Much more information below, courtesy of Human Rights Without Frontiers. Warning: it’s pretty disturbing stuff. Seven North Korean women have turned themselves in to Thai authorities in the Nong Khai of Northeastern Thailand (map). By my count, there are at least 289 North Koreans, almost all women and children, in Thai custody now. Thailand does not seem likely to deport them to China or North Korea, but you have to wonder what’s going on after all this time. Life...

Categories Refugees/Southeast Asia
September 16, 2006

There’s Nothing New About Korea’s “New” Anti-Americanism

How could the U.S.-Korea alliance ever survive another day with this tension between President Bush and President Roh, and what, with that nasty debate over wartime command? What if I said that I actually refer to George H.W. Bush and Roh Tae Woo? If you really want to track down the point at which the U.S.-Korean relationship went over the cliff, set your Wayback Machine for 1989 and a year of ferocious anti-American demonstrations — complete with fire-bombings — that...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/U.S. & Korea
May 19, 2006

Bush’s Old “New” Approach

[Update 2, 5/18: On the other hand, the “Kim Jong Hill” plan looks great next to the Richard Lugar plan, which is nothing more than a shiny new formula for buying lies with bribes. Lugar is a very nice person to meet and has his heart in the right place, but diplomatically, this is not the thing to be proposing when our financial crackdown and our political offensive are both showing some promising signs of success. When dealing with gangsters,...

Categories Appeasement/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Human Rights/NK Economics/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized/Washington Views/WMD
May 11, 2006

The Death of an Alliance, Part 39: The Korean Malaise, Anti-Americanism & Anti-Anti-Americanism

The bee-man has officially entered his sixteenth minute, and Korea’s fiery gaze has shifted to the violent excesses of the extreme anti-American left — chiefly the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and Hanchongryeon. There is new statistical evidence that the violence of the red guards has triggered a backlash and alienated the silent majority. This occurs just 20 days before a round of local elections that will choose the next mayor of Seoul and the governor of Kyonggi Province, among...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/Uncategorized
April 5, 2006

The Other Nuclear Option

Much info on the economic front of late, including some initial, sketchy evidence to back U.S. claims that the sanctions are biting. The Chosun Ilbo continues to tremble over what the U.S. Treasury Department’s next move could be. Have a look at Section 311 (115 Stat. 298) of the USA PATRIOT Act, and if you can bear it, keep reading. It empowers Treasury to declare all of North Korea a jurisdiction of special money laundering concern — as we’ve apparently...

Categories China/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks/Uncategorized
March 29, 2005

Outbreak?

Asian dictatorships haven’t had an especially good record against the rash of new viruses lately. Now comes word that bird flu has made its way into North Korea, and that the starving nation, which depended on chicken for 13% of its meat supply (how does anyone know this?), has been slaughtering thousands of the birds and burning their carcasses. The latter may be a wise precaution in light of recent reports that starving North Koreans–the vast majority of whom probably...

Categories Uncategorized
March 29, 2005

Outbreak?

Asian dictatorships haven’t had an especially good record against the rash of new viruses lately. Now comes word that bird flu has made its way into North Korea, and that the starving nation, which depended on chicken for 13% of its meat supply (how does anyone know this?), has been slaughtering thousands of the birds and burning their carcasses. The latter may be a wise precaution in light of recent reports that starving North Koreans–the vast majority of whom probably...

Categories Uncategorized