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Anju Links for 14 August 2008

THE END OF SUNSHINE:  North Korea has begun expelling “unnecessary” South Koreans from Kumgang, presumably meaning everyone but the cashiers and Brinks truck drivers.

The South said 11 personnel including two from the state-run Korea Tourism Organisation and nine in charge of a newly built facility for reunions of separated families in the resort had been asked to leave by early Monday. “One left on Saturday and another two are supposed to leave today,” a spokesman for the South’s unification ministry in charge of cross-border relations, told AFP. “More people will leave the resort by Thursday,” he said. The withdrawal will bring the number of South Koreans staying the area to about 120, the ministry said. [AFP]

The IHT helps us count who stayed and who went:

Even before the Saturday announcement, some of the 260 South Koreans stationed at Kumgang had returned home voluntarily. Most of them are tourism officials and workers affiliated with Hyundai-Asan, a Seoul-based company that runs the resort with the North Korean government. On Sunday, four South Koreans crossed the border to the South. As of Sunday, 146 South Koreans remained at Kumgang. About 20 were expected to return home this week. [IHT]

Given that Kumgang is nothing but  an ATM  for the North Korean military, this has to be one of those rare occasions when I fully support one of Kim Jong Il’s decisions.

SOME SOUTH KOREAN  NGO’s are calling the murder of Park Wang-Ja a terrorist act, although this again puts us on the wrong side of a technicality: presuming the North Koreans killed Mrs. Park with the intent to terrorize or intimidate, this is not sponsorship of terrorism, it is terrorism. A South Korean government simulation has concluded that Mrs. Park was shot from behind while walking slowly or standing still. Infer from that what you will. I’ve suggested before that because of the state’s direct involvement in hostage-taking, murder, and bellicose threats just before South Korean elections, North Korea ought to be listed as a specially designated terrorist entity.

YONHAP REPORTS THAT A 25 YEAR-OLD NORTH KOREAN  MAN  swam from North Korea, presumably somewhere in South Hwanghae, to the waters off Gimpo,  just west of  Seoul.  It may emerge that the first  part of his journey was by boat.  If so, I  hope he was the only one in it.

MONGOLIA, WHICH HAD ONCE SHELTERED small numbers of North Korean refugees, has made an agreement with the North Korean regime  to import slave laborers.

ARIRANG, behind the cardboard.

YOU SAY THAT LIKE IT’S A BAD THING:  Yonhap reports that those in charge of setting up the program to verify North Korea’s disarmament are “hard liners,” … by Yonhap’s standards, anyway.

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  1. ARIRANG, North Korea’s surreal Mass Games … Asia’s weirdest sporting event transpires in the world’s most secretive country

    As I looked at the beautiful pics of massed groups of girls and children performing a strange thought hit me.

    Long ago, perhaps before you were born, I remember being a young airman in the military and sewed on my third stripe — it felt so good.
    We lower enlisted were dirt poor by civilian standards — earning something like $125 every two weeks. But we didn’t complain because we were all in the same boat. But surprisingly, I look back on those days as some of the happiest times of my life because of the camaraderie of our close knit military unit.

    When I saw the faces of those young folks, I saw the same type of camaraderie of being part of a SPECIAL group. Most of those kids probably have one school uniform that they wear everywhere, so that special uniform/dress/hanbok takes on so much more significance. It embodies self-pride, national pride and just about everything else positive. Like my uniform so long ago, it was a personal thing. Like these kids probably suffering from the food shortages everywhere in North Korea, they don’t complain because like me back then, they are all in the same boat.

    Maybe I’m making a false parallel, but those photos just clicked that memory and I just wanted to throw it out. Perhaps the smiles on those faces are not the plastic smiles that people feel they are. They may be genuine shows of pride and happiness — amidst all the misery that North Korea is undergoing.

  2. I think it’s completely plausible that both sets of emotions — feelings of being abused, underfed, and shoveled around on one hand, and feelings of intense cameraderie on the other — can coexist. You have to see it from the perspective of people who have never lived under any other system. This is where your analogy starts to break down, although I do think that to a degree, you’re on to something.

    And of course, human emotions are complex things. I’ve tried several child sex abuse cases. In those cases, we often elicited expert testimony about the “child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome,” in which abused kids would convince themselves that, and act as if, their abuse were somehow a normal part of affectionate parental love. Because the kids actually convinced themselves of this, they behaved in ways that juries wouldn’t expect from kids who really had been abused. It’s a natural human tendency to accommodate ourselves to even the most objectively horrible situations, because that helps us survive those situations.

    I wouldn’t infer too much from the facial expressions. The smiles all look pretty forced to me, as though they’re just another part of the performance. Note how the mouths smile but the eyes generally don’t. That doesn’t mean they kids are enjoying what they’re doing, and it doesn’t mean they aren’t. Most people who enjoy athletic events don’t smile through them. Most concentration camp inmates probably don’t wear a constant frown, and may even find an occasional reason to smile during the slow process of death.

    Really, we don’t know a lot about these games — how the kids are treated, recruited, fed, or housed. Which makes Arirang pretty much like the rest of North Korea. We know what we see, and what we see is facially pretty creepy and Orwellian. I wouldn’t assume that what you’re not allowed to see is more pleasant, and those quotes from “State of Mind” don’t suggest that it is.