Open Sources
The Donga Ilbo carries this heartbreaking photograph of the homecoming of South Korean POW who escaped after 61 years in captivity: “He escaped from North Korea in March last year and returned home in November. He settled at his sister`s home in Seoul after spending three months at a government-provided safe house.”
In an article co-authored by our friend Chris Green, the Daily NK looks how the regime works to prevent a coup d’etat in North Korea. Unless the subject is soccer, I seldom disagree with Chris, and the article is well worth reading, but would have been even more interesting had it assessed the evidence of deteriorating morale and discipline (maybe he’ll give us his assessment in the comments). Certainly a coup is far more likely today than a broad popular uprising, but it’s also far less likely to give the North Korean people the government they deserve, at least in the short term. It may well be that a coup could weaken the regime’s control machinery enough that a popular uprising might be possible another day. The other plausible path to reunification? An insurgency.
Note to Chris: I’ve been trying for going on a year to put a feed of your excellent Destination Pyongyang blog on my sidebar, but my old version of WordPress doesn’t seem to like your feed.
Speaking of great North Korea blogs, Marcus Noland has rolled out a new blog to accompany “North Korea: Witness to Transformation.” Just perusing the entries, I can see this one will be one of my daily reads, starting with Marcus’s entry about remittances, which he calls “the revenge of the politically unreliable.”
I hope WordPress likes his feed.
The Asahi Shimbun has a very interesting profile of the life of a North Korean overseas trader: “Although they feel responsible for the future of their country, they generally work alone in a foreign land. Their family members are kept “hostage,” and they must resort to secretive tactics to bypass international sanctions to feed their leaders’ voracious appetite for Japanese products. Yet being a trade agent is a favored occupation among North Koreans. The job allows individuals to live a fairly free life outside of North Korea and can lead to the accumulation of wealth. That is, if everything goes well.”
Nice: “Former Cincinnati Reds shortstop Barry Larkin will travel to South Korea and meet North Korean defectors next week as part of U.S. efforts to use baseball as a tool of diplomacy. The State Department said Larkin and former Montreal Expos pitcher Joe Logan will visit Seoul, Gwangju and Jeju Island to hold clinics, meet defectors and speak to students.”
Just for the wonks: The Federation of American Scientists links to a CIA report that assesses the impact of floods on North Korean agriculture. I hope I’ll find the time to read this, because I’ve often suspected that the effect is (a) exacerbated by ill-advised on-the-spot guidance, particularly those that caused deforestation, and (b) exaggerated at moments of convenience, to bring in food aid, which is invariably misallocated.
I wonder if it would be effective to the North Korean refugees to bring in former South Korean big leaguers such as Hee Sop-Choi or Byun Hun-Kim (just don’t have Kim teach them how to pitch in the clutch)?
Just tried visiting the DailyNK site and got a malware warning. I guess the norks have attacked the site!
I got it too — but I didn’t make the obvious connection. Silly me.
Are you two using a Mac or Safari? I routinely get a malware warning when I visit a wide range of South Korea-based sites (is DailyNK based in South Korea or using Active-X?) using Safari on one of my Macs. I’m getting the same standard warning right now when I go to the DailyNK site.
Chris Green assumes the Kim Jong Eun is the designated successor. Our friend kushibo has cast doubt on that premise, many times.
I’m seeing it with a Mac and Firefox.
I get “attack site” warnings from Firefox if I try to visit dailynk.com
“dailynk.com appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 1 site(s) including mkdays.com/.
After I got the same message in Firefox I tried it in IE and my virus scanner grabbed something that was using Java. Weird.
Glans wrote:
Designated by whom? I am fairly certain that Kim Jong-il would like his son to be the designated heir, but I think it’s far from a done deal and almost all the evidence we have of the succession having been approved is speculative and, frankly, often from sources that have a vested interest in promoting such a view.
The hardest evidence of Kim Jong-un being promoted as the new leader would necessarily come from the propaganda machine itself, which is quite silent about the young general.
But I am no longer alone in thinking this. Barbara Demick is skeptical and Andrei Lankov is now expressing doubts.
It is 5:27 a.m Eastern U.S. time here guys, I had to type in “freekorea.us” just to find the site. Typing in “One Free Korea” brought me to a pre-register page. hopefully this will be fixed soon.
I really need to get some sleep.
Hey, thanks for talking about me, I didn’t realize coz OFK has, yes, been a bit hard to get to. But I was replying to something Kushibo posted, and thought I would (partially, with edits) cross-comment;
deteriorating morale and discipline, you cry? Try here~
kushibo’s January 8 post on his blog, to which he links in his comment above, establishes him as a leading expert on North Korea. I hope he can find the time to clarify this:
“… and by groups of brave North Korean defectors and rogue on-the-ground which inadvertently satiate a hungry no-nothing South Korean, Japanese, and Western media …”
Kushibo:
I was using Google Chrome on my MacBook when I got the warning. It said “google had detected the site was trying to install malware on my computer” and that google “has notified the owner of the site.
I also got the same message in Safari and Firefox. Didn’t bother trying with Opera and never use IE since I only use Macs.
Ha ha! I did start writing up something on this, but for now I’ll just say that if you’re going to have a figurehead, a seven-year-old is as good as a twenty-seven-year-old. It’s time to make that kid the head of the Navy or the Air Force.
Seriously, though, it may be that Kim Ok is the answer to what I think is an important question: Who was Kim Jong-il’s Edith Wilson?
Glans wrote:
God help us!
Hmm… sounds like this kushibo character has been blogging while inebriated. It should read:
What I mean is that folks who write for The Daily NK — brave North Korean defectors and people inside North Korea who bravely courageously stand up against the regime (perhaps “rogue” is not the best adjective for them, but I meant that in a positive way) — are filling a vacuum of “news” with their reports on what’s going on within the DPRK, and these reports end up replacing the fact-finding role that the paid media themselves would normally be playing. The nature and ease of getting these reports has dulled the journalistic sensibilities of the paid media, which frankly has little clue about what is actually going on in the North (i.e., they’re know-nothings) and so they lap up these morsels unquestioningly and uncritically.
At least, that’s what I think I meant to say.