Anju, May 16, 2012

NORTH KOREA LOSES A CUSTOMER, MAYBE?  The Burmese junta says it will stop buying weapons from North Korea, but that’s what you expect them to say, given that any such purchases would violate UNSCR 1874, and have previously attracted unwanted attention from the U.S. Navy. We’ll see soon enough if they’re serious about that.

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DO YOU SUPPOSE IT’S A COINCIDENCE that Kim Yong Nam recently chose to make a state visit to Indonesia, which also happens to be the home country of the current U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea?

“As a member of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Indonesia must fulfill its international obligations in promoting human rights by utilizing Kim’s visit to initiate a progressive dialogue on overcoming the prolonged human rights problems in North Korea,” Marzuki Darusman, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation concerning human rights in North Korea, told The Jakarta Post.

“There are about six million North Koreans who are so close to death because of famine. There have also been accusations that 150,000 to 200,000 people have been detained without trial for political reasons. This can only be changed through an international movement. If Indonesia fails to do this, we can be accused of negligence,” the former attorney general said.

I’d love to know how much of a role China played in facilitating that visit. They seem to be the root of all evil in that region.

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LIKE I SAY:

Four South Korean activists have been detained in China since March on suspicion of spying after they interviewed North Korean refugees living in hiding there, according to an anti-Pyongyang group. [….]

One of the four is Kim Young-Hwan, a former leader of an underground leftist party who became an activist opposing Pyongyang’s regime. Names of the three others were not given. [AFP]

Kim isn’t the only ex-leftist to see the error of his ways after getting a closer look at North Korea. I remember driving Ha Tae-Keung from Washington, D.C. to where he was staying in the Virginia suburbs, as he told me about how he was imprisoned by South Korea’s former right-wing dictatorship for possession of pro-North Korean literature. Since then, Ha founded Open Radio for North Korea and got himself elected to the National Assembly