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Category: Foreigners in N. Korea

April 27, 2018

The Warmbiers sue North Korea

WHILE THE WORLD IS AGOG AT THE SIGHT OF KIM JONG-UN’S impersonation of a human being, Fred and Cindy Warmbier wish to remind you of his true character by sharing with you what their son—or what was left of him—was like when he came home from North Korea. Yesterday, they filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the North Korean government for the wrongful death of Otto Warmbier. I downloaded the complaint from PACER. Warmber...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
July 25, 2017

The North Korea travel ban, PUST, and the failure of people-to-minder engagement

Earlier this week, the State Department announced that it will publish a Federal Register notice in the next 30 days, restricting the use of U.S. passports for travel to North Korea, where Americans tend to end up getting arrested, detained for prolonged periods, and lately, much worse. If State will implement the ban through a Federal Register notice, it means it will be done pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act under some existing statutory authority — almost certainly this one: §211a. Authority to...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
June 20, 2017

How to hold North Korea accountable for Otto Warmbier’s death

In North Korean prisons (at least, in those from which release is possible at all) when the guards conclude that a prisoner is about to die, they release her and send her away to die at home, so that disposing of her body will be someone else’s problem, and so that the warden can manipulate the camp’s rate of in-custody deaths downward. (Perhaps in some small way, even the wardens of North Korean prisons fear being held accountable, one day,...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Sanctions/U.S. Law
June 14, 2017

One American tragedy, millions of North Korean statistics

The idea that foreign tourists in North Korea could escape the evil they help, however minimally, to propagate, was never sustainable. Tourism in North Korea reduces the physical and mental slavery of totalitarianism to a circus performance and its subjects to zoo animals. It doesn’t only endanger the tourist, it plays some unquantifiable role in sustaining that horrid system, and in endangering the lives of people from Seoul to Seattle to Aleppo by giving cash to a regime obsessed with the...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
May 26, 2017

H.R. 2732 would ban the North Korea tourist racket from the dollar system

Yesterday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D, Cal.) and Joe Wilson (R, S.C.) introduced a bill that would ban transactions incident to travel to, from, and within North Korea. The text isn’t posted on Congress.gov yet, but Schiff and Wilson have issued identical press releases describing what the bill would do: Today, Congressmen Adam Schiff (CA-28) and Joe Wilson (SC-02) introduced the bipartisan North Korea Travel Control Act, which would require the Treasury Department to issue regulations requiring a license for transactions...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/U.S. Law
May 8, 2017

The PUST hostage crisis is a fitting symbol of the futility of engaging Pyongyang

Just one week after I predicted that the misbegotten experiment known as the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology would soon be at the center of a hostage crisis, the inevitable has happened. North Korean state media reports the country has detained a U.S. citizen ” the fourth U.S. citizen being held there amid rising tensions between the two countries. The official Korean Central News Agency identifies the man detained Saturday as Kim Hak Song, an employee of Pyongyang University...
Categories Engagement/Foreigners in N. Korea/Sunshine/Terrorism (NK)
December 4, 2016

What the Treasury Department’s blocking of Air Koryo means

Last week’s North Korea sanctions designations by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — commonly known as OFAC — go far to explain why U.N. Security Council Resolution 2321 took so long to negotiate and pass. There were many reasons why I panned the terms of that resolution last week, including new and not-improved coal export limits, and the U.N.’s failure to designate North Korea’s state airline, Air Koryo. Friday’s OFAC designations — which block any of...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Sanctions
January 23, 2016

How Congress can ban tourist travel to North Korea, and why it should

[Update: If I had known when I wrote this that the North Koreans would torture and, for all practical purposes, kill Otto Warmbier in custody, I’d have written this post very differently. Frankly, I’m ashamed to reread it today, and can only ask you to understand that at the time, I had every reason to expect that this young man’s misadventure would end as anti-climatically as other arrests of foreigners in North Korea had ended until that time, and as...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
November 24, 2015

Jeffrey Fowle’s mission to N. Korea no dumber than the rest of them

In this age of click-bait listicles, The Atavist has published a rare example of real journalism, in which reporter Joshua Hunt traces the story of Jeffrey Fowle from its origins (in a dream!) to its anticlimax. Fowle, you will recall, is the Ohio municipal worker who went to North Korea, “certain that God had a plan for him,” left a Korean-language Bible next to a toilet in Chongjin, got himself arrested and detained for six months, and nearly lost both his job and his wife. Later, asked if...
Categories Engagement/Foreigners in N. Korea
November 2, 2015

Tourists put $43M in Kim Jong-Un’s pockets last year

Despite a string of high-profile arrests of foreign tourists recently, Darwin’s light continues to draw slummers — and record hauls of their money — into Pyongyang: North Korea earned tens of millions of dollars from foreign tourists in 2014, around half of the hard currency it won from the lucrative inter-Korean industrial park, a researcher said Sunday. North Korea’s income from foreign tourists is estimated at US$30.6 million to $43.6 million last year, considering about 95,000 Chinese tourists and 5,000...
Categories Engagement/Foreigners in N. Korea
May 19, 2015

2016 Defense Authorization Act would define N. Korea as state sponsor of terrorism

On Sunday, I spotted this interesting Yonhap headline: “U.S. defense bill calls N. Korea terror sponsor.” Given my own recent work on this subject, I was curious about the effect of this provision, so I pulled up the text of the bill, H.R. 1735, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016. The versions on Thomas and Congress.gov don’t yet reflect the amendment, but clues from the Yonhap piece led me to the amendment in question, offered by Rep....
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Terrorism (NK)
December 16, 2014

Suki Kim responds to critics of her decision to go undercover

It’s ironic to read how the people at PUST–who’ve suppressed their religious, political, and moral beliefs to accommodate and assist the world’s most oppressive regime, and also, to suppress the truth about it–have challenged Suki Kim’s ethical decisions. But some of those criticisms might be more valid coming from other sources, so Kim addresses them on her web site. I can’t disagree with Kim’s justification that overt journalism has failed us. There is a long tradition of “undercover” journalism—pretending to be something one is not in...
Categories Books & Films/Foreigners in N. Korea
December 14, 2014

The North Korea crazy train keeps on a-rolling

So the views of Arturo Pierre Martinez that interest me aren’t his views on Iraq, Ferguson, or even North Korea, but the views that explain him best, which were buried at the bottom of CNN’s report: He also talked about unidentified flying objects, CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, “ultrasonic” devices that cause people to hear voices and experience bodily discomfort and how the Western news media unfairly portrayed North Korea. [CNN] You can see a video clip here, if...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
November 14, 2014

Suki Kim recalls a “good student” in Pyongyang

Writing in The New York Times, Kim recalls a young North Korean student who made her uncomfortable with his risky questions about government in America: What I had just described was, more or less, democracy. I could not read his expression, but he thanked me and excused himself. That evening, I discussed my growing fears about the student’s motives with my teaching assistant. There was nowhere we would not be overheard, so we took a walk around campus, hoping it...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Subversion/Sunshine
November 8, 2014

No, this does not mean it’s safe to go to North Korea.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has left Pyongyang with U.S. hostages Kenneth Bae and Preston Somerset Matthew Todd Miller, who voluntarily presented himself to the North Koreans as both a prisoner and a spy. I’m somewhat sympathetic to Bae, who seems to have been moved to take undue risks by the suffering of the North Korean people around him. Bae has young kids, and nothing Bae did could possibly justify having his kids grow up without their father. As for Miller, his...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
November 3, 2014

Now, that wasn’t very smart, was it, Mr. Fowle?

My working assumption about Jeffrey Fowle had been that no believing Christian would have intentionally left a Bible next to a toilet, but evidently, I was mistaken about that. I wonder whether the Bible in question was even translated into Korean, but either way, Fowle’s tactical decision to waste thousands of dollars from his modest municipal salary to nonchalantly place one Bible next to a toilet … in Chongjin puts him firmly in the same category as the South Korean missionaries...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Religion
October 21, 2014

Freed, fired Fowle flies to family

North Korea has released Jeffrey Fowle, one of its three American hostages. We learn this from, among other sources, an AP report — filed from Washington, following a State Department announcement. Hey, at least AP Pyongyang got a picture of the Defense Department plane on the runway, next to what looks like one of Air Koryo’s Il-76s in camo paint. In addition to spending five months in North Korea’s gulag lite, Fowle lost his job during his confinement. He can’t sue North Korea because of the...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea