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Category: Foreigners in N. Korea

September 21, 2014

Jeffrey Fowle just lost his job for being in a North Korean prison instead of at work.

“We had hoped this action would not be necessary,” states a letter dated Sept. 16 from Moraine City Manager David Hicks, “but in light of your continued incarceration in North Korea resulting from your (a) unilateral decision to travel to North Korea against the advice of your family and acquaintances; and (b) running afoul of North Korean restrictions on ‘anti-government’ activities, and as stated, the exhaustion of your accrued vacation time, we have to act in the best interests of...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
September 18, 2014

Matthew Todd Miller sure does sound like a weird person.

James Pearson and Ju-Min Park of Reuters have unearthed the fact that Miller lived in South Korea for several months, pretending to be a British person named “Preston Somerset,” and working on his magnum opus — an “Alice In Wonderland” anime project. I guess “Sir Trevor Biggleswade-Duxbury, CBE” was already taken by a comic store clerk from Rancho Cucamonga. Since then, Suspected British Person James Pearson and Confirmed British Person Chad O’Carroll of NK News have published some of Miller’s pictures. Your reaction to those pictures...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
September 18, 2014

What Bob King should have said about travel to North Korea.

Ambassador Robert King, whose title is Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, has written to The Washington Post in response to Anna Fifield’s reporting on North Korea’s efforts to market itself as a tourist destination (which may be more accurately described as the efforts of foreign collaborators to sell North Korea as a fine place to go slumming). King wishes that Fifield had given more emphasis to what should be obvious to anyone with good sense — that “[t]ravel to...
Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Foreigners in N. Korea
September 17, 2014

Adam Johnson: “Everyone who deals with them eventually gets burned.”

Somewhere, the world’s smallest violin is playing a Samuel Barber adagio for Walter Keats, who whines, not about the North Koreans who shut down his tour business after he spent years coddling and enriching them, but about Adam Johnson for writing a Pulitzer Prize winning novel: Between 2006 and 2012, Walter Keats led dozens of tours as president of Asia Pacific Travel. By 2012, after building trust with North Korean officials, Keats and his wife were permitted to lead groups year-round. Then, without explanation, Keats and his wife...
Categories Books & Films/Foreigners in N. Korea/Useful Idiocy
September 14, 2014

Travel in N. Korea “feels incredibly safe,” says tour company whose customer just got 6 years hard labor.

In a proceeding that took just 90 minutes — about as long as most arraignments I’ve done — North Korea’s “Supreme Court” has sentenced American tourist Matthew Todd Miller to six years of hard labor for “entering the country illegally and trying to commit espionage.” The AP omits the State Department’s easily accessible finding that North Korea’s “judiciary was not independent and did not provide fair trials,” but adds the amusing detail that Miller waived his right to a North Korean lawyer....
Categories AP Watch/Foreigners in N. Korea/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
September 11, 2014

Anna Fifield examines the soulless imbeciles who visit North Korea as tourists …

here: “A lot of people don’t know they can even come here, and then when they get here they say it’s not what they were expecting,” said Rowan Beard, 27, an Australian who runs Young Pioneers. “They think it’s going to be all doom and gloom and death and sad faces.” That’s funny. I’m no Madonna expert, but if I ever met her, I’d expect to see cosmetics troweled over layers of cosmetic alterations and a vacuous personality, not running sores, lesions, or...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
September 1, 2014

Only terrorists make hostage videos, and North Korea just made a hostage video

… of three Americans it is holding for “crimes” that wouldn’t be cognizable as such anywhere else on earth.  All three men said they hope the U.S. government will send an envoy to North Korea to help get them out of their situations, similar to how former President Bill Clinton helped secure the release of two journalists in 2009. [CNN] At which point, Pyongyang will present its demands. Former President George W. Bush removed North Korea from the list of state...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)
August 20, 2014

In Pyongyang, men are locking themselves in the bathroom to download …

 I hear that’s not all they’re downloading (ahem). ” the deeds were done from the Ryugyong-dong district – also the place where all my hits from North Korea come from – a “neighbourhood in the northeast of Pyongyang … which contains … the Pyongyang International Communications Centre” and Koryolink’s main office. So that’s why. On reflection, I suppose Martyn Williams is probably correct in identifying foreigners as the most likely culprits. You know what this means, of course: Pyongyang may be the only city in Asia where...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Subversion
August 20, 2014

Another outbreak of the Madonna Syndrome, this time …

at the Wall Street Journal. Despite all the references to “risk,” “tension,” and “testing the … limits,” the slide show shows us the same stations in the same old state-sanctioned tour that hundreds of people have been hyping for a decade and a half. It is all so very dull now. You could find more arresting images of almost any other city on Earth without attracting the interest of a single newspaper, yet no image of Pyongyang is too trite to be at least...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
August 19, 2014

One of the few examples of potentially effectively engagement by foreign governments …

in North Korea is being shut down by the regime after being outed. The Diplomat reports that the unsecured wireless networks of foreign embassies had allowed North Koreans living nearby to access the internet without restriction, and that the hunger of North Koreans for that information was so great that it caused something of a housing boom in those neighborhoods. Now that the security forces know about this, they’re cracking down, and forcing embassies to secure and password-protect their signals....
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Subversion
August 15, 2014

Pyongyang, as Leni Riefenstahl might have seen it*

Last week, a slick new video of Pyongyang by Rob Whitworth and JT Singh infected many writers and readers who don’t know much about North Korea with the Madonna Syndrome, defined as the illusion of entering virgin territory actually while plodding along a tired, well-worn, loveless, and morally ambiguous path in the footsteps of Dennis Rodman. The chirpy reaction of Washington Post blogger Abby Phillip was typical: A new video aims to show a different side of Pyongyang. It is...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Propaganda
June 30, 2014

N. Korea Perestroika Watch: 2 U.S. tourists to face “trial” for petty heresies

One of the core arguments of the Sunshine Policy and its “engagement”-based derivative theories is that more people-to-people contact between Americans and North Koreas will reduce tensions, stimulate economic and political reforms, and eventually, improve inter-governmental relations.* The last two decades have been unkind to this theory, but today, North Korea made an announcement suggesting that its opposite may be closer to the truth. SEOUL—North Korea said Monday it will charge two Americans in its custody with unspecified crimes, a move that may signal...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
June 9, 2014

Religious crusades to Pyongyang no more naive than any other kind.

By now, you know that it has happened again, and the unethical North Korea tourism industry has flung a third sacrifice into the bubbling, sulfurous maw of the North Korean penal system. The North Koreans identify the latest victim as Jeffrey Edward Fowle, who joins erstwhile tour guide Ken Bae,* and tourist and possible defector Matthew Todd Miller. (This obviously doesn’t include Merrill Newman, who was released not long after his arrest.) Despite State Department warnings and my own humanitarian pleas, some people still haven’t...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea