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Category: Defectors

August 18, 2016

“Citizens of Pyongyang, my name is Thae Yong-ho.”

When the news broke yesterday that North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Thae Yong-ho, had defected, many reporters who knew him were astonished. Subject to the confirmation of reports that a North Korean general and several diplomats defected in China recently, Thae would be the highest-ranking diplomat to have defected from the North, and the second-highest official, after Hwang Jang-yop‘s defection in 1997. This is a new low in a bad year for Kim Jong-un. Defections are not...
Categories Defectors
August 5, 2016

S. Korea’s quisling left goes all-out to bully N. Koreans out of defecting, and it just might work

We still have few details and no confirmation regarding the reported defection of that North Korean general in China, other than this Korea Times report that he absconded with $40 million, and that he “was in charge of Section 39 inside the Korean Workers’ Party.” (KBS had reported that he was in charge of regime slush funds in southeast Asia only.) The Korea Times report probably refers to what’s more commonly referred to as Bureau 39, Room 39, or Office 39, the...
Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/The Fifth Column/Useful Idiocy
July 29, 2016

Latest N. Korea defections: 6 soldiers, 3 workers, a top student, a general & slush fund manager

It has been three months since 12 young women and a man defected from that North Korean restaurant in Ningpo, China, and since 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait staged a mass protest against their minders. I’d begun to wonder if the regime had cauterized the wounded cohesion of the very people it needs most desperately to pay its bills and seal its borders, but the drops of fresh blood on the floor tell another story. Let’s begin with the most...
Categories Border Control/Defectors/Human Trafficking/NK Military/Sanctions
July 5, 2016

Minbyun’s frivolous lawfare terrorizes 12 young N. Korean refugees & endangers lives.

The western association of “left” with “liberal” does not hold up well in South Korea, whose political spectrum is dominated by warring factions of nationalists. These factions wield the law as an authoritarian sword against their rivals, and as a (sometimes flimsy) shield against their rivals’ authoritarian assaults. Historically, the worst authoritarianism was on the political right before the transition to democracy in 1987. The left still fuels its moral propulsion from the nostalgia of dissent dating back to this...
Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Korean Politics/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
April 12, 2016

If Kim Jong-un can’t trust his own spies and assassins, who can he trust? (updates)

The revelation last weekend that a colonel in North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, or RGB, defected to South Korea last year represents a huge potential windfall in uncovering North Korea’s operations in the South. Reuters quotes Yonhap as reporting that the colonel “specialized in anti-South espionage operations before defecting and had divulged the nature of his work to South Korean authorities.” The Korea Herald, also citing Yonhap, reports that he gave “detailed testimony” on RGB operations in the South. Or so says...
Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees
September 9, 2015

Pyongyang’s elites wait for Phase Five, and wait ….

Robert Collins, the author of the famous briefing on the seven phases of regime collapse in North Korea, almost certainly does not recall that, years ago, I was among a small group of Army officers who heard him deliver his briefing at Yongsan Garrison, in Seoul. For those who aren’t familiar with the seven phases, Robert Kaplan reproduced them in The Atlantic: Phase One: resource depletion; Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion; Phase...
Categories Anju Links/Defectors/Kremlinology/Regime Change/Resistance
July 9, 2015

The summer of their discontent: Is Kim Jong Un losing the elite classes?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a spate of reports about defections from North Korea. Broadly, this is nothing new. The defection, for example, of three crew members of a fishing vessel is life-changing for three men, but is no more likely to rend the fabric of Kim Jong-Un’s regime than 27,000 other defections, almost all of them of people the regime had written off as expendable.  Recently, however, we’ve seen multiple reports suggesting something very different, and vastly more consequential...
Categories Defectors/Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
September 23, 2014

4th Annual North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival

NKnet is hosting its 4th annual North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival this coming Friday and Saturday, September 26-27, in Gwanghwamun, Seoul. This year there are 14 films from Korea, the US, and Saudi Arabia, and two of the films received financial support from the festival: November 9th 100 min. – Korea – documentary – no English subtitles Directed by: Kim Gyu-Min (the director of Winter Butterfly, which played at the first NHIFF in 2011) Category: Reunification of the...
Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees
September 16, 2014

North Korea doesn’t want defectors from South Korea or the U.S. anymore.

There was a time when North Korea would have welcomed a defector from the United States and, long after any intelligence value had been squeezed out of him, put him in propaganda films for a generation. Today, if you try to defect to North Korea, they’ll sentence you to hard labor until Jimmy Carter comes to make them a different kind of propaganda film. More surprising, however, is that North Korea doesn’t want South Korean defectors, either. There was a time...
Categories Defectors
August 29, 2014

Top N. Korean money man defects to “third country”

A senior North Korean banking official who managed money for leader Kim Jong Un has defected in Russia and was seeking asylum in a third country, a South Korean newspaper reported on Friday, citing an unidentified source. Yun Tae Hyong, a senior representative of North Korea’s Korea Daesong Bank, disappeared last week in Nakhodka, in the Russian Far East, with $5 million, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported. [Reuters, Ju-Min Park and James Pearson] Daesong Bank is sanctioned by both the...
Categories Defectors/Kremlinology/Money Laundering/Sanctions
September 16, 2013

ROK Army shoots, kills man attempting to swim to N. Korea

I’ll withhold my criticism until I know a few more facts, but I can’t immediately understand why South Korean troops had to shoot and kill a South Korean man who was swimming the Imjin toward North Korea. This would not be the first South-to-North defection, but I don’t know why one the loss of one more nut or fugitive would be a great loss to the South. If the South doesn’t address the appropriateness of the use of force, it will weaken calls...
Categories Defectors/North-South/ROK Military
November 7, 2012

Escape from North Korea: An Incremental Review

Nov. 7, 2012.  Early in Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Korea, you start to find powerful phrases that stay with you — phrases that make you stop reading and chew on them, to extract the full significance of some aspect of life in another reality.  I couldn’t help quoting two of them.  The first is illuminating: So accustomed are North Koreans to the lack of light that when I asked a North Korean who had settled in an American city...
Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
May 3, 2011

Learn about North Korean Human Rights Crisis at JFNK Volunteer Orientation

For those of you in Korea, if you don’t know much about the human rights crisis that is North Korea (and spilling into China and South Korea) and/or if you want to learn how to get involved, there’s a great opportunity for you this Saturday in English or next Saturday in Korean (please encourage your Korean friends. coworkers, students to attend!). I volunteer with Justice for North Korea, and we’re holding our third round of informational orientation sessions for volunteers...
Categories Activism/Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees
February 7, 2011

31 North Koreans cross into S. Korean waters near Yeonpyeong

It’s not just the boat that smells fishy here: Thirty-one North Korean people crossed the tense Yellow Sea border by boat and arrived in South Korea two days ago, but they have not expressed any wishes to defect to the South, a military official said Monday. The North Koreans, consisting of 11 men and 20 women, arrived on Yeonpyeong Island by a wooden fishing boat in thick fog at around 11 a.m. Saturday and were towed away to the western...
Categories Defectors/Refugees
December 15, 2010

Kim Jong Il, Unplugged Again

First, I’ll just say that I have nothing to say about Eric Clapton that I didn’t say more than two years ago. We’ve already heard Eric Clapton unplugged. The economic unplugging of Kim Jong Il is a more consequential thing, one that I see as closely related to domestic discontent inside North Korea. My suspicion, though it is not yet supported by much direct evidence, is that these recent developments have reduced him to new lows of extortionate desperation. When...
Categories Defectors/NK Economics/Sanctions