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Category: Regime Change

October 30, 2014

Park Geun-Hye still pushing for reunification

President Park Geun-hye on Tuesday made another pitch for her signature reunification vision, emphasizing that it’s time to end the pain of a divided Korean Peninsula. “I think the time has come to fundamentally resolve the pain of a division on the peninsula, as next year marks the 70th anniversary of that,” she said in a video message for the inaugural World Conference on North Korean Studies. The two-day forum opened at Seoul’s Yonsei University, drawing more than 150 South...
Categories Reconstruction
October 28, 2014

Sue Terry v. John Delury and Moon Chung-In, on reunification

Although Delury and Moon may not like the idea of North Korea’s collapse, that is a far more likely scenario than their fantasy of “the gradual merging of North and South.” South Korea has tried to make that dream come true before, through the so-called sunshine policy it pursued from 1998 to 2008, and the result was unambiguous failure. During those years, South Korea gave North Korea $8 billion in investment and assistance. In 2000, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung...
Categories North-South/Reconstruction/Regime Change
October 10, 2014

The Asahi Shimbun looks at corruption in North Korea …

from the perspective of a former truck driver and chauffeur, tarnished by bad songbun. Along the way, the man relates a story of an act of symbolic resistance: Q: Is it true that you witnessed the defamation of a bronze statue of Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea? A: At Taeochon (near Hyesan in Ryanggang province), someone had thrown rabbit feces at the bronze statue of Kim Il Sung. I believe it occurred on Feb. 11, five days before...
Categories Inside NK/Resistance
June 18, 2014

Sue Mi Terry in the New York Times: Let N. Korea Collapse

Writing in The New York Times, Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA Senior Analyst and current Columbia University Senior Research Scholar, calls for the five parties to accept and prepare for the collapse of North Korea. In the process, Terry also gives Park Geun-Hye’s “jackpot” concept a coherence that Park herself never quite could. Considering all these benefits, the United States and its allies must revise their approach to North Korea. Rather than continue to prop up a government they worry might...
Categories Reconstruction/Regime Change
February 5, 2014

Can Park Geun-Hye prepare Korea, and the world, for reunification?

Yesterday, Yonhap reported that an unusual billboard had appeared in Times Square in New York: “Korean Unification would be an immeasurable BONANZA for any nations with interests in the Korean Peninsula.” To most of the Americans who read it, the billboard will seem odd, but Korea-watchers will recall when Korean-Americans took out similar ads in the United States, about things that matter much less. Beneath the paywall, we learn that “[t]he ad was set up by Han Tae-gyuk, a 66-year-old Korean-American man, at his own expense,”...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Reconstruction/Regime Change/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea
January 14, 2014

N. Korea’s new “reign of terror” stirs fear, flushes out dissent

Rimjingang, the guerrilla news service that brought us the footage we’ll see in Frontline: Secret State of North Korea, has published a spate of reports that give credence to Park Geun-Hye’s prediction that a “reign of terror” would follow the purge of Jang Song-Thaek. The reports clearly rely heavily on third-hand rumor, so I wouldn’t necessarily consider them so much for the truth of the matters asserted as for what they say about the mood on the street. But amid...
Categories Inside NK/Regime Change/Resistance
September 27, 2013

RAND’s study of N. Korea collapse should be required reading at State, USFK

This week, the World Bank recently analyzed a series of governance indicators to conclude that the North Korean regime is stabilizing. Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees. Bruce Bennett of RAND has just published an indispensable, readable, and plausibly terrifying new study of the regime’s stability, and he reaches a very different conclusion. To Bennett, a violent and chaotic collapse looks increasingly likely as North Korea tries to consolidate succession to its third hereditary ruler. (Thanks to a reader for forwarding). Bennett lays out a...
Categories Reconstruction/Regime Change
August 18, 2012

Curb Your Enthusiasm: On Change in North Korea

Over at Destination Pyongyang, Chris Green offers some useful cautions to those who have allowed themselves to become unduly aroused at the prospect of reform in North Korea based on “evidence” that is either superficial, questionable, irrelevant, or some combination of these things.  Green questions “hyperbolic” reports that North Korea will abandon its central rationing system — a system that is more responsible for North Korea’s famine and hunger than any other single factor — because that would mean ceding a...
Categories NK Economics/Regime Change
May 11, 2012

Border Guard Fragging Incident

I’m not sure how I missed this one, but the Daily NK reports that two North Korean border guards shot roughly half a dozen of their colleagues, crossed the border, and went up to the hills to hide. The Chinese caught them and repatriated them back to North Korea, where they’re enduring the sort of treatment I wouldn’t even want to imagine, if they’re still alive. (Hat tip.) This isn’t the first example of defections we’ve seen at the North’s...
Categories NK Military/Resistance
March 5, 2012

Col. David Maxwell, on why the North Korean people don’t rebel

It’s funny how life moves in oddly circular ways sometimes. I first met Col. David Maxwell more than a decade ago on Okinawa, when I was an Army defense counsel and he was commanding a Special Forces battalion. This unequal juxtaposition of his cred versus mine makes me begin this post feeling sheepish about disagreeing with one of his conclusions here, that the North Korean people are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they would not consider rising against the system. I...
Categories Resistance
February 3, 2012

Why we should support the Syrian opposition, in spite of everything we know

Things sure aren’t looking too good in Egypt these days. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised by this. For decades, the true character of its society lay latent behind the veil of a dictator friendly to our interests, who mouthed words we like to hear about moving toward a more open, secular society. This never really happens under unrepresentative governments, of course. What happens instead is that the people seethe and their grievances build, and they’re drawn to well-organized, well-financed...
Categories Regime Change
January 25, 2012

North Koreans killing secret police?

So says the Daily NK of recent events in the northeastern city of Chongjin, a frequent venue for reports of anti-government sentiment: A source in North Hamgyung Province told Daily NK on January 19, “During the mourning period, one official from the provincial NSA, one from the prosecutor’s office and two from the People’s Safety Agency were murdered in Cheongjin. The source added, “There was a note found lying next to the body of the executed NSA official which said...
Categories Resistance
August 22, 2011

What Qaddafi’s Fall Means for North Korea

As I write this morning, the Libyan rebels are battling to seize Colonel Qaddafi’s surrounded Furhrerbunker, and the Untergang seems near. Yes, the differences may be as great as the similarities, but the similarities are still significant. The fall of the Libyan government to a popular uprising would have been unthinkable a year ago. Libya was a totalitarian state with no opposition movement, in which subversive ideas could not circulate freely. Like Syria, where recent events have been just as...
Categories Regime Change
July 8, 2011

My Country, at Its Best

Regimes come and regimes go, but friendship with the people of a nation endures. You earn that friendship when you stand with them in their darkest hours: Hundreds of thousands of Syrians poured into the streets of the opposition stronghold Hama on Friday, bolstered by a gesture of support from the American and French ambassadors who visited the city where a massacre nearly 30 years ago came to symbolize the ruthlessness of the Assad dynasty. The citizens of Hama, who...
Categories Regime Change
June 23, 2011

A Syrian Solution for North Korea

So now that the Syrian army is invading town after town from Dara’a in the south to its restive border with Turkey, can we call it a civil war yet? Worse things could happen there, and absent this wave of unrest, probably would have. If Syria isn’t likely to become a democracy within the next year, a destabilized Syria is probably the next best thing. If Bashar Asad is preoccupied fighting to survive, he’ll be impeded in his capacity to...
Categories Resistance
February 23, 2011

Chosun Ilbo: Protests in NK Over Food, Electricity

North Korea is to political disgruntlement what tar sands are to energy — enough to supply the whole world for decades, if only someone could figure out a way to harness it: Small pockets of unrest are appearing in North Korea as the repressive regime staggers under international sanctions and the fallout from a botched currency reform, sources say. On Feb. 14, two days before leader Kim Jong-il’s birthday, scores of people in Jongju, Yongchon and Sonchon in North Pyongan...
Categories Resistance