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Category: Resistance

March 6, 2007

Can They Do It? A Brief History of Resistance to the North Korean Regime

[Updated March 2007; See new incidents and survey stats at the bottom of the post.]   According to the  image of the North Korean people that their rulers carefully cultivate, North Koreans are brainwashed automatons.  Regime minders, who closely follow foreign camera crews inside North Korea, seldom permit outsiders to see any alternative.  That image  is probably a combination of fear, stage management, brainwashing, and a degree of truth:  few North Koreans have ever known anything else, and extreme nationalism...
Categories Resistance
February 22, 2007

Two Jailbreaks Reported in Hoeryong

As North Korea tries to enforce a crackdown on cross-border smuggling of people and subversive items, it finds that control isn’t as easy to maintain as it once was.  Both incidents involved suspected (cross-border?) smugglers: The source said that in the evening, around 10 PM, unknown arsonist set fire on armory that caused confusion. Amid fire, two smugglers broke the prison bars and escaped. Although the Manghyang district security guards declared state of emergency over Hoiryeong and tried to catch...
Categories Inside NK/Resistance
February 6, 2007

Mass Escape at N. Korean Concentration Camp; 120 Escape

[For images of North Korea’s nuclear sites, click here; for updates and commentary on North Korea’s latest nuclear test, click here; for images of other concentration camps, click here and here; for more Google Earth imagery of North Korea, click here.] [Update 11 Feb 07:   North Korea denies it] The Daily NK reports: Sources residing in the district of Chongjin, North Hamkyung informed on the 1st and 5th “On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the...
Categories Google Earth/Human Rights/Inside NK/Resistance/The Camps
January 12, 2007

Beyond Empty Threats

  Yes, Stealth fighters have some value in deterring a North Korean  first strike, if we think that’s a possibility, but I do not believe that any weapon in the U.S. military arsenal (with this possible exception) can deter or prevent a North Korean nuclear test.  The threat of a direct, large-scale  use of force by either the United States or North Korea against the other  is an empty threat.  The conventional Korean War has been a standoff since 1953. ...
Categories An Alliance?/NK Military/Resistance/ROK Military/U.S. Military
January 7, 2007

You Can’t Eat Plutonium

The Daily NK previously reported that Pyongyang’s patrician class had swallowed the whole “barrel of a gun” spin after North Korea’s nuclear test.  It didn’t surprise me to hear that.  I’d even predicted it. I’m equally unsurprised that North Korea’s proles, and some of its urban youth, are less impressed and seem completely disillusioned with the course of things. Young adults in Pyongyang commonly call Kim Jong Il as “that guy,” whereas in the province of Hamkyung, Kim Jong Il...
Categories Deprogramming/Inside NK/Resistance
December 3, 2006

N. Korea Arrests Hoeryong Protest Leaders

You will recall my post regarding the merchants’ protest in Hoeryong, against the closure of a market for which the merchants had already rented stall space from the authorities.  The Daily NK reported that a hundred people protested the decision at the market management office.  Since then, a subsequent report suggested that the authorities might cave.  Any such hope has proven premature.  It’s still North Korea up there. The Daily NK now reports how the chapter closed:  one dead, 20...
Categories Inside NK/Resistance
November 27, 2006

CNN Reports from the Yalu River

The Daily NK provides this link to the video of the broadcast (which worked fine for me).  They show scenes from across the river and interview a refugee woman on the Chinese side. It’s nothing new, really, although it bears constant repetition that North Koreans aren’t brainwashed automatons.  Increasingly, they’re willing to say just what they think of the Dear Leader’s bounty … even to foreign journalists. On a related note, don’t miss the Daily NK’s follow-up to the protest...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Refugees/Resistance
November 9, 2006

A Protest in North Korea?

That’s what the Daily NK is reporting: On Tuesday, a number of residents in Hoiryeong, North Hamkyong Province mass-protested in front of the Nammun (a south gate) market for “compensation of market refurbishment payment” and against the merger of Hoiryeong markets, according to a North Korean source. The inside source told the Daily NK through a telephone interview that evening ,”From this morning, more than a hundred shopkeepers, their families and the residents of Nammun district rushed to the market...
Categories Inside NK/Resistance
October 24, 2006

‘Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.’

Reports the Australian: An  underground resistance movement in North Korea, capable of smuggling out videos of executions and staging violent acts of defiance, has emerged as the Kim Jong-il regime faces international sanctions for testing a nuclear bomb. Let’s contain our exuberance long enough to ask ourselves if it’s irrational.  Break this down into its components.  I do believe that  organized networks of guerrilla cameras, missionaries, and people smugglers  are  operating; that  they’re increasing  their reach inside North Korea; and...
Categories Resistance
October 21, 2006

Another MUST-READ: NYT on the Erosion of the Information Blockade

Many thanks to a reader for forwarding. The Times is on an absolute roll with its recent Korea reporting. Here, we learn more of the underground network that can sow dissent, and that could eventually form the foundation of a resistance movement. The increasing ease with which people are able to buy their way out of North Korea suggests that, beneath the images of goose-stepping soldiers in Pyongyang, the capital, the government’s still considerable ability to control its citizens is...
Categories Refugees/Religion/Resistance
September 23, 2006

Waiting for the Ceausescu Moment

History has a strange habit of pivoting on the tempers and moods of ordinary people whom it swallows and forgets, and one of those people is the first angry man in a crowd of thousands in Bucharest, on December 20, 1989.  For some reason, he acted on his urge to shout  blasphemous words at  Europe’s most dreaded tryant.  There were others in that crowd whose anger overcame their fear, and those others also shouted out their discontent.  The tyrant failed...
Categories Democracy/NK Economics/Resistance
September 20, 2006

Another Public Execution Video

The guerrilla cameras of the North Korean resistance have brought out another video of a public execution. Like the most recent video releases, showing border guards hauling away South Korean food aid and the display of a dissident banner, it’s from South Hamgyeong Province. The Daily NK has stills and audio, although the images, for understandable reasons, are not clear. The headline says the video depicts a woman being executed for stealing corn from another woman’s home. Later on, however,...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Resistance
September 12, 2006

Open Dissent in the North?

You may recall this post from a few days ago, in which a North Korean guerrilla cameraman filmed members of the military hauling away what was purported a year’s supply of South Korean food aid … after South Korean monitors certified that it had been distributed to hungry civilians. As it turned out, there was more to the film, reports the Daily NK. In the video, a bill is posted in a black market near Dancheon Station, which read “˜People...
Categories North Korea/Resistance
September 5, 2006

Busted: S. Korean Monitoring of Food Aid Exposed as a Sham

[Updates: English version here, and a small correction below.] “At least since 2000 when we began providing assistance to the North, no one there has been starving to death.” ““ UniFiction Minister Lee Jong-Seok, May 2, 2006 You may recall that just over a year ago, Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard provoked controversy when they published a report called “Hunger and Human Rights.” In that report, the authors concluded that up to half of food aid deliveries to North Korea...
Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Resistance
September 3, 2006

Breaking the Blockade

[Update: Andrei Lankov has a must-read piece on radio broadcasting in the Asia Times Online.] Where there is demand, there will be a supply, and the trickle of alternative information to North Korea, though small, shows signs of persistence and of having a receptive market. In addition to Radio Free NK and Open Radio for North Korea, there is now a Japan-based broadcaster, Shiokaze. The DailyNK interviews its director. Although their original focus is on sending messages to Japanese abductees,...
Categories Abductions/Activism/Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Japan & Korea/Reconstruction/Refugees/Resistance/Uncategorized
April 28, 2006

N. Korea Freedom Week Updates

First, please join us on the West side of the U.S. Capitol today, starting at 11:30. The rally will last well into the afternoon, with plenty of opportunities to frighten powerful and cynical people throughout the day. Some of us may even make a special appearance at the South Korean Embassy later this afternoon. At 6 PM, Suzanne Scholte of the North Korean Freedom Coalition will lead a rally at the Chinese Embassy that will become an all-night prayer vigil....
Categories Abductions/Activism/Appeasement/China & Korea/Defectors/Democracy/Human Rights/Japan/Japan & Korea/Korean History/North Korea/Refugees/Resistance/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized/Washington Views
February 21, 2006

Anti-Kim Jong Il Leaflets Reported at Onsong

Via the refugee-run DailyNK: Feb 10, Onsung-gun, North Hamkyung province, anti-Kim Jong Il flyers were found, reported North Korean internal source on Feb 17. The source said the flyers read, “Stand Kim Jong Il Upside Down” and tens of them were found near the Wangje Mt. Grand Monument and the Security Agency along with other government agencies. Read the rest here.
Categories Defectors/Inside NK/North Korea/Refugees/Resistance