April 10, 2010

Of Fools and Their Money, Pt. 3: Thoughts on the End of Kumgang

North Korea has announced that it will make good on its threat to confiscate the South Korean property at the Kumgang tourist project. In a statement on Thursday, the North’s Guidance Bureau for Comprehensive Development of Scenic Spots, which is in charge of the tourism, said it is seizing a meeting hall for separated families built by the South Korean government, and a cultural hall, a hot spring spa, and a duty-free shop owned by the Korea Tourism Organization, as...
Categories NK Economics/Sunshine
April 9, 2010

North Korea and China Feast Amid Famine

As the food situation in North Korea continues to deteriorate for its most vulnerable, a South Korean NGO is sending 300 tons of flour and other supplies to help feed 12,000 “marginalized” people, including kids in 50 orphanages. The article mentions nothing about monitoring or nutritional surveys, so pray to a God they can’t that there will be a few dollops of gruel left for their begging bowls after all of the theft, diversion, and corruption. Note, by the way,...
Categories Appeasement/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Six-Party Talks
April 8, 2010

8 April 2010

You know, until I was introduced to KCNA, I did not fully realize that living under the “dignified” Juche system was the human right that replaced all the rest of them: There exists no such issue as “human rights issue” in the DPRK nor can it exist there as it provides full legal and institutional guarantees to the independence of human being and the equal rights of the popular masses guided by the Juche idea. The south Korean puppet group...
Categories Anju Links
April 8, 2010

Cheonan Survivors: Explosion Came from Outside

For the first time, the reporters have been allowed to interview survivors of the Cheonan incident. The spontaneity of the surviving sailors’ reactions was diminished by the appearance that they were instructed not to speculate on North Korean involvement, but all seem to agree that the blast came from outside the ship: “I heard a loud boom, and felt my body being instantly lifted up in the air,” Senior Chief Petty Officer Oh Seong-tak told a news conference. “The noise...
Categories Cheonan Incident
April 8, 2010

Tremble, Commies!

Forwarded by a friend: WASHINGTON, D.C. ““ Today, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) issued the following statement in response to the conviction of American Aijalon Gomes by a North Korean court. Senator Kerry called on the DPRK to release Mr. Gomes immediately on a humanitarian basis: “This is a mother’s worst nightmare and a horrific situation. This young man belongs in Massachusetts with his family, and I join with them in expressing my hope that North Korea...
Categories Aijalon Gomes/U.S. Politics
April 8, 2010

Kim Jong Il, Global Fashion God

It’s moments like this when I most suspect that the people who write North Korea’s propaganda aren’t the hacks we’ve thought them to be, but are actually subtle, subversive, and satirical. Uriminzokkiri, quoting an article in communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun, said the modest-looking suits have gripped people’s imagination and become a global vogue. “The reason is that the august image of the Great General, who is always wearing the modest suit while working, leaves a deep impression on people’s...
Categories Propaganda/WTF?
April 7, 2010

North Korean “Court” Sentences Aijalon Gomes to 8 Years at Hard Labor

North Korea’s sham legal system has sentenced U.S. citizen Aijalon Gomes to 8 years at hard labor and a ransom fine of $70,000 for walking across the border into North Korea. An American has been sentenced to eight years of hard labor and fined the equivalent of $700,000 for illegal entry into North Korea. Aijalon Mahli Gomes, 30, who had taught English in South Korea, is the fourth U.S. citizen in the past year to walk into North Korea from...
Categories Aijalon Gomes
April 6, 2010

6 April 2010

Are you happy to see me, or is that just a cargo train? _______________________ Make that two officials executed over The Great Confiscation. Just to show that North Korea hasn’t lost its flair, it forced a crowd of economic officials to observe the proceedings. How many executions does it take to make this officially a purge? _______________________ Some surprisingly interesting observations from Hwang Jang Yop, via Don Kirk. _______________________ The collapse of North Korea’s educational system is creating a lost...
Categories Anju Links
April 6, 2010

Government Bungling Feeds Cheonan Conspiracy Theories and Frustrates National Unity (Updated)

More than a week after the mysterious sinking of the corvette Cheonan, the only certainties for the families of the missing are loss, tragedy, and confusion. In the last several days, the body of just one missing sailor was found. Divers have searched much of the sunken stern section of the ship, but did not find any bodies there. In addition to the diver who was lost trying to save the crew, nine more crew members of a fishing boat...
Categories Cheonan Incident/ROK Military
April 5, 2010

North Korea Reaffirms Plans to Close Markets

If you’ve read a spate of recent reports and op-eds in places like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal recently, you might have acquired the impression that The Great Confiscation was a fiasco that caused panic, chaos, and an unprecedented swelling of discontent. The North Korean government wants you to know that all of this is all a brigandish, flunkeyist fabrication: ”In the early days immediately after the currency change, market prices were not fixed, so markets were...
Categories NK Economics/Resistance
April 5, 2010

Will South Korea Go Nuclear Next?

For more than a year, the Lee Administration has been talking about “closing the nuclear fuel cycle” with respect to the uranium it currently uses to produce electricity. Denials notwithstanding, I had concluded that President Lee had given up on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program, and worried that the limitations of America’s will weakened the sufficiency, in his mind, of the U.S. nuclear umbrella over which South Korea frets so much. But now, calls for South Korea to go nuclear...
Categories Proliferation/ROK Military/WMD
April 5, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

Writing in Foreign Policy, Marcus Noland writes about discontent and dissent in North Korea, and the impact of The Great Confiscation as a catalyst for it. The surveys’ results suggest that the regime’s discomfort might be well founded. Countries such as North Korea, where people routinely hide their true opinions, are prone to sudden, explosive political mobilizations like the ones that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1980s. Those mobilizations happen when nascent expressions of discontent cascade —...
Categories NK Economics/Propaganda/Regime Change/Subversion
April 4, 2010

4 April 2010: Kim Jong Il in China; More Tension Along the DMZ

Sounds like the perfect time for a coup: Kim Jong Il, and possibly his son Jong-Eun, are rumored to be in China. ______________________________ North Korea has accused South Korean soldiers of firing on a police post on the North Korean side of the DMZ. ______________________________ Vitit Muntarbhorn calls for the U.N. to set up a commission of inquiry into North Korea’s crimes against humanity. If only someone at the U.N. really understood and cared about the history, suffering, and han...
Categories Anju Links
April 2, 2010

Nothing to Envy, Except …

From KCNA: All the people should unite close around General Secretary Kim Jong Il and dynamically accelerate the on-going advance for a great surge to materialize President Kim Il Sung’s noble idea of believing in people as in Heaven and thus glorify this significant year as a year of great prosperity to be recorded long in the history of the country, urge papers Thursday in their editorials. [….] It is the unshakable resolution and will of Kim Jong Il to...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Propaganda
April 1, 2010

How Republican Stall Tactics Could Capsize Guam!

I really wish I could say this was an April Fool’s hoax or a Mensa audition gone horribly awry. Actually, it’s a hearing in the House Armed Services Committee: Which seems like a good time to mention that Senator Carl Levin is filled with angst over all the wise on-the-spot guidance our general officers are missing out on because of a Republican parliamentary stall tactic somehow related to health care collectivization reform: “Lives are at stake here. American lives and...
Categories U.S. Politics/WTF?
April 1, 2010

Hwang Jang Yop Calls for Ideological Warfare Against Kim Jong Il

I was too busy to see Hwang Jang Yop speak in D.C. the other day, but a few news services picked up his remarks: North Korea’s highest-ranking defector said “ideological warfare,” not military action, would help topple the regime of Kim Jong Il. “We don’t need to resort to force,” Hwang Jang-yop told a small audience Wednesday at the Center for Strategic International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “We need to use ideology and markets and diplomacy. We need to...
Categories Defectors/Propaganda/Subversion
March 31, 2010

31 March 2010

Nearly a year after voting for UNSCR 1874, Russia gets around to implementing anti-proliferation sanctions. Let’s hope that Russia takes enforcement more seriously than China, though I’m not particularly optimistic. ________________________ Projection: “The south Korean conservative regime is no more than a marionette as it acts according to the script written by outsiders, bereft of any independence. This reactionary ruling group is bound to go to a ruin any moment as it goes against the requirements of the times and...
Categories Anju Links
March 31, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch: Evan Ramstad and Aidan Foster-Carter

It is now possible to say that a new consensus is emerging that the North Korean regime’s stability is in doubt. The latest article to strike this tone is from Evan Ramstad in the Wall Street Journal: North Korea’s authoritarian regime appears to be weakening and the prospect of its collapse is being discussed anew by longtime observers, though there is still a broad debate about when that could happen. [Wall Street Journal, Evan Ramstad] You’re on your own from...
Categories China & Korea/Regime Change