May 27, 2008

Guest Post: Dan Bielefeld Goes to a Screening of “Crossing” at the National Assembly

[Update:   Apologies — I had Dan’s name misspelled before.]   I met Dan Bielefeld at a LiNK event in Washington two years ago, and he has been living in Seoul since shortly thereafter.  After Dan’s excellent photography of the Chinese riot in Seoul last month, I invited him to guest-post here.  He was recently invited to a screening of “Crossing” at the Korean National Assembly, and here is review.  Since this is Dan’s first post, I’ll introduce him this...
Categories Korean Society/Refugees
May 27, 2008

Documentary: Escape from North Korea

This will be the first of two documentaries from Journeyman Pictures I’ll be featuring this week. “Escape from North Korea” follows an entire North Korean family all the way from their relatively privileged life in Pyongyang to the end of their long journey to escape the North, starting with clandestine camera phone images. For both of these documentaries, a big hat tip to commenter and blogger usinkorea.
Categories Activism/Defectors/Refugees
May 27, 2008

“China Hand” Owes Me a Retraction

[Update, 31 May 08:   China Hand publishes a retraction: In a comment on Arms Control Wonk in 2007, I made the statement that the website Onefreekorea had apparently received an advance copy of a government ruling concerning Banco Delta Asia. I inferred this from my reading of the timestamp on the OFK post, which I believed indicated that the post had been put up the day before the ruling was officially announced and publicly available. OFK’s proprietor has advised...
Categories Blogs & Blogging
May 26, 2008

Good Friends: As Famine Worsens, Soldiers Go Hungry, Disease Spreads

Good Friends has released two more newsletters, numbered 129 and 130. No. 129 is partially made up of material I had passed along here yesterday, but picks up from there with some interesting reports about the food supply to the military. The reports are from Kangwan Province, which lies just north of the DMZ’s eastern sector. According to one soldier in Keumkang County, the soldiers in this county are experiencing a food shortage as well. They are fed with less...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 26, 2008

Of Hollow Men: Obama Flip-Flops on Removing N. Korea from Terror-Sponsor List

In March of 2005, I blogged about this letter from the Illinois congressional delegation to the North Korean government, in which all members of the delegation warned Kim Jong Il that they would firmly oppose removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism unless North Korea accounts for the fate of the Reverend Kim Dong Shik, a lawful permanent resident of the United States who had resided in Illinois. In 2002, Rev. Kim was in northeast China...
Categories Japan/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics
May 25, 2008

Good Friends: Some Districts of Pyongyang Near Starvation

While some reports continue to suggest that North Korea’s elite is still surviving by spending their savings in food markets, it also appears that the elite isn’t what it once was. Without as much food to go around, it no longer includes the entire population of Pyongyang or the “core” areas surrounding it. Today, according to Good Friends, the inhabitants of several districts in the privileged capital may be surviving on watery gruel. Nampo, the port city that serves Pyongyang,...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 24, 2008

Noland and Haggard on North Korea’s New Famine

Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard have just published three new op-eds in an attempt to sound the alarm about North Korea’s growing new famine. The first of these you should read is an extensive discussion of the evidence supporting their dire predictions in the Korea Herald (normally unlinkable, but uploaded in pdf here). The second is this op-ed at Newsweek, which draws an apt comparison to the situation in Burma. Although Noland and Haggard place most of the blame for...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 24, 2008

Murder, Plain and Simple: North Korean Snipers Killing Refugees Along the Chinese Border

[Updated below with photographs; Digg it here.] Helping Hands Korea, one of the most intrepid and trustworthy organizations that assists North Korean refugees escape from their repressive, famine-plagued homeland, has written to me with a detailed account of how the North Korean and Chinese militaries have joined forces to prevent North Koreans from escaping their homeland, one where large numbers are people are now starving to death once again because the government won’t feed them and won’t let them fend...
Categories Activism/Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Refugees
May 23, 2008

Death Star

Throughout the year the animals worked even harder than they had worked in the previous year. To rebuild the windmill, with walls twice as thick as before, and to finish it by the appointed date, together with the regular work of the farm, was a tremendous labour. There were times when it seemed to the animals that they worked longer hours and fed no better than they had done in Jones’s day. On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
May 21, 2008

Two Dispatches from Good Friends

Blogging will have to be light for a while, but fortunately, I’m now on the distro list for Good Friends, which welcomes recipients to redistribute its dispatches. Ven. Pomnyun also said Good Friends will increase the volume of dispatches it publishes. I’m going to republish two of them today, one of which I’ve grafed before. The obvious cautions apply, but overall, the evidence suggests that trends are very bleak in the short term — famine is killing a lot of...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 20, 2008

Hungry N. Korean Bureaucrats Become Shakedown Artists

“After food distribution being halted, many low-ranking officials stopped showing up for work. Instead, they started picking on people. They carry out frivolous inspections anytime they want to extort people,” said a source from North Hamkyung Province in a phone conversation with Daily NK on May 15. “Nowadays, you see all sorts of inspections going on. Those with a shred of authority all come to carry out inspections. They try to find fault with people and fine them in order...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change
May 16, 2008

The North Korean People Are Dying

Good Friends and the Daily NK continue to be our only sources of information about what is happening to the North Korean people as famine stalks some areas of the country. This isn’t going to be pleasant reading, and if you’re not well-braced to confront the hard realities of a collectivist utopia in which some animals are more equal than others, read no further. With the food crisis worsening on farms in Gumchun County in North Hwanghae Province, the number...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 16, 2008

Korean Church Coalition Launches Ad Campaign on Behalf of N.K. Refugees

I’ve been encouraged about the direction of the movement to publicize the plight of the North Korean people since the KCC and its leader, Sam Kim, threw their weight behind it. They’re bringing much-needed money, manpower, organization, and clout to the fight, and now they’ve launched a modest ad campaign in Korean-language media: I can’t wait to see how the Chinese netizens react to this. It’s probably true — though not necessarily helpful to their cause — that the image...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/Refugees
May 15, 2008

Today, In Some Parallel Universe

Addressing the Israeli Knesset today, President Bush apparently said some inflammatory things: “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this...
Categories Appeasement/Iran/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics
May 15, 2008

Sung Kim’s Sideshow

Yesterday, the State Department’s Sung Kim was paraded before the cameras with seven boxes of documents handed over by the North Koreans. For the most part, the media have glossed this story as a tangible sign of progress in disarming North Korea, a conclusion that doesn’t seem very well supported if you read the entire transcript of the press conference. The key points I take from this begin with the best question asked at the news conference, apparently by Arshad...
Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks
May 14, 2008

N. Korea Human Rights Bill May Have Passed in House

[Update: I can’t confirm the final outcome, but I’m led to believe that the vote on these bills was put off at the last minute.] Someone supplied me (thanks) with this press release from Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s office, dated yesterday: (WASHINGTON) ““ The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to approve two North Korea-related bills today coauthored by U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), including an initiative to improve procedures for resettling refugees and funding programs to promote human rights. Separate...
Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics
May 13, 2008

U.S. Food Aid on the Way to North Korea?

Here’s what the Financial Times is reporting today: Washington will supply 400,000 tonnes via the World Food Programme while US non-governmental organisations will distribute another 100,000 tonnes. President George W. Bush is expected to approve the deal “within days,” according to one official. [Financial Times, Demetri Sevastopulo] That probably means that at least the 400,000 tons of WFP aid will be channeled through the North Korean Public Distribution System, which has become infamous for diverting aid from less privileged people...
Categories Famine & Food Aid