August 11, 2015

North Korean Men Cross DMZ (and plant land mines)

By now, you’ve read that South Korea’s government has accused the North Korean military of sending soldiers across the DMZ to plant mines near South Korean guard posts, an act that blew the legs off two South Korean soldiers last week. The two South Koreans, both staff sergeants, triggered the mines last Tuesday just outside their post, within the South Korean half of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer separating the two Korean armies. One lost both legs in the...
Categories Appeasement/Kaesong/Korean War II/North-South/Propaganda/ROK Military/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy
August 6, 2015

NYC insurer agrees to $271K penalty for insuring North Korean ships

This afternoon, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets control announced that as part of a settlement, Navigators Insurance Company has agreed to pay OFAC a civil penalty of $271,000 for 48 sanctions violations involving Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea. Navigators is a New York-based provider of maritime insurance. It also had a branch in London, which evidently decided to cut costs by skimping on lawyers. Here’s how that worked out for them. Between May 8, 2008 and April 1, 2011, Navigators and...
Categories Sanctions
August 5, 2015

Famine, food policy, and the lost lessons of history

A drought, exacerbated by disastrous agricultural policies, causes widespread famine. A divided Congress, unsure about feeding an enemy, reluctantly agrees to send aid. A paranoid, totalitarian government obstructs the delivery of the aid, infiltrates and spies on aid organizations, and diverts food from starving children to a loyal elite. Desperate victims resort to cannibalism. Back in America, politics continues to intrude — the hard right wants to starve a Marxist-Leninist government into submission, while the hard left sympathizes with the regime and accuses...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
August 4, 2015

Switzerland sells luxury watches to Kim Jong-Un, despite U.N. sanctions and food shortages

Throughout North Korea’s Great Famine, as millions of North Koreans either starved to death or watched their loved ones die, suppliers across Europe willingly sold Kim Jong-Il millions of dollars’ worth of luxury cars, yachts, cognac, and Swiss watches. In 2006, the U.N. Security Council recognized the obscenity of this practice by adopting Resolution 1718, which first banned the export of luxury goods to North Korea. Among European nations, probably none has done more than Switzerland to enable the democidal kleptocracy of...
Categories Europe/Luxury Goods
August 3, 2015

In North Korea, prostitution used to be a survival strategy. Now, it’s just another racket.

The Great Famine of the 1990s changed North Korean society so profoundly that we are still trying to understand the breadth and depth of that change. During and after the famine, millions of North Koreans grasped at any survival strategy necessary to feed themselves. Those who did not change, and whom the state did not feed, died. For thousands of North Korean women, prostitution was the survival strategy of last resort to feed themselves, and often, their children. In Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, the sex trade was invisible to the...
Categories Capitalism/Human Trafficking/NK Crime
July 31, 2015

The rise of North Korea’s dissident culture

Totalitarian states have always understood the power of culture. Historically, they have required culture to serve the state. Also historically, once they lost control of culture, they also eventually lost control of everything else. In the 1930s, during the worst excesses of Stalinism, intellectuals, whether Soviet or western, seldom denounced the system. A decade or two later, however, one could already hear Soviet composers expressing disillusion, alienation, and loss — without words, of course — in the dark, mourning, and menacing notes of Prokofiev’s 6th Symphony and Shostakovich’s 11th....
Categories Propaganda/Subversion
July 30, 2015

Obama Administration plans N. Korea human rights push at U.N., but is it too late?

Had you asked me two months ago how a deal between the Obama Administration and Iran would affect North Korea policy, I’d have answered that it would preoccupy Congress through September, and that after that, things would pick right up where they left off. How wrong I was. The Iran deal continues to dim the odds of another Agreed Framework with North Korea by drawing so many unflattering comparisons to the 1994 Agreed Framework as to destroy its legacy. Republicans...
Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
July 29, 2015

These songs of freedom

If Kim Jong-Un’s twenty-something year-old little sister really has taken control of the manufacture of North Korea’s production of propaganda and mythology, she has begun her work with a powerful tacit admission: the state her brother leads has much in common with the feudal oligarchs past generations of North Koreans sang about overthrowing. In an attempt to root out elements that can lead to potential political instabilities in the country, North Korea is stepping up music censorship and scrapping all cassette tapes and...
Categories Propaganda/Subversion
July 29, 2015

Must read: Jieun Baek on how North Koreans beat the border blockade

Admittedly, Baek’s explanation of the North Korea’s guerrilla banking system isn’t the first I’ve read, it’s only the best: The next time Kevin talks to his mother, she asks him for $1,000. She gives Kevin a phone number. When he hangs up after about a minute, Kevin then calls that number and tells the stranger on the line that he got a call from someone (he uses a pseudonym to protect his mother’s identity). Every time, the phone number is...
Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Health & Disease/Subversion
July 27, 2015

House, Senate will both hold hearings on North Korea policy this week* (updated)

If you ask senior Obama Administration officials about the policy of “strategic patience” with North Korea today, they will bristle and recast it as something else, but this wasn’t the case in 2010, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained her policy in a visit to Seoul: “What we’re focused on is changing North Korean behavior,” one senior U.S. official said. “We are not focused on getting back to the table.” “We recognize that diplomacy, some form of diplomacy with North Korea, is inevitable...
Categories U.S. Politics/Washington Views
July 24, 2015

Treasury designates Singaporean shipping company for N. Korea weapons trade, but what about the Bank of China?

More than two years after the North Korean merchant vessel Chong Chon Gang was caught trying to sneak a shipment of Cuban MiGs and missiles through the Panama canal hidden under 200,000 sacks of sugar, the Treasury Department has, slowly and slightly, expanded its sanctions against the shipping companies involved in the incident. Yesterday afternoon, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Singapore-based Senat Shipping and its Director, Leonard Lai a/k/a Yong Chian Lai, a Singaporean national. It also blocked...
Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
July 23, 2015

That time in 2013 when 100 N. Korean women staged a walkout at a prison uniform factory

Fittingly, our story begins with a Chinese textile company that made prison uniforms. We don’t ordinarily think of Chinese prison-garment workers as overpaid, but then, some North Korean officials paid them a visit. The officials knew of a derelict factory in the extreme northeast of the workers’ paradise, where women would work 12 hours a day for 30 kilograms of rice a month. For the women, this was still a good wage, especially compared to any wage that might be paid in...
Categories China & Korea/Resistance
July 22, 2015

U.N. must confront the political causes of North Korea’s food crisis

In North Korea, the land of suspended disbelief, an almost unbroken twenty-year series of meteorological miracles has bounded droughts and floods within the blighted land between the DMZ and the Yalu River each year, without having once caused a famine or food crisis in South Korea. For a few months this year, a serious drought threatened to be the worst-ever again, until rains came and eased conditions in most parts of the country. North Koreans can still look forward to a hard year...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Resistance
July 21, 2015

“The first words she said were, ‘let’s die together.’ But I was still happy.”

National Geographic recounts the story of Eunsun Kim, who survived the Great Famine and a dangerous journey from North Korea to the South: Many people died because of malnutrition, including my grandparents. In 1997, my father passed away too. My mom sold or bartered everything from our apartment until we had nothing left. So she decided to go to the city to search for food. She left me at home, but took my older sister who’s two-years-older than me. She said...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Trafficking/Refugees
July 20, 2015

The courage of Hyeonseo Lee: “I am human also. I am scared.”

Last Wednesday, Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation hosted and moderated an event called “Confronting the Human Rights Challenge in North Korea.” Hyeonseo Lee, author of “The Girl With Seven Names,” was the keynote speaker. Lee spoke in accented, but clear English of the indoctrination she received as a child, of the revelations that broke the hold of the state’s propaganda over her, of her flight from North Korea, and of her resettlement in South Korea. (Later, we learn that Lee also speaks fluent Chinese;...
Categories Deprogramming/Refugees/Terrorism (NK)
July 17, 2015

U.N. asks China why it sent 29 refugees, including a 1 year-old baby, to North Korea

The U.N. has requested Beijing for an explanation of its decision to repatriate 29 North Korean defectors last August, and of their current status in North Korea. [….] The U.N. Commission of Inquiry is particularly concerned about the status of human-trafficking victims and illegal immigrants in China, and the persecution or torture, as well as the long detentions that await returnees in North Korea, South Korean outlet No Cut News reported. North Korean women also are vulnerable to forced abortions...
Categories China/Refugees
July 16, 2015

Does the Iran deal make a North Korea deal more likely? Here are six reasons why it doesn’t.

The Korean press today is filled with analysis of how the Iran deal could affect North Korea policy. China, which has long sought what would amount to de facto recognition of North Korea as a nuclear state, thinks the Iran deal is a swell model for a deal with North Korea, which almost certainly means that China sees the Iran deal as a capitulation. State itself is saying it’s ready for “authentic, credible” negotiations with Pyongyang, although State’s operational definitions of “authentic”...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy