October 16, 2012

Reform Watch: North Korea can now afford to bury its orphans in Snoopy T-shirts

As a vibrant market economy arises from an underdeveloped one, it does not lift all boats as a rising tide would.  Some get very rich fast, and some stay very poor.  Such periods of rapid development are politically risky times, as uneducated masses are drawn away from their hardscrabble farm lives and packed into factory dormitories, slums, and shanty towns in the cities.  Those places become hothouses of envy and radicalism that can bring down the political systems in which...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
October 15, 2012

New satellite imagery shows few changes at Camp 22

Those of us who watch North Korea spend a lot of time speculating, either because the truth is unknowable or because it’s not of interest to many of those who report the news for a living, or even to most of the top executives of the human rights industry. But when I read the reports of Camp 22’s closure, I decided not to settle for speculation this time.  These reports were simply too horrible, and too consequential, to be left at...
Categories Anju Links/The Camps
October 11, 2012

Open Sources, October 11, 2012

WHAT? STATE’S EAST ASIA BUREAU COLLABORATING WITH CHINESE OFFICIALS who unjustly imprison and torture a U.S. citizen? Say it aint so. ————————————- DON’T TELL ME SANCTIONS CAN’T WORK; they’re certainly exceeding my expectations in Iran. Iran, unlike North Korea, has a functioning market economy. That means that its economy has more international exposure, but also that it’s more difficult to isolate. And yet we seem to have had enough success to threaten the stability of its regime. ————————————- AS YE...
Categories Anju Links
October 11, 2012

Yes, even AP reporters can do good reporting from North Korea

Finally.  An AP reporter goes to North Korea and puts the showpieces of Pyongyang into the context of how people in the rest of North Korea live.  Naturally, the reporter is Tim Sullivan. There are no nightspots here, no modern apartment complexes, no electricity except for a few hours every evening. The shelves in most stores are noticeably half-empty, and dirt sidestreets lead to clusters of small houses, many little more than shacks, with bulging walls and broken roofs. It...
Categories AP Watch
October 9, 2012

Conference on North Korean political prison camps and refugees, this Friday in Los Angeles

This Friday, the Museum of Tolerance, in cooperation with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Liberty in North Korea and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, will host a conference on human rights in North Korea. According to the agenda flyer, which you can see at this link, “The event will conclude with a book signing by Melanie Kirkpatrick (author of Escape from North Korea, The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad), Blaine Harden (author of Escape from Camp 14),...
Categories Anju Links/Refugees/The Camps
October 6, 2012

North Korean soldier frags 2 officers, defects across DMZ

Reuters reports: A North Korean soldier killed two of his officers before crossing the heavily mined border into South Korea on Saturday, South Korea’s defence ministry and media reports said.  [….] Local media quoted a statement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying the North Korean soldier crossed the western section of the border at around noon. The North Korean claimed that he shot dead his platoon and squad chiefs while on guard duty shortly before his border crossing, according to the reports. The unnamed defector was being questioned by...
Categories NK Military
October 5, 2012

Open Sources, October 5, 2012

WHILE 30,000 STARVED IN CAMP 22: Saenuri Party lawmaker Yoon Sang-hyun, a member of the National Assembly`s foreign affairs, trade and unification committee, released Wednesday an analysis of closed trade data between North Korea and China, saying the North`s imports of luxury goods via Chinese customs reached 446.17 million U.S. dollars in 2010 and 584.82 million dollars last year. The figure was 272.14 million dollars in 2008 and 322.53 million dollars in 2009. Kim Jong Un debuted in the Stalinist...
Categories Anju Links
October 4, 2012

Open Sources, October 4, 2012

YAWN:  North Korea goes to the U.N., an organization it ought to have been expelled from a decade ago, and threatens nuclear war. ———————————————- IN IRAN, JOURNALISM IMITATES PARODY, but we’ve known the same about North Korea for a while now, haven’t we? ———————————————- DEATH STAR INDEED:  The Daily Mail piles on the empty shell that is the Ryugyong Hotel.  If the reports about Camp 22’s liquidation are correct, the regime was choosing to starve the prisoners at the same time it was also choosing...
Categories Anju Links
October 3, 2012

The Liquidation of Camp 22

I have updated the Camp 22 page to reflect the latest reports of its closure. According to one of those reports, out of an estimated 2010 population of 30,000 prisoners, all but 3,000 were starved to death and burned to ashes in a crematorium. The latter detail comes from a Korean-language Radion Free Asia report that reports details the Daily NK didn’t, so it suggests multiple sourcing. The people I’ve reached out to in the last few days sound convinced...
Categories The Camps
October 2, 2012

North Korean Reform Watch 7

BURIED WITHIN THIS DAILY NK REPORT about the rumored merger of multiple regime-owned businesses was this dire statement: “At the time of writing, the price of rice has reached an outlandish 6700 won/kg even in Pyongyang itself, while also arriving at 7000 won in Onsung County and 6500 won in Hyesan, putting those people without foreign currency in a very difficult situation.” It’s remarkable how similar the Pyongyang price is to the prices in Onsung and Hyesan, two of North...
Categories Anju Links
October 1, 2012

Open Sources: October 1, 2012

STEPHAN HAGGARD REVIEWS MELANIE KIRKPATRICK’S “ESCAPE FROM NORTH KOREA:” Haggard’s intellectual honesty holds my respect despite all we disagree about, but when he points out that Kirkpatrick has little “patience for engagement,” and considering the results engagement has achieved over the last two decades, it’s not Kirkpatrick’s views that are really questionable on that point. My own views on Kirkpatrick’s book ought to be suspect, too: once you’ve read the Title of Chapter 17 you’ll see that how hard it’s...
Categories Anju Links
September 27, 2012

Open Sources, September 27, 2012: AP Watch Special Edition

MY MY, LOOK WHAT slipped out of the memory hole. Double plus odd. ——————————————– SO THIS POST SEEMS TO HAVE TRIGGERED a Twitter skirmish between reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post on one side, and the AP on the other. It all starts when the NYT’s Hiroko Tabuchi, retweeting my post, says, “Time-old trap: offer of access -> controlled info,” and then tweets that another Jean H. Lee story “does read a bit like KNCA .....
Categories AP Watch
September 25, 2012

North Korean Reform Watch 6

We don’t know how extensive North Korea’s agricultural reforms are meant to be, but we do know that North Korea wants us to think that it’s instituting big reforms in its agricultural sector, because it took the AP’s Jean Lee on a show tour of a collective where the “farmers” were primed to tell her it was so. Is it too cynical of me to tend to disbelieve any fact that North Korea wants me to believe is true? Props...
Categories AP Watch/Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
September 24, 2012

Washington Post report exposes AP’s North Korea disinformation

Let’s take stock of what the AP has accomplished in the year-plus since it announced those agreements with North Korea — the ones it still hasn’t disclosed — to open a bureau in Pyongyang.  It disseminated at least one faked photo globally; co-sponsored a Kim Il Sung propaganda exhibition in Manhattan with North Korea’s official “news” service; invited two North Korean propagandists into its news team; and provided us a stream of leash-and-collar journalism that repackages North Korean propaganda with...
Categories AP Watch
September 20, 2012

North Korean human rights film festival in Seoul

?? ????? ???????.   NKnet’s second North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival in Seoul on September 20-21, 2012. There will be new films, documentaries, animation, and commercially made films. This year’s films are from South Korea, Japan, and the US, and the festival’s themes are: • Journey To Freedom & Human Rights (Refugees) / ??? ??? ?? ?? (??? ??) • Those Who Have Not Returned (Abductees) / ???? ?? ??? (???) • Get Rid of the Barbed Wire (Political...
Categories Anju Links
September 19, 2012

House will hold hearing on N. Korea human rights this morning

Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC) Hearing  North Korea: Ongoing Human Rights Violations in an Era of Change Wednesday, September 19, 2012 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM 340 Cannon House Office Building Please join the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission for a hearing on the status of human rights in North Korea. Following the death of Kim Jong-Il, his son, Kim Jong-Un, has taken over as the leader of North Korea.  Despite the transition of power, a majority of North Korean...
Categories Anju Links