Monthly Archives: June 2015

A so-called normal childhood in North Korea

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If such a thing as a normal childhood can be had in North Korea, Joseph Kim had it. He lived with his father, mother and older sister in Hoeryong. At the end of each day, the neighborhood children would gather around the television and gorge themselves on popcorn and candy.

When Kim was nearly 4-years-old, his father, a respected member of the Workers’ Party of Korea, was so successful that he was able to build a house for his young family. It was 1994.

As he writes in his new memoir, Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Kim and his family believed that they wanted for nothing.

What Kim’s family did not know was that Hoeryong was, and remains, home to a maximum-security concentration camp, one of six the country is known to run.

Every North Korean was to have a framed picture of Kim Il-sung and his wife in their homes. “You could be sent to a prison camp for allowing dirt to gather on Kim Il-sung’s portrait, or for putting it behind cracked glass,” Kim writes.

The children learned about America, mainly through illustrations. Teachers showed their students drawings of American soldiers spearing pregnant North Korean women with bayonets and marching them into gas chambers.

“I held my breath,” Kim writes, “as the teachers explained that Americans had come to our country to massacre Koreans for no other reason than they liked to … the only people who stopped the Americans from coming to my country, our teachers said, were Kim Il-sung and the soldiers of North Korea.”

[News.com/au]

New defense minister for North Korea?

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North Korea may have selected a new defense minister following the presumed execution of former office holder Hyon Yong Chol, according to a new report Friday.

A new video broadcast by North Korea’s government-run media shows Gen. Pak Yong-Sik saluting Kim during a visit, a sign that he may have been promoted to the position. Hyon, the former minister, has been removed from all state videos in the month since his death.

If Pak has been promoted, his path to the minister position bears a resemblance to Hyon’s, who took on the role of minister in June after a promotion to four-star general, similar to Pak. He was the fourth person to take on the roll in two-and-a-half years.

Media reports vary on when Hyon was executed. The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal both reported that Hyon was killed in October 2014, while the BBC, CNN and the Korea Herald reported it occurred in April of this year.

In the three years since Kim Jong Un became the leader of the country, there have been many changes in  government staff. Dozens of officials have reportedly been executed under Kim, including an uncle who, like Hyon, was executed for treason.

[International Business Times]

North Korean defector opens about being gay

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When North Korean defector Jang Yeong-jin arrived in South Korea in 1997, officials debriefed him for five months but still hesitated to release him. They had one crucial question unanswered: Why did Mr. Jang decide to risk crossing the heavily armed border between the two Koreas?

“I was too embarrassed to confess that I came here because I felt no sexual attraction to my wife,” Mr. Jang said. “I couldn’t explain what it was that bothered me so much, made my life so miserable in North Korea, because I didn’t know until after I arrived here that I was a gay, or even what homosexuality was.”

Mr. Jang, 55, is the only known openly gay defector from North Korea living in the South. In late April, Mr. Jang published an autobiographical novel, “A Mark of Red Honor.” In the book and during a recent interview, he described his experiences as a gay man growing up in the totalitarian North, where the government maintains that homosexuality does not exist because people there live with a “sound mentality and good morals.” His struggle continued even in the capitalist South, where he said he felt like a “double alien”: a North Korean refugee who was also gay.

“In North Korea, no ordinary people conceptually understand what homosexuality is,” said Joo Sung-ha, who attended the elite Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in the 1990s and now works as a reporter for the mass-circulation South Korean daily Dong-A Ilbo. “In my university, only half the students may have heard of the word. Even then, it was always treated as some strange, vague mental illness afflicting subhumans, only found in the depraved West.”

While North Korea has no laws explicitly prohibiting same-sex relationships, it is not shy about expressing its homophobia. Last year, for example, it said that Michael D. Kirby, a former Australian judge who led a United Nations investigation of human rights abuses in the country, was “a disgusting old lecher with a 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality.”

Mr. Jang said he never heard of homosexuality while growing up in Chongjin on the eastern coast of North Korea. “Most gay men in the North end up marrying whether they like it or not, because that’s the only way they know,” Mr. Jang said. “On the first night of my marriage, I thought of Seon-cheol and could not lay a finger on my wife.”

In the winter of 1996, he swam across an icy river into China. After looking in vain for 13 months for a passage to South Korea, he slipped back into the North and crawled cross the border into the South in 1997. He was one of only a handful of defectors to make it across the mine-strewn frontier. His defection made headlines.

[The New York Times]

Whispers of dissent and waning loyalty to Kim Jong-un

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The North Korean regime has always relied on public loyalty to the ruling Kim dynasty to maintain its totalitarian grip on power. But following a series of apparent high-profile executions, sources within the country suggest that cracks are beginning to show amid a growing willingness to express dissatisfaction with Kim Jong-un’s leadership.

Criticism of the alleged recent execution of the defence chief, Hyon Yong-chol, has been circulating in the capital, sources say, although it is impossible to verify these claims independently.

“Kim’s popularity among citizens has rapidly declined,” a woman from South Pyongyan province, who asked to remain anonymous, said during a phone conversation on 31 May. “People say that considering the fact that Kim had executed dozens of high-ranking officials within the few years since coming to power, ‘there’s no hope left’.”

Criticism of Kim, who succeeded his father Kim Jong-il in 2011, has spread to other regions of the country, she says, with the common complaint being that the younger Kim is “even worse than his father”.

Another source in North Pyongyan confirmed reports of mounting criticism, adding that unlike during the Kim Jong-il era: “officials in rural regions and security agents are far more inclined to air grievances more publicly regarding the leadership. Not only residents but even party cadres sneer when they see footage broadcast idolising the leader,” he claimed. “Many just say, ‘this sucks’, and switch off the TV.”

[The Guardian]

A suggestion that US should offer to talk with North Korea

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[Excerpts of a Forbes Opinion piece by Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan.]

As usual, no one knows what is going on in Pyongyang. Its internal politics appears to be bloodier than usual. Ironically, this might provide an opportunity for Washington to initiate talks over a more open bilateral relationship.

The latest rumor is that young dictator Kim Jong-un had his defense minister executed with anti-aircraft fire for disrespectful conduct, including falling asleep in meetings. If Hyon Yong-chol was killed quickly and unexpectedly, it probably wasn’t for dozing off, even in front of the new strongman. More likely the military man was plotting, or at least feared to be plotting, against the North’s leadership.

There has been striking turnover among party and military officials, including multiple appointments for some positions, since Kim Jong-un took over after his father’s death in December 2011. Half of the top 218 officials have been changed, according to the NIS. Even more dramatic was the arrest and execution of Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-taek, another “regent” seen as the regime number two, in December 2013. He was charged with treason, among other offenses, and his blood relatives were said to have been later executed as well.

In April the NIS reported that so far this year 15 high ranking North Korean officials, including an economist whose advice Kim Jong-un disliked, had been executed. Overall some 70 top apparatchiks and more than 400 lower level officials apparently have been killed this year.

This brutality towards the power elite sets Kim apart from his father and grandfather. While Kim Jong-un’s apparent penchant for executions may reflect a peculiarly sadistic nature, it more likely grows out of insecurity. Continuing turnover and executions after more than four years in charge suggests that Kim is not, or at least does not see himself, as yet secure.

Recent events suggest that something unusual is going on in that normally abnormal place.Kim’s bloody rule offers at least a possibility of a shift within the ruling elite. A clear American willingness to reward a more reform-minded government might aid the least bad actors in any power struggle. The Kim regime likely would not reject a process seeming to offer the respect it long has craved. Proposing talks and suggesting rewards would be the best response to an uncertain situation. Someday Pyongyang will change. Engagement is the best way to prepare for that day.

[Read full article]