Monthly Archives: July 2015

Diplomats state international pressure the key to change in North Korea

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Maintaining international pressure on Pyongyang is crucial in moving North Korea to improve its behavior and to better human rights conditions inside its borders, diplomats from the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan said at a Heritage Foundation forum this past week.

Speaking at the Washington, D.C., event, Ahn Ho-young, South Korea’s ambassador to the United States, said, “Much of the leverage is held by China” in addition to the three allies and Russia.

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea “shocked the international conscience,” Ahn said, when it released its report on conditions there in February 2014. He added that only 17 of the 108 non-aligned nations in the United Nations supported Pyongyang by not approving the report’s recommendations for inspections, further isolating the regime diplomatically.

U.N. inspectors “need to be given access to North Korea” to understand how dire the situation is,” Sasae said. International concerns about the regime’s actions “are not only limited to nuclear and missile issues.”

[USNI]

To date Kim Jong Un has executed 70 officials

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has executed an estimated 70 officials since taking power in late 2011 in a “reign of terror” that far exceeds the bloodshed of his dictator father’s early rule, South Korean officials said Thursday.

An official from South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, who refused to be named, citing office rules, confirmed that the spy agency believes the younger Kim has executed about 70 officials but wouldn’t reveal how it obtained the information.

Experts say Kim could be using fear to solidify his leadership, but those efforts could fail if he doesn’t improve the country’s shattered economy.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, at a forum in Seoul, compared Kim Jong Un’s 70 executions with those of his late father, Kim Jong Il, who he said executed about 10 officials during his first years in power.

High-level government purges have a long history in North Korea. To strengthen his power, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, removed pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions within the senior leadership in the years after the 1950-53 Korean War. The high-ranking victims included Pak Hon Yong, formerly the vice chairman of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea and the country’s foreign minister, who was executed in 1955 after being accused of spying for the United States.

 [AP]

UNICEF: Drought puts North Korean children’s lives at risk

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A severe drought in North Korea is putting the lives of children at risk and many are in serious danger of disease and malnutrition, the U.N. children’s agency said on Wednesday.

UNICEF said in a statement that there had been in a sharp increase in cases of diarrhoea among children in drought-affected areas, as access to safe drinking water and sanitation was severely compromised. “Lack of rain reduces access to clean water and undermines effective hygiene, putting children’s lives at risk,” UNICEF Regional Director Daniel Toole said.

The North says it is experiencing its worst drought in a century, with some of its main farming regions particularly hard hit.

The country’s large number of malnourished children – as many as one in four children according to a 2012 study – heightens concerns about the impact of drought, UNICEF said. “These children are particularly vulnerable, because children who are malnourished have less resilience to water-borne illness and disease,” the agency said.

Experts said that despite the severity of the drought, the North’s fledgling markets and private farm plots should provide a buffer against a famine of the sort that devastated the country in the 1990s.

[Reuters]

Defector lawmaker urges Seoul to stand firm with North Korea

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A North Korean elite-turned-South Korean lawmaker, Rep. Cho Myung-chul of the ruling Saenuri Party, has insisted Seoul must be firm and patient in dealing with Pyongyang, asserting that Seoul must avoid talking for the sake of talking, or giving unilateral concessions.

“The North refuses to apologize for the 2010 Cheonan sinking and the 2010 Yeonpyeongdo Island shelling,” Cho told the Korea Herald, touching on the March 2010 sinking of the South Korean naval ship Cheonan and the North’s November 2010 shelling of a South Korean island. “If we forgive them again and just forget about it, nothing will come of it. How can we just forgive them, when they kill our young men left and right, whenever they want?” the first-term lawmaker said.

Cho also urged Seoul’s National Assembly to pass a human rights bill aiming to improve the situation in the North as soon as possible. The bill has been stalled in the Assembly since 2005. “The North is a country where freedom is absolutely absent,” the lawmaker said. “I know this because I’ve been there, and lived there.”

Cho, 56, is a former professor of economics at Kim Il Sung University, the North’s top school. Cho defected to the South in 1994 while serving as an exchange professor in China, leaving his parents, his brothers, a wife and children in the North. Cho said his frustration with the North’s repressive government led him to come to the South. “I felt that if I, a person from one of the most prestigious families in the North, defected, I would be able to shock the government’s leadership. My defection was a form of protest.”

[The Korea Herald]

Information the most powerful weapon against North Korea

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Beijing has the power to dramatically alter the course of history in North Korea. Because of this, the west needs to put pressure on both capitals and create a new vector of power: information.

New platforms and forms of communication are necessary to reverse a campaign of brainwashing that dates back three generations. Pirate videos, thumb-drives and smuggled phones spread the truth, that in the outside world, people lives unimaginably better lives than they do inside North Korea. Critics of the state rely on hot-air balloons to carry anti-regime information across the border, but it’s not enough.

Interviews with defectors reveal that many listen to news from shortwave radios, despite fear of severe punishment, and despite the government’s best efforts to isolate its population.

The BBC, hard-pressed as it is, must seriously consider broadcasting into North Korea. According to BBC internal estimates a Korean service would cost around £1m a year to run and a shortwave transmitter would cost about £300,000 a year. North citizens need to understand more about the true working of their own country.

This regime, that looks so strong, is weaker than you think.

[Excerpts from John Sweeney’s book “North Korea Undercover”, as published in The Guardian]

Defector to reveal human experiments taking place in North Korea

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A North Korean scientist has defected to Finland, and he may have evidence that his native country has been conducting ghastly experiments on humans involving chemical weapons, reports the South’s Yonhap News Agency.

The scientist is identified only as a 47-year-old named Lee who worked at a facility in Ganggye near the Chinese border. He reportedly managed to escape via the Philippines last month, carrying with him a storage drive loaded with information on the North’s human experiments.

He is expected to testify before the European parliament this month. “His ostensible reason for defection is that he felt skeptical about his research,” says Yonhap’s source.

“We have been told similar stories in the past that human experiments are carried out in prison camps,” says the director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, per the Independent.

In fact, a North Korean officer who defected in the 1990s recounted biological and chemical warfare tests on victims including mentally and physically disabled children, reports the Telegraph. “We watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies,” he said in an interview last year. “I saw it with my own eyes.” No actual evidence of such tests has emerged, but this latest defection could change that.

North Korea: Life in a brainwashed society

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A North Korea defector, Hyeonseo Lee, has revealed in a new book how she was forced to watch her first execution at the age of seven.

Lee and her classmates grew up convinced they lived in the ‘greatest nation on earth’ run by a benevolent god-like leader whom they loved in the way many children love Santa Claus. It wasn’t until she left North Korea at the age of 17 that she began to discover the full horror of the government that had fed her propaganda since birth.

All family life took place beneath the obligatory portraits of North Korea’s revered founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il which hung in every home. Failure to clean and look after them was a punishable offence. At supper Lee had to thank ‘Respected Father Leader Kim Il-sung’ for her food before she could pick up her chopsticks.

The faintest hint of political disloyalty was enough to make an entire family – grandparents, parents and children – disappear. ‘Their house would be roped off; they’d be taken away in a truck at night, and not seen again,’ she says.

Public executions were used as a way to keep everyone in line. After Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994 she recalls a spate of executions of people who had not mourned sufficiently. Lee witnessed her first execution at seven.

In the mid-1990s North Korea suffered a famine which killed an estimated one million people. Lee’s first inkling of the crisis came when her mother showed her a letter from a colleague’s sister living in a neighboring province. “By the time you read this the five of us will no longer exist in this world,” it read, explaining that the family were lying on the floor waiting to die after not eating for weeks.

Lee, who still believed she lived in the world’s most prosperous country, was stunned. A few days later she came across a skeletal young mother lying in the street with a baby in her arms. She was close to death, but no one stopped.

Beggars and vagrant children began to appear in the town and corpses turned up in the river. ‘The smell of decomposing bodies was everywhere,’ Lee said, speaking at her book launch in London.

In her book she describes taking a train through a ‘landscape of hell’ to visit a relative. She saw people roaming the countryside ‘like living dead’. In the city of Hamhung she recalled people ‘hallucinating from hunger’ and ‘falling dead in the street’.

The government blamed the famine on US sanctions, but she later learnt it had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union which had been subsidizing North Korea with food and fuel.

[Daily Mail]

North Korean defector: Leaving North Korea is like leaving another universe

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Hyeonseo Lee left North Korea at the age of 17 and began to discover the propaganda the government had fed her since birth.

In a memoir published in London on Thursday, Lee gives a rare insight into the bizarre and brutal reality of daily life in the world’s most secretive state. “Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe,” she writes in The Girl With Seven Names.

Lee, now a human rights campaigner living in South Korea, grew up in Hyesan next to the Chinese border. Her family was well regarded and her father’s job in the military meant they were not short of food. As Lee entered her teens, however, her world was turned upside down when her father was arrested by the secret police. He was later released into a hospital. He had been badly beaten and died soon afterwards. The circumstances remain unclear.

One winter night in 1997 she slipped out of the house and crossed the narrow stretch of frozen river to China. But China was not safe either. Lee lived in fear of being unmasked and deported back to North Korea, where she would have been imprisoned or even killed.

To survive she changed her name numerous times – hence the book’s title. She had many close shaves: she narrowly escaped an arranged marriage, almost became enslaved in a brothel, was kidnapped by a gang of criminals and caught and interrogated by police.

After years on the run she reached South Korea where North Koreans are given asylum. But she missed her family desperately. In a daring mission she returned to the North Korean border to rescue her mother and brother and guide them 2,000 miles through China into Laos and from there to South Korea – a journey beset by disaster from start to finish.

[Reuters]

Young North Korean defectors now Pyongyang Poster Children

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A CNN crew led by Will Ripley met several North Koreans Pyongyang intent on defending their country’s tarnished human rights record. As is normal procedure, the team was given no advance notice about what or who they would be able to film before they arrived in the capital. On the first morning, they were led into the same meeting room at the Koryo Hotel, where most visiting foreigners stay.

In 2013, these youngsters had been caught on the Laos-China border as they attempted to head for South Korea. Returned to North Korea, the world feared for their safety at the hands of a state that is usually merciless when it comes to defectors they regard as traitors.

But instead of being punished, they told CNN they received special treatment, extra tuition to make up for three years of missed schooling while on the run, as well as places in the best educational establishments in the Pyongyang — poster children for the state’s “benevolence and forgiveness.”

While there was no way to confirm how they were chosen to speak, the highly secretive state seems keen to get its point of view across when it comes to its rights conduct — it vehemently rejected claims in a United Nations report that it “terrorizes” its own citizens.

[CNN]