Monthly Archives: November 2015

Kim Jong-un spotted in Chicago?

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A photo of North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un casually riding a train in Chicago?

The photograph, posted on Imgur by a commuter, shows the lookalike playing on his phone, looking a bit bored despite being in the land of the free!

While the man’s trademark haircut and grey suit seemed to suggest he was the real deal, commenters online were quick to point out that he has been seen in the area plenty of times before – and is actually a student at the University of Illinois.

Minyong Kim dresses up as the North Korean tyrant and is often seen partying at bars and playing basketball while impersonating him.

While he loves pretending to be Kim Jong-un, Kim’s parents are less keen because of worsening relations between South Korea – where he is from – and North Korea.

‘My parents are kind of worrying I might be assassinated or kidnapped,’ he said.

He has a reputation among students at the University of Illinois and is regularly stopped for selfies on nights out. Kim said: “College life is very hard and stressful. If people can laugh for a while for 10 seconds, I’ll be happy with it.”

[Daily Mail]

Suicide rates high amongst North Korean defectors

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Statistics gathered in South Korea indicate that a startling number of defectors from North Korea end up taking their own lives. This is the darker side to the stories of those who flee their homeland.

Over the past ten years, 6% to 7% of defectors who’ve died have been suicides.

But this year, there’s been a big rise. According to the ministry, 14% of deaths among defectors have been suicides.

There are a number of factors involved. One is that the home they’ve left is close but unreachable. Another is that their new economic reality can be very different from the glamorized life portrayed in the South Korean soap operas smuggled into the North.

Defectors get three months’ training when they arrive but critics of the system say that’s not enough to learn new skills. Some Christian groups provide vocational training and say that what works best is training in simple but useful skills like making coffee to serve in a cafe.

[BBC]

Kenneth Bae, detained 2 years in North Korea, releasing book

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Kenneth Bae, a U.S. citizen who was detained in North Korea for two years before his release last November, plans to tell his story in a book. “Not Forgotten: The True Story of My Imprisonment in North Korea” will be released next spring.

Bae, a Christian missionary and pastor from the Seattle area, moved to China in 2006. He began leading tours to North Korea in 2010. He was arrested in 2012 while leading a tour group to a special economic zone and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for alleged anti-government activities.

Bae suffered medical issues in detention. He was freed along with one other American detainee after a mission to the reclusive Communist country by James Clapper, the top U.S. intelligence official.

[SFGate]

Charity sneaking spy equipment into North Korea endangers Christians worldwide

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Was a Christian non-governmental organization funded by the Pentagon, with Congress fully briefed on the plan, used to smuggle spy equipment into North Korea?

The story goes something like this: in 2004 the Pentagon, fired up by the need to “protect the country” post 9/11, was keen on muscling in on the CIA’s virtual monopoly on strategic intelligence collection, including on North Korea.

[Devised was] a scheme to smuggle electronic monitoring equipment and other spyware into top priority target North Korea. … A religious charity called Humanitarian International Services Group (HISG) was developed [to enable] the smuggling of monitoring equipment into North Korea under cover of shipments of used clothing.

The HISG charity was funded by the Pentagon to the tune of an estimated $15 million during the course of the operation. In a test run the HISG charity managed to successfully conceal a large number of Bibles in a hidden compartment at the bottom of a shipping container topped up with used winter clothing, a highly prized commodity for starving and freezing North Koreans.

It is reported that short wave radios and some electronic devices intended to monitor nuclear programs as well as interfere with North Korean military communications were indeed smuggled into the country by unwitting Christian missionaries, aid workers, and Chinese smugglers, but whether they provided any critical intelligence is unclear. The operation continued to run during the Obama administration, finally winding down in 2013. While it is certain that George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew of and approved the operation, it is not known if either the Bush or Obama White Houses had explicit knowledge of it.

The United States government does in fact impose a ban on recruiting certain categories of individuals as spies. Clergymen are off limits partly for ethical reasons but more because the exposure of such a relationship would be devastating both to the religious organization itself and to the United States government. Use of the U.S. taxpayer-funded Peace Corps is also banned because exploiting it would potentially turn its volunteers into targets for terrorists.

[Read full American Conservative article by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer]

North Korea says action by U.S. could lead to peace

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TIME reports North Korea saying the United States needs to end its “nuclear-based threats and blackmail” and respond to the North’s recent diplomatic overture to formally end the decades-old Korean conflict.

Speaking in an interview Tuesday in London with Associated Press Television News, senior North Korean Foreign Ministry official Jong Tong Hak said a permanent peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula first requires a North Korean-U.S. agreement.

Discussing North Korea’s view of the root cause of tensions, he blamed what he described as “the U.S. government’s decades of hostile policies against the DPRK and its endless nuclear-based threats, blackmail and manipulative schemes.” He said Washington provides “strategic nuclear weapons” to South Korea, “in other words the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers it always pushes (toward the DPRK) and the strategic nuclear bombers it always has flying in the skies above the southern part of the Korean Peninsula.”

Jong said a compromise to break the impasse requires decisive action by Washington. “The issue of signing a peace treaty between the DPRK and the United States depends on the policy determinations of the U.S. administration,” he said, adding that Washington must “make a policy decision to respect our republic’s sovereignty and end the decades-long hostility between the DPRK and the U.S. to guarantee peace in the Korean Peninsula.”

The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, is mulling whether North Korea should be designated a state sponsor of terrorism.

Capitalist narrative integrated into North Korean society

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North Korean propaganda is built on a popular anti-capitalist narrative – Americans are evil imperialists and the great leader Kim Jong-un is celebrated for his devotion to the masses.

But since the 1990s the country has cautiously welcomed foreign business, with one unintended consequence: citizens have started to talk capitalism. Where once there were “management secretaries” and “operations”, now talk of “bosses” and “companies” has crept into day-to-day parlance. This vocabulary was once feared as the antithesis of socialist principles.

For years private ownership was banned in North Korea. Companies were non-existent and this meant there were no bosses. But despite technically still being banned, de facto private operations have become ubiquitous.

Today, most people refer to a boss as someone who works with foreigners, such as the Chinese, to earn money. In the 1990s, as many faced starvation it was these bosses who eventually found a way to bring food and opportunity to those in need. That’s why the word is now infused with a sense of respect and loyalty. It reflects the new status, jobs and skills that people aspire to.

Unlike most aspects of life in North Korea, one’s ability to shoot up through the company ranks is less contingent on background: even those with poor songbun, a caste system delineated by family background and political loyalty, can be a boss. Those who failed to get into the Workers’ Party – once the preferred method to secure favorable living conditions – have been known to gain the title. Even former prisoners of re-education camps can be bosses.

 

Joint Letter to UN Security Council re North Korean human rights

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Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a number of other co-signers * are urging the UN Security Council to hold another formal session, prior to the end of 2015, on the human rights situation in North Korea.

Excerpts of the letter:
As you know, the UN Human Rights Council-mandated Commission of Inquiry on the human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) concluded that “the long-standing and ongoing patterns of systematic and widespread violations” of human rights in the DPRK “meet the high threshold for proof of crimes against humanity.” The commission found that the nature, scale, and gravity of these abuses “reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

The commission concluded that the DPRK’s ongoing “open defiance of the United Nations makes this a case where decisive, yet carefully targeted action should be taken by the Security Council in support of the ongoing efforts of the remainder of the United Nations system.”

The human rights situation in the DPRK remains dire. In his most recent report to the UN General Assembly, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK concluded that “grave violations continue to be committed on a large scale and particularly affect the most vulnerable groups.” The Special Rapporteur further called on the international community to “step up efforts to protect the population” of the DPRK and “hold the government accountable for those gross violations.”

In our view, it is critical that the UN Security Council hold another formal session on the situation in the DPRK this year. International pressure remains a critical avenue to press the DPRK to change. It is no coincidence that last year’s unprecedented engagement by the DPRK at the UN Human Rights Council and at the UN General Assembly followed concerted international attention to its human rights record.

[Co-signors include Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (NKHR), Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea (ICNK), International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights]