Monthly Archives: September 2016

China has a new detention center for North Korean refugees

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China appears to have built a new detention center near the North Korea border, according to an exclusive South Korea press report on Tuesday.

The camp, according to a China-based source who spoke to Newsis on the condition of anonymity, was built to keep arrested North Korean refugees in China. North Korean defectors are apparently kept at the facility until they are repatriated to the North, according to the source.

Photographs of the camp, located near the Chinese city of Tumen, Jilin Province, show a blue building with an arched roof. Facilities include the blue building, a management office and a watchtower next to the detention center.

The status of North Korean refugees in China remains uncertain. Beijing does not recognize the defectors as refugees, and have previously cooperated with Pyongyang in repatriating North Koreans who have fled their country.

[UPI]

Floods kill 60, displace 44,000 in North Korea

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Flooding following heavy rain has killed 60 people and left over 44,000 homeless in North Korea, the United Nations said Tuesday, after the country reported that a northeastern river suffered its worst-ever flood.

Pyongyang said Friday the Tumen river, which partially marks the border with China and Russia, experienced the biggest flood ever recorded due to a rainstorm that began four days earlier.

Nearby areas including Musan and Hoeryong were hard hit, with 60 dead and five percent of the population homeless, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement. Nearly 9,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged with 10,000 hectares (24,711 acres) of farmland flooded, it said, adding joint relief efforts involving the UN and the North were underway.

The impoverished nation is vulnerable to natural disasters, especially floods. Its territory is largely composed of mountains and hills that have long been deforested for fuel or turned into terraced rice fields. This allows rainwater to flow downhill unchecked.

[AFP]

North Korean ballistic missile launch during G20 meeting in China

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North Korea fired three ballistic missiles Monday morning, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, towards the Sea of Japan. Sources at Japan’s Defence ministry said the missiles likely landed in the sea 200 to 250 km (120-160 miles) west of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern-most main island.

This comes just under two weeks after Pyongyang test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile which entered Japan’s air defense identification zone, the first time that had happened.

It also comes at a potentially embarrassing time for North Korea’s only real ally, China, which is currently hosting the Group of Nations summit in Hangzhou.

At the G20, Chinese President Xi Jinping told his South Korean counterpart on Monday that Beijing opposes the deployment of the United States’ THAAD missile defense system to South Korea, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency. The stated purpose of the THAAD system is to defend South Korea from missile attack from North Korea.

[CNN/Reuters]

Information to the most information-starved nation on earth

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The theory of Jung Gwang Il’s work is essentially this: Tiny packets of information just might bring an end to decades of tyranny in his homeland. From his base in South Korea, he sends USB drives, SD cards, and other devices—loaded with Hollywood movies, South Korean television shows, and testimonials from North Korean defectors—across North Korea’s borders.

Jung runs No Chain, one of several defector-led organizations trying to pump data into North Korea through helium balloons, human smugglers, and even helicopter drones. The idea is that the contraband flash drives and memory cards will then make their way to North Korea’s black market, where they can be sold and plugged into a computer or the Chinese-made portable media player known as a “notel.” By some rough estimates, 10 percent of North Korean households have a computer at home, and up to half of urban households own a notel.

In conversations with Jung, I’ve asked the 53-year-old activist many questions in hopes of answering only one: Why has he decided to do what he does? What I’ve come to understand is that the trajectory of Jung’s life as he relayed it to me—from his immigration to North Korea as a child to his military service as a young man to his nightmarish ordeals as a political prisoner—is, at its core, a story about the power of information.

With all the focus on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and various provocations, people don’t always recognize “how powerful information can be,” Jung told me. He argues that it’s this information  that Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s 32-year-old leader, fears most.

[The Atlantic]

North Korean women in China ‘sold without their knowledge’

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See-Yeon Kim defected to China and was repatriated back to North Korea.  She escaped again in 2008 and settled in South Korea. She shares the following insight:

Human trafficking smugglers [have existed] ever since traders along the China-North Korean border area requested North Korean women in return for money.

Women who [defected] were able to settle down if they met good people amongst the many Korean-Chinese living along the frontier. However, there were also a lot of North Korean smugglers living near the frontier who knew the situation of these women very well.

Many times, women defectors were [enticed for meals, drugged and] sold without their knowledge [to] ignorant, old men whom these women had no interest in. These unmarried old men would buy North Korean women and force them to bear children.  At first, women denied and complained but they had no idea how to escape and nowhere to run to. They didn’t even know how to speak Chinese so they had no choice but to stay.

There are still North Koreans out there who either defected or were sold, living in this condition. These North Koreans who are still living in Chinese households do not know anything about the outside world. They don’t know how the country is run, and they don’t know how to get out of their situation right now or where to go. They are unsure if their lives will be any better. They have no choice but to live their lives like this.

Many of these people are still indicated as ‘missing’ or ‘dead’ back home in North Korea. However, the families still have hopes that they are alive.

[Radio Free Asia]

North Korea diplomats defected from Vladivostok and St. Petersburg

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A North Korean diplomat and trade representative fled a consulate in Vladivostok, Russia. The diplomat, who remains unidentified, defected in July with his wife and children to South Korea through a third country, Yonhap reported.

A source in Russia who spoke to the South Korean news agency on the condition of anonymity said the “secretary-level” official also took substantial amounts of cash that belongs to Pyongyang.

North Korea’s embassies abroad are often tasked with commercial enterprises, often illegal, in order to earn foreign currency for the regime. In Russia, North Korean trade representatives are also responsible for acquiring necessary goods.

The defection took place in early July before the high-profile defection of Thae Yong Ho in August, and the defection of another Russia-based trade representative, Kim Chol Song, from St. Petersburg.

[UPI]

American student held in North Korea goes six months without consular access

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An American man sentenced to 15 years hard labor in North Korea for attempting to steal a propaganda poster has not been permitted consular access in nearly six months, the U.S. State Department confirmed Wednesday.

Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old college student at the University of Virginia, was detained in January as he prepared to leave North Korea at the end of a tour. He was sentenced in March for swiping the poster and for other unspecified “crimes against the state.” Washington has criticized the sentence as “unduly harsh.”

In a statement, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said that an official from the Swedish Embassy, which represents American interests in the country, last visited Warmbier nearly six months ago. “Even when requested by the Swedish Embassy, … the DPRK still routinely delays or denies consular access to U.S. citizens,” the statement, released Tuesday, said. “Representatives from the Swedish Embassy have not been granted consular access to Mr. Warmbier since the visit on March 2.”

“Three months without consular access is a violation of the right to equality before the law,” Arnold Fang, a Hong Kong-based researcher with Amnesty International said. “Despite official claims that U.S. citizens arrested in the DPRK are not used for political purposes, it’s increasingly clear from its very public treatment of these cases that the DPRK does just that,” he said.

[Japan Times]