Monthly Archives: July 2018

Recent changes in Kim Jong Un’s high command

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Prior to the Singapore Summit, Kim Jong Un switched his top military leaders as part of the preliminary phase of mothballing the DPRK’s WMD program.

The changes in the high command made in the past two months involve the heads of the three institutions which comprise a military and political command and control over the Korean People’s Army (KPA) conventional and special operations forces, as well as the rear service and administrative components which support them. These institutions include the Minister of the People’s Armed Forces (the DPRK’s equivalent of a defense minister), the Chief of the KPA General Staff Department (and by extension the 1st Vice Chief of the General Staff and Director of the Operations Bureau) and the director of the KPA General Political Bureau. These are the top three positions in the KPA high command.

All three of the appointees are Kim Jong Un loyalists who have held high office since 2012. They will contribute to and implement his policies, including external overtures to China and the ROK as well as phased denuclearization, with little to no resistance. None has any long-standing patronage ties, and can be counted on not to feather their nests through malfeasance or misappropriation of resources. This is not to suggest that their predecessors were corrupt or disloyal; rather, the new appointments are an insurance policy based on their previous positions and contributions to the regime and their close links to Kim Jong Un and other members of the core leadership. In this respect, the Suryong (supreme leader) is leaving nothing to chance.

[38 North]

The intel file on Kim Jong-un

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Over the past decade, allied intelligence agencies have pieced together a profile of the young Kim Jong-un from extensive interviews with teachers, students, food preparers, and other staff at the elite Swiss boarding school that Kim attended during his adolescence, according to a source who has carefully studied the classified binder on Kim.

“The picture that emerged from literally dozens of interviews bears a striking similarity with the man he has emerged into today,” the source said. “Gluttonous, prone to fits of anger and swaggering around his classmates. Kim Jong-un was an in-attendant student but demanded slavish loyalty from other children in his wake.”

“He was prone to violence,” the source added. “He had a couple of young guys who were with him” at the Swiss boarding school, and “he hit them frequently.”

The binder describes the young Kim making vague and grand declarations to his classmates — for example, after games he would say, in the source’s recollection, “Someday you will all remember me.”

Other reports indicate Kim was described as shy, and a good student while attending school in Switzerland, who got along well with his classmates, in addition to being a huge NBA basketball fan. (Kim Jong-un’s school friends recalled he “spent hours doing meticulous pencil drawings of Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan.”)

Although the classified binder indicates, “[Kim Jong-un] didn’t do well in school, as he was distracted a lot,” the classes Kim attended at international schools in Switzerland would have been taught in English. So he can read, write, and probably speak English. He also speaks German and French.

An unsubstantiated source adds: “To my knowledge, Kim Jong Un speaks Korean, English, German, French, Turkish and very likely also speaks Mandarin which his grandfather was fluent in. From all that I have read or learned Kim is what would be termed a polymath as he also has a passion for maths & physics. I would personally expect his IQ knocks the socks off most western politicians, not to mention the President of the United States.”

[Axios/Quora]

Trump to hold Round 2 with Kim Jong Un in NYC?

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Some Trump administration officials are so optimistic about making progress with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un that they hope a Round 2 with President Trump can be held in New York in September, when world leaders pour into Trump’s hometown for the U.N. General Assembly.

The possibility would be for Trump to hold out a Round 2 meeting as a carrot to encourage real movement by North Korea over the summer. Kim would have to show progress for the meeting to occur.

Regardless of whether Kim gets another meeting with the leader of the free world just three months after the Singapore summit, the U.S. is giving him more time to begin denuclearizing despite new doubts about North Korea’s good faith.

  • Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will visit Pyongyang this week to press denuclearization, the Financial Times reported. Look for a win by Pompeo on securing the return of remains of U.S. soldiers killed during the Korean War.
  • Asked by Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business whether to expect North Korea to reveal the specifics of its facilities within the next several weeks, President Trump said: “I think they’re very serious about it. I think they want to do it. We have a very good chemistry.”
  • But national security adviser John Bolton sounded cautious on CBS’ “Face the Nation“: “We’re very well aware of North Korea’s patterns of behavior over decades of negotiating with the United States. … There’s not any starry-eyed feeling among the group doing this.”

[Axios]

For North Korean defectors, escape is ‘like jumping 50 years into the future’

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When Jung-ae Gwak, 64, arrived in South Korea, she was often afraid to leave her apartment. “When I was in North Korea, so many things were restricted,” Gwak said. “When you were outside, you weren’t sure who was spying on you, so you always had to be conscious.”

Gwak’s husband died during “the Arduous March”—the famine that killed between 1 and 3 million North Koreans in the years after Kim Il-Sung’s death in 1994. In those years, Gwak sometimes crossed North Korea’s border with China to get food for her starving family. Her trips across the Tumin River raised suspicions, and in 2002 she slipped across the border to escape the regime; she was sent back to North Korea several times and spent time at a detention center for defectors before escaping for good in 2007.

The distance between North and South Korea may be less than three miles, but the Korea societies are decades apart. South Korea is a frenetic hub of modern technology and giddy consumerism; across the most heavily militarized border in the world, North Korea is a undeveloped country whose citizens suffer from intermittent power outages, widespread malnutrition, and a dearth of information about the outside world.

“One way of framing this is that coming from North Korea to South Korea is like jumping 50 years into the future in a day,” said Sokeel Park, a director at Liberty in North Korea, a defector assistance organization in Seoul.

The leap into modernity can be jarring when you’ve come from a place where public transportation can mean flagging down a tractor pulling a trailer. Negotiating the ever-expanding Seoul Metropolitan Subway, which has nine lines in the city and more spreading out to the region, can be a bewildering adventure. The system carries more than 7 million passengers a day, making it one of the busiest and best public transportation systems in the world. In North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang, the nation’s first and only subway system has only 16 stations, two lines. Most North Koreans have never set foot in it.

Gwak is particularly grateful for consistent, hot running water. “All of it feels like a dream really,” Gwak said. “When I think how good it would be if many people in North Korea could come to South Korea and all live well, I feel so bad for North Koreans. Worse than animals, compared to life here.”

[CityLab]