Monthly Archives: November 2018

US relations with North Korea strained

Posted on by

US and foreign sources close to the North Korean talks paint a picture that’s starkly different from the image President Donald Trump sought to convey Wednesday, when he told reporters the administration is “very happy with how it’s going with North Korea. We think it’s going fine.”

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha told lawmakers in Seoul that she was told the North Koreans asked the US to postpone the talks, citing their busy schedules. A senior US official told CNN the North Korean delegation did not offer a clear explanation. Another source familiar with the US-North Korea talks and familiar with North Korean thinking said Pyongyang canceled because it came to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to get anywhere with working level talks.

North Korea’s state media outlet KCNA said November 2: “We gave all things possible to the US, things it hardly deserves, by taking proactive and good-will measures, what remains to be done is the US corresponding reply. Unless there is any reply, the DPRK will not move even 1 mm, how costly it may be.”

US military officials, foreign diplomats and sources familiar with developments say the two sides are locked in a standoff over who will make concessions first, that North Korea is “really angry” about the US refusal to offer sanctions relief and that personal friction between US and North Korean negotiators may be slowing progress.

A former CIA deputy division chief for Korea, Bruce Klingner, now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, pointed to North Korea’s recent threat to restart “building up nuclear forces” if the US didn’t ease sanctions, the fact that Pyongyang has yet to meet Pompeo’s Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, and that the two countries still haven’t agreed on the definition of basic terms such as “denuclearlization” — five months after Trump’s historic summit with Kim. “Clearly the two sides remain very far apart,” Klingner said. “It doesn’t bode well for the negotiations, which were already not proceeding well.”

Pyongyang’s threats over the weekend to restart its nuclear program have also increased tensions, according to the sources familiar with the exchanges between the US and North Korea. They also say that personal friction between negotiators has been a problem. The US side sees the North Korean general charged with leading negotiations, hardliner Kim Yong Chol, as “difficult and old-fashioned” in negotiations and would prefer‎ to work with someone else.

President Trump has said he would meet with Kim Jong-un “sometime next year, sometime early next year”.

[CNN]

Trump wants second meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in early 2019

Posted on by

President Trump said today that he expects his second meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will take place “sometime early next year.” Trump’s remarks came as his administration postponed a Thursday meeting between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a top North Korean official.

Pompeo’s meeting with Kim Yong Chol, the former head of North Korea’s spy agency who has been leading nuclear talks for North Korea, has been rescheduled and will now take place at an unspecified “later date,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement released late Wednesday.

North Korea is now seeking sanctions relief as a bargaining chip in giving up its nuclear weapons, but Pompeo over the weekend said that the United States would not lift sanctions until it could verify that the isolated nation had halted its missile and nuclear programs.

“We’re very happy how it’s going with North Korea. We think it’s going fine,” Trump told reporters at a post-election press conference. “The missiles have stopped, the rockets have stopped. …. I’d love to take the sanctions off, but they [North Korea] have to be responsive, too. It’s a two-way street. But we’re not in any rush at all. There’s no rush whatsoever,” Trump said.

[The Hill]

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un gets ‘first official portrait’

Posted on by

North Korea has unveiled what’s thought to be the first official painting of Kim Jong-un, lifting the leader to a new level of personality cult.

The huge new picture was on display during a visit by Cuba’s president. The new larger-than-life artwork shows him smiling, looking slightly to his left, while wearing a Western style suit and tie.

“That a painted portrait of Kim Jong-un has appeared in this style is a strong hint that the regime could be beginning to take steps to develop the Kim Jong-un personality cult,” Oliver Hotham, managing editor with NK News, told the BBC.

The style of the painting is so evocative of the ever-present portraits of the older Kims, that “North Koreans will certainly understand the symbolism of this move”. Symbolism and imagery are all-important in North Korea: portraits of Kim Jong-un’s father and grandfather portraits hang in every building in the country.

“Everything that’s happened in 2018 has also worked to solidify his image,” says Mr Hotham. “Eight summit with foreign heads of state have been a delight for Pyongyang’s propagandists, helping them paint the leader as an internationally respected statesmen on par with Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.”

Whether Kim Jong-un’s official portrait will indeed become a propaganda staple like the portraits of the father and grandfather remains to be seen.

[BBC]

North Korea issues nuclear threat ahead of high-level talks with US

Posted on by

As the United States and North Korea prepare for another round of high-level talks this week, Pyongyang’s increasingly heated rhetoric has analysts worried that the stalemate between the two sides could lead to a breakdown in negotiations.

An official with North Korea’s Foreign Ministry issued a veiled threat Friday, warning that Pyongyang could restart “building up nuclear forces” if the US does not ease the crippling sanctions levied on North Korea.

The comments come ahead of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s meeting with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Yong Chol, in New York this week.

Experts like Adam Mount, a senior fellow and the director of the Defense Posture Project at the Federation of American Scientists, say, the North Korean position does not come as a total surprise — staking out hard-line positions in state media ahead of diplomatic meetings has long been a favored tactic in Pyongyang’s playbook. “It’s a clear play for leverage, it’s a clear play to set the agenda in the upcoming round of diplomacy, but there’s still a very real risk that it does seriously damage the negotiation process.”

Additionally, Kim Jong-un received Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, who holds the title of “president” but remains subordinate to dictator Raúl Castro. Díaz-Canel received a hero’s welcome in North Korea on Sunday and Monday, enjoying a theater performance and street parade with Kim.

[CNN/Breibart]

US/South Korea resume low-key military drills ahead of talks with North Korea

Posted on by

The United States and South Korea will begin small-scale military drills on Monday just days ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with a North Korea official to discuss denuclearization and plans for a second summit between the two countries.

The Korean Marine Exchange Program was among the training drills that were indefinitely suspended in June after U.S. President Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore and promised to end joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises often criticized by the North.

A spokesman for South Korea’s Ministry of Defense confirmed a round of training would begin near the southern city of Pohang, with no media access expected. About 500 American and South Korean marines will participate in the maneuvers, the Yonhap news agency reported.

Last week, South Korea’s defense minister said Washington and Seoul would make a decision by December on major joint military exercises for 2019.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo, interviewed on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” said he would be in New York City at the end of this week to meet with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Yong-chol.

“I expect we’ll make some real progress, including an effort to make sure that the summit between our two leaders can take place, where we can make substantial steps towards denuclearization,” Pompeo said.

[Reuters]

North Korean women suffer serious sexual violence by authorities

Posted on by

Sexual violence against women by authorities, government officials and police is part of daily life in North Korea, according to a new report by  the international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch, which based its data on two years of interviews with more than 50 North Koreans who left the country — more than half of them after 2011. Titled, “You Cry at Night but Don’t Know Why,” the report claims to give viewers an inside look at what happens in detention facilities, open markets, checkpoints, trains and army bases.

The report detailed sexual abuse by men in official positions of power, such as prison guards, police officers, prosecutors, soldiers and market supervisors. “The North Koreans we spoke with told us that unwanted sexual contact and violence is so common that it has come to be accepted as part of ordinary life: sexual abuse by officials, and the impunity they enjoy, is linked to larger patterns of sexual abuse and impunity in the country,” the report stated.

Defectors told the human rights group that government officials harmed them while they were in detention centers. “Interviewees told us that when a guard or police officer ‘picks’ a woman, she has no choice but to comply with any demands he makes, whether for sex, money or other favors,” the report said. “Women in custody have little choice should they attempt to refuse or complain afterward, and risk sexual violence, longer periods in detention, beatings, forced labor or increased scrutiny while conducting market activities.”

Yoon Mi Hwa, who fled the hermit kingdom in 2014, claimed in the report that a prison guard sexually abused her. “Click, click, click was the most horrible sound I ever heard,” she said. “It was the sound of the key of the cell of our prison room opening. Every night a prison guard would open the cell. I stood still quietly, acting like I didn’t notice, hoping it wouldn’t be me the one to have to follow the guard, hoping it wouldn’t be him.”

Oh Jung Hee, another woman interviewed in the report, said she had no idea she could resist the advances or report the sexual abuse. “It happens so often nobody thinks it is a big deal. Men who sexually assault women don’t think it is wrong, and we [women] do not either,” she said. “We don’t even realize when we are upset. But we are human, and we feel it. So sometimes, out of nowhere, you cry at night and don’t know why.”

Critics say North Korea’s human rights status has been ignored as nuclear negotiation talks continue. The report will likely anger North Korea, which often complains about what it claims is persistent U.S. hostility.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s propaganda service has billed the country as a “socialist paradise” free from crime, but Kenneth Roth, the executive director of the Human Rights Watch, said the regime could not ignore the report. “After this report, North Korea can’t say sexual violence doesn’t exist, so they have to either change their tune or fix the problem,” Roth said in a statement. “Kim Jong-un could stop this, he could enforce the laws North Korea already has on the books.”

[Fox News]

North Korea’s ‘bold and audacious’ millennials

Posted on by

From the outside, it might look like North Korea hasn’t changed much over the last seven decades. But from the inside, a fundamental shift has been taking place: an economic revolution led by a generation of millennials who grew up as capitalists in a theoretically-communist state.

They are the “Jangmadang Generation,” and they have emerged as the greatest force for change that North Korea has ever seen. Jangmadang are the markets that popped up during the devastating famine in the 1990s when the state could no longer provide for the people. North Koreans turned into entrepreneurs out of necessity. Those with corn made corn noodles; those with beans made tofu. Capitalism took root in this communist society, and the regime had to tolerate it or risk an uprising.

Take Joo Yang, who was 6 years old when the famine began and grew up seeing people dying of starvation or cold. She began thinking about doing business when she was 14, and started out by picking leftover soybeans from the chaff at a factory and selling them.

Or Kang Min, who was separated from his mother when he was 9 years old and never saw her again. He began a new life as a street beggar, or “flower swallow” as they are known in North Korea, and made his living as a pickpocket in the markets, working his way up to importing socks and batteries from China.

Or Danbi, who started importing clothes from China — copies of outfits worn in smuggled South Korean dramas — and had her good-looking friends walk through the markets in them, acting as human advertisements.

As a result of the famine, these kids grew up “bold and audacious,” says the mother of Geumju, another of the Jangmadang Generation.

Fast forward 20 years and those jangmadang are now the centerpiece of towns and cities across North Korea, having been retroactively legalized by a regime that knew it could not put this genie back in the bottle. Read more

[Washington Post]

Jangmadang generation at the forefront of social change inside North Korea

Posted on by
2

These days, markets throughout North Korea are not just a place for buying food, clothes and household goods. They have also become the clearing house for information from the outside world, a place where USB sticks loaded with foreign movies and soap operas can be bought.

A documentary, Jangmadang Generation, came about after North Korean escapees kept telling Sokeel Park, South Korea country director for LiNK (Liberty in North Korea), that the change inside the country was important. LiNK decided to make the film, to show that young North Koreans are not brainwashed automatons and are not just victims. That they have agency, and that they are at the forefront of social change inside North Korea.

“This is the most closed and repressive country in the world,” said Park, who directed and narrates the film. “But we wanted to let the audience see North Koreans are relatable people, to see that many of these people have experienced incredible loss and tragedy, but to also see the dynamism that is happening across the country.”

All the members of the Jangmadang Generation featured in the film escaped to South Korea, where they are now studying at universities or making their own way in the world. While older North Koreans often struggle to adapt to the fast-paced and ruthless capitalism of the South, people of this generation usually settle right in.

“Our generation grew up learning about and seeing freedom while being repressed by the government at the same time,” Huh Shimon said. “So our desire for freedom is strong.”

Asked to define freedom, he said: “Freedom means being able to work in a certain place if you want and not if you don’t want, being able to do your own business if you want, living where you want and being able to go where you want.”

[Washington Post]