Author Archives for Grant Montgomery

Major loophole and other weaknesses with North Korean sanctions

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North Korea is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world. And so far, these punitive measures have yet to achieve their aim — forcing North Korea to denuclearize, or at least return to the negotiating table.

The most recent round of U.N. sanctions — which U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power called the “toughest … in more than two decades” — was passed by the Security Council last March.

One sanctions workaround for North Korea has been to station North Korean businessmen in China. While there, they work with a network of private Chinese companies. “So these private Chinese companies were able to order parts and materials from other Chinese companies or from European companies that had set up production platforms in China, selling their goods without ever knowing that they were ultimately going to the North Koreans,” Jim Walsh, an international security researcher at MIT, says.

China signed on to the package of new sanctions in March, which called for cutting off trade in commodities, such as coal. Many analysts thought that was a big deal at the time, since coal is North Korea’s No. 1 export and makes up an estimated 35 percent of the economy there.

But before signing on to the sanctions, China insisted on a key loophole called the “livelihood exemption.” It allows the export of a product if cutting it off might affect the livelihood of the exporter, so long as the revenue doesn’t go to North Korea’s nuclear program. The problem is, companies self-certify that’s the case.

[NPR]

North Korea claims country stronger despite UN sanctions

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North Korea’s economy shrank last year, but, CBS News correspondent Adriana Diaz reports, [at least Pyongyang] looked like a place that was expanding, not one crippled by sanctions.

“The purpose of the sanctions is to squash us,” North Korean Ri Kum Jin told CBS News. “But we cannot surrender. We have to defend our lives and our nuclear program,” he said.

“We have abundant natural resources that can be used for nuclear technology,” said economist Ri Ki Song, who advises on policy in North Korea. He was selected by the North Korean government for an interview with CBS News. “It’s the nuclear threats made by the U.S. that caused all of this,” Song said. “The question is whether the new president is willing to abandon hostile policies. Your presidents all sanction us, and we just grow stronger.”

Despite this claim, Diaz reports, in 2016, the average person in North Korea earned just over a thousand dollars a year, less than half what individuals made in the 1980s. They were staying afloat because of China and its appetite for commodities like coal.

China bought 60 percent more coal from North Korea in August than in April, when the sanctions took effect. It did this by taking advantage of a humanitarian exemption in the law; a loophole which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry wanted to see eliminated.

China would have to sign on to any new U.N. sanctions against North Korea, and though they opposed the country’s nuclear program, they have so far been unwilling to go as far as Western powers wanted, Diaz reports. Their fear is that an economic collapse would send millions of refugees across their border, Diaz says, as well as American troops to their doorstep.

[CBS]

Every Falling Star

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“My father left to find food, said he was going to China, and he hasn’t come back yet. … My mother went to Aunt’s house to get food, too. She told me she would be gone a week and to eat salt and drink water until she got back. That was, I think, about ten days ago.”

[My fellow street urchin] Young-bum responded, “… I believed you were just acting dumb when we told you about things going on in Joseon. But really… you don’t know! …Your family was kicked out of Pyongyang, fancy-pants, because Pyongyang people don’t come here to live unless the government has told them to get out. And when Pyongyang fancy-pants people are asked to leave, they’re stripped of everything.

“Everyone knew about your family the moment you arrived in that train station, all polished like those shiny metal escalators in the metro in the capital. Everyone talked behind your father’s back about how a great star of the regime must have done something really bad to have fallen into a garbage heap like this.”

I felt the knot in my throat grow tight. My father hadn’t wanted me to know these things.

“You can’t go back to Pyongyang,” Young-bum continued, his voice light and soft as if he genuinely wanted to comfort me. “And even if you found a way, your grandfather isn’t there anymore. When someone does something against the government, the entire family is usually penalized. Your doctor grandfather has been kicked out, too. Or if he hasn’t been kicked out, he’s been stripped of all his things and likely left on his own to survive.

I lowered my head, feeling all hope drain, like on a hot steamy day being given a glass of water with holes in it. I swallowed hard so as not to cry.   Read more

9.27 Shangmoo

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“You’ve never heard of the 9.27 Shangmoo?” he asked, staring at me wide-eyed. “On September 27, the government formed the Shangmoo, a band of police to collect people who are not at home or at school and take them to shelters. Every city has a force of these 9.27 Shangmoo, except maybe Pyongyang, because [it’s] like the golden perfect city in the sky, with golden perfect people who all have homes and who never do anything wrong.

“But everywhere else, there are so many kids not at school, adults hunting for food… the Shangmoo’s job is to clean the streets of these people. The Shangmoo send the people they find to so-called shelters—the adults to one place, the kids to another. But these are not nice places. They’re guhoso, jails.”

“Where are you taking me?” I demanded, afraid he was taking me to the prison. … “Here,” he said, stopping. We were standing at the edge of the market.

“I can’t look after you. This is your kitchen now,” Young-bum said, waving an arm around the market.

I followed his hand and looked into the tired eyes of the vendors, eyes that no longer reflected light. The men were wrinkled, sunken, and walking around on bowlegs; the children had runny noses, swollen stomachs, and open sores; the women, who like my own eomeoni, I could tell from their fine features and graceful movements, had been beautiful once like swans, until their skin became first pallid from malnutrition and then blue from dirt and their hair began to fall out.

“At least you’re alive,” Young-bum whispered.

“Am I?” I grunted. “Maybe I died a long time ago, and this is just my nightmare.”

[Extract from “Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea” by Sungju Lee & Susan McClelland]

North Korea unhappy about UN threat of more sanctions

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North Korean officials lashed out Monday at efforts in the United Nations to strengthen sanctions following the North’s latest missile launches and nuclear test in September.

The United Nations has imposed sanctions on North Korea since 2006 for its nuclear tests and rocket launches. Last week, the U.N. Security Council called on members to “redouble their sanction efforts.”

“The sanction resolutions of the U.N. Security Council are illegal criminal documents,” Pang Kwang Hyok, vice director of the department of international organizations at the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the APTN crew in Pyongyang.

“These resolutions determined that our nuclear tests and satellite launches pose threats to international peace and security, but then the problem is why has the U.N. Security Council never taken issue with the nuclear tests and satellite launches conducted by other countries?” Pang said.

Pang repeated the North’s claim that sanctions won’t stop Pyongyang from developing its nuclear arsenal. “I can state that it is a complete miscalculation to think that any sanctions or pressure can have any effect on us,” he said.

[AP]

North Korean defector explores integration

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Audrey Park, a master’s student studying political science in Seoul, is working for Conservative Sen. Yonah Martin, the first Canadian of Korean descent to serve in the Senate. Through her six-month internship split between Toronto and Ottawa, Park will explore the similarities and differences of integration policies between Canada and South Korea.

During a widespread famine in the 1990s when Park was seven, her family in North Korea lived off of one meal a day. Park also remembers it was not unusual to see people passed out or dead in the streets due to starvation.

In December 1998, when Park was 10, her mother felt she had no choice but to leave their home in Hamgyong to flee to China. They embarked on a terrifying 12-hour walk to the Chinese border, dodging car headlights at night and walking through forests during the day. Her mother bribed a soldier to cross the border, which was not uncommon.

The pair lived in China for seven years. They were deported three times to North Korea, each time again fleeing the Hermit Kingdom. In 2006, they escaped for the third and final time during the winter, eventually ending up in South Korea.

When asked how she survived her ordeals, the stoic young woman said the need to survive trumped fear.

[Ottawa Citizen]

North Korean defectors struggle with English language in South

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One out of three North Korean defectors who attend university in South Korea are considering a leave of absence, or dropping out, because of language barriers.

While Koreans on both sides of the divide speak the same language, English words are commonly used in the South Korean vernacular, and English is often a required second language in educational settings, which may not be the case in the North.

The findings from government-run Korea Development Institute indicate nearly a third of defectors enrolled in universities would like to suspend their studies because they struggle with English. Not all defectors, however, are considering permanently dropping out of school. About 30 percent of those surveyed said they would like to take time off to study English.

Others may be struggling economically in South Korea: About 29 percent said they would like to leave school in order to “keep up with the cost of living,” while about 12 percent said they “cannot keep up with the course content.”

[UPI]

Defectors adjusting to life beyond North Korea

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For most people, adapting to life in a foreign country is a challenge. For North Korean defectors, such challenges are much more imposing.

Take those who defect to South Korea, for example. “For them, it’s kind of like waking up from a time machine and finding yourself in the future,” Sokeel Park, director of Research and Strategy for Liberty in North Korea, an international non-governmental organization that works with North Korean defectors.

North Korea and South Korea started off on similar footing. Unlike North Korea, the South embraced globalization, democratization, and massive economic development. Where South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world today, most North Koreans have never used a computer.

North Korean defectors sometimes struggle with poverty, language barriers, social anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and suicidal thoughts, criminality, drug abuse, a lack of education and employable skills, and discrimination, Park explained.

North Koreans living in South Korea are reportedly three to four times more likely to end up prison than their local counterparts. “Under the burden of livelihood difficulties and homesickness, more defectors tend to get involved in crimes with the number of defector prisoners on the rise,” South Korean Rep. Kang Chang-il reported in late September.

Drug abuse is a noteworthy problem. Park noted that some North Korean defectors abuse drugs because that cultural norm exists in North Korea. Others use narcotics as a response to trauma, and for some other defectors, drug abuse is a type of self-medication.

For many North Koreans, freedom, while cherished, is sometimes bitter-sweet. The transition from a broken kingdom to the modern world is often overwhelming.

Most North Korean defectors despise the Kim regime for the tragedies inflicted upon them and their families, and pray for change in their former homeland.
[Daily Caller]

The plight of North Korean women who defect to China

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A steady stream of North Korean defectors make their way down through China, across to Laos, then into Thailand and eventually to South Korea. Most are women from the northern provinces, considered down-and-out even by North Korean standards, and face an extremely precarious life in northeastern China.

Many had been sold — some knowingly, thinking life couldn’t get any worse. But other women had been tricked into thinking they were heading to jobs in China, only to find that the man who offered to help them escape, paying bribes to border soldiers and arranging passage, turned out to be a trafficker, selling the women and pocketing the profits.

The buyers are men in the countryside who are too poor or unappealing to get a wife any other way, and the women are stuck in remote villages where they cannot communicate with the locals — if they are permitted to leave the house, that is.

Women ages 15 to 25 are the most prized, fetching between $10,000 and $12,000, brokers and humanitarian workers say, while women in their 30s can be acquired for half that. These increased prices mean that some Chinese families are spending their entire life savings to buy a North Korean woman, and as a result the women are sometimes shackled inside the house.

But even if the women are allowed out and even after they learn some Chinese, venturing into the open is a risky business. If they’re caught by the Chinese police, they face repatriation to North Korea and, at a minimum, time in a labor camp. Read more

North Korean defectors turn to online sex work

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Although some North Korean women who have defected and marry rural Chinese men take the risk of working outside the home, shuttling between cleaning and babysitting jobs or working behind the scenes in restaurants, an increasing number feel they have no choice but to try to make money behind closed doors.

That is where video chatting comes in. About one-fifth of the North Korean women living in hiding in China are involved in this kind of online sex work.

“If you’re working in a restaurant or outside, you run the risk of being asked for your papers by the police. So doing this work is safer and the money is better,” said Park a broker who works to get women out. “In the village where they lived, every North Korean woman does this. It’s so normal to be doing this.”

“These North Korean women in China faced a dire dilemma, either having to remain hidden and submit to this kind of sexual exploitation, or risk working outside of their residence with the very real possibility that Chinese authorities could arrest them at any time and force them back to North Korea,” said Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch.

Suh was sold eight years ago to a man in northern China who, she said, treated her well — he beat her “only a few times.” But the arrival of their second child made a tough financial situation untenable. She heard about video chatting through a friend of a friend and began chatting with South Korean men at night when everyone in her house was asleep.

On her first day she earned $3. In her best week, she netted $120. A few months ago, Suh decided she couldn’t take it. “I wondered why I had to do this. I’m a human being, the same as everyone else,” Suh said, breaking down into heaving sobs. “I wanted to be a good mother, a strong mother for my daughters.”   Read more