Author Archives for Grant Montgomery

North Korean floods a serious challenge for Kim Jong Un

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Battling to rebuild homes damaged by the flooding, North Korean work gangs are filling sacks with rocks — 20 bags every hour, from dawn to dusk. It’s back-breaking labor.

It is a mark of how serious this disaster is that Kim Jong Un has appealed to the world for help and for money to rebuild. South Korea has already refused. North Korea isn’t asking everyone. “I’m not going to reach out my hand to the United States,” said one official, Ri Song Chol. “Not after 70 years of their aggression.”

Many people are putting their trust in their all-powerful commander-in-chief.

“Our Dear Leader Kim Jong Un promised us he would provide new house for us before winter,” said homeless mother Taw Kyung Wha. “So we believe him.”

For Kim, who rules some of the poorest people on earth, it is risky.

He can’t afford to lose popular support as his father did in the early 1990s when a flood was followed by a terrible famine that left hundreds of thousands dead.

[NBC]

North Korea official who supplies medicine to Kim Jong-un defects

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A ranking North Korean embassy official in Beijing has defected, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has said, while a separate report suggested two embassy staff had sought asylum with the Japanese mission in the Chinese capital.

If confirmed, it would mark the latest in a recent series of high-profile North Korean defections that some observers see as a sign of growing instability within the leadership in Pyongyang.

Yonhap, quoting an anonymous source “familiar with Pyongyang affairs”, said the official – stationed in the Beijing embassy but attached to the North Korean health ministry – had disappeared with his family in late September. The source said the official was responsible for sourcing medical supplies for a clinic in Pyongyang that caters to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and his family.

In a separate report, the South Korean daily, JoongAng Ilbo, said two senior staffers at the North Korean embassy in Beijing had asked for asylum in Japan.

[The Guardian]

North Korean floods: Homeless survivors as winter approaches

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One month after devastating floods ravaged North Korea’s northeast, aid agencies have warned that many survivors are homeless and at risk of disease as winter looms.

“In two to three weeks it will be a different story,” Patrick Elliott, a delegate with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said in a statement warning that incoming snowfall in October could be disastrous for unprepared flood survivors. “People have lost their coal supplies and are burning bits of wood in makeshift stoves to keep warm. They need proper roofs over their heads, fuel and warm clothes. The risk of a secondary disaster is very real.”

Elliott said that increasing numbers of old people and young people had been diagnosed with respiratory infections and diarrhea.

The floods, considered the worst in decades, killed hundreds, left 70,000 people homeless, and a total of 140,000 people in desperate need of assistance in the north of Hamgyong province.

Flood survivors are currently staying in public buildings and with host families. While the IFRC is purchasing thousands of roofing sheets for permanent homes, the North Korean government has started to reconstruct permanent homes.

[CNN]

North Korea devastation in flood-hit area

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One month after devastating floods caused by a typhoon hit a remote area of North Korea, Red Cross officials said Sunday that more help is needed for thousands of displaced people before harsh winter conditions set in.

In a video provided by The Red Cross, people of North Hamgyong are seen living in temporary shelters amid rubble and mud-caked areas of destruction left in the wake of the flooding. North Korean authorities have launched a major reconstruction effort, but have asked international humanitarian organizations for help.

The Red Cross has sent supplies to construct temporary shelters and provide daily necessities for people who lost everything in the flooding.

Winter is coming soon, meaning snow and plummeting temperatures will make life more difficult for thousands of displaced people still living in very basic conditions. Red Cross official, Chris Staines, who was among the first international humanitarian workers to reach the area in early September, said in this part of the country, the peak of winter can see temperatures reach as low as -30 degrees Celsius.

[AP]

Laos a remote battleground for the Koreas

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“North Korea has had fairly close relations with Laos for several decades. They’re both countries that [are] at least nominally socialist or communist states,” says Sokeel Park, research director for Liberty in North Korea, a South Korean organization that assists North Korean refugees.

To find evidence of Laos’ longstanding ties to North Korea, look no further than the dining establishments. Laos hosts a North Korean-run restaurant in the heart of Vientiane, the capital of Laos. These North Korean restaurants are part of the regime’s money-making operations, a way for Pyongyang to earn hard currency abroad, since sanctions have increasingly cut it off from the rest of the world.

Laos is also one of the countries North Korean defectors sometimes pass through on their way to a final destination, like South Korea. They know …. Laos is willing to look the other way.

But in recent months, South Korea has stepped up efforts to drive a wedge between Laos and North Korea. South Korea has been sending diplomats, increasing communication and signed a new military-to-military agreement. All in hopes Laos will get tougher on its North Korean partner.

“We think Laos and other countries previously friendly with North Korea have turned around considerably after the U.N. sanctions went into effect, and that they’re now supporting South Korea’s policies,” says South Korea’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Cho June-hyuck.

[NPR]

South’s Park Geun-hye directly appeals to North Koreans to defect

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South Korean President Park Geun-hye has called on North Koreans to abandon their country and defect, just a day after a soldier walked across the heavily fortified border into the South.

In a rare message directly addressed to rank-and-file troops and North Korean citizens, during a speech marking the country’s Armed Forces Day, the president on Saturday invited North Koreans to relocate to the “bosom of freedom” in the South.

“The universal values of freedom, democracy, human rights and welfare are the precious rights you should also enjoy. We will keep the road open for you to find hope and live a new life. Please come to the bosom of freedom in the South whenever you want.”

Park said defections by North Koreas fleeing hunger and oppression were increasing “drastically”. “There have been persistent defections, even by North Korean elites who have been supporting the regime”, she said.

The call comes a month after North Korea’s deputy ambassador to Britain defected to South Korea, handing the country a major propaganda coup at a time of rising tension on the divided Korean peninsula.

Ties between the two Koreas are at the lowest ebb since the height of Cold War in the 1970s, with Pyongyang test-firing more than 20 missiles and carrying out two nuclear tests this year alone.

[Al Jazeera]

North Korean unpredictability and provocation

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On paper, the US military is formidable, huge, with carrier battle groups, advanced technology, remarkable submarines, satellites, and so on. What does this translate to in North Korea?

Military power does not exist independently, but only in relation to specific circumstances.

While America is vastly superior militarily to North Korea in every category of arms, the North has nuclear bombs. It can’t deliver them to the US mainland, but can to Seoul. Even without nuclear weapons, North Korea has a large army and large numbers of artillery tubes within range of Seoul.

So an American attack by air on North Korea, the only attack possible short of a preemptive nuclear strike, would offer a high probability of a peninsular war, devastation of Seoul, paralysis of an important trading partner –think Samsung– and an uncertain final outcome. The United States hasn’t the means of getting troops to Korea rapidly in any numbers, and the domestic political results of lots of GIs killed by a serious enemy would be politically grave.

The probable cost far exceeds any possible benefit. And Pyongyang knows it.

As Gordon Liddy said, if your responses to provocation are wildly out of proportion to those provocations, and unpredictable, nobody will provoke you.

North Korean soldier defects crossing border into South Korea

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A North Korean soldier defected Thursday after crossing the border and entering South Korea, according to a press release from the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The South Korean military says the soldier crossed the mid-eastern portion of the Military Demarcation Line — which is located inside the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two countries — at 10 a.m. local time.

It’s not clear how or why he defected, but the South Korean military said it will investigate.

The defection comes amid a particularly tense time in North-South relations.

[CNN]

No indicators of North Korea releasing two American hostages

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North Korea is holding two U.S. citizens as “prisoners of war,” regime officials have told Americans lobbying for their release, as the months drag on with no word about the pair.

During this period of Kim Jong Un’s military launching a stream of increasingly longer-range and more reliable missiles and conducted its fifth nuclear test, there has been no word on Otto Warmbier, a business student at the University of Virginia, and Kim Dong-chul, a South Korean-born naturalized American citizen, since they were separately sentenced to years of hard labor in North Korean prisons in March and April respectively.

“I am certain that North Koreans will keep Otto Warmbier and Kim Dong-chul until after the U.S. election,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former North Korea analyst for the CIA who is now at Bower Group Asia, a consultancy.

“American prisoners are one of the few bargaining chips North Koreans has,” she said, and there is “zero incentive” for the North Koreans to release these Americans at this point. “Why waste it now with the Obama administration when there appears to be little progress that can be made in terms of either returning to talks or easing of the sanctions in place?”

In recent years, the regime has made a habit of detaining U.S. citizens and using them as bargaining chips. This has followed a familiar pattern: arrest and harsh sentence, then release after a high-profile American flies to Pyongyang to get them out.

These visits are portrayed in North Korea’s media as signs of the isolated state’s strength–a weak Washington coming begging to Pyongyang.

Because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea, the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang represents American interests there. Swedish diplomats have not been granted access to Warmbier since March 2, John Kirby, spokesman for the State Department, said.  Kirby declined to comment on whether the Swedish diplomats had seen Kim Dong-chul since his arrest and conviction.

[Washington Post]

The generation of semi-legal North Korean jangmadang markets

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As the United States and other nations grasp for new ways to sanction Pyongyang in response to its latest nuclear test, some North Korean defectors see investment in its rudimentary market economy as a way to foment gradual change from within.

South Korea forbids its citizens from trading with anyone in North Korea but turns a blind eye to remittances estimated at $10 million a year sent to relatives by many of the nearly 30,000 defectors in the South.

Surveys of defectors by Seoul National University found that the biggest challenge for North Koreans doing business was funding, followed by bribes paid to authorities and occasional crackdowns on market activity.

One young defector, Seoul-based activist Ji Seong-ho, has been sending funds of $300 to $500 at a time for North Koreans to open food stalls and crop-lending businesses in rural areas.

“The bigger markets grow, the weaker the regime gets, so we need to support North Korean entrepreneurs,” said Ji, 34, who heads Now, Action and Unity for Human Rights (NAUH), which tries to help North Korean refugees in China to defect.  Read more

[Reuters]