Author Archives for Grant Montgomery

North Korean activist Yeonmi Park a tale of triumph

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A refugee of Kim Jong-Il’s regime, Yeonmi Park has become an unlikely mouthpiece for the 25 million living on the very edge, in a place shrouded in darkness–literal and metaphysical. It is a nation predicated on fear, misinformation, and torture; a place that asks its citizens for absolute devotion, even as it executes them indiscriminately.

The Establishment sat down with North Korean defector Yeonmi to discuss her newfound activism and the painful realities of penning her memoir. In person, she is a portrait of grace and composure, possessing a preternatural wisdom for any 22 year old.

Elaborating on the plight of her fellow North Koreans and the global community’s obligation to them, she becomes quietly insistent: “These people, they don’t even know they have rights and I think it should be stopped. If we allow this to happen, it makes us less human, that’s what I believe. We have to fight, we have to educate the public, we have to tell their story, we have to ask North Korea to stop killing its own people…

“And we have to tell China that they cannot send these refugees back to their country–they are actually committing a crime by this; they’re helping North Korea and killing these people.”

Yeonmi Park’s childhood reads like the kind of fiction best-suited for sadists, marked by starvation, the execution of a friend’s mother, the imprisonment of her father, human trafficking, and chronic sexual violence.

Her story is also a tale of triumph–of a victory as formidable as the darkness that threatens to tamp it out forever. It is not a tale of good conquering evil–for the evil still thrives, with North Korea a prison kingdom of the first degree. But it is a story that reminds us of the strength of the human spirit.   Read more

The harrowing story of North Korean defector Yeonmi Park

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Yeonmi Park, although just 13 years old when she fled North Korea and a mere 22 years old now, is a testament to an archetypal–if rare–act: it is sometimes better to spit in the face of death than suffer at the hands of crippling oppression.

The oppression she faced growing up in North Korea was absolute. Park describes a fear that plagued and formed her childhood. Born in the wake of the Soviet Union collapse and consequent famine in North Korea, Yeonmi faced hardships beyond this brutal mind control. The daughter of a once-successful civil servant for the ruling Working Party, Yeonmi adored her father, who was sentenced to 17 years in a labor camp for smuggling metal to feed his starving family. There he was tortured and fell ill under the harsh conditions; meanwhile Yeonmi, her mother, and her sister were relegated to the margins of society as a part of her father’s punishment.

At times subsisting on insects and grass, the family decided they had to leave–or perish. Her mother and Yeonmi fled when Yeonmi was 13. What they hoped would be their path to freedom, quickly proved to be another two-year chapter of degradation and suffering. Trafficked upon entering China, Yeonmi’s mother sacrificed herself to prevent her daughter from being raped, and was in turn violated in front of her child. Both members of the family were sold.

Yeonmi was purchased for $260. Essentially functioning as a sex slave, Yeonmi said she cried every day. Her captor, however, ultimately released them, but only after her father rejoined she and her mother in China; he died soon after from untreated colon cancer.

In the wake of this tragedy, Yeonmi and her mother set out again for freedom–this time traversing the Gobi Desert on foot in frigid temperatures, with only the stars to guide them. Both carried knives to use on themselves if they were captured, resigned to suicide rather than facing repatriation.

[The Establishment, republished in Huffington Post]

Kim Jong-un impersonators

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With his extreme crew cut, chubby cheeks and a penchant for black button-up shirts and shiny brogues, Kim Jong-un is one of the world’s most recognizable dictators – and one of the most memed and mocked .

It’s good work if you can get it. One impersonator, who asked to be identified as Howard, hung out with pop star Katy Perry at this year’s Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Another, who goes only by Jeremy, boasted of snogging up to 40 womenwhen he went – in character – to Hong Kong’s rugby sevens tournament in March.

Howard is keen to stress that his character, whom he calls “Kim Jong-um”, was the world’s first professional Kim lookalike, predating his rival Jeremy. Howard markets himself as “the closest thing you will get to the Dear Leader without going to North Korea” and speaks frankly about the fact that he’s happy to “lend the character to projects that make extra money”. …It started in 2013 on April Fools day, I uploaded some pictures of me with a Kim Jong-un-esque haircut… Two weeks later I got a call asking me to go to Israel to shoot a burger commercial ,” says Howard, speaking on the phone from Hong Kong.

But it’s not just about the commercial gigs, he says. “Kim Jong-um” attended Russia’s Victory Day celebrations this year when the real Kim, who was on the Kremlin’s guest list with a cast of other well-known autocrats, failed to show. He has also lent his face to protests organized by a group called North Korea Defector Concerns, rallying against China’s forcible repatriation of North Koreans, a situation he has called “unacceptable and extremely unethical”.

Minyong Kim from South Korea has also adopted the look. He too first dressed up for fun before realizing it could make for an interesting part-time vocation. Arguably his most impressive stunt was when he joined forces with Barack Obama impersonator Reggie Brown to croon a rendition of Eric Carmen’s 1970s classic “All By Myself” on the streets of Seoul. He has since moved to the US to study where he has become “ the most selfied guy on campus ”, he told News Gazette.

 [Mail & Guardian]

North Korea raises issue of “comfort women” with Japan

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North Korea has urged Japan to also address North Korean “comfort women” as part of the current discussion with neighboring South Korea. As many as 200,000 women, mostly from Korea and China, were forced into the Japanese Army’s brothels during World War II, though it is not known how many may currently live in North Korea.

“This issue can hardly find a final solution unless the damage suffered by all Koreans is redressed throughout Korea because there are victims of the sexual slavery of the Imperial Japanese Army not only in the south of Korea but also in the north,” said a spokesperson for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry in a statement carried by the country’s state-controlled media Korean Central News Agency.

Pyongyang has claimed compensation from Tokyo for the aggression in the past, but the latest move comes at a delicate time. North Korea is facing growing criticism for its human rights record.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor of University of North Korea Studies in Seoul, said North Korea’s focus on the comfort women issue appears to be an attempt to counter the Japanese efforts on Pyongyang’s human rights conditions. “Pyongyang might have raised the issue to try to deflect the world’s attention away from its human rights situation. …” said Yang.

Nam Gwang-gyu, a professor at Korea University, said Pyongyang might be trying to use the diplomatic row between Seoul and Tokyo to press Seoul. “North Korea can blame South Korea for any unsatisfactory results from future talks between South Korea and Japan over the comfort women issue,” said Nam.

[VoA]

Kim Jong-un spotted in Chicago?

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A photo of North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un casually riding a train in Chicago?

The photograph, posted on Imgur by a commuter, shows the lookalike playing on his phone, looking a bit bored despite being in the land of the free!

While the man’s trademark haircut and grey suit seemed to suggest he was the real deal, commenters online were quick to point out that he has been seen in the area plenty of times before – and is actually a student at the University of Illinois.

Minyong Kim dresses up as the North Korean tyrant and is often seen partying at bars and playing basketball while impersonating him.

While he loves pretending to be Kim Jong-un, Kim’s parents are less keen because of worsening relations between South Korea – where he is from – and North Korea.

‘My parents are kind of worrying I might be assassinated or kidnapped,’ he said.

He has a reputation among students at the University of Illinois and is regularly stopped for selfies on nights out. Kim said: “College life is very hard and stressful. If people can laugh for a while for 10 seconds, I’ll be happy with it.”

[Daily Mail]

Suicide rates high amongst North Korean defectors

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Statistics gathered in South Korea indicate that a startling number of defectors from North Korea end up taking their own lives. This is the darker side to the stories of those who flee their homeland.

Over the past ten years, 6% to 7% of defectors who’ve died have been suicides.

But this year, there’s been a big rise. According to the ministry, 14% of deaths among defectors have been suicides.

There are a number of factors involved. One is that the home they’ve left is close but unreachable. Another is that their new economic reality can be very different from the glamorized life portrayed in the South Korean soap operas smuggled into the North.

Defectors get three months’ training when they arrive but critics of the system say that’s not enough to learn new skills. Some Christian groups provide vocational training and say that what works best is training in simple but useful skills like making coffee to serve in a cafe.

[BBC]

Kenneth Bae, detained 2 years in North Korea, releasing book

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Kenneth Bae, a U.S. citizen who was detained in North Korea for two years before his release last November, plans to tell his story in a book. “Not Forgotten: The True Story of My Imprisonment in North Korea” will be released next spring.

Bae, a Christian missionary and pastor from the Seattle area, moved to China in 2006. He began leading tours to North Korea in 2010. He was arrested in 2012 while leading a tour group to a special economic zone and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for alleged anti-government activities.

Bae suffered medical issues in detention. He was freed along with one other American detainee after a mission to the reclusive Communist country by James Clapper, the top U.S. intelligence official.

[SFGate]

Charity sneaking spy equipment into North Korea endangers Christians worldwide

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Was a Christian non-governmental organization funded by the Pentagon, with Congress fully briefed on the plan, used to smuggle spy equipment into North Korea?

The story goes something like this: in 2004 the Pentagon, fired up by the need to “protect the country” post 9/11, was keen on muscling in on the CIA’s virtual monopoly on strategic intelligence collection, including on North Korea.

[Devised was] a scheme to smuggle electronic monitoring equipment and other spyware into top priority target North Korea. … A religious charity called Humanitarian International Services Group (HISG) was developed [to enable] the smuggling of monitoring equipment into North Korea under cover of shipments of used clothing.

The HISG charity was funded by the Pentagon to the tune of an estimated $15 million during the course of the operation. In a test run the HISG charity managed to successfully conceal a large number of Bibles in a hidden compartment at the bottom of a shipping container topped up with used winter clothing, a highly prized commodity for starving and freezing North Koreans.

It is reported that short wave radios and some electronic devices intended to monitor nuclear programs as well as interfere with North Korean military communications were indeed smuggled into the country by unwitting Christian missionaries, aid workers, and Chinese smugglers, but whether they provided any critical intelligence is unclear. The operation continued to run during the Obama administration, finally winding down in 2013. While it is certain that George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew of and approved the operation, it is not known if either the Bush or Obama White Houses had explicit knowledge of it.

The United States government does in fact impose a ban on recruiting certain categories of individuals as spies. Clergymen are off limits partly for ethical reasons but more because the exposure of such a relationship would be devastating both to the religious organization itself and to the United States government. Use of the U.S. taxpayer-funded Peace Corps is also banned because exploiting it would potentially turn its volunteers into targets for terrorists.

[Read full American Conservative article by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer]

North Korea says action by U.S. could lead to peace

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TIME reports North Korea saying the United States needs to end its “nuclear-based threats and blackmail” and respond to the North’s recent diplomatic overture to formally end the decades-old Korean conflict.

Speaking in an interview Tuesday in London with Associated Press Television News, senior North Korean Foreign Ministry official Jong Tong Hak said a permanent peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula first requires a North Korean-U.S. agreement.

Discussing North Korea’s view of the root cause of tensions, he blamed what he described as “the U.S. government’s decades of hostile policies against the DPRK and its endless nuclear-based threats, blackmail and manipulative schemes.” He said Washington provides “strategic nuclear weapons” to South Korea, “in other words the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers it always pushes (toward the DPRK) and the strategic nuclear bombers it always has flying in the skies above the southern part of the Korean Peninsula.”

Jong said a compromise to break the impasse requires decisive action by Washington. “The issue of signing a peace treaty between the DPRK and the United States depends on the policy determinations of the U.S. administration,” he said, adding that Washington must “make a policy decision to respect our republic’s sovereignty and end the decades-long hostility between the DPRK and the U.S. to guarantee peace in the Korean Peninsula.”

The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, is mulling whether North Korea should be designated a state sponsor of terrorism.

Capitalist narrative integrated into North Korean society

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North Korean propaganda is built on a popular anti-capitalist narrative – Americans are evil imperialists and the great leader Kim Jong-un is celebrated for his devotion to the masses.

But since the 1990s the country has cautiously welcomed foreign business, with one unintended consequence: citizens have started to talk capitalism. Where once there were “management secretaries” and “operations”, now talk of “bosses” and “companies” has crept into day-to-day parlance. This vocabulary was once feared as the antithesis of socialist principles.

For years private ownership was banned in North Korea. Companies were non-existent and this meant there were no bosses. But despite technically still being banned, de facto private operations have become ubiquitous.

Today, most people refer to a boss as someone who works with foreigners, such as the Chinese, to earn money. In the 1990s, as many faced starvation it was these bosses who eventually found a way to bring food and opportunity to those in need. That’s why the word is now infused with a sense of respect and loyalty. It reflects the new status, jobs and skills that people aspire to.

Unlike most aspects of life in North Korea, one’s ability to shoot up through the company ranks is less contingent on background: even those with poor songbun, a caste system delineated by family background and political loyalty, can be a boss. Those who failed to get into the Workers’ Party – once the preferred method to secure favorable living conditions – have been known to gain the title. Even former prisoners of re-education camps can be bosses.