Author Archives for Grant Montgomery

The North Korean defector news network – Part 1

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News about North Korea often originate from people in North Korea, through networks of defectors determined to get out information on the authoritarian, highly insular country they left behind.

Their words and images are snapped up with enthusiasm, and often credulously, by South Korean and international media desperate for news from the poorly understood country. The sources may not be particularly well informed: They could be ruling-party officials or factory workers. Or smugglers, professors or soldiers.

Generally, they are in it for the money, not a desire to force change in their homeland, according to the defectors they communicate with.

Whatever their motives, the risks they face are the same. Defectors say some of their sources are now dead because of their work.

In the months after the North’s December 2013 execution of Jang Song Thaek — an uncle of Kim Jong Un who had been widely regarded as the country’s No. 2 official — a defector’s organization reported on its website that another top official, Choe Ryong Hae, had been detained for unclear reasons. Those reports, cited by many news outlets, appeared doubtful days later when state TV aired photos of Choe accompanying Kim on an inspection trip.

Kim Seong-Min, a well-known defector who heads the organization involved, Free North Korea Radio, said he now believes Choe was least investigated, if not detained. There have been varying reports about Choe’s political fortunes, but on Friday, state media reported that he will travel to Russia as Kim Jong Un’s special envoy.

Kim Seong-Min is unperturbed as long as the information helps expose North Korean wrongdoing. And he has worked to help North Koreans bolster their reports by smuggling in illegal cellphones and camcorders for them.

[Excerpts from Associated Press article by writer Hyung-Jin Kim]

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The North Korean defector news network – Part 2

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Most of the North Korean defectors’ groups in Seoul specializing in sneaking news out of North Korea have no more than 10 North Korean sources. They regularly call their South Korean contacts at dawn or late at night, when North Korean security officials are less likely to be out with mobile equipment to detect cellphone signals.

Defectors’ organizations say they don’t tell their sources exactly who they are or how their information will be used, so the sources will more freely share information and will face less danger. The organizations usually release no details about a source except the province he or she reported from.

“They’d face espionage charges if they’re arrested” and owned up to a connection with an anti-Pyongyang organization in South Korea, said Kim Heung Kwang, a North Korean defector who heads the North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity organization. “I just tell them I’m writing something and need some information.”

His organization got a legitimate big scoop about the North, one of the few reports by defectors’ groups to be independently confirmed: the news of the country’s botched currency revaluation in 2009. South Korean officials confirmed the details days later.

Defectors say their sources often include their own relatives, friends and acquaintances. In return for information, they often get cash or gifts.

Kim Heung Kwang says he gives $50 to $100 to ordinary sources when they give him useful information, with more money for “ace” informants.

Ahn Kyung-su, a North Korea researcher at a Seoul-based nongovernmental organization, says he suspects that sources are mostly ordinary citizens who pick up rumors circulated in North Korean border markets. That can be useful in getting a picture of life in many North Korean communities, but much less so when it comes to high-level government decisions.

[Excerpts from Associated Press article by writer Hyung-Jin Kim]

Korean-American Christian aid worker detained in China near North Korean border

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A Korean-American living on the border of China and North Korea has been detained by Chinese authorities, US officials have confirmed.

Peter HahnPeter Hahn, a 73-year-old naturalized American citizen who left North Korea as a child, was taken in for questioning by local police on Tuesday and placed under detention after a six-hour interrogation, his lawyer told reporters earlier.

According to Hahn’s lawyer, Shanghai-based Zhang Peihong, the aid worker is accused of embezzlement and possession of fraudulent receipts. Zhang described the allegations as “groundless” and “impossible to stand up.”

Hahn has run a Christian aid agency in Tumen, Jilin province for the past two decades, which provides education and supplies to the poor in North Korea. Two other staff members, including a South Korean national, were detained earlier this month.

Hahn’s detention comes three months after Chinese authorities detained Canadians Kevin and Julie Garratt, who had lived in Dandong, Liaoning province – also on the North Korean border – since 1984. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said the couple was “under investigation for suspected theft of state secrets about China’s military and national defence research.”

Pastor Simon Suh told reporters that around 1,000 South Korean missionaries have been forced out of China, and many churches in the region had closed. “Obviously, the screw is tightening all along the border,” a South Korean Christian activist told Reuters.

[South China Morning Post]

North Korea threatens more nuclear tests

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North Korea responded harshly to a United Nations draft resolution referring the reclusive regime to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, promising that such a move would prompt it to conduct more nuclear tests.

A committee of the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday voted in favor of the draft resolution condemning the country’s human rights record and calling for “targeted sanctions.”

Before the vote, Choe Myong Nam, North Korea’s representative at the U.N., issued a familiar warning, saying that seeking to punish the country on human rights “is compelling us not to refrain any further from conducting nuclear tests.” The North Korean representative told the U.N. gathering Tuesday that the resolution “provoked confrontation” and “failed to reflect the reality on the ground.”

China is likely to use its veto against the resolution. Chinese officials have repeatedly said efforts to send North Korea’s leadership to the ICC “won’t help improve a country’s human rights condition.” North Korea’s longtime ally has never wavered in its support for Pyongyang.

The regime in Pyongyang is known to have conducted three previous tests, all of them believed to be based on plutonium. The most recent one took place in February 2013.

[CNN] 

UN votes to hold North Korea accountable for crimes against humanity

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A United Nations human-rights committee voted to hold North Korea accountable for crimes against humanity, spurning a diplomatic campaign waged by the totalitarian regime to protect leader Kim Jong Un from any possibility of prosecution.

The non-binding resolution drafted by the European Union and Japan was adopted with 111 votes in favor, far more than the majority required.

While the text doesn’t single out Kim Jong Un by name, it calls on the Security Council to refer North Korea’s rights situation to the International Criminal Court. China’s diplomats at the UN have said their country would use its veto power on the Security Council to block any referral to the court. North Korea may also be seeking support on the Security Council from Russia.

North Korea has become increasingly active on the diplomatic front in recent weeks as the EU and Japan presented the resolution, based on a 400-page report published in February by an independent UN commission of inquiry. The study documented the regime’s network of political prisons that hold an estimated 120,000 people and cited abuses such as “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence.”

[Bloomberg News]

UN rapporteur states Kim Jong Un guilty of complicity in North Korean abuses

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Marzuki Darusman, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said the country’s leader Kim Jong-un was guilty of “complicity in crimes against humanity” and “should be held responsible” by international justice.

Darusman made the remark at a press conference in Seoul, in reference to a UN report and a subsequent resolution that called for North Korea’s referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC). He added that the report “was able to point unequivocally to the responsibility and the culpability (for) these massive human rights violations to a single source of policy decision-making in the country”.

In March, a UN commission of inquiry published a detailed report which accused Pyongyang of carrying out “crimes against humanity” comparable to those committed by the German Nazis or the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Kim Jong-un ignored the UN letter that “directly put culpability on the supreme leader for these massive human rights violations”, according to the UN envoy.

The UN General Assembly is scheduled to vote on the resolution.

[IANS]

North Korea reaching out to Russia

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will send a special envoy, Choe Ryong Hae, to Russia next week, both countries announced Friday, in a trip expected to focus on how to boost ties at a time when his country faces deepening diplomatic isolation.

The ministry said in a statement that Russia hopes to discuss trade and economic ties, the situation on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia, and other international issues. Choe’s trip also appears aimed at easing North Korea’s diplomatic isolation, said analyst Cheong Seong-chang at the private Sejong Institute.

Choe, a senior Workers’ Party official, is considered as one of Kim’s close associates. He visited Beijing last year as a special envoy and told Chinese President Xi Jinping that North Korea would take steps to rejoin stalled nuclear disarmament talks.

Choe was also a member of a high-profile North Korean delegation that visited South Korea in early October and agreed to resume senior-level talks. The talks, however, haven’t moved forward because of tension over propaganda leaflets that South Korean activists send by balloon across the border into North Korea.

Russia and North Korea maintain cordial ties, but are not as close as they were during Soviet times, when Moscow provided significant aid and support to Pyongyang.

For North Korea, better ties with Russia could provide a much-needed economic boost because its ties with China are not as strong as they once were. Russia, for its part, has been seeking to bolster ties with North Korea amid a longtime effort to strengthen its role in Asia.

 [Associated Press]

Connecting with the Internet from North Korea’s borders

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According to North Korea Tech, which monitors technology in North Korea, foreign visitors now have to de-activate their Sim cards upon departure from the country.

They can buy cards which give web access on entry but, in the past it was possible that they could be left behind, still loaded with unused internet access for locals to use. That gap has been plugged.

So has the possibility that North Koreans near foreign embassies and the offices of international organizations could access the buildings’ wi-fi.

In August, foreign missions were told that “signals of regional wireless networks… produce some effect on our surroundings” and, therefore, their licenses were revoked. The ban followed a report on a South Korean website that demand for property around embassies in Pyongyang had risen because of the ability of neighbors to furtively make use of unencrypted wi-fi.

There is a continual game of cat and mouse between the North Korean authorities and people who want to talk to the outside world – for which there are fierce penalties.

Martyn Williams who runs the North Korea Tech monitoring site says, “It’s very difficult for the average North Korean to get near the South Korean border because that’s such a heavily guarded security area.”

“It’s easier to get near the Chinese border and there you do see people inserting Chinese Sim cards into their phones, or they’ll have smuggled phones from China.If they can get onto the Chinese cellular network, they can make calls to anywhere in the world. They can also access the internet without the North Korean government stopping them.

“One of the things the North Korean government does is heavily patrol the border and try to find people using these cellphones.”

[BBC]

Christian groups treading carefully in North Korea

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Christian groups in North Korea are vowing to carry on their missionary work despite mounting risks since Korean-American activist Kenneth Bae was imprisoned two years ago.

North Korea and neighboring China have clamped down on the groups’ activities recently, and the organizations say that has forced them to become more secretive. Bae’s unexpected release has not changed that.

Bae has remained silent on his missionary work and his imprisonment. On Monday, Bae’s sister said he would not do interviews. Such reticence is necessary, said one U.S.-based activist, because of the dangers involved in propagating religion, especially in an overt, organized way, in a totalitarian state. “If one person is caught, then everyone else can suffer the consequences,” said Sam Kim, executive director of the Korean Church Coalition for North Korea Freedom, which is based in Southern California.

“We have to come up with a strategy to avoid another case like Kenneth Bae’s,” said Kim Seung-eun, a missionary for the Caleb Mission, which is based in South Korea’s South Chungcheong Province but frequently travels to North Korea.

Open Doors, a group that monitors religious persecution globally, says North Korea is the worst country to be Christian. It says 70,000 Christians are in labor camps there.

The clamp-down on Christian-backed humanitarian organizations along the North Korea-China border has made it harder for activists to aid fleeing North Koreans. “The people I talk to – the rescuers – say that it’s tough right now,” said Melanie Kirkpatrick, who has written a history of the “underground railroad,” the network that helps people escape from North Korea.

[Reuters]

Gruff former general the right man for North Korean mission

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The North Koreans passed word they wanted a high-ranking U.S. government official for the job, so President Barack Obama sent a gruff former general to spirit home two Americans held captive. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is no diplomat by training, and that’s perhaps just why he earned the clandestine call.

For past visits to the unpredictable and reclusive country, the United States has sent smooth-tongued luminaries such as former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and former U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson. Or North Korean experts, one of whom was Sydney Seiler, a former intelligence official who is now with the State Department.

But analysts who follow North Korea say Clapper may have been perfect for the role. The spy chief was senior enough to convey a message of respect to the North Korean. But he is not a diplomat, so he could beg off any unrelated demands the North Koreans may have made. The two countries do not have diplomatic relations.

“The director of national intelligence was just the right person for this,” said Joseph DeTrani, who used to work for Clapper as his North Korean mission manager.

Matthew Miller arrives in US from North KoreaOn Saturday, Clapper landed on a U.S. government plane with the two Americans, Matthew Miller of Bakersfield, California, and Kenneth Bae of Lynnwood, Washington, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Washington.

Many analysts suggested that the conciliatory moves, after years of bellicose rhetoric and inflammatory actions, were in response to recent pressure over North Korea’s human rights record.

DeTrani said he believed that report may have been a factor, but he saw the releases as a hopeful sign that North Korea “wants to come out of the penalty box. … The North Koreans want to come back to negotiations,” said DeTrani, who nows leads an intelligence contractor trade group. “They are going through a bad patch. The last two years have been a disaster. They are more and more of an isolated state. We’re seeing an outreach – the leadership in Pyongyang is saying, ‘we’ve got to change course, it’s not working.”

[Associated Press]