Author Archives for Grant Montgomery

China arrests four Christian missionaries near North Korea border

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Chinese authorities recently arrested four Christian missionaries near the North Korea border, but reasons for their arrest were not provided.

A local resident in Yanji, a city in the Yanbian region of Jilin Province, said the arrests were made at a hotel in the town on Thursday, Radio Free Asia reported.

All four missionaries appear to be of Korean descent, but carried different passports.

One missionary identified as Pastor Park Won-cheol is a man in his fifties and an American citizen. Park’s whereabouts are being confirmed by the U.S. embassy in China, the source said.

Park had been traveling frequently to China “for years,” the source said. “Park flew to China from South Korea last week. On Feb. 9, at 10:30 a.m., immediately before he was to travel to Yanji airport to board a plane to return to South Korea, he was arrested at his hotel after a raid.”

Of the other missionaries, at least one is a South Korean passport holder with the surname Kim, and in his thirties.

[UPI]

North Korea launches ballistic missile test-fire

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North Korea says it has successfully completed the launch of a new ballistic missile, according to state media. KCNA reported Kim was present at the site and personally gave the order for the launch, which was the first missile test by Pyongyang since US President Donald Trump took office.

A US official said the missile traveled 500 kilometers (310 miles) before landing in the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea, and that it was launched from North Pyongan province.  Intermediate-range ballistic missiles typically travel from 3,000 to 5,500 kilometers (1,864 to 3,417 miles).

The United Nations Security Council said it plans hold consultations on an “urgent basis” Monday afternoon regarding North Korea, according to the US Mission to the United Nations. The meeting was requested by the United States, South Korea and Japan — whose Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, was visiting President Trump in the United States when the launch occurred.

Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, spoke to his South Korean counterpart Kim Kwan Jin, according to the South Korean President’s office. They condemned the launch and agreed “to seek all possible options” to deter Pyongyang in the future. China, North Korea’s neighbor and most important strategic partner, has not yet commented on the launch.

[CNN]

North Korean defector Hyeonseo Lee prominent global voice

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Hyeonseo Lee is a miniature hurricane and a woman of strong will — “obstinate” is how she puts it herself — she is not at all the doll-faced persona suggested in photographs. Now 36, she escaped on foot across the frozen Yalu river into China from her home in North Korea at the age of 17. For the next decade, she survived abusive Chinese pimps, gangsters, importunate marriage suitors, informers and police interrogators, and then escaped again to seek asylum and a new home in South Korea.

She is now one of the most prominent global voices of the subjugated North Korean people, a bestselling author and public speaker and a campaigner against the thriving Chinese trade in Korean sex slaves. Recalling the TED talk she gave in 2013 that propelled her to stardom, and which has so far been watched 7 million times, she says, “The TED talk I gave [me] a kind of responsibility. Every word I’m speaking, it’s not from myself. I’m speaking for and representing the people of communist North Korea.”

Lee is The Girl with Seven Names (her autobiographical book describes how she escaped detection in China, learning the language and living under a series of assumed identities), and unless the two Koreas are reunified, I will probably never know her real name, which must remain secret to protect relatives and friends left behind under the dictatorship of Kim Jong Un. She chose the name Hyeonseo — whose two parts mean “sunshine” and “good luck” — to celebrate her emergence from the “long tunnels” of darkness into her new life of freedom in South Korea, and insists that even her mother must use it all the time.

The dangers are real. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service has warned Lee that Pyongyang’s agents may try to kidnap her — it has happened to other critics of Pyongyang and Beijing — and make an example of her in North Korea. “That’s why the NIS tells me, every event, when you receive an invitation, better check if that’s a real event. And the one thing they told me is, don’t go to Southeast Asia, including China.”

[Financial Times]

North Korean defector Hyeonseo Lee on the secretive state

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While interviewing North Korean defector Hyeonseo Lee, her memories come tumbling out, some good but mostly bad: her disbelieving mother — lost and now found again — running towards her in a prison yard in Laos; the corpses of famine victims floating down the Yalu River; the handcarts to take away the dead so that Chinese visitors would not see evidence of North Korea’s shameful failure; a weakling flung on to the heaps of dead because he was probably going to die anyway and a passing Chinese driver laughing at the sight. “Sometimes the dead bodies wouldn’t be moved, so the smell of the decomposing flesh was everywhere, especially under the bridge and near the train station, because under the bridge is where not many people can see.”

North Koreans flee because they realize there is something wrong with their homeland. It is the lies they have been taught about the rest of the world that are deeply ingrained. “We learned that Americans are our primary enemies and all human scums live in America,” says Lee, who stunned her mother and brother by entering a relationship with an American man called Brian, before marrying him four years ago.

“South Korea was described as the poorest country in the world, where beggars were filling the streets. And then the most shocking thing for us was the Korean war — it was created by the American and South Korean enemies together. We never learned it was actually started by the North Korean regime. My mum, who was brainwashed for more than 60 years, she still asks me: ‘Show me the proof’.”

Lee wants reunification, she wants to be able to go back to her hometown on the Yalu, and she worries that young South Koreans do not care as much as their parents whether or not it ever happens. (“Many people in the past, they never predicted German reunification,” she says hopefully, “but it did happen very abruptly.”).

The importance of Lee’s story rests on her intimate understanding of China. … The communist government in Beijing treats North Korean refugees with varying degrees of cruelty and indifference, depending on the winds of geopolitics. “We refugees [are a political punching bag] between China and South Korea and North Korea. China has all the keys right now. .. So if … China stops supporting North Korea, within one week or 10 days they can make North Korea chaos. I wish they could do more, but they are not doing it at all.”

[Financial Times]

The hidden North Korean human rights issue

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Excerpts of an interview with Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation:

 Q: We are constantly seeing news out of North Korea, that is—for lack of a better phrase—bizarre.

 Scholte: This regime is sadistic and cruel. Just talking about recent events, Chang Sŏng-t’aek, who was Kim Jong Un’s uncle, devoted his entire life to that regime and was successful in helping the regime and then all of a sudden he falls out of favor and is basically publicly humiliated and then brutally killed. It just shows the level of cruelty that this regime represents. I do not believe he was fed to dogs; that report came out of China. … Part of the problem with reporting about North Korea is that we cannot go and see the political prison camps. … So it’s difficult to try to corroborate some of the stories. … One interesting thing about the defectors is that there’s a self-policing among them. They know that they were doubted, and therefore their credibility is always on the line. So they’re very careful, the defectors that I work with, they’re very careful to make sure that if we have a witness that comes over, that they’ve been vetted, and they’re really telling their true story.

Q: Why do you think governments and Western journalists have put so much focus on the nuclear issue and not the human rights threat for the citizens of North Korea?

The policy of George W. Bush was the same as Bill Clinton’s: we have to reach a deal on the nuclear issue first, then, we can talk about human rights. That has been a horrible mistake. During all the talks whether Four Party talks or Six Party talks, millions of North Koreans have died. And, not talking about the human rights atrocities fed into the lie that the North Korean people tell their own citizens, which is we hate them. North Koreans are told by the regime that Americans are Yankee imperialist wolves that occupy South Korea, and they want to destroy them, and so we have to build these nuclear weapons, because the United States is ready to attack us. … We fed into that lie because we didn’t talk about these human rights issues.

The Obama Administration has been very careful to keep the focus on human rights and the nuclear issue and give them equal importance. During this period the North Korean defectors kept telling us, “They will never give up their nuclear weapons. They only use negotiation to extract aid.” Hwang Jang yop (highest ranking North Korean defector and author of juche ideology) said that in 1997 when he defected, “Human rights is their Achilles heel. Human rights is what you have to talk about. They’re killing their own people. They’re using you in these talks. …At least we’ve come to that point now where we realize that.

[Acton Institute]

North Korean defector in Russia facing repatriation and execution

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A North Korean defector who has been on the run in Russia for nearly two decades is due to be repatriated this Friday, with human rights organizations claiming he faces certain execution.

Choe Myong-bok was working in a logging camp in Siberia in 1999, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported, but escaped guards and made his way to St Petersburg. He managed to hide in the city until his arrest by Russian authorities. A local court has now ruled that he should be repatriated to his own country.

Russia and North Korea signed an agreement in November 2014 under which nationals of either country “found to have illegally entered or been living in either country’s territory” are repatriated.

The Russian human rights group Memorial is attempting to have the court’s ruling overturned on the grounds that he faces execution. The organization has also appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to seek protection for Mr Choe.

An estimated 20,000 North Koreans are reportedly working in appalling conditions in Russia, with the Chosun Ilbo claiming that at least 40 defectors are living in shelters in different parts of the country.

[The Telegraph]

North Korea rated “worst of the worst” for violations of rights and liberties

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North Korea again received a “worst of the worst” rating for its lack of political rights and civil liberties from Freedom House, a U.S.-based think tank in Washington, D.C.

According to Freedom House’s 2017 report on “Freedom in the World,” the Kim Jong Un regime’s violation of rights and liberties was ranked one of the world’s worst for the 44th year in a row.

North Korea received an aggregate score of 3 for civil liberties and political rights out of a possible 100, tied with Eritrea and Uzbekistan for the second-lowest position.

South Korea by contrast scored 82 points out of a possible 100, and is categorically a “free country,” according to the report.

[UPI]

North Korean defector’s role at London embassy

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Besides being the deputy ambassador, North Korea’s number two diplomat in London, Thae Yong Ho, was the man appointed to spy on embassy colleagues and report signs of disloyalty to the feared secret police.

Thae said in an interview that one of his jobs was to report to the “bowibu”, North Korea’s Stasi-like State Security Department, on everyone in the embassy, including the ambassador. But he told his embassy colleagues about the reports and made sure they were positive.

“In the London embassy, I was in charge of this kind of surveillance,” the 54-year-old said.

“I had to write back if they had any ideological changes or if they met any British or South Koreans in secret,” Thae said of his colleagues. “But I always reported good things”.

Thae first came to London as a North Korean diplomat in 2004, when he spent four years as counselor under ambassador Ri Yong Ho, now North Korea’s foreign minister. His two sons went to local London schools, but returned with Thae and his wife to Pyongyang after his first posting there.

In 2013, Thae returned to London with his family, the same year Jang Song Thaek, Kim Jong Un’s powerful uncle by marriage, was executed in a brutal purge that included extended members of Jang’s family and business contacts.

“It was a huge nationwide purge,” Thae said, adding it prompted him to plan an escape. “I had to leave the system”.

[Reuters]

North Korea sacks head of secret police amid signs of ‘crack in elite’

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North Korea has dismissed its minister of state security, a key aide to the reclusive state’s young leader, Kim Jong Un, South Korea said on Friday, in what a high-profile defector said would be another sign of a “crack in the elite” in Pyongyang if true.

Kim Won Hong was removed from office as head of the feared “bowibu”, or secret police, in mid-January apparently on charges of corruption, abuse of power and human rights abuses, Jeong Joon-hee, South Korea’s Unification Ministry spokesman, said, confirming media reports.

“There is always a possibility that purges continue as part of constantly strengthening power,” Jeong told a briefing, adding punishment for Kim could be more severe depending on the outcome of the investigation, but he had been dismissed and demoted from the rank of general to major general.

Kim Jong Un became leader in 2011 after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, and his consolidation of power has included purges and executions of top officials.

Thae Yong Ho, North Korea’s former deputy ambassador to London who has defected to the South, told Reuters he was not surprised by the news. “I cannot confirm if the reports are true or not, but this kind of power struggle is quite normal in North Korean history. Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un’s style of control is always one of collective surveillance that checks the power of each organization.

“Kim Jong Un has killed too many high officials and there are a lot of complaints and dissent amongst the high elite because of it. If the demotion of Kim Won Hong is really true, then that’s another sign of a crack in the North Korean elite group.”

[Reuters]

Trump’s defense chief in Seoul to show solidarity on North Korea threat

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s defenses secretary told South Korea on Thursday the two allies would stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” to face the threat from North Korea, in a message of reassurance after Trump questioned aspects of the alliance in his campaign.

Jim Mattis’ two-day visit comes amid concern that the North may be readying to test a new ballistic missile, in what could be an early challenge for Trump’s administration. Mattis, in his first trip abroad as Pentagon chief, vowed to strengthen ties in talks with South Korea.

In his New Year’s speech, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had said his nation was close to test launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). North Korea appears to have restarted operation of a reactor at its main Yongbyon nuclear facility that produces plutonium that can be used for its nuclear weapons program, according to a U.S. think-tank, 38 North.

Mattis’ trip to the region, which will include a stop in Japan, is the first foreign trip by any of Trump’s cabinet secretaries. U.S. officials have said the trip is meant to reaffirm ties with South Korea and Japan, U.S. allies hosting nearly 80,000 American troops, and the importance of the region overall.

Both South Korea and the United States on Thursday recommitted to plans to deploy a U.S. missile defenses system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), in South Korea later this year.

[Reuters]