Category: China

North Korea “the most dangerous place on Earth”

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Along the so-called Demilitarized Zone that divides South Korea from North Korea, only about 2,000 yards of wasteland separate hundreds of thousands of battle-ready troops backed by enough artillery to obliterate each other within a few hours.

Over the decades, sporadic gun battles have taken the lives of scores of soldiers on both sides. The Communist regime still sends spies and saboteurs and now drones south, keeping the war at a low boil. Naval and air clashes regularly erupt. Just south of the DMZ, South Korea keeps finding tunnels big enough to rush thousands of Communist soldiers south in an hour.

“The most dangerous place on Earth,” President Bill Clinton once called the Korean Peninsula, and it’s probably gotten more dangerous since he said that two decades ago. Following a searing U.N. condemnation this month of its Soviet-style gulags and other human rights outrages, Pyongyang threatened a fourth nuclear weapon test.

Such grandiose brinksmanship is typical of the regime. Last year, North Korea rattled its missiles at Hawaii, Guam and Washington, D.C. (no matter that it can’t yet reach them) as well as South Korea.

Faced with such threats over the years, the U.S. has embraced its own doomsday scenario. After meeting with the U.S. commander in South Korea when he was defense secretary in 2012, Leon Panetta said he had a “powerful sense that war in that region was neither hypothetical nor remote, but ever-present and imminent,” he recalls in his memoir. If the Communists invaded en masse, he wrote, the U.S. would use “nuclear weapons, if necessary.”

All of which makes Korea a kind of Cold War theater of the absurd, frozen in amber. Outright war is unthinkable, suicidal. Yet both sides talk about a future “reunification” based on the triumph of one side over the other.

Most observers think China will never permit a North Korean collapse, in part because it would propel millions of refugees into its territory, not to mention open the gates to a U.S -South Korean advance to its doorstep. Nevertheless, officials in Seoul recently showed off its Ministry of Unification, which has an annual budget of about $180 million and 200 staffers (augmented by 600 government advisers) dreaming about the future, “so people won’t be caught off guard when it actually happens,” as a slideshow there instructed the visiting reporters. Plus, according to South Korea’s JoongAng Daily, the government has budgeted as much as $500 billion for “a possible sudden collapse of [the North Korean] government or another kind of rapid and unexpected reunification.”

[excerpted from Newsweek]

North Korea goes nuclear after UN presses for criminal court

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How has North Korea reacted to a historic United Nations vote to begin the process to refer its leadership to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity?

By threatening nuclear strikes on the US, Japan, South Korea and all US “followers”. In other words, by offering to commit further crimes against humanity.

“It would be funny if it were not so serious,” says the man who gathered the evidence for the case, Australia’s Michael Kirby. “You should always take seriously threats by someone in charge of a nation state, especially if they have possession of a reported 20 nuclear weapons.”

But, tellingly, North Korea seems more frightened by Kirby’s report and the consequences than any of its target countries are by its threat of “unimaginable and catastrophic consequences.”

Pyongyang had furiously denounced the report itself as a “fraud” and a tactic of “the frantic human rights racket” and labelled the witnesses who had come forth as “human scum.” But all the testimony, given in public, is now on the public record, on the UN website, for all to see.

Why is Pyongyang so afraid? Even if the report goes to the UN Security Council, even if North Korea’s traditional protectors China and Russia decide not to exercise their veto, even if it is referred to the International Criminal Court, the chance of ever getting Kim into the dock at the Hague must be a very small one. The country already labors under a raft of international sanctions.

“I think the regime is genuinely shocked,” says Kirby. “North Korea is not used to being the issue, and sailing under the radar. Those days are over. The international community has had enough.”

As the matter goes to the full General Assembly and then the Security Council in the days ahead, we will find out whether that it true.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

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]

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]

Kim Jong Un and relations with China

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Kim Jong-un’s vanity has been on display in the promotion of costly yet impractical construction projects that would be worthy of a pharaoh. These public works involve the mobilization of the masses—soldiers and students in addition to laborers—in “speed campaigns” to achieve hasty completion according to Kim Jong-un’s whim. The projects, including an elaborate ski resort, a refurbished amusement park, and an aquarium with a dolphin show, have done little to address the chronic malnutrition and meager living standards of a people isolated in an island of poverty in the midst of the most economically dynamic region of the world.

The projects, ostensibly undertaken to promote tourism, reflect the young general’s narcissistic lifestyle, as vividly described last year by retired basketball star Dennis Rodman. Rodman had made a visit with Kim Jong-un to the latter’s pleasure island, complete with horseback riding, free-flowing alcohol, and yachts.

The indulgent lifestyle probably also explains the use of a cane by thirty-something Kim Jong-un. He allegedly suffers from a series of debilitating illnesses—including obesity, gout, diabetes, and high blood pressure—usually associated with individuals twice his age.

In almost three years in power, Kim Jong-un, who once lived as a student in Switzerland where he was reportedly an avid fan of Western sports teams and rock music, has not left the country. This indicates a degree of insecurity and is in marked contrast to his father, Kim Jong-il, who is thought to have traveled three times to China and once to the Russian Far East during the last two years of his life. Kim Jong-un’s lack of an invitation to visit Beijing, North Korea’s sole ally in the world, has reached the point of embarrassment—especially after President Park Geun-hye of rival South Korea was invited on a state visit to Beijing in 2013, which was reciprocated by a visit to Seoul of Chinese president Xi Jinping this summer.

There is the question of the increasingly frosty relations between the two erstwhile allies. Kim Jong-un’s father was always careful to treat China, North Korea’s economic and energy lifeline, with a degree of respect, even traveling to China in May 2011, although in frail health, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between China and North Korea. Kim Jong-un, however, has treated China with barely veiled contempt, causing Beijing to lose face when he went forward in early 2013 with a nuclear test despite Chinese admonishments to cease and desist. He then publicly purged and executed his uncle, a key Chinese ally, after condemning him for “economic crimes” linked to a foreign power—obviously a reference to China.

[The Weekly Standard]

How North Korean defectors send money to their families

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Under one common method of transferring money, North Korean defectors use online banking sites to wire money to a bank account of a Korean-Chinese broker based in a Chinese town near the border with North Korea. The broker then takes out 20 to 30 percent of the money as commissions and asks a Korean-Chinese trader, who can freely cross the border into North Korea, to deliver the rest of the money to the defector’s relatives.

The step of carrying money across the border is not always necessary when the go-betweens are involved in separate operations of smuggling Chinese goods for sale in North Korean markets. For example, a North Korean broker who owes money to a Chinese supplier could pay the debt by giving a defector’s family cash, if the supplier is also involved in the transaction.

If a defector’s family lives far from the Chinese border, a transfer will take more effort because North Korea restricts its citizens’ movement and has poor transportation services.

In the early days, brokers frequently cheated defectors, but the business has since become more orderly and lucrative, with brokers more concerned about retaining customers.

It’s not known how many North Koreans have been arrested for getting money from their relatives in South Korea or communicating with them. But activists who have interviewed defectors say many North Koreans have avoided trouble by using some of the money to bribe local officials.

At the same time, activists and defectors say North Korea has been cracking down, using equipment near the border to check for signals from Chinese mobile phones.

[AP]

Smuggling preferences for North Koreans

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A North Korean defector calling himself “Mr Chung” revealed North Korea’s smuggling preferences in a Channel 4 documentary last year.

He smuggles radios, USB sticks and DVDs of soap operas and entertainment shows into the North, posing as a mushroom importer.  He said, “Men love their action films! I sent them Skyfall recently. The women enjoy watching soap operas and dramas.

“The more people are exposed to such media the more likely they are to become disillusioned with the regime and start wanting to live differently.”

A group of activists in South Korea led by another defector from the North send satchels containing anti-regime flyers, noodles, $1 bills and USB sticks containing South Korean soap operas over the border attached to balloons.

North Korea forbids its 24 million people from watching foreign broadcasts and videos out of fear outside influence could undermine the dictatorship’s ideology.

Anyone caught smuggling them in or distributing illicit material can be executed for crimes against the state and viewers have reportedly been sentenced to years in prison camps or hard labor. A purge was reported last year, when around 80 people were said to be executed for watching South Korean television shows in November.

[The Independent]