Category: DPRK Government

Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong in her brother’s shadow

Posted on by
4

Kim Yo-jong chooses to remain in her brother’s shadow at public events.

Still, Kim Yo-jong “has a lot of control over who has access to her brother, what they say to him, what documents they hand over – in short, she is a combination gatekeeper and traffic cop,” said Michael Madden, editor of the North Korea Leadership Watch blog.

She joined her brother in handing out awards to troops at an air force competition in May and that suggests she commands the party’s Organization and Guidance Department, which handles everything from promotions to purges, Cheong Seong Chang, a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute near Seoul, said in an e-mail.

Kim was born to the same Korean-Japanese dancer, Ko Yong Hui, as Kim Jong-un. In February 2011 South Korean broadcaster KBS showed what it identified as Kim Yo-jong and her other brother, Kim Jong-chol, enjoying an Eric Clapton concert in Singapore.

Yonhap News said January 2 Kim married one of party secretary Choe Ryong Hae’s sons, citing two people in China it didn’t identify and a photo of her wearing a ring. Dong-A Ilbo newspaper rebutted the report days later.

[Washington Post]

Kim Jong Un opens North Korea a crack

Posted on by

In an evident small-scale relaxing of North Korea’s rigid isolation, young leader Kim Jong Un is allowing new kinds of Western and American pop culture symbols to appear in his country, including Mickey Mouse. The regime is also curbing its harsh intolerance of high-tech gadgets and consumer goods, the possession of which could sometimes mean prison or worse.

Some 2.4 million North Koreans now subscribe to mobile phones according to Orascom Telecom Media & Technology Holding of Egypt, which provides cell service here. Since mid-2014, phones loaded with high tech games and romance novels have arrived in Pyongyang, the capital. North Koreans can now own Google Android smart phones with 30 foreign games included, even as access to the Internet and 3G is still unavailable.

Despite crippling conditions in many places, Kim has expanded the availability of previously forbidden products to a broader swath of the nation’s elite and their offspring in urban areas – partly to placate new generations of Koreans and party to offer perks to regime loyalists the Kim needs support from.

Digital cameras, credit cards, and cosmetics – the basics of Western and Chinese consumer culture — are now showing up in one of the world’s most ideologically rigid states. Previously unavailable foreign products, including German beer, shampoo, toothpaste and Japanese mayonnaise are on the increase. Coffee has become a common drink, and some restaurants even serve espresso from Italian espresso machines.

The message if not the reality is that daily life is improving for those in urban areas.

Yet, food and power shortages remain in much of the country, and a gap has widened between the privileged in the city and those living second-class lives in the countryside. Most ordinary North Koreans can’t afford a camera. Wood-burning steam-powered trucks are still seen running outside Pyongyang. And many people rely on their feet or on hitchhiking for transportation.

[Read full article in The Christian Science Monitor]

The North Korea financial sanctions debacle in a different decade

Posted on by

Gaddafi being killed, after he agreed to  decommission his nuclear program, definitely put the USA on the wrong side of the North Korea, which understandably cited the Libyan precedent as justification for why it could never, ever surrender its nuclear weapons.

The anti-North Korea financial sanctions are an exercise in nostalgia in the matter of policies, rhetoric, and even actors–and also a bitter reminder of two lost years of US DPRK policy, and the bomb they helped birth. North Korean financial sanctions is truly a matter of Same Sh*t Different Decade, recapitulating and hopefully improving on one of the biggest and at the same time unreported fiascos of American foreign policy: the 2005 attempt to achieve regime change on the cheap against North Korea through covert financial sanctions.  I think it’s a good time to lift up the curtain and look at what happened, what didn’t happen, and what was misreported the first time America took a financial swing at North Korea.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) operation tracked and blocked drug cartels’ ongoing struggle to launder the immense ocean of cash sloshing out of their operations.  Then under Bush, Section 311 of the Patriot Act was generously reinterpreted to exploit its coercive potential by employing FinCEN money laundering investigations against disliked state actors like North Korea.  Somebody coined the term “financial waterboarding” to describe the borderline legality and extremity of the tactic. Aggressive North Korea regime change policies moved to the top of the agenda.

Ground Zero for the initiative was a small Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia, which had allowed North Korean entities to open some 50 accounts.  The U.S. Treasury Department designated BDA as an institution “of primary money-laundering concern” under Section 311, averring that it was suspected of laundering the infamous North Korean “supernotes”—a miraculous counterfeit of the US hundred-dollar note that was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.  To “protect the U.S. financial system”, U.S. financial institutions were instructed not to have dealings with BDA.  Result: a run on the bank, and BDA went into receivership in the hands of the Macau financial authorities.

Mission accomplished, one might think.  … It turned out that BDA routinely sent all its cash deposits over to Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong for vetting. … But that did not deter the Treasury Department, which ground on with the apparently bogus case.  … By the way, despite the US Treasury final rule, Banco Delta Asia is still in business.

[Read the full article in CounterPunch] 

Kim Jong Un may make first foreign trip to Moscow

Posted on by

Kim Jong Un is likely to make his first foreign trip on May 9 as North Korean leader to Moscow where he will be part of Russian celebrations for the 70th anniversary of World War II victory.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that North Korea had given a “positive”, response “as a first signal” to an invitation for Kim to attend the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.

Lavrov told reporters that invitations had been sent “to heads of lots of foreign states, including the Commonwealth of Independent States, BRICS, Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, European Union, member states of the anti-Hitler coalition, heads of international and regional organizations”.

South Korean President Park Geun Hye has also been invited and but it remains unclear if she will visit Moscow.

If Park and Kim both attend the ceremony in Moscow, the possibility of a meeting between the two archrivals could not be ruled, according to Yonhap news agency.

Kim in his New Year speech said he was open to the “highest-level” meeting with South Korea. The peace gesture was reciprocated by Park saying that she was willing to meet with Kim without preconditions while urging North Korea to drop its nuclear pursuit in order for any meeting to produce meaningful progress.

Kim has never met any head of state or made foreign trips since he took power after his father, Kim Jong Il, died at the end of 2011.

North Korean defector: I could not trust anyone – Part 1

Posted on by

A North Korean defector has spoken out about how he escaped from the world’s most secretive state with his infant son strapped to his back and a cyanide pill in his mouth.

New Malden, a suburb in south-west London, is known for its large South Korean population, but few people know about the 600 or so North Korean defectors who have taken refuge in the borough.

Choi Joong-Ha had to leave North Korea with his wife Yun-Ah-Jung and one-year-old son Joon Choi in 2004. The country had just come out of a devastating famine that killed almost 3.5m people when he made a comment to his brother about how conditions would not change while the Kim dynasty was in charge. Joong-Ha became so scared that someone would repeat his words and he would be arrested that he made plans to leave.

He had been conditioned into such a state of paranoia that he did not tell his wife about the escape. Speaking through a translator, Joong-Ha said: “My wife is another person and I didn’t know what she was thinking. I could not trust her, I could not trust anyone. It is the way the regime works, the way it stays in power. You can only trust yourself.

“I was scared that I would be sent to a labour camp for what I said and that would have effectively been a death sentence.”

Joong-Ha told his wife they were going to visit his brother who lived near the Chinese border. When they reached the Tumen River that separates the two countries he revealed the real reason they had come. “My wife was not pleased and she didn’t want to go. If the authority catches you trying to escape you will be shot or sent to a camp.”

For 12 years Joong-Ha had been in the North Korean army and would, therefore, have been subjected to the most severe punishment if he had been caught trying to leave. Because of this he waded across the river with his son strapped to his back and a cyanide pill in his mouth.

He said: “I got to quite a high position in the army and we were constantly shown propaganda about how our country was the best in the world and no one could compare to us. … If I had been caught they would have singled me out as an example to others who might be planning to do the same thing. I would have been arrested, tortured and put in a camp or shot there and then. If the authorities saw us trying to cross it would be better to die in the river.”

[continued]

UN panel on North Korea stands by rights abuses report

Posted on by

The head of the UN commission that produced a damning report on North Korean rights abuses has dismissed Pyongyang’s claim that doubts about the credibility of a prominent witness made the panel’s findings “invalid”.

“The partial retraction of Shin Dong-hyuk of the testimony he gave to the Commission of Inquiry on North Korea is not significant for the report, conclusions or recommendations of the commission,” said retired Australian judge Michael Kirby.

Mr Shin, a well-known defector and Pyongyang critic, admitted this week that elements of his best-selling gulag survivor book Escape from Camp 14 were inaccurate, although he stressed that the crucial details of his suffering and torture still stood.

For his part, Mr Kirby noted that Mr Shin was only one of 300 witnesses interviewed by his commission, whose overall findings were based on a mass of “overwhelming” corroborative evidence.

The commission’s conclusion that North Korea was committing human rights violations “without parallel in the contemporary world” was the basis of a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly last month. It urged the Security Council to consider referring Pyongyang to the International Criminal Court.

For activists within the North Korean defector community, Mr Shin’s admissions of inaccuracies in his survivor story are a genuine blow, given his high profile.

In his statement, Mr Kirby was protective of the 32-year-old defector. “Mr Shin bears, on his body, the evidence of torture and suffering. At this stage he needs help and support, not hounding,” he said.

[AFP]

US aims at remaining North Korean financial links

Posted on by

The United States aims to use new sanctions imposed on North Korea over the cyber attack on Sony Pictures to cut off the country’s remaining links to the international financial system, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Tuesday.

Daniel Glaser, assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury Department, said past sanctions had already discouraged “hundreds” of overseas banks, including China’s major commercial banks, from doing business with North Korea. New sanctions announced by President Barack Obama on Jan 2. provided “a tremendous amount of flexibility” and the goal was to identify remaining financial institutions that allowed North Korea access to the global system, which could face sanction themselves, Glaser told a House of Representatives briefing.

Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for use of the full scope of the new sanctions announced. “The significance of this new Executive Order may come from the broad power it gives the president to target anyone who is a part of the North Korean government, or is assisting them in any way … that is if the administration chooses to use it to its full advantage,” he told the briefing. “We need to step up and target those financial institutions in Asia and beyond that are supporting the brutal and dangerous North Korean regime.”

When challenged by Royce about “a number of small banks” still doing business with North Korea and the need to choke off the country’s access to hard currency, Glaser replied: “That’s exactly what we are trying to do.”

Royce said he hoped a bipartisan bill he sponsored that would label North Korea “a primary money laundering concern” would be passed by the Senate this year.

[Reuters]

Talks coming between North and South Korea?

Posted on by

In a New Year’s press conference Monday, South Korean President Park Geun-hye made an overture to North Korea, extending an offer to hold talks without any preconditions. “My position is that to ease the pain of division and to accomplish peaceful unification, I am willing to meet with anyone,” Park said in her speech. “If it is helpful, I am up for a summit meeting with the North. There is no pre-condition.”

Geun-hye’s remarks are in part a reaction to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un conceding that he would be willing to hold a summit with the South under certain conditions, says Charles Armstrong, a professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University.

“If the atmosphere and environment is there, there is no reason not to hold a high-level summit [with South Korea],” Kim Jong Un said in a speech broadcast on state media January 1. However, Pyongyang has not acquiesced to recent requests to resume negotiations with South Korea on human rights and other matters.

Amstrong says that “both sides are sending signals to the other that they are ready to open dialogue.”

The Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief in Korea is less optimistic about the possibility for talks, saying that “there are always unpalatable preconditions in inter-Korean talks even if one side says there aren’t.”

The two countries have been divided since the end of World War II. The Korean War that followed ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty, thus North and South Korea have technically been at war for more than six decades. Reunification has been a goal for both states, but they lie on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of political ideology.

[Newsweek]

North Korea offers to suspend nuclear tests if US suspends military drills

Posted on by

North Korea said on Saturday it was willing to suspend nuclear tests if the United States agreed to call off annual military drills held jointly with South Korea, but Washington rejected the proposal as a veiled threat.

The offer is an often repeated demand by Pyongyang for an end to the large-scale defensive drills by the allies.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the nuclear tests and military exercises were separate issues.

The United States and South Korea have stressed that the annual drills, which in some years involved U.S. aircraft carriers, are purely defensive in nature, aimed at testing the allies’ readiness to confront any North Korean aggression.

[Reuters]

North Korea threatens ‘war disaster’ over sanctions

Posted on by

North Korea has again condemned U.S. sanctions imposed on the country following a cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment and on Wednesday demanded the restrictions be lifted.

“The U.S. took part in wars of aggression … But it has never experienced a hail of bullets and shells on its own territory,” North Korea’s National Defense Commission said in a warning through state-run media. “The U.S. should roll back its hostile policy towards the DPRK of its own accord if it does not want to suffer a war disaster.”

The United States on Friday slapped sanctions on 10 individuals and three entities, including North Korea’s primary intelligence organization and its arms dealer, over the country’s alleged role in a cyberattack that threatened to derail Sony’s release of “The Interview” and made public emails that embarrassed top-level executives.

North Korea has denied it carried out the cyberattack and said the sanctions were imposed “under absurd pretexts and conditions.”

[NBC]