Category: DPRK Government

Matthew Miller’s goal was imprisonment in North Korea to expose human rights violations

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American Matthew Miller ripped up his visa upon arrival in North Korea so he could go to prison and expose human rights violations there, state media KCNA said Saturday. Miller shouted his desire to seek asylum, and was later convicted of committing “acts hostile” to North Korea and sentenced to six years of hard labor last week.

Saturday’s report in the state-run Korean Central News Agency boldly heaped blame on Miller, claiming his acts were a preconceived plan to gain notoriety. State media described him as “rudely behaved,” saying he was sent to infiltrate prison as part of a United States campaign against North Korea.

“He perpetrated the above-said acts in the hope of becoming a world famous guy and the second Snowden through intentional hooliganism,” state media said. (Edward Snowden got asylum from Russia, where he fled last year after leaking classified U.S. government documents.)

Once sentenced, Miller hoped to meet Kenneth Bae, another American detained in North Korea. Miller planned to secure Bae’s release so both can serve as “witnesses” to the human rights violations in the nation, state media said.

Earlier this month, Miller told CNN’s Will Ripley that he “prepared to violate the law of DPRK before coming here. And I deliberately committed my crime.” But Miller didn’t elaborate on what his “crime” was. He said he wouldn’t learn of his charges until he went to trial.

Miller’s family lives in Bakersfield, California. In a July interview, a neighbor told The Associated Press that Miller went to South Korea about four years ago to visit his brother and started teaching English. He then traveled to North Korea this year after arranging a private tour through the U.S.-based company Uri Tours, which takes tourists into North Korea.

[CNN]

North Korea unresponsive to offer of a US envoy visit

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North Korea is not accepting American offers to send a high-level envoy to seek the release of three detained Americans:

  • 24-year-old Matthew Miller of Bakersfield, California, who this week was sentenced to six years hard labor, deepening U.S. concern over the cases.
  • Jeffrey Fowle, of Miamisburg, Ohio, who was arrested in May for leaving a Bible at a sailor’s club, is expected to be called to trial soon.
  • Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American missionary from Lynwood, Washington, is serving out a 15-year sentence for alleged “hostile acts.”

North Korea often accuses the U.S. of refusing to talk with it.

Robert King, the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, would not specify whom the administration was now willing to send, since the offer of him visiting was earlier turned down. But Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said he has been told by the administration that it has offered in recent weeks to send Glyn Davies, who leads U.S. diplomacy on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and Pyongyang has not responded favorably.

Davies has not met with North Korean officials since an agreement on a nuclear freeze in exchange for food aid collapsed in the spring of 2012 after the North tested a long-range rocket. Since then, relations have frayed further.

“The issues that are hampering contact are fundamental issues about, in particular, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. But certainly, releasing the American citizens that are held there is an important step that might lead to broader discussions and contacts in other areas. The real question is whether the North Koreans want anything other than trying to create problems,” King said.

Former President Jimmy Carter on Tuesday criticized what he characterized as a refusal by President Obama to hold direct talks with the North Korean government. “I think they use these three hostages,” Carter said at the Carter Center in Atlanta, “to try to get the United States to talk to them diplomatically.”

[AP]

South Korean President says door open for talks with North Korea

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South Korean President Park Geun-hye said the door is open for talks with the North during the upcoming U.N. General Assembly. However, Park said that Pyongyang must show sincerity in seeking a constructive dialogue and “walk the talk” in taking up South Korea’s offers for engagement aimed at ending a deadlock after a decade of warming ties.

North Korea will send its foreign minister, Ri Su Yong, to the U.N. General Assembly meeting, the highest ranking official from the reclusive state to attend in 15 years.

Park, who will soon travel to New York where she will address the General Assembly, has unveiled an ambitious initiative to engage North Korea to eventually bring the rivals close enough to make unification feasible for most on both sides.

Park also called for a “courageous decision” by Tokyo to improve ties between Japan and North Korea.

[Reuters] 

Defectors detail North Korea Leader’s slush fund

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Choi Kun-chol says he didn’t know he had spent several years helping to fill Kim Jong Il’s private slush fund until he left North Korea. Like the thousands of others working under the North Korean government division known as Office 39, Mr. Choi was told by superiors that he was generating money to build a strong socialist economy.

In fact, according to details that Mr. Choi gave about his work it was a shadowy network of businesses that contribute to a private fund believed to be worth billions of dollars for the use of the ruling Kim family.

Defectors say Office 39 was created during the 1970s by Kim Jong Il, the father of current leader Kim Jong Un, to buy influence in his own rise to power. Office 39 has been accused by the U.S. and others of running an array of illicit money-making operations such as currency counterfeiting, narcotics and arms sales. Some experts estimate the total annual income of Office 39 to be up to a couple of billion dollars a year.

High-level defectors, security officials and analysts say the fund still enables current ruler Kim Jong Un to underwrite comfortable lifestyles for the upper tier of North Korean society to ensure their support. Analysts and security officials say the execution of Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, late last year may have been because Mr. Jang had interrupted the flow of funds to Office 39.

Office 39 also runs legal businesses under a state-owned shell corporation known as the Daesong Group, according to Mr. Choi and other defectors.

[read full Wall Street Journal article] 

Many countries get their priorities wrong, not just North Korea

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Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Dr J E Hoare, Britain’s first diplomatic representative in North Korea:

When I was working in North Korea in 2001-2002, the WFP programme was one of the largest in the world. It was never enough, however, and WFP always had to prioritize: Pregnant mothers, children and the old.

There were other benefits as well. It gave many North Korean officials the valuable experience of working with an international organization, useful exposure for those who had little experience of the outside world.

WFP has always had to fight off those who are opposed to giving any food to North Korea. Various reasons have been put forward for not supplying aid, including the charges that food was being diverted or that funds spent on the military should be spent on feeding the population. There be truth in such charges but … the vulnerable remain. We know from nutritional surveys that lack of good food in early years means that many will be permanently affected.

We also know that many countries get their priorities wrong; children go hungry even in the richest nations. To penalize those who are already suffering and who can do nothing to influence the government would be unjust. The WFP should be helped to continue its North Korean program.

 [The Guardian]

Hungry North Koreans should not be penalized

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Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Roberta Cohen, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution:

To attract donors, North Korea will need to devote more of its own resources to agricultural reforms, incentives for food production, ending market restrictions, importing greater quantities of food and improving its deteriorating health structures. Even so, some donors might not be eager to help a country that regularly hurls distasteful epithets and threatens its neighbors and beyond.

The most critical question, however, is whether hungry people should be penalized for the policies of their government. The answer is no. The stunting of children (one out of four under the age of five), high maternal mortality rates and tuberculosis for lack of vitamins and iron should be de-linked from political issues.

But here the case of North Korea presents a dilemma: reaching the needy has often been thwarted by a lack of access and transparency. While donors, UN agencies and NGOs have devised increasingly stringent monitoring conditions, including measuring children’s arms and providing corn soy blends so as not to be diverted to the military or elite, a widely disseminated United Nations report this year found that the government distributes food primarily to persons crucial to the regime, favors certain parts of the country, and avoids structural reforms of agriculture and health care out of fear of losing political control.

It therefore behooves the UN to press North Korea for strengthened monitoring and to link its aid to long term reforms designed to achieve sustainable results. And the UN must broaden its focus beyond traditional donors to China. As North Korea’s principal ally, recent estrangement notwithstanding, China should be urged to join in meeting shortfalls and in adopting international monitoring standards.

 [The Guardian]

Cut off food aid to North Korea entirely or double down?

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Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Steven Weber, professor of political science at UC Berkeley:

Societies choose between spending to defend what they have, increasing current consumption, and building for the future. For decades now, the world has been subsidizing North Korea’s choice to invest massively in defense at the expense of both investment and current consumption.

Humanitarian fatigue may not be humanity’s most admirable trait, but it’s a real one and it’s not likely to be reversed unless the North Korean regime delivers something positive on security. And that’s less likely to happen if we keep the regime on slowly diminishing life support.

There are better choices: One would be to cut off aid entirely and force Pyongyang’s hand. The other would be to massively increase food aid so that the population actually receives sufficient calories to thrive.

Both strategies have obvious risks. Cut off aid and North Korea could strike out as a last ditch effort to force our hand in return. But Pyongyang might also be forced to spend more resources growing and buying food.

Double down on aid and North Korea might take advantage and happily divert yet more of its resources into the military. But it might also take the signal of peaceful intentions as an opportunity to go further in its ever-so-slight opening to the world.

[The Guardian]

Stop funding food aid to North Korea?

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Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Jang Jin-sung, once one of Kim Jong-il’s favorite state poets until he defected in 2004:

North Korean exiles will tell you that the international community must stop funding food aid. We say this for pragmatic and humanitarian reasons.

Today, the fatal threat for the regime lies not in the outside world, but within the country itself. More specifically, this is the jangmadang – an underground economy arisen from the ashes of economic collapse in the 1990s, and which consist of market activities taking place beyond the remit of the regime’s control mechanisms.

This fundamental transformation from below, the notion that lives may be lived outside the domain of loyalty to the system, is the greatest imminent threat to the regime’s power – which is held in place by inculcating the cult of the Kim dynasty, surveillance controls and the coercive mobilization of its subjects.

In today’s North Korea there are two rival forces in battle: the forces of the regime and the forces of the market. The former’s interests are better served by the maintenance of existing party, military and surveillance mechanisms of control. The latter are equivalent to North Korea’s progressives, who believe in a future that is possible beyond the absolute, stifling and structurally inhumane confines of the regime.

An international community wishing to assist the North Korean people should recognize that funding food aid is a channel of limited efficiency. The majority of North Koreans depend not on the regime’s munificence but on market forces – they have already found this a more successful alternative, despite a disproportionate lack of international support or awareness. Even at times when the regime is calling for food aid, it does not mean that the jangmadang will not have food on offer, whether stolen from state cooperatives or smuggled in from China.

[The Guardian]

Feeding North Koreans an ethical conundrum

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Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Marcus Noland, director of studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics:

The most recent UNICEF survey suggests that 10% of the country’s two-year-olds are afflicted with severe stunting. Stunting of that degree at that age is irrecoverable and confers a lifetime of physical and mental challenges.

When the country finally admitted in 1995 that it was facing famine, the international community responded with considerable generosity, at one point feeding roughly a third of the population. But the North Korean government has never accepted the international norms in the provision of aid, impeding normal assessment, monitoring, and evaluation functions of the relief organizations.

Critically, with assistance ramping up, the government cut commercial grain imports – in essence using humanitarian aid as a form of balance of payments support, freeing up resources to finance the importation of advanced military weaponry.

The resources needed to close the hunger gap could be closed for something in the order of $8-19m — less than 0.2% of national income or one per cent of the military budget.

We evidently care more about hungry North Koreans than their government does. We should provide assistance. But we should be clear-eyed about the terms of that engagement and seek to provide aid in ways consistent with our values and our obligations under international law.

Should the world continue to fund food aid to North Korea?

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For nearly three decades, a chronic food emergency has gripped North Korea. In the 1990s a famine killed up to five per cent of the pre-crisis population.

Pyongyang presses on with its nuclear programme and prestige projects while millions remain malnourished. The long-running food crisis is the outcome of decades of economic mismanagement and a political system that absolves its leadership of any real accountability.

Humanitarian activities by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) and private relief groups constitute the longest ongoing engagement between the hermit state and the international community. But the North Korean regime’s actions create an ethical conundrum which may be reaching its breaking point.

Donor fatigue has set in. The WFP’s assistance requests are grossly undersubscribed and the organization may be forced to shut down its remaining programme. And if it tries to soldier on with reduced resources, its ability to monitor its own activities will be badly affected, risking aid diversion and catastrophic scandal.

[The Guardian]