Category: DPRK Government

Preparing for a North Korean collapse

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A major crisis scenario that destabilizes the North Korean government and its mechanisms of control, no matter how unlikely, should prompt the international community to consider a multilateral framework for intervention.

The first step toward planning a credible response is to consider the absence of a totalitarian regime previously possessing rigid control over territory, weapons of mass destruction, and the civilian population. Working under the assumption that Chinese and South Korean border issues could be mitigated by their respective militaries, and WMD tracked and secured by American military forces working alongside integrated allies, the pre-eminent question becomes one of human security.

Specifically, how to deal with twenty million physically and psychologically scarred individuals as an operational challenge. Regardless of the ongoing struggle for power and stability, these individuals represent a major hurdle for any external force crossing the 38th parallel and constitute the bulk of human terrain. For many, their day-to-day lives reflect a permanent wartime experience, an existence on the edge that has defined families for more than three generations. Devout loyalty to the North Korean system is arguably so ingrained within many citizens, it is difficult to project how the majority of individuals would behave after the cataclysmic event of totalitarian collapse.

There would likely be a profound absence of the overarching stability that has come to define the norm within Pyongyang’s invasive culture of oppression. Beyond fundamental necessities of food, water, shelter and physical security, what unforeseen conditions might an external group encounter among the civilian population?

The disintegration, or even transformation, of this familiar norm would potentially compound dangerous social, economic and political inadequacies while pushing individuals past an already desperate state of existence. To paraphrase experts, exposure to an event involving potential death or serious injury to the self or others leads to intense states of fear, helplessness or horror. Under this scenario, an outside group would likely encounter upwards of twenty million individuals suffering from the effects of severe grief and incapacitating post-traumatic stress disorder.

These reactions might appear as abnormal reactions to normal stress, but inside the reality of North Korea, it would reflect a normal reaction to abnormal stress. Whether an intervening humanitarian force, or an individual state dealing with refugees fleeing across its border, responsible powers should not overlook such a traumatic moment for geopolitics.

[Read full opinion piece: The Nation] 

North Korea “executes 80 people for watching foreign films”

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North Korea has publicly executed 80 people for watching foreign television programs, a South Korean newspaper claims. JoongAng Ilbo daily reported that the killings were carried out in seven separate cities on November 3, with an alleged 10,000 people forced to attend one group execution held in a sports stadium in the eastern port city Wonsan.

Citing a “single unidentified” individual as the source of the story, the newspaper said the majority of those executed had been charged with “watching illicit South Korean TV dramas and some with prostitution”.

The story gained credibility when Daily NK – an online media agency run by North Korean defectors – said it had also heard the reports of mass executions taking place.

During the front page report, the JoongAng Ilbo reporter cites another defector group as saying it had warned of a forthcoming wave of executions several months ago.

A spokesman for North Korea Intellectual Solidarity reportedly said “The regime is obviously afraid of potential changes in people’s mind-sets and is pre-emptively trying to scare people off”.

Watching films or television from capitalist countries – especially South Korea – is a serious offence in North Korea, but despite the risk of execution, shows like Desperate Housewives from the US have acquired a large following.

It is thought the majority of the programs are smuggled into the country on DVDs, MP3 players and Flash drives.

[The Independent]

North Korea to turn over 6 detained South Koreans

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North Korea plans to allow six detained South Koreans to return home, officials in Seoul said Thursday, an unusual move that accompanied Pyongyang’s separate approval of a visit by South Korean lawmakers to a recently restarted factory park both Koreas run in the North.

Pyongyang’s Red Cross sent a letter to the South saying the detained South Koreans will cross over the heavily armed border at the so-called truce village of Panmunjom on Friday, according to a short statement from the South’s Unification Ministry, which is responsible for cross-border ties.

The statement says Seoul plans to accept the South Koreans and investigate how they entered North Korea. Seoul provided only scant details, saying they were men ranging in age from 27 to 67.

The North’s move, which some South Koreans saw as a conciliatory gesture, came as Pyongyang approved a tour next week by 24 South Korean lawmakers of the jointly run Kaesong factory park, located just over the border. The moves come a month after Pyongyang abruptly canceled reunions for families separated during the 1950-53 Korean War.

While it’s not clear why the South Koreans to be released Friday went North, or why Pyongyang is releasing them now, there’s media speculation in Seoul that they may have either voluntarily crossed the border or been captured near it. North Korea said in 2010 that it was investigating four South Koreans for allegedly illegally entering the country. Seoul says it has repeatedly asked Pyongyang to confirm the four citizens’ identities but has received no reply.

South Koreans visiting North Korea without government approval can be punished by up to 10 years in prison under South Korea’s National Security Law.

[Associated Press]

Kim Jong Un removes many key figures to cement his leadership

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has replaced officials holding almost half of the nation’s key posts in an attempt to strengthen his control over the country, a South Korean government report reported Tuesday.

Kim Jong Un has changed the officials filling 97 out of 218 military, party and government posts since he took over the communist dynasty in December 2011, the South’s Unification Ministry said in a report.

Kim has often used a “demotion and reinstatement” process in reshuffling military posts in an attempt to tighten control over the military, the ministry said.

“This means Kim has completed the dynastic succession of power successfully and faster than expected,” Yang Moo-Jin, a professor at Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies, told AFP.

He said Kim had replaced old appointees dating from his father’s era with relatively young figures loyal to himself.

The South’s spy agency said in a separate report to parliament that Kim had stepped up a campaign to build up a personality cult around himself.

[Agence France-Presse]                              Related post

 

The Dastardly North Korean Dynasty

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In The Last Days of Kim Jong-il, Bruce Bechtol outlines the progress North Korea has made in weaponizing uranium … At the heart of Bechtol’s analysis is an explanation of why these weapons, whether filled with plutonium or uranium cores, are so dangerous in the hands of the Kim family regime.

As he tells us, the ruling group is unstable, headed by a young leader constantly struggling with willful individuals, some of whom are scheming relatives and all of whom are rivals. And in the never-ending contest for power in Pyongyang, Bechtol explains, losers often come to a bad end. Beginning in 2010, senior North Korean officials started dying “under mysterious circumstances.” Some were killed in suspicious traffic accidents; others were simply executed. The deaths appear to have been arranged by Kim Jong-il, then the North’s leader, to assure the eventual succession of his youngest son, Jong-un, to ultimate power. As Bechtol points out, these “forcible removals” looked as if they were staged to open up vacancies in the regime; in fact, the number of executions tripled in 2010 over 2009, with at least 60 performed in public.

To be sure, peace did not come with the ascension of Kim Jong-un in December 2011, after his father’s fatal heart attack. And the new dictator—perhaps 27 at the time—was ruthless, even ordering the assistant chief of staff of the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces to be obliterated with a mortar round, “to leave no trace of him behind down to his hair.” The purges continued in less dramatic fashion into the fall of 2012.

Kim Jong-il spent about two years preparing his son [beginning] the process after he recovered from his 2008 stroke. Bechtol pegs the beginning of Kim Jong-un’s succession training to sometime early in the following year. The ailing Kim Jong-il speeded up the transition by eliminating officials who stood in his way, and the resulting turbulence eroded support for Jong-un in North Korea’s “cadre society.” Bechtol writes: “Sections of the elite have felt increasingly betrayed because of the large number of purges and executions that have occurred, presumably because of succession issues.” Young Kim may not be able to count on the support of the various factions that make up the regime. Continued   

The Dastardly North Korean Dynasty Continues

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In addition to the tight Kim family circle, the North Korean regime is, generally speaking, composed of three elements: the security apparatus, the People’s Army, and the party. All three parts have always fed into the one man—a Kim—in the center. But Kim Jong-un has yet to gain control by placing his supporters in positions of power. More important, he has not had time to learn how to balance and rule an inherently unstable structure. The result is that he is now guided by his aunt, Kim Kyong-Hui, and her husband, Jang Song-Thaek.

He reports that, last year, powerbrokers did exactly what Kim Jong-un told them to do, but what Kim told them to do “was exactly what they told him he should tell them to do.” In short, Kim was in charge in name only. Kim Jong-nam, the ruler’s eldest brother, is on-record saying that “the existing ruling elite” will keep Jong-un “as a symbolic figure.” To attain real power, Kim Jong-un will have to do what his father did: rely on the nation’s strongest institution, the military.

The never-ending intrigue and struggle inside the army is a major factor in making the North so volatile, and troubles in the military undercut the prevailing view among Korea-watchers that Kim Jong-un has consolidated power faster than anticipated.

Bechtol’s main contribution—and it is a critical one—is drawing the line from Pyongyang’s ugly succession politics to its belligerent external behavior. Deadly incidents were executed to gain support among Kim Jong-un’s young, hardline “guardian cadres.” Attacks will probably continue, he argues, because provocations along the Northern Limit Line are not only part of the North’s asymmetric tactics to intimidate Seoul, but they help consolidate the succession, which is clearly Kim’s top priority.

Kim cannot act peacefully because to do so would undermine the beliefs, developed by his grandfather and father, that hold the ruling group together. This explains why North Korea has remained belligerent no matter who resides in the White House. Kim Jong-un is bound by the conventions established by his predecessors, which means that he cannot easily divert North Korea from its unsustainable path. In his final years, Kim Jong-il pursued “defiant” policies, especially in his development of nuclear warheads and proliferation of weapons, and the North will continue this aggressive behavior.

[From a book review by Gordon G. Chang, author of Nuclear Showdown] 

Daughter of African dictator tells of growing up in North Korea

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  • Monique Macias was packed off to North Korea with her siblings in the 1970s when her father was executed
  • The former leader of Equatorial Guinea struck a deal with Pyongyang to take his children shortly before his death
  • Monique’s schooldays consisted of firing Kalashnikovs and completing survival courses and military drills
  • Now in her 40s, Ms Macias has just published her memoirs of North Korea, ‘I’m Monique, from Pyongyang”

New memoirs by an African woman that document her bizarre childhood living in exile in the secretive state of North Korea could shed new light on the totalitarian regime.

Born in Equatorial Guinea, Monique Macias spent 15 years living in the capital Pyongyang, where her school days consisted of firing Kalashnikov rifles at the same prestigious military academy that Kim Jong-il was educated.

Being one of very few black people in Pyongyang and living in a strange country taught Ms Macias to see the world differently. She writes, “I know how Koreans think and how to talk to them because they taught me. They made me.”

This, she said, is what inspired her to publish her memoirs now, with tensions between North and South Korea running high. She said: ‘Although North and South say they want unification, they don’t actually know each other as people. If we want unification, we have to bury prejudice.’

She recalls rumors in 1989 of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement and subsequent massacre in Beijing reaching the hallways of North Korean colleges. “I felt university students in Pyongyang at the time were thinking about change too. Although they (North Korean media) didn’t report it, a lot of people knew about it.”

Her education, which she speaks highly of, was peppered with survival courses and drills. Under the North Korean education system, anti-Americanism became a constant factor in her understanding of the world as a child, something that made meeting her first American a big shock on a rare trip to see relatives in Beijing.

She said: “At that time no one there spoke English and I was lost. I saw a white guy passing and I asked him if he spoke English but when he started talking he had an American accent,” Macias said. “I was so scared. I thought ‘oh my god, it’s an American’. My palms were sweating and I just started to run. He was shouting ‘hey, stop! I’m not going to eat you’.”

This week, state media in North Korea criticized a report by a US think-tank on scenarios for the collapse of a reclusive country with a grim record of famine, prison camps and nuclear brinkmanship. But Ms Macias sees that as unlikely. “I don’t think it’s going to collapse easily. What I’ll say is that it can open up like China but very, very slowly.”

[Full Daily Mail story and photos]

A brief history of nuclear threat on the Korean peninsula, as viewed by North Koreans

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According to declassified and other US government documents, some released on the 60th-anniversary of the Korean War, the United States has repeatedly pondered the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea.

• The United States introduced nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula as early as 1950.

• During the Korean War, US president Harry Truman announced that the use of nuclear weapons was under active consideration; US Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over Pyongyang; and US commander General Douglas MacArthur planned to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs across the northern neck of the Korean peninsula to block Chinese intervention.

• In the late 1960s, nuclear-armed US warplanes were maintained on 15-minute alert to strike North Korea.

• In 1975, US defense secretary James Schlesinger acknowledged for the first time that US nuclear weapons were deployed in South Korea. Addressing the North Koreans, he warned, “I do not think it would be wise to test (US) reactions.”

• In February 1993, Lee Butler, head of the US Strategic Command, announced the United States was retargeting hydrogen bombs aimed at the old USSR on North Korea (and other targets.) One month later, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

• On July 22, 1993, US president Bill Clinton said if North Korea developed and used nuclear weapons “we would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate. It would mean the end of their country as we know it.”

• In 1995, Colin Powell, who had served as chairman of the US joints chiefs of staff and would later serve as US secretary of state, warned the North Koreans that the United States had the means to turn their country into “a charcoal briquette.”

• Following North Korea’s first nuclear test on October 9, 2006, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice reminded North Korea that “the United States has the will and the capability to meet the full range—and I underscore full range of its deterrent and security commitments to Japan.”

• In April 2010, then US defense secretary Leon Panetta refused to rule out a US nuclear attack on North Korea, saying, “all options are on the table.”

• On February 13, 2013, Panetta described North Korea as “a threat to the United States, to regional stability, and to global security.” He added: “Make no mistake. The US military will take all necessary steps to meet our security commitments to the Republic of Korea and to our regional allies.”

As the North Koreans put it, “no nation in the world has been exposed to the nuclear threat so directly and for so long as the Koreans. … For over half a century since early in the 1950s, the US has turned South Korea into the biggest nuclear arsenal in the Far East, gravely threatening the DPRK through ceaseless maneuvers for a nuclear war. It has worked hard to deprive the DPRK of its sovereignty and its right to exist and develop….thereby doing tremendous damage to its socialist economic construction and the improvement of the standard of people’s living.”

[Excerpt of article by Stephen Gowans]

North Korea testing more rocket engines?

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China’s foreign minister is pushing for the restart of international talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, saying that Pyongyang is ready to recommit to the goal of denuclearization.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday North Korea has recently said it is ready to come back to a 2005 commitment on giving up nuclear weapons and to an agreement it reached with the United States in February last year on freezing its nuclear programs in exchange for food aid. That agreement fell through soon after it was hatched because North Korea tested a long-range rocket.

The U.S. remains skeptical about Pyongyang’s intentions.

Meanwhile,  38 North, a blog run by the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, suggests that North Korea more than likely tested a long-range rocket engine late last month, according to analysis of new satellite imagery over the site. From the photos released, indicators of a probable test are seen through the presence of a probable rocket stage, propellant tanks, as well as the appearance of burned vegetation around the launch stand.

“These are not in and of themselves indicators that there is going to be a rocket test six months from now,” Joel Wit, a former North Korea specialist at the State Department who is now with 38 North, told CNN about the photos. The Sohae launch facility, where the latest photos were taken, is the same facility from which North Korea has conducted previous rocket launches, including last December’s test.

In recent months, similar satellite imagery has shown what look to be other instances of rocket-engine tests by North Korea, as well as the resumption of production at a previously closed plutonium production site.

North Korean refusal to cooperate with UN rights probe

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Not surprisingly, the head of a U.N. human rights probe says he can’t get answers from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un regarding harrowing testimony from victims of the enigmatic regime, including allegations of being forced to survive on vermin, drown babies and witness the execution of loved ones.

Michael Kirby, who heads the U.N. commission examining North Korea’s human rights record, said Tuesday that his July 16 letter to the leader hasn’t been answered, and the government has offered no evidence to contradict graphic testimony of human rights abuses.

Kirby, a former judge in Australia’s highest court, told the U.N. Human Rights Council that the commission it created in March nonetheless gathered testimony from dozens of victims, including defectors, and experts at public hearings in Seoul and Tokyo last month that has “given a face and voice to great human suffering.”

Overall, the testimony “points to widespread and serious violations in all areas that the Human Rights Council asked the commission to investigate. We heard from ordinary people who faced torture and imprisonment for doing nothing more than watching foreign soap operas or holding a religious belief,” said Kirby.

For example, he said, the commission heard from a young man imprisoned from birth, who said he lived on rodents, lizards and grass and saw his mother and brother executed.

It also heard from a young woman who said she saw another female prisoner forced to drown her own baby in a bucket, Kirby said, and a man who said he was forced to help collect and burn the corpses of prisoners who died of starvation.

The U.N.’s top rights official, Navi Pillay, reported to the Council that the U.N. had amassed evidence indicating that up to 200,000 people were being held in North Korean political prison camps rife with torture, rape and slave labor, and that some of the abuses may amount to crimes against humanity.

“The commission invited the authorities of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to attend the public hearings in Seoul and make representations, but received no reply,” Kirby said.

[AP]

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