Category: DPRK Government

Mystery of military equipment discovered on North Korean boat

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What was the massive military equipment hidden under hundreds of thousands of sacks of brown sugar on a North Korean boat? Where did it come from? And where was it going before investigators seized the vessel near the Panama Canal?

Hours after Panama said it would ask U.S. and British officials for help solving the puzzle, Cuba gave an answer Tuesday night.

In addition to 10,000 tons of sugar, Cuba’s Foreign Ministry said, the shipment contained “240 metric tons of obsolete defensive weapons” sent to North Korea “to be repaired and returned to Cuba.”

The equipment was manufactured in the mid-20th century and included two anti-aircraft missile systems, nine missiles in parts and spares, two MiG-21 jets and 15 motors for this type of airplane, the foreign ministry said.

Because it is supposedly pursuing nuclear weapons, North Korea is banned by the United Nations from importing and exporting most weapons.

Panamanian investigators are asking the United States and the United Kingdom to send teams to help them identify the weapons, and will invite a special commission from the United Nations to determine whether the shipment violates the organization’s North Korea weapons ban.

Investigators spotted the boat going through the Panama Canal to Havana and then back toward the canal, according to two senior U.S. officials who said the United States had been tracking the ship along with the Panamanians for some time.

CNN

An Orphan in North Korea

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Hyuk Kim lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11. After his father died, he lived with a group of six other orphan boys in North Hamgyong province, located at the northern most tip of North Korea.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep.  “Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea. As Hyuk dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep. “During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said. “The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk Kim fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan. Hyuk, now 21, attends Hangyeore Middle-High School in South Korea, where he sleeps in a bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays. The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

Most North Koreans escape by crossing the river on the northern border to China. Some street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists. The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men. China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

 CNN

North Korea seeks talks without preconditions to ease tensions

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North Korea’s top diplomat said Tuesday that the U.S. must accept its offer for dialogue without preconditions if it wants to ease tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula. He drew a quick rebuttal from his South Korean counterpart, who said the international community has made clear that Pyongyang must give up its nuclear ambitions if it wants better relations.

The Koreas were among 27 nations at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum in Brunei, where the North’s nuclear weapons program was a key topic, along with other hot-button regional issues.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that the U.S., South Korea, Japan and China – North Korea’s chief ally – were “absolutely united” in their insistence on a denuclearized North Korea. Washington says Pyongyang must move in that direction before it will agree to talks, but North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun said during the conference Tuesday that it is America that must act.

“The U.S. must positively respond to our sincere and courageous decision (to offer talks) without preconditions if it is truly interested in ending the vicious circle of intensifying tension on the Korean Peninsula and safeguarding peace and stability,” Pak said, according to North Korean delegation official Choe Myong Nam.

Pak said that “a touch-and-go situation in which a war can break out anytime is fostered” on the Korean Peninsula, and that U.S. hostility against the North was primarily responsible for that.

Shortly after Choe spoke, South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se told reporters that most diplomats at the forum expressed a “very strong message” to the North Korean delegation that Pyongyang must scrap its nuclear program and refrain from launching another provocation. “So they must have listened to this message very, very seriously,” he said.

On Tuesday, senior North Korean nuclear strategist and First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan left for Russia. Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov as saying he’ll meet with Kim in Moscow on Thursday to discuss the possibility of resuming the six-party talks.

The nuclear disarmament talks – which involve the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia – have been stalled since North Korea quit the negotiations in 2009 to protest international condemnation over a rocket launch.

AP

Major government and media websites shut down in South and North Korea

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Major government and media websites in South and North Korea were shut down for hours Tuesday on the 63rd anniversary of the start of the Korean War.

Seoul said experts were investigating attacks on the websites of the South Korean presidential Blue House and prime minister’s office, as well as some media servers.

The North Korean websites that shut down Tuesday included those belonging to the national airline, Air Koryo, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the North’s official Uriminzokkiri site and Naenara, the country’s state-run Internet portal. All but Air Koryo were operational a few hours later.

It wasn’t immediately clear who was responsible. North and South Korea have traded accusations of cyberattacks in recent years.

The shutdowns came on a war anniversary that both countries were marking with commemorations. North and South Korea are also gearing up for the 60th anniversary of the end of the fighting July 27.

 

Anonymous takes on North Korea

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Operators of several Twitter accounts who purported to be part of a global hackers’ collective known as Anonymous claimed that they attacked North Korean websites today.

Some days back, Chosun Ilbo reported that Anonymous was poised for a massive cyberattack on North Korea. In April, the “hacktivists” had threatened to attack 46 North Korean websites including the official KCNA news agency at 12 noon on Tuesday.

In a recent video clip on YouTube, they also claimed to have extracted missile blueprints from the intranet of the North Korean military and other information. Anonymous vowed to reveal the information on the internet.

Last Friday, KCNA denounced the hackers as a “ragtag band” under the control of U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies. It claimed the intranet which Anonymous claim to have infiltrated “does not even exist.”

Last February, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed confidence in his regime’s cyber warfare capabilities against South Korea.

A South Korean official indicated the North has reason to be confident in its 12,000 highly skilled hackers. It is believed that North Korean children talented in the sciences get intensive computer training at Kumsong Middle School in Pyongyang, and are then raised as “cyber warriors” for three to five years at either Mirim College under the General Staff Department or Moranbong College under the Reconnaissance Bureau.

Time for China to discipline their wayward child North Korea?

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In 2011, China accounted for an estimated 67.2% of North Korea’s exports and 61.6% of imports, according to the CIA World Factbook. So LA Times’ Beijing Bureau Chief Barbara Demick suggests, “There’s a lot more China could do that it has chosen not to.”

So why is China not using its economic leverage to rein in the nuclear threat and proliferator next door?  In a word — fear.

There’s fear of a North Korean collapse that would lead to instability and a refugee crisis along its 1,400 kilometer (880 mile) border with North Korea. And then there’s the far greater fear of an all-out conflict that would redraw the geopolitical map.

And there’s something else holding Beijing back — the historic and symbolic relationship with Pyongyang that is hard to give up.

“The Chinese Communist Party thinks of North Korea as this small state that is in its own image,” says Demick. “The structure of the North Korean government is very similar to the Chinese government and, in a way, it’s the pure Communist state. It’s just really hard psychologically to dump North Korea.”

“They treat North Korea a bit like a wayward child,” adds Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, the North Asian head of the International Crisis Group. ” You want to be the one to punish your child, but you’re not going to turn them over to police.”

But for many people in China, enough is enough.

“Their rhetoric is increasing the number of Chinese who feel very, very disgusted by their behavior, their psyche and their regime,” says Zhu Feng, professor of International Relations at Peking University. “China’s government is seriously under fire because I think the majority of Chinese really, really feel that North Korea’s bad behavior will inevitably endanger China.”

CNN

China’s tougher stance on North Korea

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US President Barack Obama said that China is taking a tougher line against North Korea’s nuclear program as he credited new President Xi Jinping with taking more responsibility in the world.

“We’ve seen the Chinese take more seriously the problem of constant provocation and statements from the North Koreans — rejecting the nuclearisation,” Obama said on “The Charlie Rose Show.”

China is the main economic and diplomatic supporter of Kim Jong-Un’s isolated regime, which brazenly defied Beijing’s warnings by carrying out its third nuclear weapons test in February.

China took the rare step of cracking down on North Korean bank accounts as part of new UN-led sanctions, although many experts doubt Beijing would go so far as to risk a collapse of the impoverished state separating it from US ally South Korea.

Obama held two days of informal talks with Xi on June 7-8 at a California desert resort. “My impression of President Xi is that he has consolidated his position fairly rapidly inside of China, that he is younger and more forceful and more robust and more confident, perhaps, than some leaders in the past,” Obama said.

AFP

Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi

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GQ magazine sent Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson to interview Japanese sushi chef Kenji Fujimoto, who for eleven years was Kim Jong-il’s personal chef, court jester, and sidekick in North Korea.

Fujimoto had seen the palaces, ridden the white stallions, smoked the Cuban cigars, and watched as, one by one, the people around him disappeared. It was part of Fujimoto’s job to fly North Korean jets around the world to procure dinner-party ingredients—to Iran for caviar, Tokyo for fish, or Denmark for beer. It was Fujimoto who flew to France to supply the Dear Leader’s yearly $700,000 cognac habit. And when the Dear Leader craved McDonald’s, it was Fujimoto who was dispatched to Beijing for an order of Big Macs to go.

When he finally left North Korea, Fujimoto became, according to a high-level cable released by WikiLeaks, the Japanese intelligence community’s single greatest asset on the Kim family, rulers of a nation about which stubbornly little is known.

Among other things, Kenji Fujimoto reveals present leader, Kim Jong-un’s, birth date. (January 8, 1983.)

Read the interesting 9-page article

Watch CBS interview re: Kenji Fujimoto 

Incentives still in place for Korean talks

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The cancellation of the Korean rivals’ much-anticipated meeting, felled at the last minute by a protocol dispute, shows their deep mutual mistrust. Still, they may have more reasons than not to eventually unpack the meeting gear and get back to negotiations.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye is under pressure to make good on her campaign promises to reverse a deterioration of ties under her hard-line predecessor. A high-level meeting would validate her efforts to be tough against provocations while committing to aid and calls for dialogue.

North Korea is interested in reviving the two economic projects that were to be the main focus of the meetings, both as an emblem of reconciliation and as a source of foreign investment and hard cash. Pyongyang may also be feeling a pinch from its only major ally, China, which has clamped down on cross-border trade and financial dealings in displeasure over the higher tensions.

On Wednesday, Pyongyang wouldn’t answer Seoul’s calls on a communications line that was restored ahead of preliminary negotiations for the failed meeting. On Thursday, North Korea release a statement in state media warning Seoul against advocating “confrontation accompanied by dialogue.”

Ryoo Kihl-jae, South Korea’s Unification Minister and Park’s point man on North Korea, had likened the talks’ failure Wednesday to “labor pains” in the creation of new relations.

Yoo Ho-yeol, a North Korea studies professor at Korea University in the South, said calling off the talks at the last minute shows the degree of mistrust is high.

Later Wednesday, more than 100 right-wing protesters, including Korean War veterans, chanted anti-Pyongyang slogans as they burned an effigy of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and ripped a North Korean flag with a box-cutter.

“Even though a cooling-off period at this point is inevitable, it is still possible for a different level of the South-North talks to take place as time passes,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korea studies of Dongguk University in Seoul.

AP

A new window for diplomacy with North Korea?

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From a CNN opinion piece by Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing:

Beijing has long seen itself as the arbitrator between Pyongyang and Washington in addressing North Korean nuclear proliferation, as China … pushed to preserve the status quo on the Korean Peninsula.

But this is changing – North Korea is now China’s problem. This means that President Obama should take full advantage of his meeting with President Xi Jinping in California to offer help in finding a way to compel Pyongyang to alter its behavior.

While some argue that Beijing doesn’t hold significant leverage to shape Pyongyang’s behavior, without China’s strong support at the United Nations and economic and humanitarian assistance, North Korea’s continued existence would be uncertain.

There are clear reasons for China to address its North Korea problem. China’s security interests have evolved over the past three decades as the country has prospered and achieved feats of development unparalleled in modern history. Xi has spoken about an enhanced Chinese leadership role in the Asia-Pacific, but this goal will be hard to achieve if China is unable to rein in the reckless behavior of its unruly neighbor.

Efforts to boost China’s soft power and international image are undermined every time North Korea defies China’s pleas. And if North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities continue to advance, China should expect an enhanced U.S. security posture in the region – not something Beijing wants.

China is beginning to take steps in this direction through toughened public statements, the closure of North Korean accounts in Chinese banks, and a significant drop off in cross-border trade. South Korean President Park Geun-hye was also invited for a summit with Xi in late June, while the North Korean leader has not, despite apparent repeated requests. China is clearly sending the North Korean regime a message that business as usual is no longer acceptable.

A new window for diplomacy is now opening as North Korea becomes more China’s problem than Washington’s – and Beijing has a responsibility to come up with credible diplomatic options.