Category: DPRK Government

North Korean defectors tell Trump what it’s like to escape

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Last Friday, President Trump met with several North Korean defectors in the Oval Office. Among the guests: Ji Seong-ho, who Trump lauded at his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. Ji lost a leg and an arm while scavenging coal as a boy, and later fled to South Korea.

Trump used Ji’s story to illustrate what he called the “depraved character of the North Korean regime” and the kind of threat it could pose to the United States and its allies if it obtains nuclear weapons.

During the meeting, Trump asked the defectors to tell their stories.

Hyeonseo Lee, another defector who met with Trump, said escaping from North Korea is not like leaving another country.  “It’s more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity no matter how far I journey.”

“The world knows about the terrible things being done to his own people – it has to stop,” said Greg Scarlatoiu, the executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. “Every time human rights comes up, the very legitimacy of (Kim’s) regime is undermined.”

[USA Today]

Pence presence to counter South Korean warming to North Korea

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Vice President Pence is heading to South Korea, where — in addition to representing the U.S. at the Olympics — he plans to counter North Korea’s media messaging and push allies to maintain pressure on the rogue nation, according to multiple reports.

As NPR’s Elise Hu reports, the VPs aides have said that he wants to use the time in Korea to remind the world that just because North Korea will have a visually appealing cheering squad and an impressive figure skating duo, the regime running the country is brutal and totalitarian.

“One obvious sign of that is going to be who Vice President Pence is with,” Elise says. He’s expected to attend the opening ceremony with the father of deceased American college student Otto Warmbier, who died after being imprisoned in North Korea. That’s going to be a public reminder of that secrecy and brutality— at the same time that North Korean dignitaries will be in the same audience.

An Axios reporter and a Washington Post columnist both say they spoke to an unnamed White House aide who told them the White House won’t allow North Korea to “hijack the messaging of the Olympics.”

North Korea is sending its ceremonial leader, King Yong Nam, to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, where he will meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

[NPR]

Former US intelligence chief reveals North Korea’s ‘kryptonite’ which could topple Kim Jong Un

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Dennis Blair, a former director of national intelligence, defined what he called North Korea’s “kryptonite,” saying it could collapse Kim Jong Un’s government without firing a shot.

While President Donald Trump’s inner circle reportedly weighs the use of military force against North Korea, Blair, a former US Navy admiral, has suggested another method of attack that wields information, not weapons. “The kryptonite that can weaken North Korea is information from beyond its borders,” Blair said in a written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

North Koreans have no idea how bad things are in their country, Blair said, because they’re subject to an “unrelenting barrage of government propaganda.”

But Blair said the US could leverage a recent trend in North Korea: cellphones. About one in five North Koreans own a cellphone, many of which can connect to Chinese cell towers across the Yalu River along the countries’ border, he said.

“Texts to these cellphones can provide subversive truth,” Blair said. “Cell towers can be extended; CDs and thumb drives can be smuggled in; radio and TV stations can be beamed there.” Blair added: “The objective is to separate the Kim family from its primary support — the secret police, the army, and the propaganda ministry.”

Though outside media does get into North Korea and reaches the country’s elites, the US could expand efforts to flood it with outside news. The US used a similar tactic during the Cold War in setting up Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to combat the Soviet Union and its state-controlled media.

Yun Sun, a North Korea expert at the Stimson Center, agrees: “Kim Jong Un understands that as soon as society is open and North Korean people realize what they’re missing, Kim’s regime is unsustainable, and it’s going to be overthrown,” Sun said. Sun said that in the past when South Korea flew balloons that dropped pamphlets and DVDs over North Korea, Kim’s government responded militarily, sensing its frailty relative to those of prosperous liberal democracies.

Blair pointed to other totalitarian states where popular uprisings have become informed and sought to take down a media-controlling dictator, concluding his testimony by saying that “once that process starts, it is hard to stop.” “Such will be North Korea’s fate,” he said.

[Business Insider]

North Korea’s Olympic charm offensive

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North Korean defectors, who fled their impoverished and repressive homeland, are voicing concern that the North’s Olympic delegation featuring its “army of beauties” will score deceptive propaganda points, but they also hold out hope that inter-Korean cooperation can create an opportunity for peaceful progress.

A 230 member all female cheerleading squad, often called the “army of beauties,” will be among the large North Korean Olympic delegation planning to visit South Korea for the PyeongChang Olympics in February.

“It will garner the spotlight, and as each of its actions can become an opportunity to promote North Korea, I consider this as a political move,” said Kim Chul-woong, who was a pianist with Pyongyang University of Music and Dance, before defecting in 2002.

The cheering squad is made up of attractive and relatively tall women (over 160cm,) who were selected from elite universities and have no relatives living abroad. Perhaps the most famous former cheering squad member is Ri Sol Ju, the wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. At the age of 16 she participated in the 2005 Asian Athletic Championships in South Korea.

The women cheerleaders also undergo extensive ideological education to ensure loyalty to the state and to the leadership of the Kim family. “Leaving North Korea and visiting overseas is like going to fight in the heart of the enemy,” said North Korean defector Han Seo-hee. Han can also testify that the state’s ideological training is not always effective, as she was actually a North Korean cheerleader for the 2002 Asian Games held in Busan, South Korea, before she defected.

[VoA]

North Korea increasing executions as sanctions strain its military, top U.S. General says

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North Korea is increasing executions, the top commander of U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula said Monday, as the state has been decreasing military exercises under strain from economic sanctions.

“We’re seeing some increase in executions, mostly against political officers who are in military units, for corruption,” General Vincent K. Brooks, commander of U.S. Forces in Korea, told The Wall Street Journal. Brooks described the executions as attempts to “clamp down as much as possible on something that might be deteriorating and keeping it from deteriorating too quickly.”

Brooks said that defections had been occurring “in areas where we don’t generally see them,” such as crossings through the heavily guarded Demilitarized Zone separating the North and South.

[Newsweek]

Despite sanctions, North Korea exported coal via Russia

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North Korea shipped coal to Russia last year which was then delivered to South Korea and Japan in a likely violation of U.N. sanctions, three Western European intelligence sources said.

The U.N. Security Council banned North Korean exports of coal last Aug. 5 under sanctions intended to cut off an important source of the foreign currency Pyongyang needs to fund its nuclear weapon and missile programs.

But the secretive Communist state has at least three times since then shipped coal to the Russian ports of Nakhodka and Kholmsk, where it was unloaded at docks and reloaded onto ships that took it to South Korea or Japan, the sources said.

A Western shipping source said separately that some of the cargoes reached Japan and South Korea in October last year. A U.S. security source also confirmed the coal trade via Russia and said it was continuing.

Asked to respond to the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia abided by international law.

[Reuters]

North Korean singer’s visit to Seoul a propaganda coup

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Koreans on both halves of the divided peninsula are fond of the phrase “Nam nam buk nyeo,” literally “Southern man, Northern woman.” South Korean men use it to assert that they are the most handsome, while North Koreans claim that their women are the most beautiful. (South Korean women and North Korean men are, understandably, less fond of the phrase.)

South Koreans are now in the midst of a North Korean beauty blitz–and, well, they’re gaga.
A frenzied media posse has been chasing Hyon Song Wol, a singer in North Korea’s all-female Moranbong Band and a rising political star in Kim Jong Un’s regime, on her two-day visit to the South. She has been leading a seven-member delegation to inspect facilities in the South where the North’s Samjiyon Orchestra will play on its visit during the Winter Olympics next month, in which 22 North Korean athletes will compete.

Television networks carried live coverage of the delegation’s arrival in the South and camera teams were in hot pursuit every step of the way from then on. Hyon’s face graced the front pages of almost every newspaper in South Korea on Monday morning.

Hyon, who is 35, is the focus of so much curiosity partly because of her role at the center of one of North Korea’s biggest cultural exports, the Moranbong Band. The band was established on Kim’s orders in 2012 and was like nothing North Korea had seen before. Instead of women in tent-like traditional dresses with a repertoire made up entirely of songs about revolutionary fervor, Hyon and her fellow singers made their debut in sparkly short dresses and performed the theme from Rocky, and Disney’s “It’s a Small World.”

The glamorous singer represents a very different side of North Korea from the one with the rampant starvation and human rights abuses–the one that is reality for the vast majority of North Koreans. In that way, Hyon’s visit is a propaganda coup for North Korea.

“North Koreans are very proud,” said Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert on North Korean culture who teaches at Korea University in Seoul. “They are saying, ‘We may be a communist state, but our girls are the most beautiful, they’re not like those plastic girls in the South,’” she said, in a reference to the extensive use of cosmetic surgery in South Korea.

Not everyone in South Korea is so wild about North Korea’s soft-power efforts. The JoongAng Ilbo, one of South Korea’s top three newspapers, on Monday warned the government not to be seduced by North Korea.

[Washington Post]

Seoul tells North Korean defectors to take low profile during Olympics

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South Korea’s government is telling high-profile North Korean defectors such as Thae Yong-ho to “cool it” by not engaging in public criticism of Pyongyang during February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

The Chosun Ilbo reports that the South Korean government’s efforts to set a “festive mood of rapprochement” with the North contrasts with a huge military parade that Pyongyang plans to hold just before the Games begin – “suggesting that the appeasement is all one way.”

On the advice conveyed to North Korean defectors, one South Korean government source reportedly said: “The request was ostensibly made out of concern for their safety, but it sounded like a warning not to pour cold water on the event.”

A military source was also cited as saying that Seoul had also nixed plans to send out “a congratulatory message marking the handover of the next-generation F-35A fighter jet in Texas in late March.”

The aforementioned Thae Yong-ho has been described as one of the highest-ranking North Korean officials ever to defect.

[Asia Times]

Concerns over US launching ‘limited’ strike or ‘preventive’ action against North Korea after the Olympics

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Despite peace gestures tied to next month’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, officials in South Korea are worried the U.S. may be preparing for military action against North Korea.

Bruce Klingner, former chief of the CIA Korea division and now senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at the Washington-based conservative think Heritage Foundation, just returned from Korea, where he heard firsthand the concerns of senior South Korean officials. He said the unanimous view is that even a limited strike would certainly trigger a response from the North Koreans.

Some proponents of the Trump administration’s limited-strike option contend that the North Koreans might actually hold back from any military response out of fear that the risks of doing so are too great because it could produce a massive response from Washington and perhaps be fatal to the Kim regime. Yet others disagree, saying the North Korea leader would look bad if he didn’t respond since the regime has blamed the U.S. for crippling international sanctions and its other problems. They also contend that a faction of the military could act on its own if Kim failed to order a military response.

“Kim would have no choice but to respond back or he’d face the possibility of a coup,” said Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, a U.S. think tank. “And maybe even respond more ferociously than we attack him.”

Any retaliation could potentially pose a threat to the greater Seoul area, where about half of the South Korean population lives. North Koreans are known to have thousands of hardened artillery sites, including some dug into mountains, along the Korean DMZ and within range of Seoul.

Another wildcard is what China would do if the U.S. were to conduct a strike against North Korea. An editorial last year in China’s semi-official Global Times newspaper suggested Beijing might help North Korea if Washington launched a pre-emptive attack. China was noticeably absent last week when diplomats from 20 countries met in Vancouver, British Columbia, to discuss the North Korean nuclear threat and international sanctions.

The upcoming war games known as Foal Eagle and Key Resolve are set to get underway after the Olympics and involve American and South Korean ships, tanks and aircraft as well as live-fire exercises and more than 230,000 combined troops.

[CNBC]

Neither North or South Korea want defections during Olympic Games

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South Korea normally encourages North Koreans to defect, but not at next month’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. The reason: Both countries want to avoid a confrontation at such a sensitive time with the whole world watching.

Both sides want the Olympics to go smoothly. A defection would be a major embarrassment for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a major blow to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has made peace overtures to the North a central policy.

The two countries will march in the opening ceremony behind the same flag, and the women’s ice hockey team will be the first with players from both countries. North Korea also will send a 230-member cheering squad and a 30-member taekwondo demonstration team.

In addition, a 140-member orchestra from the North will be part of the delegation and is expected to perform in the South Korean capital of Seoul, 80 miles west of the Olympic site, and Gangneung, a city hosting some of the events.

The discussions in Panmunjom have not resulted in any major diplomatic breakthroughs and are not designed to reach an agreement on North Korea’s controversial nuclear and ballistic missile development. But Moon sees the Games as an opportunity to lessen tensions, which could lead to broader agreements, and has staked much of his political reputation on hopes the North’s participation will go off without a hitch.

[USA Today]