Category: DPRK Government

North Korea warns of a ‘physical response’ if US missile deployment continues

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South Korea and the U.S. are reportedly close to finalizing military locations for the THAAD anti-missile defense system in South Korea.

North Korea’s military warned of “physical response measures from us as soon as the location and time that the invasionary tool for U.S. world supremacy, THAAD, will be brought into South Korea,” Reuters reports.

According to the Associated Press, South Korea’s deputy defense minister, Yoo Jeh Seung, told a nationally televised news conference Friday that Seoul and Washington would quickly deploy the system because North Korea’s growing weapons capabilities pose a big threat to the region.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula have grown since last month, when Pyongyang successfully sent a mid-range ballistic missile more than 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) high. Analysts say this means that North Korea has made progress in its ambition to be able to strike at American forces in the region.

North Korea, which frequently makes grandiose threats, has warned that it will turn South Korea “into a sea of fire and a pile of ashes” if the THAAD deployment goes ahead.

[TIME]

North Korean diplomat and family flee Russia seeking political asylum

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A North Korean diplomat based in Russia has gone missing, and it is likely he is attempting political asylum with his family.

According to a Pulkovo Airport official in St. Petersburg, the diplomat left the country on a plane bound for Belarus on July 2, Ria Novosti reported.  The man was identified by Russian media as Kim Chol Song, a third secretary and trade representative of the North Korean mission in St. Petersburg. (Chinese state media, however, has said the man’s name is Kim Chol Sam.)

The diplomat, his wife and son boarded a Belavia Belarusian Airlines flight, purchasing the tickets three hours prior to boarding, according to the report.

Fontanka, an online Russian news site, quoted a local investigator who also said the North Korean envoy had left for Belarus to seek asylum in Europe.

[UPI]

US sanctions North Korean leader Kim Jong Un

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The Obama administration today slapped sanctions on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and 10 other regime officials for their alleged complicity in human rights abuses against the North Korean people.

The move marked the first time Washington sanctioned Kim Jong Un personally. Administration officials said Kim was “ultimately responsible” for what they called “North Korea’s notorious abuses of human rights.”

“Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam J. Szubin said in a statement announcing the new action.

“As a result of today’s actions, any property or interest in property of those designated by (Office of Foreign Assets Control) within U.S. jurisdiction is frozen,” the Treasury Department said. “Additionally, transactions by U.S. persons involving the designated persons are generally prohibited.”

The sanctions also extend to five North Korean state entities, including the Ministry of People’s Security, which the report says oversees labor camps and other detention facilities, where torture, execution, rape, starvation and forced labor takes place.

U.S. officials briefing reporters on the new actions say they expected the sanctions to have “a worldwide ripple effect” making it harder for those on the list to do business with global financial institutions.

[CNN]

North Korea no longer a smoker’s paradise

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North Korea, one of the last bastions of free, unhindered smoking, a country where just about every adult male can and does light up almost anywhere he pleases and where leader Kim Jong-un is hardly ever seen without a lit cigarette in his hand, is now officially trying to get its people to kick the habit.

Ri Yong-ok, a 57-year-old pharmacist whose heavy-smoking husband nearly died of lung cancer, is leading the charge. Her small anti-smoking center that she manages in Pyongyang has something you almost never see in the North — a no-smoking sign placed prominently above its entrance.

The potential health benefit to the nation could be tremendous. Ri estimated about 54 per cent of adult male North Koreans smoke — a higher figure than the 43.9 per cent given by a World Health Organization report released at the end of 2014.

North Korea has toyed with the idea of pushing harder to get smokers to kick the habit before — Ri’s humble anti-smoking center has been around since 2007. But it has stepped up its effort to at least provide more education of smoking’s health risks since an anti-smoking decree was made by Kim in April.

The start of the new drive prompted speculation in the foreign media that Kim himself had quit, since cigarettes were conspicuously missing from his hands in photos carried by the state media of his “on-the-spot guidance” visits around the country from around that time. The buzz didn’t last long. He was pictured smoking on a visit to a children’s camp in June.

[AP]

North Korean defectors’ detention unlawful, say human rights lawyers

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The ongoing tussle between the two Koreas over 12 waitresses from North Korea who defected to the South spilled into a courtroom in Seoul on Tuesday, where human rights lawyers accused the authorities in the South of unlawfully detaining them.

The 12 women, together with their male manager, flew to Seoul, the South Korean capital, in April after leaving a North Korean government-run restaurant in the Chinese city of Ningbo. South Korea welcomed the women and described them as having defected of their own free will after growing fed up with their totalitarian government.

Colleagues and family members of the 12 North Korean waitresses who defected were presented to the news media in Pyongyang

North Korea immediately accused the South’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, of kidnapping the women. It has since arranged for their parents to give interviews with the Western news media, during which they have demanded that South Korea allow them to meet with their daughters to learn their true intentions. The South has dismissed the demands as propaganda.

The inter-Korean standoff took an unexpected turn recently, when a South Korean human rights group, Lawyers for a Democratic Society, asked a court in Seoul to release the women from a tightly guarded government facility south of the city where they have been kept since their arrival, so they could speak for themselves. The group accused the National Intelligence Service of blocking the women’s access to legal services and their right to speak freely.

The South Korean government has denied the lawyers access to the women, saying that the defectors do not want their services. It has also said that if the women appeared in court and testified that they abandoned North Korea of their own accord, that would prompt the North to persecute their relatives in retaliation.

By law, the National Intelligence Service can keep North Koreans who flee to the South at a secluded facility outside Seoul for as long as six months for debriefing and to ferret out spies.

[New York Times]

Kim Jong Un fearful about his personal safety and image

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is so paranoid about his personal safety that he has developed insomnia, South Korea’s spy agency says.

The young leader lives in fear of assassination and spends his days gorging on food and drink, supposedly ballooning in weight from about 90 kilograms (198 lbs) when he took power in 2012 to around 130 kg (286 lbs) today, the National Intelligence Service reported to a committee of the national assembly on July 1.

Members of the Intelligence Committee said Kim, who in the past ordered his mentor uncle executed on grounds of treason, could well be suffering from lifestyle-related diseases as a result.

Recently, an aunt of Kim who lives in exile in the United States, granted an interview with The Washington Post and said of her nephew’s childhood: “He was short-tempered and had a lack of tolerance.”

Kim instructed North Korean ambassadors overseas to ensure that those details do not reach the masses in North Korea.

In North Korea, Kim Jong Un is portrayed as a boy genius who learned to drive a car at the age of three and excelled in sports and as an academic.

[Asahi Shimbun]

Satellite imagery suggests China is punishing North Korea

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Following North Korea’s nuclear test in January, trade over the China-North Korea border dropped dramatically, according to newly released satellite imagery. The revelation has led experts to conclude that Beijing has been quietly punishing Kim Jong Un by cutting off the flow of funds to his regime.

There’s no question that the China-North Korea relationship has been strained since Kim assumed power in 2011. Against Beijing’s wishes, the young leader has revved up North Korea’s pace of missile tests and detonated two nuclear devices, one in 2013 and then again this January. In 2013, Kim executed his uncle Jang Song Thaek, who had been China’s main contact in Pyongyang.

After the latest nuclear explosion, Secretary of State John F. Kerry publicly called on China to end “business as usual” with North Korea. Publicly, Beijing rejected being told by the United States how to handle its client state. Behind the scenes, it appears Beijing was doing just that.

Victor Cha, director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, and now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), led a team of researchers that procured and analyzed the new satellite imagery as part of their project, a website and database dedicated to demystifying what’s going on inside the world’s most secretive state.

“It shows that China pursues things in their own way when it comes to North Korea, not because the U.S. or the U.N. tells them to,” said Cha. “The good news is that they are squeezing them more than we were led to expect.”

CSIS worked with imagery analysts at the commercial satellite firm DigitalGlobe to collect and examine satellite photos of several key trade-related areas on both sides of the China-North Korea border. Satellite images showed a “substantive reduction of economic activity on the Sino-North Korean border” as evidenced by a huge drop in the number of rail cars at the stations, trucks in customs areas, trucks on the bridge and undocked boats in the Yalu River.

[Washington Post]

Kim Jong-un gets another new title

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been named Chairman of an organ called the Commission on State Affairs, a new body established under a revised constitution adopted by the parliament and which replaces the powerful National Defense Commission. Pundits speculate that the aim of restoring this agency is a decisive move away from the military-first doctrine, as part of Kim junior’s ongoing attempts to bring the unruly military to heel and gain full control of the state.

The North Korean leader now has nine titles, most amounting to the same thing, including:

  • Chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers Party
  • Member of the standing committee of the Politburo
  • Workers Party chairman
  • Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army
  • Chairman of the military committee of the Workers Party
  • First Chairman of the National Defense Commission
  • Chairman of the Commission on State Affairs.

[Chosun Ilbo]

More North Korean workers defect from China

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Several North Korean women reportedly defected from their work site in the Chinese city of Dandong – a month after a group of waitresses fled a state-run restaurant in central China.

Kim Seong-min, a defector in South Korea who heads Free North Korea Radio, said seven or eight North Korean women escaped their place of work on Saturday.

In response, North Korea’s state security department dispatched agents to China to track down the women, with the cooperation of Chinese security, Kim said.

Kim told Yonhap the women were all in their 20s, and they were working at a Chinese-owned company, although he did not specify whether the site was a factory or another establishment.

[UPI]

Chinese tourism to North Korea

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“Every day we send dozens of people across to Sinuiju for one- or four-day trips,“ says local travel agent Li Qiang, referring to North Korea’s third largest city that sits opposite Dandong. “Anyone can go — except Americans, Japanese and South Koreans.” Boat tours weave between North Korean islands that sit in the middle of the waterway. For about an hour, passengers are completely surrounded by North Korean territory.

“I’m really curious and wanted to see the mysterious North Korea,” says Luan Shicai, a 42-year-old hairdresser from provincial capital Shenyang, standing by a Chinese government sign that warns visitors against throwing food to the North Koreans. “After seeing their life, it makes me feel good about my life here.”

“More and more foreigners are coming here to see North Korea,” says the captain called Mr. Kang, explaining that he makes 10 trips a day in peak season. A single-engine longboat approaches driven by a man in black flat-cap, utility waistcoat and cloth trousers rolled up to his knees. He begins hawking an assortment of wares — eggs, North Korean cigarettes, plastic tubs of kimchi pickled cabbage, “tiger bone” liquor. But he’s not a chancing smuggler — he’s an employee of the North Korean government, running probably the world’s smallest duty-free shop.

“He can collect 2,000-3,000 yuan [$300-500] a day,” says Mr. Kang, as he guns the engine away. “But he gives all that to the government. He only gets paid 50 yuan [$7.5] per month. That’s an extremely good wage in North Korea.”

[TIME]