Category: DPRK Government

Information the most powerful weapon against North Korea

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Beijing has the power to dramatically alter the course of history in North Korea. Because of this, the west needs to put pressure on both capitals and create a new vector of power: information.

New platforms and forms of communication are necessary to reverse a campaign of brainwashing that dates back three generations. Pirate videos, thumb-drives and smuggled phones spread the truth, that in the outside world, people lives unimaginably better lives than they do inside North Korea. Critics of the state rely on hot-air balloons to carry anti-regime information across the border, but it’s not enough.

Interviews with defectors reveal that many listen to news from shortwave radios, despite fear of severe punishment, and despite the government’s best efforts to isolate its population.

The BBC, hard-pressed as it is, must seriously consider broadcasting into North Korea. According to BBC internal estimates a Korean service would cost around £1m a year to run and a shortwave transmitter would cost about £300,000 a year. North citizens need to understand more about the true working of their own country.

This regime, that looks so strong, is weaker than you think.

[Excerpts from John Sweeney’s book “North Korea Undercover”, as published in The Guardian]

Defector to reveal human experiments taking place in North Korea

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A North Korean scientist has defected to Finland, and he may have evidence that his native country has been conducting ghastly experiments on humans involving chemical weapons, reports the South’s Yonhap News Agency.

The scientist is identified only as a 47-year-old named Lee who worked at a facility in Ganggye near the Chinese border. He reportedly managed to escape via the Philippines last month, carrying with him a storage drive loaded with information on the North’s human experiments.

He is expected to testify before the European parliament this month. “His ostensible reason for defection is that he felt skeptical about his research,” says Yonhap’s source.

“We have been told similar stories in the past that human experiments are carried out in prison camps,” says the director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, per the Independent.

In fact, a North Korean officer who defected in the 1990s recounted biological and chemical warfare tests on victims including mentally and physically disabled children, reports the Telegraph. “We watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies,” he said in an interview last year. “I saw it with my own eyes.” No actual evidence of such tests has emerged, but this latest defection could change that.

North Korea: Life in a brainwashed society

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A North Korea defector, Hyeonseo Lee, has revealed in a new book how she was forced to watch her first execution at the age of seven.

Lee and her classmates grew up convinced they lived in the ‘greatest nation on earth’ run by a benevolent god-like leader whom they loved in the way many children love Santa Claus. It wasn’t until she left North Korea at the age of 17 that she began to discover the full horror of the government that had fed her propaganda since birth.

All family life took place beneath the obligatory portraits of North Korea’s revered founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il which hung in every home. Failure to clean and look after them was a punishable offence. At supper Lee had to thank ‘Respected Father Leader Kim Il-sung’ for her food before she could pick up her chopsticks.

The faintest hint of political disloyalty was enough to make an entire family – grandparents, parents and children – disappear. ‘Their house would be roped off; they’d be taken away in a truck at night, and not seen again,’ she says.

Public executions were used as a way to keep everyone in line. After Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994 she recalls a spate of executions of people who had not mourned sufficiently. Lee witnessed her first execution at seven.

In the mid-1990s North Korea suffered a famine which killed an estimated one million people. Lee’s first inkling of the crisis came when her mother showed her a letter from a colleague’s sister living in a neighboring province. “By the time you read this the five of us will no longer exist in this world,” it read, explaining that the family were lying on the floor waiting to die after not eating for weeks.

Lee, who still believed she lived in the world’s most prosperous country, was stunned. A few days later she came across a skeletal young mother lying in the street with a baby in her arms. She was close to death, but no one stopped.

Beggars and vagrant children began to appear in the town and corpses turned up in the river. ‘The smell of decomposing bodies was everywhere,’ Lee said, speaking at her book launch in London.

In her book she describes taking a train through a ‘landscape of hell’ to visit a relative. She saw people roaming the countryside ‘like living dead’. In the city of Hamhung she recalled people ‘hallucinating from hunger’ and ‘falling dead in the street’.

The government blamed the famine on US sanctions, but she later learnt it had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union which had been subsidizing North Korea with food and fuel.

[Daily Mail]

Young North Korean defectors now Pyongyang Poster Children

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A CNN crew led by Will Ripley met several North Koreans Pyongyang intent on defending their country’s tarnished human rights record. As is normal procedure, the team was given no advance notice about what or who they would be able to film before they arrived in the capital. On the first morning, they were led into the same meeting room at the Koryo Hotel, where most visiting foreigners stay.

In 2013, these youngsters had been caught on the Laos-China border as they attempted to head for South Korea. Returned to North Korea, the world feared for their safety at the hands of a state that is usually merciless when it comes to defectors they regard as traitors.

But instead of being punished, they told CNN they received special treatment, extra tuition to make up for three years of missed schooling while on the run, as well as places in the best educational establishments in the Pyongyang — poster children for the state’s “benevolence and forgiveness.”

While there was no way to confirm how they were chosen to speak, the highly secretive state seems keen to get its point of view across when it comes to its rights conduct — it vehemently rejected claims in a United Nations report that it “terrorizes” its own citizens.

[CNN]

Watchdog warns of North Korean money laundering

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The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, a money laundering watchdog, last week reaffirmed its earlier decision to put North Korea on its watch list because of North Korea’s “failure to address the significant deficiencies in its anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism,” the task force said in a public statement released on its website. It said that failure poses “serious threat to the integrity of the international financial system.”

The group also expressed concern about North Korea’s noncompliance with its recommendations to fight money laundering.

In an apparent attempt to ease financial sanctions by the United States and the United Nations some time back, North Korea promised steps to address money laundering concerns. In July 2014, Pyongyang announced it had joined the Asian affiliate of the anti-money laundering body as an observer. Later, North Korea sent a letter to the FATF indicating its commitment to implementing actions recommended by the group.

[VoA]

North Korea the problem child of Asia

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Despite needing Beijing more than anyone else, North Korea, the nuclear-armed problem child of Asia, has frozen out its only real friend.

China’s new ambassador, the high-flying diplomat Li Jinjun, was appointed in mid-March yet has not met North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un nor had his credentials accepted. It is an unprecedented snub from the hermit kingdom to its powerful friend – and the latest sign of a growing impulsivity that has Korea watchers and seasoned diplomats deeply worried.

Stability under the 32-year-old Kim, who took power in late 2011, is shakier than it has been in a long time, prompting fears the Korean peninsula could crumble in ways that cannot be predicted or managed at a time when the region has enough flashpoints to worry about. Speaking of Kim Jong-un, one seasoned Asian diplomat commented, “Kim’s father and grandfather were as tough as you can get, they were ruthless dictators, but they were not reckless. This guy has the same brutality but with more recklessness.”

Determined to stamp his ruthless authority, Kim has shrugged off Beijing’s restraining hand and embarked on bloody purges. This included the execution of his own uncle, Jang Song-thaek, the final straw for Beijing because Jang was the point man on economic co-operation between the two countries. The purges have escalated in recent months.

Pyongyang also abruptly cancelled a planned visit by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon – which would have been the first by a UN leader since 1993. Three weeks earlier, Kim cancelled a planned visit to Moscow – reportedly annoying Vladimir Putin.

China’s biggest worry is that North Korea will collapse and unify with the south in a democratic, pro-Washington state. While Kim’s brutality is probably making some North Korean elites jittery, nobody is game to predict an internal collapse just yet.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

China willing to help drought-stricken North Korea

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China’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that the government was willing to help drought-stricken North Korea, after the isolated country said it was suffering its worst drought in a century.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a daily news briefing, “China is willing to provide the aid that is needed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” he added, without providing details.

China’s ties with North Korea have been strained over Pyongyang’s banned nuclear program. North Korea is under United Nations sanctions because of its nuclear tests and missile launches.

Beijing is Pyongyang’s last major ally, but relations have soured in recent years, while Beijing has grown closer to Seoul.

However, China is still a significant source of aid to North Korea, much of which happens off book.

[Reuters]

North Korea’s worst drought in 100 years

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North Korea has been hit by what it describes as its worst drought in a century, which could worsen chronic food shortages in a country where the United Nations says almost a third of children under five are stunted because of poor nutrition.

The North’s KCNA news agency said late on Tuesday that paddies around the country, including the main rice farming regions of Hwanghae and Phyongan provinces, were drying up for lack of rain. “The worst drought in 100 years continues in the DPRK, causing great damage to its agricultural field,” KCNA said, using the short form of the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The U.N. resident coordinator for North Korea, Ghulam Isaczai, warned in a Reuters interview last month of a looming crisis due to last year’s drought, caused by the lowest rainfall in 30 years.

Thomas Lehman, Denmark’s ambassador to both North and South Korea, told Reuters that on a visit to the North late last month he could “clearly see” attempts to deal with the drought in its fields.

The government has mounted a campaign encouraging the public to help out on farms, and is using mobile water pumps run on diesel and longer pipes to draw water into fields. North Korea relies heavily on hydroelectric power and suffers from chronic electricity shortages, which can be exacerbated by periods of no rain.

[Reuters]

North Korean confirms Hyon Yong Choi put to death for insubordination

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North Korean officials have confirmed that Hyon Yong Choi, the hermit kingdom’s former defense minister, was put to death for “insubordination,” South Korean media outlet YTN reported Monday. YTN uncovered the information after it was relayed from the North Korean embassy in China, according to YTN.

North Korean despot Kim Jong-un was upset with Hyon after he showed “disregard” for the dictator in a meeting, South Korean paper Chosun Ilbo reported. Kim responded in force and executed Hyon “for insubordination and disobeying the party leadership,” UPI writes.

According to the report, Hyon was napping during a meeting, causing Kim to consider the offense one that reached a treasonous level. Chosun Ilbo reported that Hyon would frequently become bored during meetings and would resort to napping as a way to pass the time.

Kim’s dissatisfaction with Hyon reached its climax when the dictator asked his defense minister a question during a meeting and found that Hyon was unresponsive. It was then that Kim concluded that his defense minister must be detained, punished, and later executed, the South Korean paper reported.

Chosun Ilbo reports that Kim’s leadership has become increasingly tyrannical: “The fact that Hyon was executed within days without waiting for approval from the Workers Party, just like former Army chief Ri Yong-ho and [Kim Jong-un’s uncle] Jang Song-taek, demonstrates just how volatile Kim has become.”

[Breitbart]

North Korea claims US targeted it with anthrax

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North Korea has accused the United States of targeting it with anthrax and asked the United Nations Security Council to investigate Washington’s “biological warfare schemes” after a live anthrax sample was sent to a U.S. base in South Korea.

Live anthrax samples, which can be used as a biological weapon, were inadvertently sent to Australia, Canada, Britain, South Korea and laboratories in 19 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., the Pentagon said recently.

“The United States not only possesses deadly weapons of mass destruction … but also is attempting to use them in actual warfare against [North Korea],” Pyongyang’s U.N. Ambassador Ja Song Nam wrote in a letter to the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which was made public Friday.

U.S. investigators are trying to ascertain whether the shipments of live anthrax stemmed from quality control problems at the U.S. military base in Utah which sent them, Pentagon officials have said.

North Korea “strongly requests the Security Council take up the issue of the shipment of anthrax germs in order to thoroughly investigate the biological warfare schemes of the United States,” Ja wrote in his letter, dated June 4.

He attached a statement from North Korea’s National Defence Commission, which urged the world to consider the anthrax shipment “the gravest challenge to peace and a hideous crime aimed at genocide.”

[Reuters]