Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

Creating jobs for North Korean defectors in South Korea

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The Korea Federation of SMEs and the Unification Ministry on Tuesday pledged to create job opportunities for North Korean defectors in preparation for reunification.

The federation’s chairman Park Sung-taek and Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo are to sign a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday.

The two sides agreed to cooperate in offering job opportunities to defectors through the federation’s members and to conduct joint research on small and medium-sized enterprises in preparation for reunification.

They will also try to raise awareness among SMEs of issues related to possible reunification at a variety of events.

[Chosun Ilbo]

The strange case of North Korean defector Kim Ryen-hei

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The tale of 45-year-old Kim Ryen-hei, a North Korean living in South Korea, is both extraordinary and strange. Kim told Al Jazeera that she came to South Korean against her will, and she desperately wants to go back to her home to reunite with her family in Pyongyang, a request refused by the South Korean authorities.

In 2011, Kim traveled from North Korea to China to get treatment for her worsening liver cirrhosis. However, she found out that her medical expenses were too high. Her brokers refused to give her North Korean passport back. She was told that she could make enough money to cover her medical expenses and go back to China if she worked in South Korea for two to three months.

She then decided to ask South Korea to send her back, but there is no mechanism or precedent in place for South Korea to send back North Korean “defectors” in such cases. After a long questioning process by the South Korean intelligence authorities, and rehabilitation training for new North Korea defectors, she finally applied for a South Korean passport, which was rejected and her name was added to a watch list by the intelligence authorities.

“I attempted to stowaway on a boat and managed to get a false passport. I even spent time in jail,” Kim said. In the hope of getting deported, she says she started to collect private information about North Korean defectors in the South, while reporting her “espionage” activities to the authorities, which got her convicted of violating the National Security Law.

Pastor Choi Jae-bong who is helping Kim told Al Jazeera: “This whole situation does not make sense. She is from North Korea and she got convicted for espionage. But, the South Korean government has been providing her with [the same] housing and living allowance for North Korean defectors.”

Now, her only hope is a proposed family reunion event this month. But getting onto the list is close to impossible. Of the 66,000 South Koreans on the waiting list, more than half of them are in their 80s and 90s, and only a few hundred will get a chance each time. Kim said she understands the reality, but she added: “I just want to be with my family.”

[Al Jazeera]

A North Korean information revolution resulting in actual revolution?

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How does North Korea get from an information revolution to an actual people-in-the-streets-and-toppled-statues revolution?

I pose that question to North Korean defector Kang Chol-hwan. He admits there’s not a simple answer, but he offers a few scenarios he considers plausible: The government, for instance, could sense the disconnect between its propaganda and the people’s foreign-media education and launch its own reforms, the kind of gradual opening that took place in Russia and China. Or a disillusioned populace could begin defecting en masse, forcing a border control crisis. Or some spark, like the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, could coalesce disillusioned North Koreans into their own Arab Spring, a full-scale grassroots uprising.

But then Kang surprises me by admitting that all those scenarios are unlikely: The Kim regime is too blind and stubborn to initiate its own reforms, he says, and its totalitarian grip may be too tight for a bottom-up revolution. [Nevertheless] he predicts … North Korea’s dictatorship will end within a decade. “They’re already cracking,” he says. “In less than 10 years, I’ll be able to freely go in and out.”

That nakedly idealistic statement, beyond its tinge of wishful thinking, seems to reveal something new about how Kang sees his goal. In spite of all his childhood horrors, he wants to transform North Korea not simply into a nation that will let his countrymen go free, but one that will let him back in: He wants to go home again.

Kang spent his childhood in North Korean prison camps, where his sister may still be today. “This is the best way—the only way for me—to open North Korea,” Kang finally says. “Every day until then is a delay to seeing my family again.”

[Wired]

Watch for feature film “Escaping North Korea”

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3AD, the CBS-based production company founded by actor/producer/director Daniel Dae Kim (LOST, Hawaii Five-0), is working on a feature film adaptation of Escaping North Korea and Hope in the World’s Most Repressive Country from author and speaker Mike Kim.

3AD will partner with producer Sriram Das’ Das Films to develop Escaping North Korea. The 2008 memoir chronicles Mike Kim’s first-hand account of a high-risk mission to lead a group of refugees over the North Korean border through Southeast Asia using a modern day “Underground Railroad.” Over the course of his four years in Asia, he would end up aiding thousands of people of all ages find safe haven through his heroic humanitarian missions.

[Broadwayworld.com]

How Kim Heung kwang got involved with the North Korean thought police

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Kim Heung-kwang had earned membership in the all-powerful Communist Party through years of work helping to create North Korea’s own computers, including the Paektusan minicomputer, named for the mountain where Kim Jong-il was said to have been born. As a computer science professor at Hamhung University, he had even taught students who would go on to work for North Korea’s cyberwarfare brigade, Unit 121—the group suspected of the Sony breach—in the basics of networking and operation systems.

After black markets began to spread, Kim was reassigned in 2000 to a military division that went door-to-door to search for contraband media. “I loved it,” he says. “I had the power to go into homes and take these materials and no one could even question me.”

One of the perks of Kim’s position, of course, was nearly infinite access to the media he confiscated. He began to watch the contraband films and TV shows and even loaned out his collection to friends, who rewarded him with gifts like alcohol and meat.

In 2002, Kim was given a PC, part of what he describes as a secret aid shipment from South Korea. Its hard drive had been wiped. But using forensic recovery software, Kim was able to reassemble its deleted contents. They included 400 files: films, TV shows, and, most important to his intellectual sensibilities, ebooks.

“You can’t imagine how excited I was,” he says. “I had hit a gold mine.” Read more

North Korean thought policeman abdicates

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[A PC containing 400 files of films, TV shows, and ebooks] were what finally transformed Kim Heung kwang’s thinking. He remembers reading a Dale Carnegie self-help book and Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. But most influential was a history book about Middle Eastern dictators, including the stories of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, all friends of the Kim regime. “Reading about the crimes happening in these countries, I began to realize that those crimes were happening in my country too,” Kim says. “That was the starting point of the logic shifting in my brain. I began to understand the nature of dictatorship.”

In 2003 he was arrested and taken to a detention center; he’d been ratted out by one of the comrades with whom he’d shared his secret store. He says the police tortured him for a week, forcing him to write hundreds of pages of confession under hot lights and preventing him from sleeping by jabbing his forehead with a needle. After the year of drudgery at a reeducation farm, Kim was released and managed to bribe a border guard to help him escape across the Tumen. He made his way from China to Seoul, where he set up North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity.

Kim uses Chinese traders and smuggler contacts to smuggle contraband media into North Korea. The content on Kim’s drives are mostly short educational documentaries created by and starring Kim himself. He explains to North Koreans what democracy is, for instance, or simply shows them what a bookstore or the Internet looks like. “When a North Korean watches an action movie with a chase scene in a grocery store, they want to slow it down to see what’s on the shelves,” he says. “I show them what they want to see—what I wanted to see when I was there.”

Kim has also developed what he calls stealth USB drives, designed to avoid detection. To any casual observer, the drive seems empty. But its contents reappear with a simple trigger, the details of which Kim asked that I not publicize.

[Wired]

North Korean spokeman denies persecution of Christians

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When asked about the persecution of Christians inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a spokesman for the regime responded “absolutely false”.

Alejandro Cao — the Special Delegate of North Korea’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries — publically denied that Christians are being persecuted under Kim Jong Un’s communist regime.

But as many as 100,000 Christians are estimated to be held in North Korean labor camps where they are frequently subjected to torture and are even executed for their faith because the DPRK views Christianity as a threat to “Juche”: the regime’s official ideology that demands dependence on the absolute leadership of the ruling member of the Kim family.

[Worthy News]

Jangmadang Sedae: The black-market generation of North Korea

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Yeonmi Park’s family paid around 3,000 North Korean won for a pack of DVDs that contained a bootleg of Titanic. In the early 2000s, she remembers, that was the cost of several pounds of rice in her home city of Hyesan—a significant sacrifice in a starving country.

But of all the tween girls who became obsessed with the star-crossed romance of Jack and Rose, Park was one of the very few who saw it as downright revolutionary. “In North Korea they had taught us that you die for the regime. In this movie it was like, whoa, he’s dying for a girl he loves,” she says. “I thought, how can anyone make this and not be killed?”

Titanic was hardly Park’s only foreign-­video experience. Her mother sold DVDs. Her family would put its tapes and discs in a plastic bag and bury it beneath a potted plant to hide it from the police.

But of all those illegal encounters with foreign culture, Titanic was somehow the film that made Park ask herself questions about freedom and the outside world. “It made me feel like something was off with our system,” she says in fluent English, which she perfected by watching the entire run of Friends dozens of times.

Park escaped from North Korea in 2007. Now a 21-year-old activist based in Seoul, she’s part of what’s known in Korea as the jangmadang sedae: the black-market generation.

Read more

 

North Koreans’ access to TV and DVD players

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During a famine in the North in the mid-1990s, the Kim regime began to tolerate illegal trade because it was the only option to feed a starving population. Since then, black-market commerce has been nearly impossible to stamp out. And some of the hottest commodities—particularly for young people who don’t even remember a North Korea before that underground trade existed—have been foreign music and movies, along with the Chinese-made gadgets to play them.

A 2010 study by the US Broadcasting Board of Governors found that 74 percent of North Koreans have access to a TV and 46 percent can access a DVD player. Thanks to the flourishing black market, the jangmadang generation’s technology has advanced well beyond radios and DVDs. Despite North Korea’s near-complete lack of Internet access, there are close to 3.5 million PCs in the country and 5 million tablets, according to North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity.

North Korean defector Kang Chol hwan, holding a notel.

Perhaps the most important piece of hardware in North Korea today is what’s known as a notel—a small, portable video player sold for $60 to $100 and capable of handling multiple formats. It has a screen, a rechargeable battery to deal with frequent blackouts, and crucially, USB and SD card ports. In a surprise move in December, the North Korean government legalized the devices, perhaps as part of a bid to modernize its propaganda machine, according to Seoul-based news outlet Daily NK. The result is millions of ready customers for the USB sticks smuggled across the Chinese border.

In one of North Korea’s bustling markets, a buyer might quietly ask for something “fun,” meaning foreign, or “from the village below,” referring to South Korea. The seller may lead him or her to a private place, often someone’s home, before turning over the goods. The foreign data is then consumed on a notel among small, discreet groups of mostly young people, friends who enter into an unspoken pact of breaking the law together so that no one can rat out anyone else.                                                    Read more

Drought statistics for North Korea

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Health, nutrition and sanitation conditions have deteriorated for citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) due to “a long period of abnormally dry weather,” according to the UN’s emergency aid coordination body OCHA. In a report released Wednesday, OCHA warned that a continued lack of rainfall will have a severe impact on the autumn harvest.

While UN agencies say the government has made major agricultural reforms over the past decade, and the famines of the past are unlikely now, mass hunger remains a threat that has been exacerbated by 18 months of low rainfall.

Here are some key figures:
• 600,000 – 2.5 million: Estimates of the number of people who died from famine in the 1990s
• 70: The percentage of the DPRK’s 24.6 million people whom the World Food Programme (WFP) deems “food insecure and highly vulnerable to shortages in food production”
• 27.9: The percentage of the population that is chronically malnourished and subject to stunted growth (2012 Nutrition Survey)
• 4: The percentage of the population that is acutely malnourished and subject to wasting (2012 Nutrition Survey)
• US $1,800: GDP per capita (CIA World Factbook)
• US $645,800,000: The estimated amount North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jon-un spent on luxury goods in 2012 (UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK)
• 106: The percentage increase in diarrhoea incidence between January and June in 2015 compared with 2014 in the four provinces hardest hit by the drought (OCHA)
• 36: The percentage received by August of the US $117 million the UN says it needs to address humanitarian needs
• 100: The number of years the state-owned Korean Central News Agency says it has been since the country faced a drought of these proportions

[IRIN]