Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

Did you know one in 12 North Koreans have smartphones?

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What’s the point of a computer in a hermit country sealed off from the internet? What use can a smartphone be if the smartest uses are blocked? And why would anyone learn computer coding in a country closed off from the world-wide-web?

These are the conundrums at the core of the puzzle about technology in North Korea. If the South is the most teched-up nation in the world, the North ought to be the least — except it’s not.

At least one in 12 people in North Korea have smartphones. We know that North Korea has so many smartphones because its 3G network is run by Koryolink, a joint venture between an Egyptian company, Orascom Telecom, and the North Korean state. The Egyptian end publishes figures which add up to about two million North Korean subscribers.

Another question: How do North Koreans manage without the global internet? With difficulty, is the answer.

A few bright students are trained and do have access from controlled and monitored institutions while the mass of the citizenry have to make do with the internal North Korean intranet called the Kwangmyong.

There’s advice in English, Korean and Chinese on diet and age, the kind of health webpage which would generate clicks on any website anywhere. But this is some way short of the sum of all knowledge and delight provided by the worldwide web.

For the general populace this intranet has to suffice. The authorities are hyper-keen to close the slightest crack in the wall to the internet outside.

[BBC]

How North Korean defectors send money to their families

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Under one common method of transferring money, North Korean defectors use online banking sites to wire money to a bank account of a Korean-Chinese broker based in a Chinese town near the border with North Korea. The broker then takes out 20 to 30 percent of the money as commissions and asks a Korean-Chinese trader, who can freely cross the border into North Korea, to deliver the rest of the money to the defector’s relatives.

The step of carrying money across the border is not always necessary when the go-betweens are involved in separate operations of smuggling Chinese goods for sale in North Korean markets. For example, a North Korean broker who owes money to a Chinese supplier could pay the debt by giving a defector’s family cash, if the supplier is also involved in the transaction.

If a defector’s family lives far from the Chinese border, a transfer will take more effort because North Korea restricts its citizens’ movement and has poor transportation services.

In the early days, brokers frequently cheated defectors, but the business has since become more orderly and lucrative, with brokers more concerned about retaining customers.

It’s not known how many North Koreans have been arrested for getting money from their relatives in South Korea or communicating with them. But activists who have interviewed defectors say many North Koreans have avoided trouble by using some of the money to bribe local officials.

At the same time, activists and defectors say North Korea has been cracking down, using equipment near the border to check for signals from Chinese mobile phones.

[AP]

Smuggling preferences for North Koreans

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A North Korean defector calling himself “Mr Chung” revealed North Korea’s smuggling preferences in a Channel 4 documentary last year.

He smuggles radios, USB sticks and DVDs of soap operas and entertainment shows into the North, posing as a mushroom importer.  He said, “Men love their action films! I sent them Skyfall recently. The women enjoy watching soap operas and dramas.

“The more people are exposed to such media the more likely they are to become disillusioned with the regime and start wanting to live differently.”

A group of activists in South Korea led by another defector from the North send satchels containing anti-regime flyers, noodles, $1 bills and USB sticks containing South Korean soap operas over the border attached to balloons.

North Korea forbids its 24 million people from watching foreign broadcasts and videos out of fear outside influence could undermine the dictatorship’s ideology.

Anyone caught smuggling them in or distributing illicit material can be executed for crimes against the state and viewers have reportedly been sentenced to years in prison camps or hard labor. A purge was reported last year, when around 80 people were said to be executed for watching South Korean television shows in November.

[The Independent]

EU human rights rep confirms North Korean invite

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A European Union official confirmed that North Korea has invited the EU’s special representative for human rights to visit, which would be a significant step toward resuming a human rights dialogue that Pyongyang broke off in 2003.

For North Korea to offer any dialogue on human rights, a topic which its government until recently would not discuss, is seen as significant by the international community. But such an offer also has been greeted with skepticism by rights groups and some diplomats.

North Korea also has offered the possibility of visits by United Nations rights officials, but the North Korea diplomat, Kim Un Chol, said that those offers would be dropped unless a U.N. resolution on the country removes any reference to the International Criminal Court.

North Korea has been on the defensive since a U.N. commission of inquiry early this year detailed what it said were vast human rights abuses in the impoverished but nuclear-armed country and warned that leader Kim Jong Un could be held accountable.

[AP]

North Korea tourism with a Christian motive

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An American who was detained for nearly six months in North Korea said that he left a Bible in a nightclub hoping it would get into the hands of what he called the country’s underground Christian church. Jeffrey Fowle said he traveled to the country as a tourist but saw the opportunity as a way to follow the Christian mission “to carry the Gospel to all corners of the Earth.”

“I knew it was a risk, that I was taking a gamble, but I felt compelled to do that to aid the underground church in some small way,” Fowle said in an interview in his lawyer’s office. “I felt once I left the Bible somewhere that God would take it the rest of the way into the hands of some kind of Christian organization, and I’d be able to waltz out of country fat, dumb and happy, no problem,” he said. “But God had other plans.”

Fowle said he left the Bible — with his name in it — in a bathroom under a trash bin at a nightclub in the northern port city of Chongjin and hoped a Christian would find it. He chose that city and the nightclub in the belief there would be less security. He bought the Korean-language Bible before his trip.

Instead, his tour guide asked the next day if anyone had left a Bible there and he owned up to it. He was detained a few days later while going through customs before departure.

Fowle was taken to a hotel for about three weeks and questioned, then moved to another facility. He wrote a confession and answered questions about his motivations. He said authorities couldn’t believe he had acted on his own, but he made clear it was his own decision. He was treated well and was comfortable but was in his locked quarters 23 1/2 hours a day, he said.

He was allowed to speak in September to Western news organizations in five-minute interviews. He said he was given “talking points” for those interviews, meant to convey his “desperate situation.” He said he never considered going off script, although he did reject requests that he try to be more emotional and more demanding of the U.S. government.

Fowle said his release came as a surprise — he thought he was about to be taken to prison — and he was told by an American who helped escort him home that the North Korean government was responsible for his return.

U.S. officials are trying to win the release of two other Americans who are being held in North Korea, Matthew Miller and Kenneth Bae. Fowle said he had had no contact with either.

[The Columbus Dispatch]

Jeffery Fowle admits motive in leaving Bible in North Korean nightclub

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The American detained in North Korea for leaving a Bible in a nightclub said he did exactly what the communist country accused him of.

The 56-year-old said he planned to leave the Bible in North Korea long before he even traveled to the country, he told the Dayton Daily News. He was not necessarily there to proselytize, he said, but he was driven by his “strong motivation to help the Christians” in the area, he said.

He was kept in isolation and passed the time by writing letters to his family and watching North Korean state TV, he told NBC News. Despite being in jail, he said he was treated relatively well.  He was given hearty meals of rice, meat and vegetables. When he complained that his food was too spicy, the cook turned down the heat, he said.

Two Americans remain detained in North Korea. Both Kenneth Bae and Matthew Miller were convicted of crimes and sentenced to hard labor.

The religious motive for travel to North Korea

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Religion has provided a powerful impulse for some to cross the North Korean border.

North Korea officially guarantees freedom of religion, but outside analysts and defectors describe the country as militantly anti-religious. The distribution of Bibles and secret prayer services can mean imprisonment or execution, defectors have said. “It is one of the last frontiers to spread the Christian faith, so there are people who would take unimaginable risks” to evangelize there, John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul said.

A Bible in his hand, American missionary Robert Park walked into North Korea on Christmas Day 2009 to draw attention to human rights abuses and to call for the resignation of then-leader Kim Jong Il. Park, who was deported from the country in February 2010, has said he was tortured by interrogators.

In 2010, ex-President Jimmy Carter visited North Korea to win the release of imprisoned American Aijalon Gomes, who had been sentenced to eight years of hard labor for crossing illegally into the North from China.

Gomes … may have been emulating Park, said Jo Sung-rae, a South Korean human rights advocate who met with Gomes. Gomes attended rallies in Seoul calling for Park’s release before he was arrested.

Park later said he didn’t want others to repeat his actions. “I don’t want others to do this. I just hoped that this could galvanize people to action. Because this is a society that needs change now,” he told The Washington Post in February 2011.

[AP]

North Korean officials publicly executed

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North Korea has reportedly publicly executed up at least 50 people this year, including several party officials for watching soap operas.

According to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), Pyongyang has purged about 10 officials from Kim Jong-Un’s Workers’ Party for watching South Korean soaps. It is not known whether the most recent group of officials executed include six reported missing earlier this month.

The officials, who also faced charges of bribery and womanizing, were thought to be close to Kim’s executed uncle, Jang Song-thaek, Yonhap news agency reported.

In the eastern port of Wonsan, the authorities gathered 10,000 people in a sports stadium to watch the execution of eight people by firing squad, JoongAng Ilbo reported.

All television and media is under strict state control and access to the internet is limited but despite a harsh crackdown, banned foreign shows and films have been gaining popularity in recent years. Some are believed to be secretly streamed over the internet, while others are smuggled into the country on DVDs, video cassettes of memory sticks sold on the black market.

[The Independent]

UN’s Special Rapporteur to brief United Nations General Assembly

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This year, a scathing U.N. Commission of Inquiry report was published, cataloging North Korea’s abuses that the authors said amounted to crimes against humanity. It recommended prosecuting North Korea’s leaders at the ICC for such crimes including torture and extensive political prison camps.

A former security officer at one of North Korea’s political prison camps has described how detainees, suspected of disloyalty to North Korea, would have long needles driven underneath their fingernails and a pot of water and hot chili pepper poured into their noses to extract confessions.

Former prisoners talked about being beaten on their chest repeatedly until they vomited blood or being tortured while hung upside down in a report that detailed abuses by the regime.

Pyongyang will come under scrutiny again when the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea, Marzuki Darusman, gives a briefing at the United Nations General Assembly today.

[CNN]

North Korean prison camps “without any parallel in the contemporary world”

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The gulags of North Korea exist in a strange world between secret and unsecret. No one knows for sure how many thousands or millions are locked away in the camps, which officially do not exist, and information about what goes on there can be sparse. But we can watch the camps grow and contract from satellites, where they’re so plainly and publicly visible they’re labeled on Google Maps, and we are learning more all the time from the trickle of defectors and escapees who make it out of the Hermit Kingdom.

A United Nations report called the camps a human rights abuse “without any parallel in the contemporary world.”

North Korea operates four enormous labor camps for political prisoners — sprawling, city-sized facilities in the country’s frigid and mountainous north. Most inmates are sent for life as punishment for minor slights, or because a relative committed some offense. They are subjected to backbreaking labor, routine torture and starvation, constant fear of arbitrary execution, and conditions so squalid most do not survive past age 45.

These gulags — which are separate from the country’s more conventional prison systems — are thought to house 100,000 or more people, including many women and children. Often, entire families are sent away for one member’s offense, through two or three generations. Sometimes inmates will have no idea why they’re there, or will have never met the relative for whom they are punished with a life of torture and malnutrition.

Inmates are given not quite enough food to survive, forcing them to turn against one another — or curry favor somehow with the guards — to secure enough to eat. They are assigned brutally punishing work, such as coal mining without proper equipment or ventilation. Women and girls are subject to rape and molestation by guards.

Because the generations-long sentences mean that something to akin to families often form in the camps, inmates live with the fear that they will be tortured or killed for a family member’s crime — and are often forced to betray their own family to survive.

[Vox]