Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

A rap music revolution coming to North Korea?

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Kang Chun-hyok says even though he cannot go back across the border to North Korea, he hopes his music will.

Among the more than 26,000 North Koreans who have fled their country for new lives in South Korea, one refugee is trying to start a career as a hip-hop artist with hopes his music will eventually make it back to his homeland.

Kang Chun-hyok, 28, is originally from North Hamgyong province in North Korea. He grew up there during the famine that is believed to have killed millions. Kang says it is that experience that influences his music.

He says he wants to criticize the North Korean government because people there have been starving to death and are desperate, but yet the system has not changed. In this rap, Kang reminds North Korea’s rulers that while they were drinking expensive, imported alcohol, people like him were eating tree bark and drinking from mud puddles.

Those are lyrics that would not go over well with the Pyongyang regime. But Kang says he hopes his music will resonate with many people back home. He says he is not so sure what people in North Korea will think about his songs, but maybe his lyrics could help start a revolution there.

There is nothing like rap in North Korea, he says, though South Korean pop music is broadcast into the North by defector run radio stations in Seoul.

[VoA]

Rival Koreas trade fire over propaganda balloons

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North and South Korea traded machine-gun and rifle fire Friday after South Korean activists released anti-Pyongyang propaganda balloons across the border.

North Korea opened fire nearly two hours after the release of the balloons, Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said, and several 14.55 mm machine gun bullets fell south of the border near a South Korean base and a residential area. Kim said South Korea then fired 40 rounds from K-6 machine guns. The North then opened fire with rifles, which South Korean soldiers responded to in kind, Kim said. There were no reports of damages or injuries. It wasn’t immediately clear if North Korea was firing at the balloons.

The exchange of fire comes as speculation grows about the condition of North Korea’s authoritarian leader, Kim Jong Un, who has been out of public view for more than a month. He missed a major anniversary event on Friday for the first time in three years.

South Korean activists and North Korean defectors frequently release balloons carrying leaflets into the North, but Friday’s action was especially provoking because it came on the founding anniversary of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party.

South Korean civic organizations mainly made up of North Korean defectors sent 10 balloons northward from the South Korean side of the border. They contained 20,000 anti-North Korea leaflets, 1,000 U.S. $1 bills, 400 propaganda DVDs and 300 propaganda thumb drives.

North Korea’s Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea released a statement Thursday criticizing the planned leaflet launch, calling it “little short of a declaration of a war.”

“If the South Korean authorities allow or connive at the projected leaflet-scattering operation, the north-south relations will again be pushed to an uncontrollable catastrophe and the provokers will be wholly accountable for it,” the statement said.

North Korea has issued similar warnings on the leaflets in the past but hasn’t acted on its threats.

[AP]

Why North Korea’s rare willing openness?

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With Kim Jong Un still out of sight, North Korean officials have gone on a publicity blitz — making a rare move to take questions at the United Nations, arranging human rights talks with the European Union, and taking a high-level trip to South Korea.

The overtures come at a time when its human rights record has received increased scrutiny. Pyongyang’s charm offensive has raised questions of what the regime seeks and what could be happening in the country’s inner circle.

Citing over 40 different sanctions against North Korea, Ri Tong Il, the North Korean deputy ambassador to the UN, said: “This is the most brutal sanction throughout the world. No country… has been living under these sanctions. … You can imagine how these obstacles are to the peaceful environment for the people of our country.”

He adamantly defended the country’s human rights record, saying it’s “doing its best to exceed” universal human rights conventions. North Korea had issued a rosy human rights report in September, boasting that it has “the most advantageous” system.

North Korea’s outreach at the U.N., EU and South Korea comes at a time when recommendations from the scathing UN Commission of Inquiry report  — for prosecution and more sanctions — are on its way to the U.N. General Assembly.

Another North Korean official had said last week that North Korea is ready to restart nuclear talks.

[CNN]

North Korea acknowledges labor camps at UN

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A North Korean official publicly acknowledged to the international community the existence of his country’s “reform through labor” camps Tuesday, a mention that appeared to come in response to a highly critical U.N. human rights report earlier this year.

Choe Myong Nam, a North Korean foreign ministry official in charge of U.N. affairs and human rights issues, said at a briefing with reporters that his country has no prison camps and, in practice, “no prison, things like that.”

But he briefly discussed the “reform through labor” camps. “Both in law and practice, we do have reform through labor detention camps – no, detention centers – where people are improved through their mentality and look on their wrongdoings,” he said.

Such “re-education” labor camps are for common offenders and some political prisoners, but most political prisoners are held in a harsher system of political prison camps.

Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said that the mention of the reform camps was the first direct acknowledgement by a North Korean official speaking before an international audience. Last month, a senior court official mentioned the reform camps’ existence in an interview with the pro-Pyongyang website Minjok Tongshin.

“While the North Korean human rights record remains abysmal, it is very important that senior North Korean officials are now speaking about human rights, and expressing even pro forma interest in dialogue,” Scarlatoiu said in an email. While he called the mention of the reform through labor camps “a modest step in the right direction,” he stressed that this wasn’t an acknowledgement by North Korea of the harsher system of political prison camps, which are estimated to hold 120,000 people.

Diplomats for the reclusive, impoverished country also told reporters that a top North Korea official has visited the headquarters of the European Union and expressed interest in dialogue, with discussions on human rights expected next year.

The North Korean officials took several questions but did not respond to one about the health of leader Kim Jong Un, who has made no public appearances since Sept. 3 and skipped a high-profile recent event he usually attends.

 [Associated Press]

Smuggled phones help North Korean defectors send remittance money

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A cellphone smuggled into North Korea helped Lee Seo Yeon take on two missions: one emotional, one financial.

Once the 40-year-old defector Lee was certain she was talking to her sister, a broker took the phone on the North Korean end. Lee transferred 2 million won ($1,880) to a South Korean bank account belonging to a Korean-Chinese who was working with the broker, who confirmed the transfer and handed the phone back. The arrangement gave Lee’s sister 70 percent of the money, with a 30 percent cut for the go-betweens.

Smuggled phones, combined with a resourceful underground network of brokers inside and outside North Korea, are allowing defectors not only to connect with long-lost relatives, but to send them desperately needed cash. The process remains risky, both for people within the arm of North Korean law and defectors worried about getting cheated.

The Chinese phones are illegal in North Korea, but cheap and widely available. Since late in the last decade, they have become an increasingly common way for many of the roughly 25,000 defectors in South Korea, and others hiding in China, to talk to and help relatives who stayed behind.

One recent survey by a Seoul civic group of about 400 defectors suggested that one in every two defector families in the South send home money, mostly between 500,000 won ($470) and 3 million won ($2,820) per year.

They do this even though most defectors struggle to make a living in the highly competitive, well-educated South: Their average monthly wage is about 1.4 million won ($1,320), about half the pay of an average South Korean worker.

“Even though we have very small incomes here, we still eat rice at every meal,” Seoul-based defector Choi Jung-hoon said. “If we don’t buy new clothes, we can save some money to send to our family members in the North. That’s a lot of money for them.”

[AP]

Matthew Miller’s North Korean prison photo

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matthew miller jail uniform north KoreaA North Korean government official released a photo of Miller, taken on Wednesday. Dressed in a blue-gray prison garment with the number 107 and his head shaved, Miller is seen with his eyes downcast, staring away from the camera.

Details about where he’ll serve his sentence or what labor he will be required to do were not released.

Miller was convicted of committing “acts hostile” to North Korea and sentenced earlier this month. North Korea has accused him of ripping up his visa on arrival to the country so he could go to prison and expose human rights violations there, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

KCNA described him as “rudely behaved,” saying he was sent to infiltrate prison as part of a United States campaign against North Korea. “He perpetrated the above-said acts in the hope of becoming a world famous guy and the second Snowden through intentional hooliganism,” state media said.

[CNN]

US push for Human Rights accountability in North Korea

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Seeking to push the issue of human rights abuses in North Korea up the diplomatic agenda, Secretary of State John Kerry made a passionate appeal to world leaders to seek accountability for perpetrators of torture, rape and other atrocities.

“We simply cannot be blind to egregious affronts to human nature,” Mr. Kerry said at a meeting Tuesday in New York with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea and the top United Nations official for human rights. “We cannot accept it. Silence would be greatest abuse of all.”

It was the first time the top diplomats from the three countries had publicly spoken about human rights in North Korea, though none of them spelled out exactly how to seek redress.

Any referral to the International Criminal Court would have to be authorized by the United Nations Security Council, a measure that, at the moment at least, is unlikely considering that Pyongyang’s staunch ally, China, wields veto power.

The new United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, cited a landmark report published by a United Nations commission of inquiry earlier this year documenting grave rights abuses and calling for a referral to the Hague-based tribunal.

Prince Zeid said North Korean officials had signaled the country “was prepared to some degree to open to greater engagement with international human rights mechanisms.” But, he said, his office would continue to document rights abuses there, including the establishment of a field office soon, based in South Korea.

Kerry said that abuses detailed in the UN commission’s 400-page report “have no place in the 21st century.” The commission estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are currently detained in four large camps, where deliberate starvation has been used as a means of control and punishment.

Rights activists say they are hopeful a resolution could be introduced in the General Assembly next month.

[NY Times/AP]

John Kerry speaks out on North Korean ‘evil’ labor camps

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American Secretary of State, John Kerry, has told North Korea to shut down its prison camps – describing them as an evil system. He said the barbarity and inhumanity of the labor colonies brought shame on the country.

Mr Kerry was speaking at an event in New York on North Korean human rights abuses on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting. “We simply cannot be blind to these egregious affronts to human nature… silence would be the greatest abuse of all,” said Mr Kerry at the meeting, which was also attended by the South Korean and Japanese foreign ministers.

North Korea has long rejected the charge that it maintains camps for up to a 120,000 prisoners – despite the presentation of detailed satellite pictures and testimony from former prisoners and guards. It likewise denies all charges of repression and brutality and regularly describes criticism of its record as an attempt to undermine its leadership.

US administrations were for long reluctant to challenge North Korea too forcefully on its human rights record, for fear of provoking tension in the region. Instead, they focused on North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, while attempting to draw the North Koreans into negotiations with offers of diplomatic and economic concessions.

The Obama administration, however, has increased sanctions on the North and gave its backing to a thorough human rights report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, which was published in February. That report concluded that the gravity and scale of abuses had no parallel in the contemporary world.

“The crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions, persecution on political, religious and gender grounds… and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation,” concluded the report presented by a panel of international jurists.

[BBC]

North Korea a powerful temptation for some Americans

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Sneaking into autocratic, cloistered North Korea has proven a strange and powerful temptation for some Americans. Sometimes the spur is deep religious conviction. Sometimes it’s discontent with America and a belief that things will be different in a country that can seem like its polar opposite. Quite often, analysts say, it’s mental or personal problems – or simply a case of a person acting upon a very, very bad idea.

During the Cold War, a handful of U.S. soldiers, some of whom knew little about life in the North, fled across the Demilitarized Zone and later appeared in North Korean propaganda films. Other defector soldiers had problems in their military units or issues with family at home. One was reportedly lured north by a female North Korean agent.

In the decades after the war, some Americans harbored “glamorous notions of North Korea as a socialist paradise,” said John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul. “But that’s just not part of the mix any more. Even in the furthest fringes of American online culture, you don’t find that notion.”

Mental health issues have often played a part, Delury said. “It’s seen as a forbidden country … a place that’s perceived in the American mind as being locked down,” Delury said. “To cross the border, in some ways, could be alluring” to people looking to break social rules.

Whatever their reasons, Americans detained in North Korea, including three currently in custody, are major complications for Washington, which must decide whether to let a U.S. citizen languish or to provide Pyongyang with a propaganda victory by sending a senior U.S. envoy to negotiate a release.

For North Korea, getting a senior U.S. official or an ex-president to visit is a huge propaganda coup. It allows Pyongyang to plaster its newspapers and TV screens with scenes meant to show its powerful leaders welcoming humbled American dignitaries, said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in South Korea.

Washington has repeatedly offered to send its envoy for North Korean human rights to discuss the currently detained Americans, but Pyongyang has so far balked.

“The North Koreans are in no hurry,” Lankov said. “It’s a sellers’ market. They say, ‘This is our price: a senior visit and some concessions. These are our goods, these Americans. If you don’t want to pay, that’s your problem. We can wait.’”

[AP]

North Korea threatens retaliation if defectors’ leaflets are launched from South

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A group of South Korean activists plans to launch 200,000 anti-Pyongyang leaflets slung from gas-filled balloons into North Korea from a site near the border despite retaliatory threats from North Korea. Civic groups in the South regularly float leaflets over the border with messages criticizing the Kim dynasty and urging the North Korean people to rise up against repression.

The North’s official Internet website Uriminzokkiri reads: “We will never sit by idly as a vicious provocative act, openly backed by South Korean authorities, is being committed against us at a time when our athletes are taking part in the Asian Games” [hosted by Seoul].

North Korea’s military warned it would immediately “wipe out” those “provocateurs” and their supporters if they push through with such launches. These were not “simply empty” words, the website warned. “Should puppet authorities instigate so-called ‘defectors’ to push through with the leaflet launch, there would be unpredictable consequences,” it added.

But South Korean activists said they would not flinch at the threats. “Let the North rage in anger and scream. We will do it as planned”, Park Sang-Hak who leads the activists’ group told AFP.

The warning came days after North Korea sent a rare message to the South Korean president’s office, demanding an end to such anti-Pyongyang leaflets. The message, addressed to the presidential Blue House, was sent through a military hotline on Monday by the North’s powerful National Defence Commission (NDC).

It urged Seoul to stop anti-North activists sending leaflets over the border, saying action would have to be taken before the North would consider the South’s recent proposal for high-level talks.

North Korea has sent 150 athletes for the Asian Games, who are being guarded by hundreds of South Korean security personnel.

[AFP]