Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

Two Americans detained in North Korea seeking government intervention

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Two American tourists charged with “anti-state” crimes in North Korea said Friday they expect to be tried soon, and pleaded for help from the U.S. government to secure their release from what they say could be long prison terms.

In their first appearance since being detained more than three months ago, Matthew Todd Miller and Jeffrey Edward Fowle told a North Korean AP Television News crew that they were in good health and were being treated well. They also said they were allowed to take daily walks. The brief meeting was conducted under the condition that the specific location not be disclosed.

Fowle said he fears his situation will get much worse once he goes on trial. “The horizon for me is pretty dark,” he said. “I don’t know what the worst-case scenario would be, but I need help to extricate myself from this situation. I ask the government for help in that regards.”

The date of the trial has not been announced. It was not clear whether they were speaking on their own initiative, or if their comments were coerced. The TV crew was permitted to ask them questions.

Fowle arrived in the country on April 29. He is suspected of leaving a Bible in a nightclub in the northern port city of Chongjin, but a spokesman for Fowle’s family said the 56-year-old from Miamisburg, Ohio, was not on a mission for his church.

Less is known about Miller, or about what specific crime he allegedly committed. North Korea’s state-run media have said the 24-year-old entered the country April 10 with a tourist visa, but tore it up at the airport and shouted that he wanted to seek asylum.

“I expect soon I will be going to trial for my crime and be sent to prison,” Miller said. “I have been requesting help from the American government, but have received no reply.”

North Korea has also been holding another American, Kenneth Bae, since November 2012. Bae, a Korean-American missionary who turned 46 on Friday, told a Japan-based pro-North Korean news organization earlier this week that he felt “abandoned” by the U.S. government. He is serving a sentence of 15 years of hard labor for what North Korea has claimed were hostile acts against the state.

Bae’s sister, Terri Chung, said in a statement Thursday it was the first word the family has had of Bae since April. “After months of silence, it is devastating to hear Kenneth talk about ‘feeling abandoned by the United States government,’” she said. “Although we acknowledge and appreciate all the efforts the U.S. State Department has been making behind the scenes to secure Kenneth’s release, the fact remains that after almost two years, Kenneth still remains imprisoned in North Korea.”

North Korea has in the past waited for senior U.S. officials to come to the country to secure the release of some American detainees. Both Fowle and Miller suggested that intervention from the highest levels in Washington — possibly a visit by a former president — might be needed to gain their release.

The U.S. has repeatedly offered to send its envoy for North Korean human rights issues, Robert King, to Pyongyang to seek a pardon for Bae and other U.S. detainees but without success.

Despite its North Korea efforts to bring in more visitors — mostly from neighboring China — it remains highly sensitive to any actions it considers political and is particularly wary of anything it deems to be Christian proselytizing. In March, North Korea deported an Australian missionary detained for spreading Christianity in the country after he apologized and requested forgiveness.

[AP]

North Korea preparing to prosecute 2 Americans

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North Korea says it plans to prosecute two American tourists that it detained earlier this year, accusing Jeffrey Fowle and Matthew Miller of “perpetrating hostile acts.”

“According to the results of the investigation, suspicions about their hostile acts have been confirmed by evidence and their testimonies,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Monday. “The relevant organ of the DPRK is carrying on the investigation into them and making preparations for bringing them before court on the basis of the already confirmed charges,” the report said.

The U.S. State Department called on North Korea to release the two men on humanitarian grounds.

North Korea said in late April that it had taken Miller into custody, claiming he had come to the country seeking asylum and had torn up his tourist visa.

It announced the detention of Fowle in early June, saying he had violated the law by acting “contrary to the purpose of tourism.” It didn’t provide details at the time on what exactly he was accused of doing. But the Japanese news agency Kyodo cited unidentified diplomatic sources as saying that Fowle was part of a tour group and that he was detained in mid-May after allegedly leaving a Bible in a hotel where he had been staying.

[CNN]

Imprisoned Kenneth Bae feels abandoned by US

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Kenneth Bae, an American citizen detained in North Korea, said he feels like the U.S. government has abandoned him, according to an interview he did with a pro-North Korea, Japan-based newspaper, Choson Sinbo.

Bae said that he heard the U.S. government is doing everything it can to have him released and thanked the American and North Korean government for allowing him to speak to his family over the phone and medical treatment.

He’s been in North Korea for two years and there is no sign of this issue being solved, according to the paper.

Bae said he is suffering from several health problems and is worried that his condition will worsen when he returns to a special labor camp soon. Bae was re-admitted to a hospital in Pyongyang in March. “He expressed anxiety that if he is to go back to the labor camp, such symptoms may become worse and said he is stressed that he is unable to pay fees for the hospital treatments,” the newspaper reported.

Bae, of Lynwood, Washington, was arrested in November 2012. Pyongyang sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor, accusing him of planning to bring down the government through religious activities. He is widely reported to have been carrying out Christian missionary work in North Korea.

Bae is one of three Americans currently held in North Korea. Matthew Miller Todd was taken into custody on April 10 and Jeffrey Fowle, from Ohio, was detained in June for breaking a law, according to North Korea’s state news agency.

[CNN]

Michael Kirby wants action on North Korea human rights abuses

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It’s one thing to bring down a comprehensive and definitive UN report on vile human rights abuses in North Korea. It’s quite another, especially in the fast-moving 24-hour news cycle, to keep the horrors of it in the public eye.

But the former High Court judge Michael Kirby, who chaired the UN Human Rights Council inquiry into North Korea, is determined that the report of the UN Human Rights Council will not be forgotten, and he wants action.

This was Michael Kirby’s response when I asked him to compare North Korea’s prisons to World War II concentration camps:

MICHAEL KIRBY: There are many similarities. I remember one witness who came before us who told of his job, which was to pick up the bodies every day because people just died of hunger and starvation and to put them into wheelbarrows and wheel them to a vat and put them in the vat and turn the vat on and reduce them to ashes and liquid and then to pick up the remains, including legs and arms that hadn’t quite incinerated, and then put all of this into the nearby fields where some food was grown, mainly for the guards, as fertilizer.

The prisoners themselves lived on grass, leaves and items that they could gather and rodents that were in abundance over the fields. And it’s a really horrible story. As you say, no gas ovens, that type of thing, but still people and their families…

MARK COLVIN: So back to the UN. A lot of people are cynical about what the UN can and will do. Do you think that in this case, in the case of North Korea, there’s a prospect of action?

MICHAEL KIRBY: I believe there is. Some people say that’s a naïve belief but I believe that in the end the power of the report which has been produced, the testimony, the findings that these are cases of crimes against humanity which activates the so-called principle of the responsibility to protect: that was what happened with Gaddafi in Libya. That did ultimately secure the support of the permanent five: those who have the veto under the charter.

The Chinese government must be aware of the dangers to them of a country so unstable that it could remove the second or third most powerful man in the land – Jang Song-Thaek, the uncle of the supreme leader – drag him out of the politburo under the television cameras, put him before judges who screamed and shouted at him according to the North Korean reports, calling him a traitor and a dog, and then executed him by firing squad within a matter of three or four days.

I mean, that way of resolving a political dispute essentially, as one understands it, Jang saying, “We should go down the China model and we should engage with the world and we should get a market system,” and the way that was resolved was by simply killing him, and it’s a sign of the instability of the politics of that country.

MARK COLVIN: I was just wondering if you think, maybe, that people – the media – tend to concentrate on the almost comic opera aspects of the Kim dynasty?

MICHAEL KIRBY: Well, they certainly do.

[Excerpt of ABC interview]

Choco Pie propaganda balloons launched into North Korea

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Around 200 anti-Pyongyang activists released 50 large helium balloons carrying 350 kilograms (770 pounds) of snacks, including 10,000 Choco Pies from a park in the South Korean border city of Paju, organizers of the event said.

The humble Choco Pie — a saliva-sapping confection of chocolate-coated cake and marshmallow — has become an oft-referenced footnote in the volatile history of inter-Korean ties.

Offered as perks to North Koreans working in South Korean factories in the Kaesong joint industrial zone, Choco Pies spawned their own black market and were traded on at sharply inflated prices. The emergence of a South Korean snack as an unofficial currency became too much for the authorities in Pyongyang who in May ordered the factory owners to stop handing them out.

“Embarrassed by the growing popularity of Choco Pie, North Korea banned it as a symbol of capitalism,” said Choo Sun-Hee, one of the organizers of Wednesday’s balloon launch.

South Korean activists regularly launch balloons, usually carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets, across the border.

Pyongyang has repeatedly pressed Seoul to stop the activists and threatened to shell the launch sites.

[AFP]

Silicon Valley to host North Korea hackathon

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A two-day “hackathon” plans to harness the technical prowess of Silicon Valley to come up with new ways to get information safely into North Korea. Hack North Korea, scheduled to take place in San Francisco on August 2-3, is organized by the Human Rights Foundation, a New York-based group that focuses on closed societies.

Several prominent North Korean defectors will attend the event including pro-democracy activist Park Sang-hak, former North Korean child prisoner Kang Chol-hwan, media personality Park Yeon-mi and Kim Heung-Kwang, a former professor in computer studies in North Korea. They are expected to speak on the methods currently used to get information into the country, which include CDs and DVDs, USB sticks, shortwave radio, and leaflets dropped from balloons.

Organisers said they are not encouraging hacking in the sense of gaining unauthorised access to data, but is instead hoping to “spark better ideas for getting information into the world’s most closed and isolated society”. Participants will become familiar with the various ways that information and truth are smuggled into North Korea today, and gain an understanding of the technology landscape inside the country.

Earlier this year, helped HRF to launch balloons carrying USB flash drives loaded with Korean-language Wikipedia as well as pro-democracy materials and DVDs with South Korean dramas, so that they could float from the launch site in Paju, in South Korea, across the border into the North.

Park Sang-hak also visited Silicon Valley with HRF, to improve GPS tracking on the balloons, so that the group can try and follow what happens to the balloons once they cross the border.

[The Guardian]

The income gap in North Korea

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Ordinary North Koreans are lucky to earn US$30 a month, but senior state officials easily make more than $100 a day from endemic corruption, a survey by the Chosun Ilbo and Center for Cultural Unification Studies shows, after interviewing 100 North Koreans living in the Chinese border areas of Dandong and Yanji earlier this year.

Ninety-eight of them said there is a huge gap between the rich and poor in North Korea. The North Koreans said the collapse of the state rationing system and growth of the black economy have enabled those in power and successful traders to amass fortunes, while ordinary people who have been unable to adjust to these changes often barely have enough to eat.

One woman from Pyongyang said “Ten percent of the public is rich, 10 percent are middle class and almost 80 percent are poor.”

The majority said that the gap is most apparent when it comes to the bare necessities. “Poor people can barely afford to buy new shoes no matter how hard they work and don’t have the money to buy pork, which costs W30,000 per kilogram,” a woman from North Pyongan Province said.

Food aid provided by the UN usually ends up in the hands of party and military officials. Forty-three of the North Koreans who took part in the survey said party officials wield the greatest power in the North, and 41 percent said party officials in charge of overseeing Pyongyang’s overseas businesses are the most powerful.

Meanwhile, North Korea’s Hwanghae Province on the impregnable border with South Korea is said to be at least half a century behind Sinuiju bordering China in the North. A man from Hwanghae Province described the difference between the two regions as “like night and day.” “After we supply crops to Pyongyang, we end up starving,” he added.

[Chosun Ilbo]

The North Korean component in the persecution of Christians

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The normally diplomatic Pope Francis recently asserted: “The persecution of Christians today is even greater than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era.”

To those familiar with the history of early persecution — when Christians were habitually tortured to death, set on fire, fed to lions and dismembered to cheering audiences — his statement may seem exaggerated. But even today, as in the past, Christians are indeed being persecuted for their faith and even tortured and executed.

A January, 2014, Pew Research Center study on religious discrimination across the world found that harassment of Christians was reported in more countries (110) than any other faith.

Open Doors, a nondenominational Christian rights watchdog group, ranked the 50 most dangerous nations for Christians in its World Watch List. The No. 1 ranked nation is North Korea, followed by a host of Muslim countries. (Disturbing indeed is the fact that three of these countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya — were “liberated” in part thanks to U.S. forces, while in the fourth, Syria, the U.S. is actively sponsoring the “rebels,” many of whom are responsible for attacks and kidnappings of Christians.)

North Korea, amongst other Communist countries, is intolerant of Christians; churches are banned or forced underground, and exposed Christians can be immediately executed.

Nothing integral to the fabric of these societies makes them intrinsically anti-Christian. Something as simple as overthrowing the North Korean regime could possibly end persecution there — just as the fall of Communist Soviet Union saw religious persecution come to a quick close in nations like Russia.

To influence these situations, Western nations must make foreign aid contingent on the rights and freedoms of minorities. After all, if we are willing to give billions in foreign aid, often on humanitarian grounds, surely the very least that recipient governments can do is provide humanitarian rights, including religious freedom.

[Read full CNN article] 

North Korean man defects to the South through tense sea border

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A North Korean man defected to South Korea on Thursday, using a small wooden boat in a rare and risky crossing of the heavily patrolled maritime border in the Yellow Sea, military officials said.

The man expressed his desire to defect after landing on the frontline South Korean island of Baengnyeong Island.  Yonhap news agency quoted an unnamed military officer as saying the ship was “half-submerged” by the time it reached the island.

“The man is under investigation by security authorities,” a spokesman for South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff told AFP.

Intentional defections by individuals in small boats are rare and dangerous given the tensions along the disputed maritime boundary which has seen bloody clashes in the past.

While hundreds of North Koreans flee their isolated homeland each year, most of them go to China and then to a third country, such as Thailand.

[AFP]

North Korea to try two American tourists

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North Korea said Monday it is preparing to try two Americans, Matthew Todd Miller and Jeffrey Edward Fowle, who entered the country as tourists for carrying out what it says were hostile acts against it.

KCNA said North Korea is making preparations to bring them before a court. It did not specify what the two did that was considered hostile or illegal, or what kind of punishment they might face. It also did not say when the trial would begin.

Fowle arrived in the county on April 29. Diplomatic sources said Fowle was detained for leaving a Bible in his hotel room. But a spokesman for Fowle’s family said the 56-year-old from Miamisburg, Ohio, was not on a mission for his church.

KCNA said Miller, 24, entered the country April 10 with a tourist visa, but tore it up at the airport and shouted that he wanted to seek asylum. A large number of Western tourists visited Pyongyang in April to run in the annual Pyongyang Marathon or attend related events. Miller came at that time, but tour organizers say he was not planning to join the marathon.

North Korea has also been separately holding Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae since November 2012. He was convicted by a North Korean court and is serving 15 years of hard labor, also for what the North says were hostile acts against the state.

The latest arrests present a conundrum for Washington, which has no diplomatic ties with the North and no embassy in Pyongyang. Instead, the Swedish Embassy takes responsibility for U.S. consular affairs in the North. State Department officials say they cannot release details about the cases because they need a privacy waiver to do so.

[AP]