Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

Mother of Kenneth Bae departs North Korea without him

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The mother of Kenneth Bae has left North Korea “more anxious than ever” to bring her imprisoned and ailing son home.

In a statement she released Tuesday, Myunghee Bae said she was able to visit her son three times and was relieved to see his health was improving.

Earlier this year, Bae, a Korean-American, was sentenced to 15 years in a North Korean labor camp for what the government called “hostile acts.” His family had not been able to see him for almost a year since his November 3 arrest in North Korea.

The North Korean government accuses Bae of setting up bases in China for the purpose of “toppling” the North Korean government, encouraging North Korean citizens to bring down the government and conducting a “malignant smear campaign.”

The country’s state media also says that Bae had planned what it called a “Jericho operation” to bring down North Korea through religious activities. They have suggested that Bae could have been sentenced to death, but avoided it through “candid confession of his crimes.”

Myunghee Bae, of Lynwood, Washington, said that she pleaded with the North Korean authorities to let her visit her son, and expressed gratitude for granting permission.

“I plead with our government to do everything in their power to secure my son’s release soon,” Myunghee Bae said Tuesday.

 

North Korea requires external aid to feed its people

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North Korea remains one of the 34 countries in the world that require external assistance to properly feed their people. The October issue of “Crop Prospects and Food Situation” by the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that there will be some 2.8 million “vulnerable” people in the communist country needing assistance until this year’s fall harvest.

The Washington-based media outlet Voice of America said that judging by official estimates tallied by the United Nations organization, Pyongyang’s spring cereal harvest for 2013, mainly winter, wheat and barley, fell shy of the initial forecast, and that this is the main reason for the current shortage. The U.N. agency also said people in the country are experiencing “widespread lack of access” to food caused in part by past floods.

North Korea is the only country in East Asia to be placed on the list requiring external aid. Others on the list of the 34 countries are in Africa and Central Asia.

The country had reported improved harvests in the fall of 2012. The FAO, meanwhile, estimated that North Korea has been able to secure 328,000 tons of various grain from November of 2012 to early last month. This is equal to 65 percent of the 507,000 tons of grain Pyongyang needs to properly feed its population.

[Yonhap News]

The plight of young North Korean defectors

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The tragic story of this group of youngsters aged between 15 and 23 takes us back a few years when one by one they managed to cross the heavily-guarded border from North Korea into China to search for food. Most of them were orphans, while others had a parent unable or unwilling to look after them.

The youngsters survived by foraging for scraps in trashcans. Fish bones and discarded rice were mixed to make a porridge, while rodents were considered a luxury. When M.J., a South Korean missionary living in China, first met some of them in December 2009, they had frostbite on their hands and toes from living in an old abandoned building where temperatures plummeted to as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius. Some of them had injuries from beatings by security guards and merchants when they were caught stealing food.

“These kids were suffering from malnutrition and disease,” recalled M.J. “They had been living in quarters with bad sanitation … also they all seemed to have suffered in one form or another from tuberculosis. Because they were suffering from malnutrition, their growth was stunted.”

“This one child used to live with his father,” he explained. “One day his father went into a North Korean military base trying to find food but was caught and beaten to death on the spot. The child witnessed this … his mother then told him not to come home and threw rocks at him to keep him away.”

Missionary M.J. and his wife offered to help the youngsters leave China for Laos — a landlocked country in South-East Asia — and then onto a third country to claim asylum. It is a route that is well traveled by defectors, and the missionary couple had already helped other North Koreans escape to a better life that way.

“Pack your bags you’re going to South Korea.” These are the words these nine young North Korean defectors had waited years to hear, having traveled thousands of miles. This is what they were told by authorities in Laos, to where they had fled.

M.J. said they were so happy they all shouted for joy. Years in hiding seemed to finally be over. But the bitter truth of the situation soon became clear.

Later, the United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, said the group had been sent back to North Korea via China.

Read their story 

North Korea testing more rocket engines?

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China’s foreign minister is pushing for the restart of international talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, saying that Pyongyang is ready to recommit to the goal of denuclearization.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday North Korea has recently said it is ready to come back to a 2005 commitment on giving up nuclear weapons and to an agreement it reached with the United States in February last year on freezing its nuclear programs in exchange for food aid. That agreement fell through soon after it was hatched because North Korea tested a long-range rocket.

The U.S. remains skeptical about Pyongyang’s intentions.

Meanwhile,  38 North, a blog run by the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, suggests that North Korea more than likely tested a long-range rocket engine late last month, according to analysis of new satellite imagery over the site. From the photos released, indicators of a probable test are seen through the presence of a probable rocket stage, propellant tanks, as well as the appearance of burned vegetation around the launch stand.

“These are not in and of themselves indicators that there is going to be a rocket test six months from now,” Joel Wit, a former North Korea specialist at the State Department who is now with 38 North, told CNN about the photos. The Sohae launch facility, where the latest photos were taken, is the same facility from which North Korea has conducted previous rocket launches, including last December’s test.

In recent months, similar satellite imagery has shown what look to be other instances of rocket-engine tests by North Korea, as well as the resumption of production at a previously closed plutonium production site.

Documentary on Shin Dong-hyuk and North Korean Prison Camp

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A recent documentary will soon shed more light on the horrors that happen inside the extensive network of prison camps in North Korea. “Camp 14: Total Control Zone” will follow the life of Shin Dong-hyuk, a North Korean who was born inside a camp, and endured torture and total control from sadistic guards inside the wire for 23 years. The UN recently likened conditions in these camps to Nazi war crimes.

In a previous interview with 60 Minutes, Shin said he was once sent to an underground torture center at age 13 when his mother and older brother were accused of attempting an escape. “They hung me by the ankles and they tortured me with fire.”

The Guardian adds: “Shin, who recently gave testimony before a UN commission, would rather not talk about the past, but he cannot be free of it. Physically, in the film, he is in Seoul. Mentally and emotionally, he is still back in camp 14. To date, he is the only known person to have been born in a total control zone camp and escaped, and some have questioned his story. “We made something like 15 lie detector tests with him,” says Wiese, who first read about the young Korean in the Washington Post. By now there can be little doubt of his veracity, or that his experiences weigh heavily on him.

“The producers wanted to shoot him talking in a studio, but that was “impossible”. “I had to build him a setting where he felt comfortable,” says Wiese. Instead, they worked in Shin’s home, in a bare space with bedding on the floor, similar to the way he lived with his mother, as a child, in the camp. Even then, ‘it was complicated for him’ “.

As one would expect, the trailer alone is harrowing. According to the film website, filmmaker Marc Wiese crafted the documentary from interviews with Shin as well as former camp guards and secret police, coupled with animated scenes of life inside.

[Business Insider]

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Unspeakable Atrocities in North Korean Prison Camps

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UN human rights investigators described torture, starvation, and executions in North Korean prison camps as part of UN Human Rights Council’s first report on violations in the country.

Michael Kirby, head of the UN inquiry, told Reuters that the report was compiled from testimony given by former inmates and North Korean exiles at hearings in Seoul and Tokyo.

The stories were chilling. Megumi Yokota was just 13 when she was abducted by North Koreans on her way home from school in Japan in 1977. She was one of 13 Japanese citizens abducted by Kim-Jung-Il in order to help train North Korean spies, and she later died in North Korean custody, her parents testified.

Other former inmates reported being arrested and tortured for infractions like watching Western DVDs and soap operas. One woman testified that she watched as a fellow inmate was forced to drown her own baby in a bucket of water.

North Korean diplomats have declared the report a “political plot.” China, Belarus, and Syria defended North Korea in the 90 minute debate in front of the UN Human Rights Council, denying the allegations as “politicized accusations.”

Japan, South Korea, and Western powers pressured the UN to investigate the long-rumored atrocities in order to prepare a case for criminal prosecution.

[TIME] 

North Korean refusal to cooperate with UN rights probe

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Not surprisingly, the head of a U.N. human rights probe says he can’t get answers from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un regarding harrowing testimony from victims of the enigmatic regime, including allegations of being forced to survive on vermin, drown babies and witness the execution of loved ones.

Michael Kirby, who heads the U.N. commission examining North Korea’s human rights record, said Tuesday that his July 16 letter to the leader hasn’t been answered, and the government has offered no evidence to contradict graphic testimony of human rights abuses.

Kirby, a former judge in Australia’s highest court, told the U.N. Human Rights Council that the commission it created in March nonetheless gathered testimony from dozens of victims, including defectors, and experts at public hearings in Seoul and Tokyo last month that has “given a face and voice to great human suffering.”

Overall, the testimony “points to widespread and serious violations in all areas that the Human Rights Council asked the commission to investigate. We heard from ordinary people who faced torture and imprisonment for doing nothing more than watching foreign soap operas or holding a religious belief,” said Kirby.

For example, he said, the commission heard from a young man imprisoned from birth, who said he lived on rodents, lizards and grass and saw his mother and brother executed.

It also heard from a young woman who said she saw another female prisoner forced to drown her own baby in a bucket, Kirby said, and a man who said he was forced to help collect and burn the corpses of prisoners who died of starvation.

The U.N.’s top rights official, Navi Pillay, reported to the Council that the U.N. had amassed evidence indicating that up to 200,000 people were being held in North Korean political prison camps rife with torture, rape and slave labor, and that some of the abuses may amount to crimes against humanity.

“The commission invited the authorities of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to attend the public hearings in Seoul and make representations, but received no reply,” Kirby said.

[AP]

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How North Korea describes its defectors and UN human rights probe

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According to Michael Kirby, who heads the U.N. commission examining North Korea’s human rights record, North Korea’s official news agency attacked the testimony of North Korean refugees “as ‘slander’ against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, put forward by ‘human scum.’ ”

In a June 19 dispatch, the KCNA news agency also denounced defectors as “wild dogs in human form” who had become “the main player in the confrontation farce under the patronage of the South Korean puppet group and brigandish U.S. imperialists.”

“An ounce of evidence is worth far more than many pounds of insults and baseless attacks,” Kirby told the 47-nation Council based in Geneva which is the U.N.’s top human rights body. “So far, however, the evidence we have heard has largely pointed in one direction — and evidence to the contrary is lacking.”

Later in the day, Kirby told a news conference that the commission plans to hold more hearings in London, New York and Washington, before giving a final report to the Council next March. He said the commission “is not a judge and is not a prosecutor,” so it remains to be seen whether specific people will be named for alleged crimes against humanity and other abuses.

North Korea’s U.N. envoy in Geneva, Kim Yong Ho, told the Council on Tuesday that his government will not cooperate with a probe and “totally rejects” its latest report.

The report is based on information “fabricated and invented by the forces hostile to the DPRK, defectors and rebels,” Kim said.

[AP]

The real North Korea as unfiltered by Dennis Rodman

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In The World According to Dennis Rodman, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whom he just saw on his second trip to the country, is quite likable.

As Human Rights Watch puts it, Kim’s succession as supreme leader after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in December 2011, “had little impact on the country’s dire human rights record.”

People are still subjected to torture and thrown into prison camps based on political charges. Those who have managed to escape describe horror that includes beatings, starvation and executions.

In 2012, “Defectors continued to report extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detention, arrests of political prisoners, and torture,” the U.S. State Department Human Rights Report says.

“The judiciary was not independent and did not provide fair trials. There continued to be reports of severe punishment of some repatriated refugees and their family members. There were reports of trafficked women among refugees and workers crossing the border into China. … The government made no known attempts to prosecute officials who committed human rights abuses.”

Meanwhile, much of the country starves. More than 25% of North Korean children under the age of 5 suffered from chronic malnutrition in 2012, according to the National Nutrition Survey of North Korea, a report backed by UNICEF, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization. The report also found nearly one in three women suffered from anemia.

CNN 

Rodman back to Pyongyang but says won’t bring back jailed American

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Flamboyant former basketball star Dennis Rodman arrived in North Korea on Tuesday for a five-day visit, his second this year, but said he had no plans to negotiate the release of a jailed American missionary, Kenneth Bae. Bae, a Korean American who had been working as a Christian missionary in China and North Korea, was arrested in the northeast port city of Rason late last year.

“I’m not going to North Korea to discuss freeing Kenneth Bae,” Rodman told Reuters in a telephone interview before he left Beijing for Pyongyang. “I’m just going there on another basketball diplomacy tour.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is a basketball fan and appeared to get on well with Rodman on the earlier visit, with the two of them pictured laughing, eating and drinking together and watching an all-star basketball match.

Wearing his trademark dark sunglasses, the 6-foot 7-inch (2.01 meter) Rodman said, “I’m just trying to go over there to meet my friend Kim, the Marshal. Try to start a basketball league over there, something like that.”

He called Kim, 30, who rules unchallenged in a country where there are an estimated 150,000-200,000 prisoners in work camps, “an awesome kid”.

[WTAQ]