Category: Kim Jong Un

North Korea sees little reason to rein in its missile program

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Since the regime in Pyongyang doesn’t see any reason to rein in its nuclear weapons program or to put the brakes on its ballistic missile technology efforts, North Korea possibly poses “the most pressing national security issue we face,” a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Thursday.

“Tearing up [the Iranian nuclear agreement] sends a signal” to North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un that the United States might not live up to its part of any future arrangement with Pyongyang, Sen. Chris Coons, (D-Del.) said while speaking at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

He said Kim and others in North Korea’s leadership are well aware of “the Libya model,” where Muammar Gaddafi, former leader of the nation, voluntarily ended his nuclear weapons program. A few years later was killed in a coup that toppled his regime and sent his country into years of civil war. “Why would he choose to give up nuclear weapons” and risk his regime’s existence, Coons asked rhetorically.

Ukraine’s post-nuclear experience, Coons said, provides Kim with another example of the dangers he could face if he turned over his nuclear stockpile for disposal. Kyiv turned over nuclear weapons the Soviet Union left behind after its collapse. “Now it is a smaller nation and under assault by Russia,” Coons said.

Apparently, nothing is holding Kim back from resuming nuclear testing now. In the same way, North Korea continued ballistic missile testing following the two summit meetings with the United States, Coons said. Adding to the tension is the most recent test, of a sea-based missile raising the threat of quick, surprise attack to South Korea and Japan to a higher level.

[US Naval Institute News]

North Korean scam defection scheme

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North Korean leaders Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un have done a lot to deter defection, in collaboration with Chinese leaders Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. As one such incentive, North Korea offers those rural Chinese who turn in North Korean defectors 2m3‘s worth of logs per defector captured on Chinese soil and repatriated.

Life as a North Korean defector is rough. Ms. Sohn, a 36-year-old North Korean woman, had lived in South Korea for four years when she had her husband decided to set up a scam defection scheme. They collected brokerage fees from North Korean defectors in South Korea, promising to escort their clients’ families from China to South Korea. But in actuality what they did after receiving the money was convene a total of 43 defectors in China and then arrange for North Korean Embassy officials to come and forcefully repatriate them back to the DPRK.

The couple was rewarded with a vacation in Pyongyang, before returning to their hometown of Hyesan. Upon their return, the people of Hyesan all cursed the woman when they found out what she had done to all these would-be defectors, with curses like: “A thunderbolt will strike that human-garbage devil for putting those innocent people in an unescapable political prison!”

The locals in Hyesan didn’t view the defectors as state betrayers, they simply grieved their fates.

The defectors themselves were dragged to a reformatory, this result planting within North Koreans deep grudges against the government.

[Written by Tae-il Shim, is a pseudonym for a North Korean defector who arrived in South Korea in 2018.]

South Korea should welcome defectors, not pander to Kim Jong Un

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One of the more troubling questions facing the government South Korean President Moon Jae-in is how to deal with defectors from the North. If Moon appears to welcome and support them, he risks incurring the wrath of the North. If he tries to cut back on aid and other forms of support for these people, many of them women, all of them lost in their new environment, he appears heartless and unconcerned about frightened people who must fend for themselves.

South Korea routinely puts defectors through several months’ training and then provides them with limited resources for living on their own. Moon is not inclined to do more for them and might even like to do less while hoping for ever more contact with the North.

In a competitive society where they’re viewed as strangers from a strange land, defectors tell stories of slights and slurs, fruitless searches for jobs. It’s not uncommon for defectors to try to get around questions about their northern accents by saying they’re from Gangwon province, divided between North and South, though most of them come from the northernmost provinces bordering China across the Yalu (Amnok) or Tumen rivers.

It’s out of the question that President Moon would openly talk about North Korea’s horrendous human rights violations, the quickest way to trigger a volley of denunciations in the North Korean media. But South Korea should remain a safe haven for those fleeing the North. The South Koreans should also never stop demanding that China view defectors as victims of the North’s inhumane policies rather than as economic migrants.

[Excerpts of Opinion piece by Donald Kirk, writing in Las Vegas Sun]

Empathy for defectors even in the top ranks of North Korean society

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Even in the top ranks of North Korean society, there are some who spit on the dictatorship and the hereditary politics of the Kim family — case in point, the incident of Mr. Lee.

A North Korean defector, now living in the South, recalls, “While I was serving a 10-year prison term in North Korea, Mr. Lee gave my son money to get some food for me.

“Sad to say, Mr. Lee, who worked at Ryanggang province’s Ministry of State Security, later shot himself with his own gun, allegedly after being harassed for helping would-be defectors.

“One may consider suicide as merely a cowardly evasion of one’s responsibility, but in North Korea it is considered an act of rebellion and thus the person’s bereaved family is punished severely. His son who was working in the Bodyguard Bureau in Pyongyang was subsequently discharged, leaving the family with no way to support themselves.

“Given Mr. Lee’s rank in the Ministry of State Security, a very authoritative institution, and the fact that he committed such ‘treacherous behavior’ against the government shook all of Ryanggang province, as well as throughout the entire country.”

[Written by Tae-il Shim, the pseudonym of a North Korean defector who arrived in South Korea in 2018.]

Highly personalized diplomacy: When Trump is debilitated, the diplomacy suffers

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What has been most distinctive about his North Korean diplomacy is how President Trump has thoroughly personalized it—whether by measuring his “nuclear button” against the North Korean leader’s when they were at odds or by feeding a narrative that he and Kim alone could resolve the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons thanks to their “beautiful” relationship.

This weekend, U.S. and North Korean officials met in Sweden to revive nuclear negotiations, a development that barely registered amid the impeachment frenzy in the United States. With little fanfare, certainly not the kind on display during his meetings with Kim Jong Un, the bill is coming due for Donald Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea. The chief North Korean negotiator, Kim Myong Gil, blamed the “breakdown” on his U.S. counterparts not coming to the table with fresh ideas, and suggested that talks be suspended until the end of the year, a period that North Korean officials have ominously described as a deadline for Washington to adopt a more flexible position. U.S. negotiators tried to cast the impasse in the best light, stating that they’d raised “new initiatives” and describing the discussions as “good.”

If Kim’s negotiators remain determined to tread water between summits with Trump, that doesn’t bode well for the prospects of a comprehensive nuclear agreement. As the nuclear expert Toby Dalton has observed, concluding such a deal with North Korea would be more complicated than the process of negotiating the nuclear-arms-control treaty known as START was; the United States and the Soviet Union signed START in 1991 after nearly a decade of diplomacy involving “1,000 hours or more of negotiations where you had teams of Soviet and American experts who were living in Geneva, meeting every day,” and churning out hundreds of pages of text. “Presidents don’t negotiate 100-page documents,” he pointed out.

North Korean officials (who are known to closely follow U.S. politics) may be calculating that they are in a stronger negotiating position, and that Trump, a “self-advertised dealmaker” without many actual deals in foreign affairs, will be interested in “a distraction” from his domestic troubles in the form of a nuclear accord, notes Joseph Yun, who served as Trump’s North Korea envoy at the State Department until 2018. But if the assessment in Pyongyang is indeed that Trump is desperate for a win and will scramble to cut a deal at the end of the year, it could prove a hugely consequential miscalculation. One of the downsides of highly personalized diplomacy is that when the person in question is debilitated, the diplomacy suffers.

It’s also possible that North Korea’s leaders have drawn the opposite lesson from the political turmoil in the United States: that there’s no use in surrendering assets as part of an agreement with Trump that could collapse within months as a result of impeachment pressures or the 2020 election.

[The Atlantic]

How the North Korean mobile phone industry is changing the country

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North Korea is evading U.N. sanctions to cash in on soaring domestic demand for smartphones, using low-cost hardware imports to generate significant income for the regime, according to defectors, experts and an analysis of North Korean-made phones. Economists estimate as many as six million North Koreans – a quarter of the population – now have mobile phones, a critical tool for participating in an informal market economy that has become a key income source for many.

Reuters spoke to some 10 defectors and experts about the use of mobile devices in North Korea, as well as reviewing advertisements for mobile devices, and examining two North Korean-branded smartphones. The phones feature Taiwanese semiconductors, batteries made in China and a version of Google’s open-source Android operating system, analysis of the North Korean phones revealed. These basic North Korean phones typically cost between $100 and $400 at state stores or private markets.

One young North Korean woman surnamed Choi recalled selling two pigs and smuggling herbs from China to raise the 1,300 Chinese yuan ($183) her family needed to buy a mobile phone in 2013. She used the phone to help successfully run a retail business selling Chinese clothes and shampoos, arranging deliveries from wholesalers. “It turned out we could make a way more money than our official salaries,” said Choi, who has since defected to South Korea.

Phones are typically sold with service plans that include 200 minutes of calling time. Prepaid plans cost about $13 dollars for 100 minutes. While those prices are comparable to or higher than what mobile phone customers pay in other countries, North Koreans only earn an average of about $100 per month.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has endorsed wireless networks, some reportedly built with the help of China’s Huawei Technologies, and local mobile phone brands through public speeches and state media reports.

[Reuters]

North Korea and United States to resume nuclear talks Saturday

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North Korea and the United States will resume negotiations Saturday, marking the first official talks between the two sides since President Trump met Kim Jong Un in June, the North Korean government announced Tuesday.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said the two countries “agreed to hold a working-level discussion on October 5th, following a preliminary contact on the 4th,” according to a statement carried by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Negotiations between the two countries’ diplomats have been frozen since the breakdown of a summit between Trump and Kim in Hanoi in February. Another meeting between the two leaders at the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas in June was supposed to lead to a resumption of negotiations, but the stalemate persisted until now. 

On Monday, North Korea blamed the stalling of the dialogue on Washington and Seoul, accusing them of failing to keep their promises. North Korean Ambassador Kim Song told the U.N. General Assembly that it was up to the United States whether negotiations “will become a window of opportunity or an occasion that will hasten the crisis.” The ambassador added, “The situation on the Korean Peninsula has not come out of the vicious cycle of increased tension, which is entirely attributable to the political and military provocations perpetrated by the U.S.”

North Korea has also insisted that talks will succeed only if the United States takes a different approach from the one it took in Hanoi, but it has been careful not to criticize Trump directly. Indeed, the North Korean Foreign Ministry also said last week that Trump is “different from his predecessors in political sense and decision” and that it hoped he would make a wise and bold decision. 

“Next year, the United States will have its presidential election, and South Korea will have a legislative election. [Kim Jong Un’s] strategy could be to have his third meeting with President Trump before next year to get the best result ahead of the elections race,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. 

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said the removal of John Bolton as White House national security adviser last month might have encouraged North Korea to think it could win sanctions relief by making a deal with Trump. Bolton had consistently held a hard line on North Korea. In return, Easley said, Pyongyang might offer concessions, such as an unverifiable freeze on nuclear weapons production, that Trump could present as a symbolic victory.

[Washington Post]

Why a senior defector believes North Korea’s days are numbered

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Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean diplomat who held posts in Denmark, Sweden and the U.K. said that while the regime’s elusive leader, Kim Jong Un, may have no intention of undertaking reforms or giving up his nuclear weapons, change is inevitable. Thae, who lives under the protection of the South Korean government, and travels with an entourage of body guards, recently sat for an interview with TIME, amid news that U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim have been expressing interest in another summit.

Q: President Trump has pursued a strategy of cozying up to hostile leaders, including Kim Jong Un, in the hopes that it will pay off at the negotiating table. What do you think has been the effect of this?
A: I think President Trump is playing a very dangerous game with North Korea. President Trump met three times with Kim Jong-Un, [but] … has not taken any significant measures to stop the nuclearization of North Korea. Meanwhile Kim Jong Un has achieved quite a lot. First, he avoided a so-called military option, which President Trump had emphasized quite often in 2017. Second, he stopped President Trump from adding additional sanctions. Third, thanks to these meetings, Kim Jong Un actually strengthened his legitimacy and absolute rule over North Korea.

Q: President Trump has made it clear he wants the Nobel Prize for making peace with North Korea. What does Kim Jong Un want from these talks?
A: First, he wants nuclear status in this region. …Like what India and Pakistan did. Second, is that through this dialogue process with President Trump, Kim Jong Un, a man in his thirties, all of a sudden raised his rank to the same level as other important players in this region. And domestically, he proved to North Korean people that he is very capable, even though he is young.

Q: You’ve said that North Korean people, both regular citizens and the elite, don’t believe in the system. What gives you this impression?
A: The current regime can be termed a socialist skeleton. The bones have a socialist structure, but the flesh has already turned capitalist. The number of black markets and free markets are increasing every year. If you read Rodong Sinmun, North Korean media, they said North Korea will not collapse because of a military strike by imperialists, but it is possible if the young generations are not educated properly.

Q: What do they mean by ‘educated properly’? What’s different about the younger generation?
A: If you look at the millennial generation of North Korea, they are the only ones who have grown up with computers. When computers were introduced in late 1990s, all of a sudden there was a boom of English learning. If you want to use a computer, you have to know English, right? And they are not interested in watching communist or socialist cultural content. They are only interested in American or South Korean movies or dramas. I think that the young generations’ eyes are not on ideological things, but on material things. And even though the North Korean regime wants to stop it, they can’t stop this future.

[Excerpted from TIME interview]

Remembering Otto Warmbier’s death, Trump renews pressure on North Korea

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Is President Donald Trump dusting off his most potent weapon in what was his “maximum pressure” campaign to denuclearize North Korea, Pyongyang’s criminal human rights record?

In speeches before the United Nations, the South Korean National Assembly and in his 2017 State of the Union (SOTU) address, Trump had used the harshest language to expose the Kim regime’s atrocities against its long-suffering population. He told the General Assembly that “the depraved regime in North Korea is responsible for the starvation deaths of millions of North Koreans, and for the imprisonment, torture, killing, and oppression of countless more.”

Finally, the president showed that the Kim regime’s cruelty extends beyond its own people to its treatment of a U.S. citizen. He marshaled his administration’s diplomatic resources and his own personal energies to secure the release of Otto Warmbier, the American student held by Pyongyang for 17 months for trying to filch a propaganda poster as a North Korean souvenir.

Tragically, Warmbier was released in June 2017 only after he had been repeatedly beaten and tortured until falling into a coma; he died shortly after being sent home. Trump cited “the regime’s deadly abuse of an innocent American college student” in his U.N. speech.

Yet, last February, the president dramatically shifted his position on Kim Jong Un’s responsibility for Warmbier’s mistreatment and death. Asked about the case after his failed Hanoi summit with Kim, Trump stated that the North Korean leader felt “badly” about what had happened to Otto Warmbier and then went on to absolve Kim of responsibility. The Warmbier family was not so accepting of that explanation and expressed shock at the president’s statement: “Kim and his evil regime are responsible for the death of our son Otto. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that.”

Nothing more had been heard about the case from the White House in the ensuing six months — until now. The White House announced last week that the president would host the Warmbier family for a Saturday evening dinner to honor Otto’s memory. In case the media failed to take proper notice, Trump used his joint press conference with Australia’s prime minister days later to recall how “horribly” Otto had been treated.

Trump’s decision to highlight it in a high-visibility public setting … could well have been him telling Kim Jong Un that America has not forgotten or forgiven the outrageous treatment and murder of one of its young sons — or the nature of the regime that carried out such a heinous act. Trump may well be hinting at a potential return to the broader focus on North Korea’s despicable treatment of its own people, not least including the millions held in concentration camps.

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), which helped arrange the 2017 White House meeting with North Korean defectors, this past week released its latest in a series of authoritative reports laying out the inner workings of the Kim regime’s system of oppression. HRNK’s work, and that of the United Nations human rights committee, have effectively made the case for regime change in North Korea in one form or another.

[Excerpts from The Hill by Joseph Bosco who served as China country director for the secretary of Defense, 2005-2006, and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, 2009-2010.]

North Korea names conditions for getting rid of its nuclear weapons

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North Korea has laid out its conditions for discussing denuclearization ahead of the next round of planned talks with the United States, striking a positive tone for North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump’s historic peace process.

In a statement published Monday by the official Korean Central News Agency, the director-general of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s Department of U.S. Affairs said it was “fortunate that the U.S. has repeatedly expressed its stand to tackle an issue through dialogue and negotiations.” The statement noted that Washington’s approach could either “improve the relations” between it and Pyongyang or “add to the hostility towards each other, arguing there were “two options — crisis and chance” and it was “entirely up to the U.S.” to choose between the two.

“Clear and invariable is the DPRK’s stand,” the official was cited as saying. “The discussion of denuclearization may be possible when threats and hurdles endangering our system security and obstructing our development are clearly removed beyond all doubt.”

The exact meaning of that last phrase has at times proved an obstacle for the ongoing negotiations, with the U.S. pushing for a “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” without preconditions and North Korea first seeking sanctions relief and security guarantees. The two sides have yet to reach any agreement.

North Korea has long been the target of international sanctions due to its development of nuclear weapons, assets the ruling Kim dynasty has argued was necessary to deter a potential U.S. invasion. Washington and Pyongyang have never normalized ties since clashing during the 1950s Korean War in which the U.S. backed South Korea and China and the Soviet Union supported North Korea.

Still, both administrations have continued to express confidence in the other’s willingness to talk and South Korean newspaper Joongang Ilbo cited diplomatic sources Sunday as saying that Kim invited Trump to a fourth summit, possibly in Pyongyang, in his latest letter last month. Also on Monday, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency cited a State Department spokesperson as that the U.S. would “welcome the North Korean commitment to resume negotiations in late September” and was “prepared to have those discussions at a time and place to be agreed.”

[Newsweek]