Category: Kim Jong Un

North Korea official who supplies medicine to Kim Jong-un defects

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A ranking North Korean embassy official in Beijing has defected, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has said, while a separate report suggested two embassy staff had sought asylum with the Japanese mission in the Chinese capital.

If confirmed, it would mark the latest in a recent series of high-profile North Korean defections that some observers see as a sign of growing instability within the leadership in Pyongyang.

Yonhap, quoting an anonymous source “familiar with Pyongyang affairs”, said the official – stationed in the Beijing embassy but attached to the North Korean health ministry – had disappeared with his family in late September. The source said the official was responsible for sourcing medical supplies for a clinic in Pyongyang that caters to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and his family.

In a separate report, the South Korean daily, JoongAng Ilbo, said two senior staffers at the North Korean embassy in Beijing had asked for asylum in Japan.

[The Guardian]

North Korean unpredictability and provocation

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On paper, the US military is formidable, huge, with carrier battle groups, advanced technology, remarkable submarines, satellites, and so on. What does this translate to in North Korea?

Military power does not exist independently, but only in relation to specific circumstances.

While America is vastly superior militarily to North Korea in every category of arms, the North has nuclear bombs. It can’t deliver them to the US mainland, but can to Seoul. Even without nuclear weapons, North Korea has a large army and large numbers of artillery tubes within range of Seoul.

So an American attack by air on North Korea, the only attack possible short of a preemptive nuclear strike, would offer a high probability of a peninsular war, devastation of Seoul, paralysis of an important trading partner –think Samsung– and an uncertain final outcome. The United States hasn’t the means of getting troops to Korea rapidly in any numbers, and the domestic political results of lots of GIs killed by a serious enemy would be politically grave.

The probable cost far exceeds any possible benefit. And Pyongyang knows it.

As Gordon Liddy said, if your responses to provocation are wildly out of proportion to those provocations, and unpredictable, nobody will provoke you.

No indicators of North Korea releasing two American hostages

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North Korea is holding two U.S. citizens as “prisoners of war,” regime officials have told Americans lobbying for their release, as the months drag on with no word about the pair.

During this period of Kim Jong Un’s military launching a stream of increasingly longer-range and more reliable missiles and conducted its fifth nuclear test, there has been no word on Otto Warmbier, a business student at the University of Virginia, and Kim Dong-chul, a South Korean-born naturalized American citizen, since they were separately sentenced to years of hard labor in North Korean prisons in March and April respectively.

“I am certain that North Koreans will keep Otto Warmbier and Kim Dong-chul until after the U.S. election,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former North Korea analyst for the CIA who is now at Bower Group Asia, a consultancy.

“American prisoners are one of the few bargaining chips North Koreans has,” she said, and there is “zero incentive” for the North Koreans to release these Americans at this point. “Why waste it now with the Obama administration when there appears to be little progress that can be made in terms of either returning to talks or easing of the sanctions in place?”

In recent years, the regime has made a habit of detaining U.S. citizens and using them as bargaining chips. This has followed a familiar pattern: arrest and harsh sentence, then release after a high-profile American flies to Pyongyang to get them out.

These visits are portrayed in North Korea’s media as signs of the isolated state’s strength–a weak Washington coming begging to Pyongyang.

Because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea, the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang represents American interests there. Swedish diplomats have not been granted access to Warmbier since March 2, John Kirby, spokesman for the State Department, said.  Kirby declined to comment on whether the Swedish diplomats had seen Kim Dong-chul since his arrest and conviction.

[Washington Post]

Shaping North Korea’s new capitalists

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One defector living in South Korea, who escaped through China in the early 2000s, uses a clandestine funding channel to send hundreds of thousands of dollars to help dozens of North Koreans open small businesses, such as noodle shops and grocery stores.

Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea has allowed a growing number of semi-legal markets known as jangmadang, where individuals and wholesalers buy and sell goods they have produced themselves or imported from China. The markets have improved the quality of life for many but also makes them less reliant on the Soviet-style planned economy, undermining the power of the state.

“The North Korean business owners I am helping can be an alternative group to build sound capitalism,” said the defector, who is in his 40s and declined to be named fearing for his safety and that of his partners in the North.

He uses a clandestine money channel typically works with middlemen who wire money to banks in China, where it is collected by agents and carried across the border. He vets prospects through his relatives and acquaintances.His brokers on the ground send photographs to him of businesses the defector has funded, using cellphones connected to China’s mobile network.

The defector, who does not seek a profit, tells the North Koreans he helps “not to be greedy, help other poor North Koreans and gain respect,” he said. “This is [effective] because it directly supports livelihoods.”

[Reuters]

South Korea reveals it has a plan to assassinate Kim Jong Un

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South Korea has elite troops on standby ready to assassinate Kim Jong Un if the country feels threatened by North Korean nuclear weapons, the country’s defense minister revealed this week.

Asked in parliament Wednesday if there was a special forces unit already assembled that could eliminate North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, Han Min-koo said: “Yes, we do have such a plan.”

“South Korea has a general idea and plan to use precision missile capabilities to target the enemy’s facilities in major areas as well as eliminating the enemy’s leadership,” he added.

It has long been suspected that such a plan was in place but the minister’s candid answer surprised some.

Earlier this month, Leem Ho Young, Chief Director of Strategic Planning at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described a new system called the Korea Massive Punishment & Retaliation (KMPR) just hours after North Korea claimed it had tested a nuclear warhead. It would involve surgical missile attacks, exclusive special warfare units and an ability to strike North Korea’s leadership if South Korea feels threatened by nuclear attack.

[CNN]

Defected North Korean artist turns propaganda on its head

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It was after he fled North Korea in 1990s that artist Sun Mu decided to turn the regime’s propaganda painting style on its head. After he settled in South Korea, his work became increasingly provocative, gaining attention for its ability to parody and imitate the North Korean regime’s social realist style.

jeus-of-chosun
Kim Jong-un or Jesus?

Like many defectors who grew up inside the secretive state, Sun Mu’s early life was dominated by the former leaders of North Korea. Sun Mu studied at an art college outside Pyongyang and was enlisted to draw propaganda posters during his time in military service. [Once in South Korea]  he slowly became accustomed to the greater political and artistic freedoms in Seoul, and began mixing North Korean painting styles with more overtly political imagery.

As a result the artist, now in his mid 40s, has stoked controversy and he has chosen to remain hidden from the public for fear of incriminating his family still in North Korea. Sun Mu is a nom de plume, a combination of two Korean words translating as “no borders”.

6-childrenIn one poignant work, Peace, six smiling children bear the flags of the countries taking part in the long-stalled six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme. “Children can get along with each other – adults don’t,” Sun Mu replies when asked why smiling children feature so prominently in his work.

A new documentary, I am Sun Mu, was screened in the UK in March, and follows the artist as he prepares for the opening of a controversial solo exhibition in Beijing called Red, White, Blue, in which visitors can step on giant portraits of former North Korean leaders in Santa Claus hats.

[The Guardian]

North Korea, far from crazy, is actually quite rational

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Is North Korea irrational? Or does it just pretend to be?

Political scientists have repeatedly investigated this question and, time and again, emerged with the same answer: North Korea’s behavior, far from crazy, is all too rational.

Its belligerence, they conclude, appears calculated to maintain a weak, isolated government that would otherwise succumb to the forces of history. Its provocations introduce tremendous danger, but stave off what Pyongyang sees as the even greater threats of invasion or collapse.

When political scientists call a state “rational”, they are not saying its leaders always make the best or most moral choices, or that those leaders are paragons of mental fitness. Rather, they are saying the state behaves according to its perceived self-interests, first of which is self-preservation.

North Korea’s actions abroad and at home, while abhorrent, appear well within its rational self-interest, according to a 2003 study by David C. Kang, a political scientist now at the University of Southern California. At home and abroad, he found, North Korean leaders shrewdly determined their interests and acted on them.

Victor Cha, a Georgetown University professor who served as the Asian affairs director on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, has repeatedly argued that North Korea’s leadership is rational. Savage cruelty and cold calculation are not mutually exclusive, after all–and often go hand in hand.

North Korea’s seemingly unhinged behavior [is based on its creation] of permanently imminent war, issuing flamboyant threats to attack, staging provocations and sometimes deadly attacks. Its nuclear and missile tests, though erratic and often failed, stirred up one crisis after another. This militarization kept the North Korean leadership internally stable. It also kept the country’s enemies at bay.

And over time, the government’s reputation for irrationality has become an asset as well. Scholars ascribe this behavior to the “madman theory”–a strategy, coined by no less a proponent than Richard M. Nixon, in which leaders cultivate an image of belligerence and unpredictability to force adversaries to tread more carefully.

[New York Times]

North Korea’s nuclear “desperation theory”

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North Korea’s nuclear program, some analysts believe, is designed to halt an American invasion by first striking nearby United States military bases and South Korean ports, then by threatening a missile launch against the United States mainland. While North Korea does not yet have this ability, analysts believe it will within the next decade.

This is the culmination of North Korea’s rationality, in something known as desperation theory. Under this theory, when states face two terrible choices, they will pick the least bad option.

In North Korea’s case, that means creating the conditions for a war it would most likely lose. And it could mean preparing a last-ditch effort to survive that war by launching multiple nuclear strikes, chancing a nuclear retaliation for the slim chance to survive.

North Korea’s leaders tolerate this danger because, in their calculus, they have no other choice.

The rest of us share in that risk–vanishingly small, but nonzero–whether we want to or not.

[New York Times]

Why China refuses to block North Korea’s nuclear ambitions

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China’s latest diplomatic crisis began with an earthquake in a region not known for seismic activity [caused by North Korea’s nuclear test.]. And China analysts don’t expect Beijing to do much. Concerned about the implications of a North Korean collapse, China shows little appetite for confrontation.

“The reason North Korea dared to conduct this nuclear test is because it knew the Chinese are very much handcuffed,” said Tong Zhao, an associate at Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.

China is the only lifeline for leader Kim Jong Un. The bigger neighbor accounts for 90% of North Korea’s trade, much of it along the Yalu River, which serves as a border between the two countries.

Leaders worry that economic upheaval in the totalitarian nation could flood northeastern China with millions of refugees, Zhao said. But they fear much more the loss of a buffer between China and U.S.-backed South Korea, with its nearly 30,000 American troops.

China already is incensed at a July agreement between Seoul and the U.S. to deploy a missile defense system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, to protect the South from any Pyongyang attacks. Beijing sees the equipment as a threat to its own national security.

The tensions threaten efforts at any unified strategy toward North Korea. And they likely handed the unpredictable, 32-year-old Kim a greater opportunity to flout international sanctions. Many doubt China will approve stronger sanctions.

“For China, North Korea is a necessary evil,” said Zhang Baohui, the director of the Center for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “China has to maintain the survival of the North Korean regime. That’s its fundamental quagmire.”

“From China’s point of view, North Korea’s real weapon of destruction is chaos,” said Euan Graham, former charge d’affairs at the British embassy in Pyongyang and current international security program director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia. “The fear of chaos runs so deep in the Chinese psyche that it’s this overriding fear [that dominates] rather than one of a freelancing and uncontrollable ally.”

So far, Beijing has agreed only to push for multi-country talks that stalled seven years ago.

Beijing now kicks the ball to the U.S. and South Korea. States Zhang, the Hong Kong professor, “China has accepted the reality of a nuclear North Korea.”

[LA Times]

Few expect China to punish North Korea for latest nuclear test

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North Korea’s biggest nuclear test, conducted last week less than 50 miles from the Chinese border, sent tremors through homes and schools in China’s northeast. But hours later, there was no mention of the test on China’s state-run evening television news, watched by hundreds of millions of viewers.

Although North Korea remains nearly 100 percent dependent on China for oil and food, Chinese analysts say that Beijing will not modify its allegiance to North Korea or pressure the country to curtail its drive for a full-fledged nuclear arsenal, as the United States keeps requesting.

China sees living with a Communist-ruled nuclear-armed state on its border as preferable to the chaos of its collapse, says Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. The Chinese leadership is confident that North Korea would not turn its weapons on China, and that China would be able to control its neighbor by providing enough oil to keep its economy afloat.

The alternative is a strategic nightmare for Beijing: a collapsed North Korean regime, millions of refugees piling into China, and a unified Korean Peninsula under an American defense treaty.

The Obama administration’s decision to deploy an advanced missile defense system THAAD in South Korea also gives President Xi Jinping of China less incentive to cooperate with Washington on a North Korea strategy that could aim, for example, to freeze the North’s nuclear capacity, the analysts said. THAAD has effectively killed any chance of China cooperating with the United States, they said. Beijing interprets the THAAD deployment as another American effort to contain China.

“China is strongly opposed to North Korea’s nuclear weapons but at the same time opposes the defense system in South Korea,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an assistant professor of international relations at Renmin University. It was not clear which situation the Chinese leadership was most agitated about, he said.

The longstanding fear that punitive economic action would destabilize North Korea makes it unlikely that Beijing would cooperate with the United States on more stringent sanctions at the United Nations, according to Chinese analysts.

So despite what Chinese analysts describe as the government’s distaste for Kim Jong Un and his unpredictable behavior, China’s basic calculus on North Korea remains firm. Mr. Xi would continue to ensure that North Korea remained stable.

[New York Times]