Category: Kim Jong Un

North Korean defector speaks out … in Beijing!

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The Chinese government doesn’t take well to those who criticize its complicity in North Korea’s human-rights abuses. So it took some courage for native North Korean Hyeonseo Lee to take the stage at a recent public event in Beijing and blast China for sending thousands of refugees back into the grip of the Kim regime, where they face prison or worse.

Ms. Lee knows the risks well. After escaping North Korea in 1997, she spent 11 years on the run in China, hiding from authorities and using multiple aliases, before making it to freedom in South Korea.

“I want to tell the very basic things about what is happening to North Koreans here,” Ms. Lee told the Beijing audience. “China is the place we have to cross .. There are many evils living in China, human traffickers, but at the same time many good people. I’m grateful to those good people, but not the Chinese government.”

China has signed the international Refugee Convention banning “refoulement” of refugees to countries where they face persecution. Yet it denies North Korean refugees access to consulates and embassies, detains them in abusive conditions and repatriates them. Such conduct “could amount to aiding and abetting” North Korean “crimes against humanity,” a United Nations panel found in 2014.

Beijing tried to stymie the U.N. inquiry at every turn, but its report makes for bracing reading. Investigators found that when refugees “are apprehended or forcibly repatriated,” North Korean authorities “systematically subject them to persecution, torture, prolonged arbitrary detention and, in some cases, sexual violence.” Refugees “found to have been in contact with officials or nationals from [South Korea] or with Christian churches may be forcibly ‘disappeared’ into political prison camps, imprisoned in ordinary prisons or even summarily executed.”

Escape has been particularly perilous since Kim Jong Un took power in 2011 and issued shoot-to-kill orders to border guards. Successful defections are down more than half from their peak in 2009. Brokers along the underground railroad demand up to $12,000 per passage, while Chinese authorities offer rewards for turning in North Koreans on the run.

Chinese policy toward North Korea clearly still prioritizes “stability” and repression above all, motivated especially by the fear of heavy refugee flows. But doing the Kim regime’s dirty work hurts Beijing’s reputation overseas and at home, where many young Chinese see ties with North Korea as a shameful relic of Maoism.

Part of Ms. Lee’s motivation to speak out in Beijing, she says, was knowing that an earlier speech of hers was viewed more than 110,000 times on Chinese video sites. Here’s hoping her latest message earns wide notice.

[Wall Street Journal]

Disaffection growing among North Korea’s elite

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Disaffection is spreading among the North Korean elite who are unsettled by the capricious decisions of current leader Kim Jong-un.

Under former leader Kim Jong-il, defections were common among ordinary people, but Kim Jong-un’s father kept the elite sweet with gifts of cars, watches and other privileges. But since Kim Jong-un stepped into power, he has cracked down on the defection routes of ordinary people but scared the elite as well.

A string of defections of relatively senior officials followed the brutal execution of Jang Song-taek in late 2013. Over the last two years alone, around 20 senior Workers Party, state and military officials have defected to South Korea.

Sources say members of the elite are so scared they are inventing excuses to decline promotions and clamor to be posted overseas to avoid the brutal purges Kim has implemented since he came to power five years ago. An estimated 130 mid-to-high-ranking officials have been purged. Workers Party secretary Choe Ryong-hae, once touted as the North’s No. 2 official, was sent to a reeducation camp with his wife late last year after complaining about Kim.

Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee told reporters Monday that the defection of a senior spy may be “a sign” of disaffection among the elite.  The man was a colonel in the General Bureau of Reconnaissance, which was launched in 2009 by combining three military and Workers Party departments and reports directly to Kim Jong-un.

“The higher the rank, the greater the stress from possibly being purged,” a source said. Another intelligence source said, “North Korean generals have become expendable. Officials are probably afraid to serve the fickle Kim Jong-un.”

One researcher at a state-run think tank said, “Rising dissent among the elite could lead to a crisis for Kim Jong-un.”

[Chosun Ilbo]

More on further mass North Korean defections to follow – Part 2

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And what has to be of special concern to Chairman Kim, however, is that Beijing did not stop the defections. The workers did not smuggle themselves out of China, as many had done in the past. On the contrary, they openly left the People’s Republic with their passports, traveling to Thailand before arriving in South Korea.

In the past, Pyongyang could count on Beijing to do almost anything to capture defectors and hand them over to North Korean border guards. This time, however, Chinese customs officials just waved the fleeing workers across the Thai border, a clear indication China was sending an unfriendly message to the Kim regime.

And there is another wrinkle. Offshore restaurant workers generally come from the higher classes and are chosen for their loyalty, so the mass defection from the Ningbo restaurant must now be having a psychological impact on regime elements back home.

Perhaps more escapes are on the way. Seoul expects additional mass defections from the 50,000 to 100,000 North Koreans working outside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

North Korea appears very far from regime collapse at the moment, but the defection of a senior colonel, a diplomat, and the Restaurant 13 are tremors that could foreshadow quakes to come.

[Read full article at The Daily Beast]

North Korea’s largest recent defector group arrives in South Korea

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In one of the largest known group defections of North Koreans in recent years, 13 restaurant workers have arrived together in South Korea. The group of one male manager and 12 female employees were based at a restaurant in an undisclosed country outside North Korea and reached South Korea on Thursday, a spokesman for South Korea’s Unification Ministry said.

The defection is unusual because of the size of the group and because North Koreans who are allowed to work abroad are regarded among the most loyal to the Pyongyang regime. Group defections by North Koreans are also usually by families or those with very close ties because of a culture of individuals informing on each other to the authorities.

International efforts to crack down on North Korea’s sources of funding for its nuclear weapons program may have increased demands on restaurant workers to send remittances. North Korea operates some 130 restaurants in 12 countries, a source of around $10 million annually for Pyongyang, according to the ministry.

The South Korean government spokesman also cited the defectors’ exposure to TV shows, movies and the Internet as a likely contributing factor for their decision to come to South Korea. Access to foreign information and media is highly restricted inside North Korea.

The official said it was the first group defection from a North Korean restaurant. The largest single group of North Koreans to seek South Korean residency in recent years was a group of nine people in 2011, according to the official.

The overall number of annual defectors from North Korea has fallen sharply since Kim Jong Un took power at the end of 2011 and tightened the nation’s borders. Last year, 1,276 North Koreans defected to South Korea, down from a recent peak of almost 3,000 in 2009.

[Wall Street Journal]

Apparent Kim Jong Un assassination suspects arrested

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At least two suspects who attempted to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were arrested, according to unconfirmed reports in the country.

The suspects had been reportedly arrested at the China border near the Tumen River as they were preparing a hit on Kim in the city of Hoeryong in North Hamgyong Province, Radio Free Asia reported Thursday.

A source in the North who spoke to Japanese news service Asia Press on the condition of anonymity said he had heard the “terrorists” had not yet crossed the Tumen, which separates North Korea from China, when North Korean border guards crossed the border to arrest them. The source went on to say the suspects were transferred to the State Security Department, and that the border guards were given rewards – including a chance to become members of the Korean Workers’ Party.

One of the suspects is allegedly a North Korean defector from the South, but the other one or more were Chinese nationals.

Japanese journalist Jiro Ishimaru, founder of Asia Press, said it is likely a rumor that was manufactured by the state to bolster support for the party ahead of its Seventh Congress in Maya congress that is to be held for the first time in more than three decades.

[UPI]

Kim Jong Un’s North Korean nuclear capabilities and economy

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Back in 2013, Kim Jong Un publicly outlined his policy of byungjin — which roughly translates to “simultaneous” — as in developing nuclear capabilities and the economy at the same time. But this creates a contradiction for a poor country of 25 million with a small economy: Developing nuclear weaponry undermines economic development.

North Korea needs foreign investment and knows it. Its nuclear test and missile launches have brought a new round of United Nations sanctions and reinforced its status as a pariah state. China, which has protected North Korea in the past, supported the sanctions. Who’s going to do deals with the North now?

“It might have looked plausible to [Kim] that he could have it both ways, as he watched the China-North Korea relationship deepen at the end of his father’s era,” Haggard says. “… Even as trade was falling off with the rest of the world, he still had Kaesong and he still had the Chinese. But that’s why this sanctions move is different.”

While survival may be the top priority, the North Korean leadership seems concerned at some level with the outside world. “The North Korean side knows it suffers from a very serious credibility deficit in its public engagements with the world, and is changing to meet the information management challenges of the current era,” says Christopher Green, a regional researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

[NPR]

Kim Jong-un’s sister consolidates power

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Kim Yeo-jong, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s sister, appears to have risen to a position of considerable power in the secretive regime. Yeo-jong now holds a key post in the Workers Party’s department in charge of promotions and appointments. Senior officials like Army politburo chief Hwang Pyong-so now salute her.

Kim Yeo-jong rose quickly through the party ranks and consolidated her position, thanks to her quick wit and natural political acumen. Since September last year, she has been her brother’s de facto secretary, with most documents being submitted for approval by Kim passing through her desk, according to some intelligence sources.

“Rumors began spreading late last year that the fastest way of getting Kim Jong-un’s attention is to go through Kim Yeo-jong,” the source said. “She’s gaining power by controlling the information and deciding who gets to contact him.”

Kim Yeo-jong apparently won the trust of senior officials by consoling them and offering them advice when they were criticized by her brother. The two of them are seen as a classic good cop/bad cop act.

But her political ambitions have apparently led to some jealousy in the family. “When Yeo-jong was on maternity leave in May last year, Kim Jong-un’s wife Ri Sol-ju appointed a close relative of hers, and that frayed their relationship,” another source said.

A source said Kim Yeo-jong’s husband is a university professor in Pyongyang and comes from an ordinary background, denying recent rumors that she is married to the son of senior official Choe Ryong-hae.

[Chosun Ilbo]

In search of Kim Jong Un’s motive …Survival

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North Korea watchers haven’t been getting much sleep this year. With all the bluster of late, what does Kim Jong Un want?

“There are a lot of debates about ‘What North Korea wants,’ ” says Sheena Greitens, a fellow in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies and an assistant professor at the University of Missouri. “First, what matters are the interests of the very top leadership, which is narrower than ‘North Korea’ or even ‘the North Korean government.’ Second, North Korea might use a range of strategies … but we should remember that they’re all aimed at the same underlying, fundamental objective: ensuring Kim’s political survival.”

March is always a time of heightened tensions. This is when the U.S. and South Korea stage their annual joint military exercises, involving hundreds of thousands of troops. This year, the North has been especially demonstrative as it lays the groundwork for a major strategy meeting, its first Workers Party Congress since 1980.

The Chinese Communist Party holds these summits every few years to chart strategy, a common practice of communist states. In North Korea, the party congress framework was dropped under Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled from 1994 until his death in 2011. Soon to be revived under his son, the congress is expected to roll out the next phase of Kim’s rule.

“The stakes are always higher in the first few years of a dictator’s time in power, and the first few years are almost always more [internally] violent,” Greitens says. “The rules of the game under the new leader are still being established — both inside the country and externally — so it makes uncertainty higher.”

As the third-generation leader of the family dynasty, Kim needs to establish his own legitimacy, and that means standing up to enemies and advancing the nuclear program.

“I don’t think it’s all scientific tests,” Hanham says. “I think a lot of this is political.”

[NPR]

China’s thinking on North Korea

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The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, lauded China last week for joining Washington in what is probably the toughest response North Korea has faced in twenty years. But such praise may well have been premature. Last week, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Beijing opposed any unilateral punishments against North Korea.

The grim reality is that Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un decided that North Korea must have nuclear weapons, and that China has thus far decided that, as far as Beijing is concerned, the benefits of that program outweigh the costs.

China has made many pledges on North Korean sanctions in the past, but has always failed to honor them and to systematically enforce its commitments. China may be keeping the regime afloat through its provision of economic and military resources—better after all to feed North Koreans in North Korea than risk a massive refugee exodus into China if the regime collapses—and can rationally justify this as a good investment on these grounds.

Front and center on the cost side of the ledger is Beijing’s concern that North Korea’s nuclear tests, missile tests, saber rattling and occasional limited uses of force will cause South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons to deal with the menace that Pyongyang represents. This is the outcome that China above all seeks to avoid.

Short of this, but still deeply problematic, is that North Korea’s provocations push Seoul and Tokyo deeper into Washington’s embrace. For a country bent on, at minimum, increasing the costs of U.S. influence in East Asia and/or impeding U.S. activity in its littoral seas through anti-access and area denial capabilities and actively expanding its influence and territory, improving Washington’s security relationship with Japan and South Korea is the last thing Beijing wants.

Beijing has thus far decided that the benefits of a nuclear North Korea outweigh these costs. But as Pyongyang pushes closer to its ultimate goal of being able to target the mainland United States with strategic nuclear missiles, these calculations will become harder.

[The National Interest]

Why analysts of North Korea aren’t laughing

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Bruce Klingner knows better than anyone how dangerous North Korea really is. He spent years analyzing the Hermit Kingdom for the CIA, and he now works as a Northeast Asia analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

And yet even he finds himself having an occasional chuckle at the North’s absurdity. The bombastic rhetoric and over-the-top propaganda is “kind of like 1950s Soviet Union on steroids,” he says.

But over the past few months, the experts have pretty much stopped laughing. That’s because North Korea has undertaken an unusual number of tests in the first quarter of 2016, everything from detonating a nuclear bomb underground to launching a satellite on a rocket that could be converted to a ballistic missile.

Keeping up with the pace of activity is “exhausting, to be honest,” says Melissa Hanham, a North Korea analyst at the East Asia Nonproliferation Program of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey California.

What’s clear, both analysts say, is that the North is working quickly towards its ultimate goal: a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). And they’re making pretty good progress.

A series of photos released by North Korea’s propaganda apparatus earlier this March is perhaps the best example of how views are changing. It shows the country’s current dictator, Kim Jong Un, the son of Kim Jong Il, posing in front a shiny silver ball placed atop chintzy red table cloth.

As experts started to analyze the pictures more closely, they weren’t laughing. The ball on the table was obviously a model, but many of the details were reasonably close to a real miniaturized warhead.

“They definitely know what a bomb looks like,” Hanham says. “I mean, that model didn’t come out of thin air. … It has roots in the truth.”

Adm. Bill Gortney, who heads the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told lawmakers: “It’s the prudent decision on my part to assume that [Kim Jong Un] has the capability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon and put it on an ICBM.” This is a change in tone from just a few years ago, when the U.S. intelligence community stated that North Korea didn’t have all the tools it needed to send a nuke over American soil.

Both Klingner and Hanham say there’s no need to panic. North Korea’s newest ballistic missile is untested, and they have yet to prove they have vital reentry technology that would allow their warhead to reach its target without burning up in the atmosphere. But Klingner also says it’s clear that North Korea is making lots of progress.

 [NPR]