Category: Kim Jong Un

Report of latest purge of senior North Korean official

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South Korea said Wednesday it is closely monitoring the whereabouts of a ranking North Korean official dealing with inter-Korean affairs amid a local media report that he might have been purged.

Won Tong-yon, the vice head of the United Front Department of the Workers’ Party, is believed to have been purged and forced to undergo “revolutionary education,” a kind of punishment handed down to North Korean officials who commit wrongdoing, under which they must perform hard labor, according to a media report.

Won, a veteran official handling inter-Korean affairs, represented the North’s delegation during high-level talks with South Korea held in February 2014.

If confirmed, the case would be the latest in a series of purges and executions ordered by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who is tightening his grip on power through a so-called reign of terror.

[Korea Herald]

Attempting to stamp out media smuggled into North Korea

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The Kim Jong-un regime has attempted to crack down on the smuggling of foreign media into North Korea. In late 2013 the government reportedly executed 80 people across seven cities in a single day, many for trafficking in illegal media.

In February 2014, the Worker’s Party of Korea held its largest-ever conference of propagandists. Kim Jong-un himself delivered an address calling for the party to “take the initiative in launching operations to make the imperialist moves for ideological and cultural infiltration end in smoke” and to set up “mosquito nets with two or three layers to prevent capitalist ideology, which the enemy is persistently attempting to spread, from infiltrating across our border.”

But stamping out illegal media in North Korea has become an intractable problem for the government, according to Sokeel Park, director of research and strategy for Liberty in North Korea. He compares it to the stubborn demand for illegal drugs in the US. “You could call it Kim Jong-un’s War on Information,” he says. “But just like a war on drugs—you can try to slow it down, increase the risks, increase the punishments, put more people in prison. The bribe costs will go up, but it’s still going to happen.”

One young defector says that nearly all of her friends had seen a foreign film or TV show. As a result, her generation is the first to have to square the Kim regime’s propaganda with a keyhole view of the outside world. A group called Liberty in North Korea, which works with young defector refugees, finds that many no longer believe in central tenets of North Korea’s political ideology, such as the country’s superior standard of living or the godlike powers of the Kim family. Even the regime is letting that second illusion slide, admitting that Kim Jong-un has health issues—hardly the norm for heavenly beings.

[Wired]

North Korea vice-premier Choe Yong-gon executed?

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South Korea’s government says it is monitoring reports that North Korea’s vice-premier Choe Yong-gon was killed in May on orders of Kim Jong-un. Mr Choe was executed after he “expressed discomfort against the young leader’s forestation policy”, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports.

The BBC has not been able to verify the claims. North Korea rarely confirms the South’s reports of executions.

In April, South Korea’s intelligence agency said Kim Jong-un had ordered the execution of 15 officials in the first four months of the year. Among them was a forestry official who complained about the leader’s forestation plan, the agency said at the time, but it is not clear if this man was Choe Yong-gon.

Choe Yong-gon was formerly deputy minister of construction and building material industries, and had represented North Korea in trade talks in Seoul in the mid-2000s. He was appointed as one of seven vice-premiers in June last year, and his promotion was seen by one analyst as a sign Pyongyang was keen to maintain close ties with the South.

[BBC]

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Kim Jong-un’s purges continue

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North Korea’s vice-premier has reportedly been executed by firing squad after voicing discontent with the forestry policies of Kim Jong-un, the country’s young dictator. Choe Yong-gon, 63, was killed after less than a year in his job, South Korean media reported, the latest casualty in a series of high-level purges within the isolated communist nation.

North Korean has not officially confirmed the execution, reported to have taken place in May, but Mr Choe has not been seen in public since December and Pyongyang announced his replacement in July.

Reports of Mr Choe’s death come close on the heels of the execution of Hyon Yong-chol, the defense minister, who was said to have been killed in front of a large crowd of government officials as a way of setting an example to Mr Kim’s other subordinates.

North Korean vice premier Choe Yong Gon, pictured in 2005

Mr Choe is reported to have taken office in June last year. He once led the North Korean delegation in economic co-operation talks with South Korea. He was also a former member of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the North Korean parliament. South Korea’s ministry of unification, which is responsible for relations with its neighbor, said it was “closely monitoring the possibility of any changes in Choe’s circumstances”.

The dictator’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was killed in 2013 after being described as “despicable human scum” by state media and charged with treason and corruption. Unlike other purges, which happen in secret, Mr Jang’s death was publicly trumpeted by the North Korean regime, which accused him of having “perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery”.

[The Daily Telegraph]

Why North Korea’s disregard of its international relations?

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If one looks at recent trends in North Korean foreign policy, it is becoming increasingly clear that the North Korean government is not all that interested in improving its relations with the outside world.

Relations with China are as bad as they have ever been in the last 20-odd years. While China remains North Korea’s major supplier of aid, as well as its main trade partner, the North Korean side has taken a number of deliberate steps that have offended China and kept it at a distance. Very recently, one has to admit, North Korea has demonstrated some interest in improving relations with China. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether these half-hearted attempts will produce any results.

The last two years have been marked by unusually vocal diplomatic overtures to Russia. It seems that the North Korean side wishes to attract Russian trade and investment as a potential substitute for Chinese money. It is highly unlikely though that they will succeed. Russia has neither the desire, nor the ability, to subsidize North Korea on the scale that Pyongyang would consider sufficient.

What are the reasons for [North Korea’s] attitude? To some extent, it might reflect the personal style of the new, young leader [Kim Jong-un]. However, to a much greater extent, this change of line might be connected with the recent improvement in North Korea’s economic situation. In 2013-14, North Korea’s harvests were nearly sufficient to feed the population. Now, in spite of the widely-reported drought, there are no immediate signs of a food crisis.

[North Korea’s] improvement in economic fortunes may be fragile and could be short-lived, but it may have led North Korean leaders to believe that for the time being, they do not need to squeeze more aid from the outside world. However, if they do not need aid, they are likely to take a more isolationist stance, since interactions with the outside world are often seen as politically dangerous.

[Radio Free Asia]

North Korea, in Year 104, now creating new time zone

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North Korea, which was already out of sync with much of the world, announced last Friday that it would take that a step further. The isolated, authoritarian country said it would create its own time zone–“Pyongyang time”–and set its clocks 30 minutes behind those of South Korea and Japan.

The change is to go into effect on Aug. 15, the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, which liberated a then-unified Korea from decades of Japanese colonial rule. Anti-Japanese resentment runs deep in the Koreas, but the North enshrines hostility toward Japanese and other foreign “imperialists” in its Constitution, and it forms the core of the country’s ruling philosophy of “juche,” or self-reliance. North Korea traces its birth as an independent nation to its founder, Kim Il-sung, who like other Korean peasants engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Japanese.

Kim Il-sung, a godlike figure among North Koreans, is the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, the current leader. Since taking power in 2011, Kim Jong-un has been striving to highlight his ties to his grandfather, emphasizing his grandfather’s themes of self-reliance and dignity.

Chang Yong-seok, a North Korea expert at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University, saw the North’s time change as a reiteration of those themes for domestic consumption.

For years, North Korea has even been on a different calendar from both South Korea and the rest of the world. In 1997, it adopted a “juche” calendar based on the year Kim Il-sung was born, 1912. According to official documents, and much of the North’s population, this is the year 104.

[New York Times]

Freeing North Koreans through smuggled USB drives

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North Korean defector Kang Chol-hwan  founded North Korea Strategy Center and over the past few years, Kang’s organization has become the largest in a movement of political groups who routinely smuggle data into North Korea. NKSC alone annually injects around 3,000 USB drives filled with foreign movies, music, and ebooks.

Kang’s goal, as wildly optimistic as it may sound, is nothing less than the overthrow of the North Korean government. He believes that the Kim dynasty’s three-generation stranglehold on the North Korean people—and its draconian restriction on almost any information about the world beyond its borders—will ultimately be broken not by drone strikes or caravans of Humvees but by a gradual, guerrilla invasion of thumb drives filled with bootleg episodes of Friends and Judd Apatow comedies.

Kang’s NKSC, with its pop cultural offerings, capitalizes on North Korea’s flowering black markets. The group’s smugglers inside the country are motivated by profit as much as politics: A USB stick loaded with contraband films sells for more than a month’s food budget for most middle-class North Korean families. A pack of hundreds represents a small fortune. “In North Korea a USB drive is like gold,” one NKSC smuggler tells me.

Kang likens the USB sticks to the red pill from The Matrix: a mind-altering treatment that has the power to shatter a world of illusions. “When North Koreans watch Desperate Housewives, they see that Americans aren’t all war-loving imperialists,” Kang says. “They’re just people having affairs or whatever. They see the leisure, the freedom. They realize that this isn’t the enemy; it’s what they want for themselves. It cancels out everything they’ve been told. And when that happens, it starts a revolution in their mind. Continued

Every USB drive causes 100 citizens to question North Korea

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The state propaganda system of North Korea indoctrinates its 25 million citizens from birth, insisting that the Kim family is infallible and that the country enjoys a superior standard of living. (In a ranking of 197 countries’ press freedom by research group Freedom House, North Korea places last.) It sees any attempt to introduce competing ideas, even the possession of a radio capable of accessing foreign frequencies, as a threat to its power.

A growing movement of North Korean defector activist groups, including Kang Chol-hwan’s NKSC and others, like North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity and Fighters for a Free North Korea, views that reliance on ideological control as a weakness: Outside data is now penetrating North Korea’s borders more than ever before.

Kang appears on a top-10 list of North Korean defector assassination targets. His quiet demeanor masks a deep, lifelong anger directed at North Korea’s dictatorship, which held him and his entire family in a prison camp for 10 years of his childhood.

“What I do is what Kim Jong-un fears most,” says one smuggler. “For every USB drive I send across, there are perhaps 100 North Koreans who begin to question why they live this way. Why they’ve been put in a jar.”

For Kang, that makes each of those coveted flash drives a self-propelled weapon in a free-market information insurgency. “Right now, perhaps 30 percent of the population in North Korea knows about the outside world,” Kang says. “If you reach 50 percent, that’s enough people to start making demands, to start making changes.”

And if that enlightened audience reaches 80 percent? Or 90 percent? Kang leans forward. “Then there’s no way the North Korean government, in its current form, could continue to exist.”

[Wired]

North Korean defector Eun Kim on adapting to South Korea

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In  A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape From North Korea, Eunsun Kim gives us a glimpse into everyday life in North Korea behind the “Bamboo Curtain.” She now lives in Seoul and offers insights on the major differences between North and South Korean culture:

North and South Korea both speak Korean, but for North Korean refugees the most difficult thing is the language difference. In South Korea, they speak “Konglish”. A lot of words are different.

Communication is very different. North Koreans communicate more directly; South Koreans communicate indirectly. For example, if a North Korean refugee has a job interview, and the owner says, ‘I will call you if we need you,’ the North Korean refugee will wait for a month for the company to call. Then, he will call the company back and say, ‘You said you would call me, but you didn’t, what’s happened?’

The humor is also different. Even today, if I watch a [South Korean comedy], I won’t laugh because I don’t find it funny.

The most difficult thing [about adapting to life in South Korea] was the loneliness, because we had no relatives there. But it was a new place and we had to learn—like a baby taking its first steps—how to go the market, how to ask a question, everything. When I went to high school, the most confusing thing was learning about Korea. In North Korea, we learned South Korea invaded. Here they taught us that North Korea invaded South Korea.

North Korea is a big prison. People live there, but they have no human rights. So we need to open the prison and give people freedom. It’s not only North Korea’s problem.  It’s a global problem.

I believe a little movement can bring huge change in North Korea. It’s already changing faster than ever before. Videos and USB’s are being smuggled in from South Korea all the time and through those media young people are learning about other worlds outside North Korea and to have their own ideas.

And even if Kim Jung Un is a psychopath, he’s trying to change things, he seems to be shifting North Korea towards capitalism. Before, North Korea really hated Western things. Now a lot of people use these things.

[National Geographic]

Homage to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un

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Hyeonseo Lee was raised in a relatively privileged manner, a middle-class existence because of her stepfather’s job with the North Korean military, but even so she attended her first public execution at the age of seven — a stark lesson in obedience.

Seeing a man hanged under a railway bridge — one of many such public executions that are mandatory for people to see, she says — was only one of the grotesque means of control the regime waged against its citizens.

As in many authoritarian countries, for example, Lee’s family displayed portraits of the ruling family in their home, first Great Leader Kim Il-sung, then his son and heir Dear Leader Kim Jong-il and, later, his son and heir Kim Jong-un. The government gave them a special cloth for cleaning the portraits and nothing else. The pictures had to be the most prominent in any room, hung the highest, perfectly aligned and on a wall containing no other adornment.

Once a month, Lee says, officials wearing white gloves would visit every house in her neighborhood to inspect the portraits. If one was dusty or improperly hung, the family would be punished. It was with the portraits, one under each arm, that her stepfather emerged — blackened and coughing — after running back into their burning house, risking his life for their preservation.

“It was genuine (respect) and fear mixed together,” says Lee. “They had to show they were loyal to the regime in order to survive.”                    Continued