Category: Kim Jong Un

Kim Jong Un hints at further purges

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has signaled he may further purge top cadres, ordering senior Workers’ Party members to carry out a “campaign against abuse of power, bureaucrat-ism, irregularities and corruption”.

The party adopted the resolution at a politburo meeting to review his three years in power, the official Korean Central News Agency reported on Thursday.

The warning comes after Kim unleashed a series of purges to tighten his grip on power in the reclusive nation. The “Supreme Leader” last month executed a general who disagreed with him.

Kim ordered the killing of his uncle and one-time deputy Jang Song Thaek in 2013, after accusations of graft and factionalism, and had about 50 officials executed last year on charges ranging from graft to watching South Korean soap operas.

Since North Korea’s founding in 1948, Kim, his father, and his grandfather have eliminated people perceived as a threat to their dynastic rule and personal power. Charges have ranged from spying for the United States to gossiping about a leader’s mistress.

Kim, believed to be about 30, controls North Korea’s 1.2 million troops and nuclear arms program, having taken over the nation of 24 million people after Kim Jong Il died in December 2011.

[Bloomberg]

North Koreans toil in slave-like conditions abroad

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Around the globe, tens of thousands of North Koreans work long hours for little or no pay, toiling in Chinese factories or Russian logging camps, digging military tunnels in Myanmar, building monuments for African dictators, or sweating at construction sites in the Middle East and aboard fishing boats off Fiji, according to former workers and human rights researchers.

For decades, North Korea has been accused of sending contract workers abroad and confiscating most of their wages to support its leadership. But in the years since Kim Jong-un took over as leader, human rights researchers say, the program has expanded rapidly as international sanctions have squeezed the country’s other sources of badly needed foreign currency, like illicit trading in missile parts.

A 2012 study by the North Korea Strategy Center, a defector group in Seoul, and the private Korea Policy Research Center estimated that 60,000 to 65,000 North Koreans were working in over 40 countries worldwide, providing the state with $150 million to $230 million a year. That number has since grown to 100,000, human rights researchers said.

“North Korea is exploiting their labor and salaries to fatten the private coffers of Kim Jong-un,” said Ahn Myeong-chul, head of NK Watch, a human rights group in Seoul that is campaigning for a United Nations investigation into the practice. “We suspect that Kim is using some of the money to buy luxury goods for his elite followers and finance the recent building boom in Pyongyang that he has launched to show off his leadership.”

“Earnings are not sent back as remittances, but appropriated by the state and transferred back to the country in the form of bulk cash,” the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies said, noting that United Nations sanctions ban the transfer of bulk cash to the Pyongyang government. “Returning workers also act as mules to carry hard currency earnings back to North Korea.”

NK Watch has collected the testimony of 13 former North Korean contract workers, now living in South Korea, in support of a petition to the United Nations asking for an investigation into what it calls “state-sponsored slavery.” The petition, to be filed next month to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on contemporary slavery, said the migrants worked a minimum of 12 hours a day, were given a full day off only a few times a year, and received only a small portion, commonly 10 percent, of their promised pay, or none at all.

One worker told NK Watch that he received only $160 in the three years he worked in a Siberian logging camp in the 1990s, toiling up to 21 hours a day in temperatures often below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. He was told the rest of his wages were sent home to his family. But families were given only coupons for state-owned stores, which often had nothing to buy, former workers said.

[Read full New York Times article]

Nothing to celebrate about Kim Jong-Il on Feb 16

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North Korea’s so-called dear leader, Kim Jong-Il, should be remembered as his country celebrates his birthday on February 16, 2015, for presiding over one of the world’s most brutal and repressive governments, Human Rights Watch said.

“Kim Jong-Il ruled North Korea based on rights abuses, repression, and ruthlessness and prioritized maintaining his power over the welfare of the people, even as the country was facing widespread starvation,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director.

“Unfortunately, his son Kim Jong-Un, North Korea’s new leader, has continued many of his father’s abusive policies without pause.”

Kim Jong-Il took over the country in 1994 after the death of his father, Kim Il-Sung, who had ruled North Korea since 1948. His economic mismanagement combined with natural disasters forced the country into what later became known as the Arduous March, a severe famine that provoked despair and massive starvation. Kim Jong-Il and his government focused on a policy ofsongun (military first), which allocated the country’s remaining scarce resources and food to the Korean People’s Army. Kim Jong-Il ensured that the military and government elites were least affected while a still unknown number of North Koreans – estimates range from several hundred thousand to 3.5 million – died of starvation between 1994 and 1998, the most acute phase of the crisis.

Kim Jong-Il’s rights-abusing legacy also includes a massive system of kwanliso (gulag-like political prison camps) to instill fear among the people. Between 80,000 and 120,000 North Koreans are estimated to still be in kwanliso, which are characterized by systemic abuse and deadly conditions, including torture and sexual abuse by guards, near-starvation rations, back-breaking forced labor in dangerous conditions, and executions.

“The world should remember Kim Jong-Il’s brutality and his government’s horrific record of rights abuse, which only now has finally reached the international community’s agenda,” Robertson said. “The world needs to show North Korea that these serious human rights abuses will not go unpunished, and that there needs to be justice for these actions.”

[Read full Human Rights Watch article]

The decades-long cinematic arms race between North and South Korea

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In recent years, North Korea has become the antagonist of choice in Hollywood action movies such as Olympus Has Fallen and the remake of Red Dawn. That trend is mostly a matter of convenience: studios don’t want to antagonize any more plausible military powers that also happen to be emerging movie markets, including China and Russia.

But using North Korea as a workaround became less convenient in December when The Interview, starring James Franco and Seth Rogen a pair of lackadaisical journalists who land an interview with Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) and are asked by the CIA to assassinate him, prompted saber-rattling from the North Korean regime and threats of violence against theatres that had the temerity to show the movie.

While North Korea’s reaction to the US might have been unnerving for Americans, who are still adjusting to the impact of international audiences on their movies and television, the incident shouldn’t have come as a surprise. With The Interview, the US blundered into a regional cultural arms race that’s been going on for decades.

In The Interview, the two journalists are invited because Kim Jong-un happens to love The Big Bang Theory. That’s no flight of fancy: The first major position of the present leader’s father, Kim Jong-il, in his father’s regime was overseeing the Bureau of Propaganda and Agitation, including North Korea’s movie operations. Kim Sr. reportedly loved Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Connery, James Bond movies, Friday the 13th and First Blood.

Paul Fischer’s book A Kim Jong-il Production is a highly illuminating look at the middle Kim’s cinematic obsessions and the cinematic arms race between the two Koreas. Some of that competition was driven by the recognition that movies could be powerful political tools. North and South Korean children saw propaganda films about the evils of the government and people on the other side of the border. A drama Sea of Blood, which Fischer identifies as a turning point in Kim Jong-il’s movie-making, established the standard elements of a North Korean movie. At the same time, South Korea was making its own investments in movies.

As the balance of cultural influence shifted, Kim Jong-il implemented a plan to revitalize North Korean cinema that makes the present regime’s threats over The Interview seem less ridiculous and more plausible. In 1978, Kim ordered the kidnapping of a South Korean actress, Choi Eun-hee, and her director husband, Shin Sang-ok. Kim put them both to work revitalizing North Korean cinema.

In the fight for both international prestige and peninsular influence, South Korea obviously seems to be winning. The New York Times recently reported on just how powerful a temptation South Korean soap operas can be to North Koreans, but this is hardly a new phenomenon. Pirated DVDs have long been available on the black market in cities like Chongjin, and the North Korean government has long been trying to deter people from buying or owning them by making such acts a “betrayal of the fatherland”.

Paradoxically, it may have been Kim Jong-il’s attempts to create a more sophisticated North Korean cinematic culture that helped stoke North Korean hunger for higher quality, which often meant imported, stories.

Fischer writes that a North Korean defector told him that before: “We just watched our films and documentaries and accepted them the way they were. We thought that’s how movies are. But after the Shin Sang-ok era, we had new eyes.”

P.S. –Director Shin and actress Choi collaborated on a number of North Korean projects, but ultimately, they managed to escape, leaving Kim without a captive auteur, or a long-term plan to develop North Korean culture.

[South China Morning Post]

Russia in bed with North Korea

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A top Russian military official has stated that Moscow plans on conducting joint military exercises with North Korea. If negotiations are successful, the military drills will include naval and air force exercises as well as joint drills between ground troops from Russia and North Korea.

Military exercises involving both North Korea and Russia could increase tensions along the Korean peninsula — where the US routinely conducts joint military drills with South Korea.

Relations between North Korea and Russia have been on the upswing recently. Due to the sanctions placed on Russia over the Ukraine crisis, Moscow has sought to backstop its flagging economy by turning east towards China and North Korea.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has confirmed that he will attend Russian celebrations marking the end of World War II in May. It will be Kim’s first foreign visit since coming to power in 2011.

Recently, Russia offered sympathy to North Korea amid the Sony hacking scandal.  Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich, commenting on the movie “The Interview”, a comedy depicting the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that sparked the dispute, that “the concept of the movie is so aggressive and scandalous, that the reaction of the North Korean side, and not just it, is quite understandable.”

Russia’s ties with the communist North soured after the 1991 Soviet collapse, but have improved under President Vladimir Putin’s watch. Moscow has taken part in international efforts to help mediate the standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, although its diplomatic efforts have had little visible effect.

[Business Insider] [Vancouver Sun]

Kim Jong-un claims struggle of North Koreans in poverty keeps him up at night

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The leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, is claimed to worry so much about the welfare of his loyal subjects that he often “cannot sleep” while thinking of their suffering.

He said on Friday that his dutiful citizens “never enjoyed an abundant life”, according to the Korean Central News Agency. He claimed that the “most important task is to boost the living standards of North Koreans quickly” and that the way to provide them with an “affluent and happy life” was to develop livestock and fishery industries to solve chronic food shortages.

Despite claims made by Kim Jong-un that he is concerned for the well-being and happiness of North Koreans, the country still retains one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Around 200,000 political prisoners have been locked up in labor camps and 80 people were executed by the state for watching foreign films.

[The Independent]

UN official says North Korean human rights and cult of Kim can’t coexist

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A campaign within the United Nations to haul North Korean leader Kim Jong Un before an international court for crimes against humanity has touched off a defensive fury in Pyongyang, where it’s being treated like a diplomatic declaration of war , an aggressive act aimed not only at shutting down prison camps but also at removing Kim and dismantling his family’s three-generation cult of personality.

“It would be, I think, the first order of the day to get these 80,000 to 100,000 (prisoners) immediately released and these camps disbanded,” Marzuki Darusman, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But that can only happen if this cult leadership system is completely dismantled. And the only way to do that is if the Kim family is effectively displaced, is effectively removed from the scene, and a new leadership comes into place.”

Such blunt words from a high-ranking U.N. official are unusual, although common among American officials.

Darusman said the General Assembly  resolution, passed by in December, is more significant because it holds Kim responsible based on a 372-page report of findings presented last year by the U.N.-backed Commission of Inquiry that detailed arbitrary detention, torture, executions and political prison camps.

North Korea’s intense response has included threats of more nuclear tests, mass rallies across the country, a bitter smear campaign against defectors who cooperated in the U.N. report and repeated allegations that Washington orchestrated the whole thing in an attempt at speeding a regime change. Its state media last week railed yet again against the U.N. findings, saying “those who cooked up the ‘report’ are all bribed political swindlers and despicable human scum.” It called Darusman, the former attorney general of Indonesia, an “opportunist.”

In a rare flurry of talks, North Korean diplomats at the U.N. lobbied frenetically to get Kim’s culpability out of the resolution without success. The proposal is now on the agenda of the Security Council, which is expected this year to make a decision on whether the issue should be referred to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

But here’s the reality check about the resolution: The likelihood of criminal proceedings against Kim is minuscule. It would likely be shot down by China or Russia, which have veto power on the Security Council. Also, while more than 120 countries support the International Criminal Court, the United States isn’t one of them, so it is somewhat awkward for Washington to push that option too hard.

[AP]

Border Chinese fear marauding North Koreans

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On a cold, clear winter day last month, a North Korean soldier packed a pistol and slipped across the frozen Tumen River into northeastern China. He trekked about a mile to the tiny village of Jidi Tun. Then at dusk he opened fire on two elderly couples, killing all four people.

Most likely hungry from the shortage of food that plagues some units of the armed forces in North Korea, he was looking for sustenance, local officials said; some reports said he was drunk.

In most places, a solitary killer from another country would not cause much anxiety. But in China, whose relationship with North Korea has gone from warm to frosty in the last two years, and where many citizens ridicule the young and unpredictable North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, the government treated the episode with alarm.

The soldier was not the first North Korean to cross the border and wreak havoc. In September, a North Korean civilian walked into a nearby Chinese village and killed an elderly couple and their son in a robbery.

Over the past decade, many North Koreans have slipped into China to steal food, and even as Kim has made it more difficult with increased security on his side of the border, they continue to come.

In a triple killing in September, a North Korean man in his early 30s walked into Nanping village and with a hammer bludgeoned to death an elderly couple and their son as they slept. The North Korean man stole about $120 in Chinese currency, a cash bag from the son’s taxi and two cellphones.

The government installed floodlights and cameras in the two villages after the December killing, but no one feels safe, relatives say.

[New York Times]

The impact of soap operas on North Koreans

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North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has issued increasingly pointed warnings to his subjects about the “poisonous elements of capitalism” crossing China’s border with the North. South Korean intelligence reported hearing that Kim was so shaken by the spread of DVDs of soap operas that he ordered the execution of 10 Worker’s Party officials accused of succumbing to the shows’ allure.

But despite a crackdown, the country has seemed unwilling, or unable, to fully dismantle the smuggling networks that bring in not only banned soap operas, movies and K-pop videos, but also much-needed trade.

Defectors say the soaps have had an outsize impact, less for their often outlandish plots than their portrayals of the creature comforts of South Korea—a direct contradiction to decades of indoctrination about the inferiority of the South, and capitalism.

It was those portraits of wealth, Jeon Hyo-jin said, that inspired her to make the dangerous decision to flee in 2013 at the age of 18. “The kitchens with hot and cold tap water, people dating in a cafe, cars clogging streets, women wearing different clothes each day—unlike us who wore the same padded jacket, day in day out,” said Ms. Jeon, who lives in Seoul. “Through the dramas, I learned how strange my own country was, how full of lies.”

Most of the border trade is driven by money, defectors said, not ideology, but some defectors and pro-democracy groups also help arrange for the contraband material to be smuggled into the North. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” said Chung Kwang-il, a defector, who runs a smuggling operation.

Analysts and defectors alike say there are limits to how much outside entertainment can accomplish. A recent study by Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification of 149 recent defectors showed that more than eight in 10 had been exposed to South Korean movies or songs before fleeing the North. But most of them lived in areas close to China, where it is easier for smugglers to maneuver, and it is unclear how widely such entertainment has spread.

Still, the defectors say that the soaps are a potent tool for exposing North Koreans to the outside world.

[New York Times]

The two women who prop up North Korea’s Kim Jong-un

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Kim Jong-un’s wife Ri Sol Ju
Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong

One sports a Christian Dior handbag and favors Western clothes. The other carries a notebook and wears dark uniforms. These fashion opposites are the two most influential women in North Korea.

While Kim Jong-un’s wife Ri Sol Ju and younger sister Kim Yo-jong are currently allies in sustaining one of the world’s most reclusive leaders, their overlapping influence makes them potential rivals in a regime where family ties aren’t strong enough to protect against Kim’s penchant for purges.

“Uneasiness is inevitable in a relationship like this,” Kang Myong Do, a son-in-law of North Korea’s former Prime Minister, Kang Song San, said by phone. “The wife wouldn’t like it if her husband got too close to his sister; the sister wouldn’t like it if her brother got too close to his wife.”

Citing conversations with people who have been in the room with both women at the same time, Michael Madden, editor of the North Korea Leadership Watch blog, said the two appeared friendly to each other as they sat at opposite sides – Ri with her husband and Kim with senior party officials.

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