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Trump’s national security adviser vows to tackle North Korea nuclear threat

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser says North Korea’s nuclear program would be given a high priority under the new administration, a South Korean official who held talks with him said on Saturday.

Michael Flynn, one of Trump’s closest advisers, also said he would work to strengthen the U.S. alliance with South Korea, calling the relationship “vital,” the South’s deputy presidential national security adviser Cho Tae-yong was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency.

Flynn is a retired Army lieutenant general and a military intelligence veteran of three decades who has championed Trump’s promises to take a more aggressive approach to terrorism.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been criticized by Congressional Republicans that his policy of “strategic patience” was a failure and that he must make full use of sanctions authorities given to him by Congress.

[Reuters]

Surveying North Koreans to find out what they think

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What do North Koreans think? It’s an impossible question to answer, given that North Korea is a totalitarian state where professing anything other than wholehearted adulation for the Kim regime could land a person in a political prison camp — or worse.

For years, researchers in Seoul have been trying to collect data on North Korean thought by conducting surveys of defectors from North Korea who have escaped from the police state and made it to safety in South Korea.

Now, a new project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, is trying to poll North Koreans who live in North Korea.

“This gives us a window into what the average North Korean citizen is thinking,” said Victor D. Cha, chair of Korea studies at CSIS, who runs the “Beyond Parallel” project dedicated to Korean unification. “This is the first time we’re hearing directly from people inside the country.”

The project contracted a nongovernmental agency that works inside North Korea — Cha would not reveal its name to protect the safety of its operations — to carry out surveys. The NGO surveyed 20 men and 16 women between the ages of 28 and 80. They came from a variety of backgrounds, with jobs including doctor, laborer, homemaker, factory worker and company president, and they lived across the country. The survey was not done through cold calls — the survey administrators knew those they were questioning in some way.

“This isn’t Gallup-level surveying,” Cha said. “It’s only 36 people, but it’s 36 people more than anyone else has surveyed in North Korea. The findings are modest, but they’re pretty insightful.”

[Washington Post]

Film fest highlights North Korean defectors’ soul-searching

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According to director Lee Min-yong, this was a watershed year for the North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival, which was launched in 2011 to inform the world of the gross human rights violations occurring in North Korea.

This year, filmmakers started to focus on the lives of North Koreans in the South post-defection. “They looked into the defector community here, their torn sense of identity, and the hardship of trying to fit into a very modern and very different society.”

A record number of films offered diverse perspectives on the lives of both North Koreans and defectors.

For example, Kim Tae-woong’s short film “The Regular Hire” tells the story of a 24-year-old defector who has lived 16 years in Korea and struggles to be a normal office worker.

Two foreign films shot inside North Korea also gave the film fest a significant boost this year: David Kinsella’s “The Wall,” a computer graphic-infused story of a girl from Pyongyang who wants to be a poet, and Vitaly Mansky’s “Under the Sun,” a documentary which follows a North Korean family training to be ideal patriots.

[Korea Herald]

North Koreans joke about Kim Jong Un and his government

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Political satire, jokes at the expenses of national leaders, and outright criticism of the government are normal parts of both public and private lives in democratically based states across the globe.

But North Korea is not a free and open society. So what do North Koreans think about their leaders?

An interview project with North Koreans currently residing in North Korea found that 35 of 36 respondents’ family, friends, or neighbors complain or make jokes about the government in private.

The fact that all but one of the interviewees say people they know complain and makes jokes about the government is an extraordinary number given the gravity with which the North Korean regime responds to criticism.

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights (published in February 2014) on the subject of North Korean’s rights and freedoms  found that there is “an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought… as well as of the rights to freedom of opinion.”

People who express dissent or criticize the state, even if unintentionally, are subject to harsh punishments and detention, often punished without trial. Suspects of political crimes may simply disappear and their relatives may never be notified of the arrest, the charges, or the whereabouts of the alleged criminal. If not executed, citizens accused of major political crimes are sent to a political prison camp.

[Read more at Beyond Parallel]

The next US president’s North Korea dilemma

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Among the many challenges facing the next occupant of the White House, few will be more pressing, or more complex, than that posed by North Korea’s seemingly inexorable drive to nuclear statehood. Whatever the outgoing administration’s policy was with regard to curbing the North’s nuclear ambitions, it has clearly failed.

The one thing the new president will not lack is vocal advice from any number of think-tanks, policy wonks, former diplomats and retired generals who believe they have the solution. The policy argument essentially pits those who favor threatening the North Korean regime’s very existence with crushing sanctions backed by military threat, against those who prefer a cocktail of measures in which tough sanctions and military strength provide a base for offering talks and incentives to denuclearize.

In a stark assessment delivered to a Washington think-tank last week, the US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said convincing North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons was “a lost cause”.

Those who back dialogue include Jane Harman and James Person of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars who wrote a recent op-ed in the Washington Post titled: “The US Needs to Negotiate with North Korea.”

The only real area of consensus on North Korea is that …its nuclear and missile testing program has accelerated to the point where previous estimates — once seen as alarmist — that it could have an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the United States by 2020, are now seen as soberly prudent.

[The Star (Malaysia)]

North Korea unhappy about UN threat of more sanctions

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North Korean officials lashed out Monday at efforts in the United Nations to strengthen sanctions following the North’s latest missile launches and nuclear test in September.

The United Nations has imposed sanctions on North Korea since 2006 for its nuclear tests and rocket launches. Last week, the U.N. Security Council called on members to “redouble their sanction efforts.”

“The sanction resolutions of the U.N. Security Council are illegal criminal documents,” Pang Kwang Hyok, vice director of the department of international organizations at the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the APTN crew in Pyongyang.

“These resolutions determined that our nuclear tests and satellite launches pose threats to international peace and security, but then the problem is why has the U.N. Security Council never taken issue with the nuclear tests and satellite launches conducted by other countries?” Pang said.

Pang repeated the North’s claim that sanctions won’t stop Pyongyang from developing its nuclear arsenal. “I can state that it is a complete miscalculation to think that any sanctions or pressure can have any effect on us,” he said.

[AP]

Top US diplomat to the UN visits North Korean defector in Seoul

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The top U.S. diplomat to the United Nations, Ambassador Samantha Power, visited with a North Korean defector-activist at his home in Seoul.

On Monday, the ambassador met with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, and later called on defector Jung Gwang-il, who left North Korea in 2004 after his release from Yodok prison camp after serving 3 years there.

Since resettling in South Korea, Jung and his organization No Chain has launched campaigns to infiltrate North Korea with CDs and flash drives containing South Korean television shows, Hollywood films and other information that is banned by the Kim Jong Un regime.

In a message on Twitter, Power called Jung “heroic” for “smuggling” information on democracy into North Korea.

[UPI]

Laos a remote battleground for the Koreas

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“North Korea has had fairly close relations with Laos for several decades. They’re both countries that [are] at least nominally socialist or communist states,” says Sokeel Park, research director for Liberty in North Korea, a South Korean organization that assists North Korean refugees.

To find evidence of Laos’ longstanding ties to North Korea, look no further than the dining establishments. Laos hosts a North Korean-run restaurant in the heart of Vientiane, the capital of Laos. These North Korean restaurants are part of the regime’s money-making operations, a way for Pyongyang to earn hard currency abroad, since sanctions have increasingly cut it off from the rest of the world.

Laos is also one of the countries North Korean defectors sometimes pass through on their way to a final destination, like South Korea. They know …. Laos is willing to look the other way.

But in recent months, South Korea has stepped up efforts to drive a wedge between Laos and North Korea. South Korea has been sending diplomats, increasing communication and signed a new military-to-military agreement. All in hopes Laos will get tougher on its North Korean partner.

“We think Laos and other countries previously friendly with North Korea have turned around considerably after the U.N. sanctions went into effect, and that they’re now supporting South Korea’s policies,” says South Korea’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Cho June-hyuck.

[NPR]

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.

North Korea carries out biggest ever nuclear test

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The United States condemns North Korea’s Friday nuclear test “in the strongest possible terms as a grave threat to regional security and to international peace and stability,” President Barack Obama said in a statement.

North Korea said it has hit the button on its fifth and potentially most powerful nuclear test Friday morning, claiming to have successfully detonated a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on ballistic rockets. State media said the test would enable North Korea to produce “a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power.”

A blast detected in North Korea around 9 a.m. local time (8:30 p.m. ET) is estimated to have had the explosive power of 10 kilotons, almost twice as large as its most recent test in January, said Kim Nam-wook of South Korea’s Meteorological Administration. (By comparison, the nuclear bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima in World War II yielded about 15 kilotons.)

South Korea, Japan and China condemned the test, saying it was a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions. The Security Council plans to hold an emergency meeting on the issue Friday, a senior US official and a UN official said.

Seismic activity was detected Friday morning near Punggye-ri — the same location as four other tests. The US Geological Survey reported a 5.3-magnitude earthquake but later termed it an explosion.

Though North Korea has continued to improve its nuclear and missile capabilities, it has yet to pair the two successfully. But concern has been growing that the country is testing weapons at an unprecedented pace this year, CNN international correspondent Paula Hancocks said.

The test is another slap in the face to the North’s chief ally China which has been under pressure to rein in its behavior, and diminishes any chance of a resumption of six-country talks on North Korea’s nuclear program.

[CNN/AFP]