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South Korea and the power of words

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Consider how many verbal red lines South Korea’s president stomped across Tuesday when she let fly against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

She warned, in the bluntest possible way, of the authoritarian North’s worst nightmare–“regime collapse.” She invoked the North Korean leader’s “extreme reign of terror.” Extraordinarily, President Park Geun-hye even used Kim’s name three times in her speech to parliament, something usually avoided at her level.

These words signal a tough new stance from South Korea in an already anxious standoff that began with North Korea’s nuclear test last month.

To make the combination of jabs sting even more, Park’s comments came on the birthday of Kim’s late dictator father, Kim Jong Il, a revered national holiday in the North. Happy birthday, Kim family.

The brusque tone of Park’s comments directly challenge the powerful, ubiquitous North Korean propaganda machine’s portrayal of the dictators who have run the country since its founding in 1948 as infallible and able to stand up to the vicious enemies that surround the tiny, proud North.

Any high-level talk of regime collapse by the conservative president of rival South Korea–and by the daughter of one of the North’s most hated enemies, late South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee–amounts to fighting words.

As always, the animosity, both between the Koreas and within divided South Korea, also points to a bitter truth at the heart of the divided peninsula. Both authoritarian Pyongyang and democratic Seoul cherish the notion of eventual reunification; each, however, sees that new single Korea with its own government in charge.

[AP]

North Korean Groundhog Day

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Unacceptable. Won’t be tolerated. Serious consequences. Those are just a handful of the scolding phrases uttered over the past two decades at every bend on North Korea’s road to becoming a nuclear state to its more recent advances in weapons and missile technology.

There have been sanctions designed to stop North Korea from acquiring weapons technology and conventional arms, sanctions to block its ability to move money around the world and sanctions to prevent the ruling Kim family and its cronies from getting personal watercraft and fancy watches.

The United Nations was already considering a new round of measures to punish Pyongyang for its fourth nuclear test, conducted last month, when leader Kim Jong Un ordered the latest launch of a long-range rocket thought to be part of his country’s ballistic missile program.

Denunciations of North Korea’s behavior and pleas for China–a veto-wielding member of the U.N. Security Council–to get tough on the regime followed immediately, prompting a familiar sense of deja vu.

Although sanctions have no doubt made it harder for Pyongyang to do business, they clearly have not forced the regime to change its behavior or prevented significant advances in the North’s nuclear weapons program. Indeed, no matter how strong any sanctions may be, they count for almost nothing if China is not on board.

[Washington Post]

Why cracking down on North Korea is difficult

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Cracking down on Pyongyang is much tougher than it sounds. Here’s why.

1. Sanctions – Much of the talk about North Korean sanctions comes from Seoul and Washington, but it’s Beijing that holds most of the cards. While additional sanctions will hurt, North Korea has long been economically insulated by its relationship with China, its northern neighbor and main trade partner, which fears that strict sanctions could undermine the Pyongyang government, unleashing chaos. While North Korea’s economic isolation and the international financial system make it tricky to identify sanction targets and prove violations, new US legislation could hit companies in China that deal with the North, including those that buy its main exports — coal and minerals.

2. Diplomacy – Is North Korea a nuclear state? That question has largely paralyzed major diplomatic efforts on the Korean Peninsula for years. The main diplomatic forum to try to get Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program, the so-called six-party talks, hasn’t met since 2008. Some in the international community now believe that North Korea will never abandon its nuclear program, and say the only way to negotiate with the North is to accept it as a nuclear power and work on a freeze, and then gradual arms reductions. But with Washington steadfastly refusing to accept North Korea as a nuclear state — and North Korea steadfastly insisting it is one — diplomacy remains frozen.

3. Military response – What about simply erasing North Korea’s weapons programs, launching missiles to destroy its weapons facilities? Since the 1950s, South Korea and the United States have wrestled — both internally and sometimes with each other — over how to respond to North Korean aggressions. Again and again, the decision has been made to avoid military action. The immense danger on the Korean Peninsula is that any military response from the South could quickly spiral into all-out war. And with nearly half of South Korea’s 50 million people living in or around Seoul — just 50 kilometers (35 miles) from the border and within range of the North’s artillery batteries —— Pyongyang could inflict immense damage on its rival in just minutes. The potential risks are simply too high.

[Times of India]

Defiant North Korean animosity toward America

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The United States and Japan have already announced plans for new sanctions over North Korea’s recent nuclear test and rocket launch, and the U.N. Security Council is likely to deliver more soon. Cross-border tensions with Seoul are escalating quickly and even China is starting to sound more like an angry neighbor than a comrade-in-arms.

But with a storm brewing all around them, North Koreans have their own take on things — and it’s decidedly unapologetic.

Pyongyang started off the new year with what it claims was its first hydrogen bomb test and followed that up with the launch of a satellite on a rocket. When Seoul responded by closing down an industrial park that is the last symbol of cooperation between the two rivals, Pyongyang lashed back, expelling all South Koreans from the site just north of the Demilitarized Zone and putting it under military control.

Each move brought a new round of international outrage. But ask a North Korean what’s going on and the reply is swift, indignant and well-practiced. It’s America’s fault.

“It’s not right for the U.S. to tell our country not to have nuclear bombs,” Pak Mi Hyang, a 22-year-old children’s camp worker, told The Associated Press as she walked with a friend near Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang on Sunday. “The U.S. has a lot of them and tells us not to have any. It’s not fair. We’ve been living with sanctions for a long time and we are not afraid.”

“We have a lot of hatred toward Americans,” Pak said, politely, before walking on.

But anti-U.S. sentiment in this country does run deep, for good reason. That is partly because the relentless propaganda that depicts Washington — which has made no secret of its desire for regime change — as its biggest existential threat. But it also reflects the brutality of the Korean War, which left millions of Koreans dead and most of North Korea’s cities and industrial base in ruins. Though called the “Forgotten War” in America, it is anything but forgotten in North Korea. And since the 1950-53 war ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty, the U.S. is still technically and literally “the enemy.”

[AP]

One of many opinions on North Korea

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An excerpt of a CounterPunch article by Winslow Myers, author of “Living Beyond War:

“As North Korea dug tunnels at its nuclear test site last fall, watched by American spy satellites, the Obama administration was preparing a test of its own in the Nevada desert. A fighter jet took off with a mock version of the nation’s first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, it was designed with problems like North Korea in mind: Its computer brain and four maneuverable fins let it zero in on deeply buried targets like testing tunnels and weapon sites. And its yield, the bomb’s explosive force, can be dialed up or down depending on the target, to minimize collateral damage.” —The New York Times, January 10, 2016

Is there no bottom to the depth of our hypocrisy, we masters of war and merchants of death? We whited wraiths who grind the faces of the poor, who tax them to pay for world-destroying weapons to “pacify” millions across the waters who are more desperate than our own poor?

By what logic do we assume we are one jot or tittle different from or better than the North Koreans? What makes our own arrogant and pompous leaders one whit less adolescent than theirs? We are subject like the North Koreans to the same self-perpetuating paranoia, the same lack of moral imagination, the same suppression of truth-telling, the same wildly unnecessary secrets and lies, the same demagogic rationalizations of the status quo, the same folly of an endless arms race, the same nuclear dictatorship that leaves citizens without a voice when world-ending decisions are made.   Read more

Charity sneaking spy equipment into North Korea endangers Christians worldwide

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Was a Christian non-governmental organization funded by the Pentagon, with Congress fully briefed on the plan, used to smuggle spy equipment into North Korea?

The story goes something like this: in 2004 the Pentagon, fired up by the need to “protect the country” post 9/11, was keen on muscling in on the CIA’s virtual monopoly on strategic intelligence collection, including on North Korea.

[Devised was] a scheme to smuggle electronic monitoring equipment and other spyware into top priority target North Korea. … A religious charity called Humanitarian International Services Group (HISG) was developed [to enable] the smuggling of monitoring equipment into North Korea under cover of shipments of used clothing.

The HISG charity was funded by the Pentagon to the tune of an estimated $15 million during the course of the operation. In a test run the HISG charity managed to successfully conceal a large number of Bibles in a hidden compartment at the bottom of a shipping container topped up with used winter clothing, a highly prized commodity for starving and freezing North Koreans.

It is reported that short wave radios and some electronic devices intended to monitor nuclear programs as well as interfere with North Korean military communications were indeed smuggled into the country by unwitting Christian missionaries, aid workers, and Chinese smugglers, but whether they provided any critical intelligence is unclear. The operation continued to run during the Obama administration, finally winding down in 2013. While it is certain that George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew of and approved the operation, it is not known if either the Bush or Obama White Houses had explicit knowledge of it.

The United States government does in fact impose a ban on recruiting certain categories of individuals as spies. Clergymen are off limits partly for ethical reasons but more because the exposure of such a relationship would be devastating both to the religious organization itself and to the United States government. Use of the U.S. taxpayer-funded Peace Corps is also banned because exploiting it would potentially turn its volunteers into targets for terrorists.

[Read full American Conservative article by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer]

Envoys for six-party talks gather in Seoul

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Top nuclear envoys for six-party talks to dismantle the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)’s nuclear program gather in Seoul this week to discuss cooperation in Northeast Asian region.

Top delegates to the six-way dialogue from China, the United States, Russia and Japan will take part in the multilateral forum on the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative. Attending the forum, the second after last year’s first round, will be Chinese vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin, Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister Igor Margulov, U.S. special representative for DPRK policy Sung Kim, and Kimihiro Ishikane, recently appointed director-general for the Japanese foreign ministry’s Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau.

The South Korean foreign ministry asked the DPRK’s counterpart to participate in the multilateral forum, but there has been no response delivered from Pyongyang.

[Xinhua]

Comparing North Korean and British Birthday Celebrations

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“It was a birthday celebration, but it felt more like a cult meeting in adoration of the leader. Row upon row of soldiers and civilians … marched in a minutely choreographed formation for two hours,” reported the BBC during a recent report from North Korea.

But the accompanying video does not pan over lavish celebrations held in Pyongyang to mark the 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party. Instead it has been dubbed over London‘s flag-waving birthday celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II, the UK’s unelected head of state.

“A signal of unity, fearsome missiles means they [are] ready to fight any kind of war,” the BBC’s Seoul correspondent Stephen Evans goes on to say in the BBC clip … But Evans’ voice-over fits just as comfortably with footage of a flyover by the Red Arrows – the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team who are regularly deployed on big national occasions, peppering London’s sky in patriotic red, white and blue smoke.

But the video mashup – first uploaded to YouTube last week – is a humorous take on the UK’s fascination with North Korea, while showing up how the country’s media are seemingly blinded to our own national eccentricities. Of course, the comparison is crude: the UK is a healthy democracy whilst the DPRK has only known leaders from one adulated family, the Kims.

In the YouTube edit, adoring citizens are shown singing and waving the union jack in front of the Queen and her offspring, while the voice-over describes footage of North Koreans celebrating under the watchful (and forceful) eye of their authoritarian government.

“It does arguably highlight an uncomfortable truth about idolization,” wrote the Independent.

[Read full Guardian article]

North Korean students desperate to connect with outside world

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Four years ago journalist Suki Kim travelled to North Korea where she would spend months teaching English to university students from the families of the elite. She documented her time there and was unsettled by just how pervasive the influence of the North Korean government is. She found students cut off from the outside world and fearful when they accidently let on that they knew anything about life beyond their home country.

Excerpts from an interview with Mark Colvin of Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

SUKI KIM: I ate every meal with my students, three times a day. And their knowledge is incredibly limited only about the ‘Great Leader’ and also everybody’s watching everyone, so even if they did know some things that they’re not supposed to know, they can’t ever show it.

MARK COLVIN: There’s a moment when one of them tells you he loves to sing rock and roll songs, and then what happens?

SK: He just stopped, you know. He just lowered his face and he looked around instantly to see who might have heard him because there, everybody’s watching everyone. And the pure fear that I saw on his face. … normally they’re supposed to say they only sing songs about the ‘Great Leader’ or about friendship.

MC: And they had access to computers but no access the outside world, only a sort of intranet rather than an internet.

SK: Right, they thought the internet was intranet. By the end of my stay, not all of them realized, but some of them realized there was some difference. … And these were the students of science and technology.

MC: And there was an extraordinary moment where you actually showed them a couple of Western movies. First of all, how were you allowed to do that?

SK: Well, we were allowed one movie a semester, which was meant to be Narnia, and Narnia was actually rejected by the North Korean side because they thought that Narnia was chosen for a religious connotation.

MC: A Christian allegory.

SK: Right, well the school was set up by evangelical Christians. So they had presented that movie as an option, but the school rejected that. Amazingly my students knew what Harry Potter was  [as] it was mentioned in the text book as something incredibly popular in the rest of the world. So … I was allowed to show that to one group of my students and … I thought they would be amazed by the special effects actually. I’d been teaching essay writing to my students which ended up being really impossible because essays are about actually coming up with your own argument and proving it with evidence, which is critical thinking, and they really couldn’t do it. So essay became this headache classroom lesson. And in that movie Harry Potter there’s a scene where Hermione says, I have to write an essay for Professor Snape’s class, and she rolls her eyes, and they realized that she also didn’t like writing essays. And my students really connected with that moment and they couldn’t believe there was a girl outside in the outside world who also were writing essays. So I think that moment was really special and also heartbreaking for me, realizing that’s what they really want, as 19 year old kids, to connect with the outside world, which their country will never let them.

S. Korean girl bands used for North Korean psychological warfare

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The South Korean Defense Ministry is apparently considering the use of songs and music videos by manufactured girl bands such as Girls’ Generation, Wonder Girls, After School, Kara and 4minute in so-called psychological warfare against North Korea.

An official in charge of psy ops at the Joint Chiefs of Staff said … the content of propaganda broadcasts will not be limited to girl bands.

The JCS official said he is unsure how effective the work of girl bands will be. But the revealing outfits worn by the performers and their provocative dances could have a considerable impact on North Korean soldiers.

[Chosun Ilbo]