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North Korea’s latest threatened US attack

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On Monday, South Korea and Washington launched an annual joint military drill that Pyongyang routinely describes as a rehearsal for an invasion. In response, North Korean officials have leveled serious threats against the United States. RT reports that a spokesman for North Korea’s National Defense Commission warned that it had weapons “unknown to the world” that made it an “invincible power,” while the state news agency KCNA warned that “if [the] United States wants their mainland to be safe” they should end the military exercises.

Why don’t we take threats from North Korea seriously? Part of it is a simple boy-who-cried-wolf situation. North Korea has threatened to attack the United States many, many times before. Here’s just a short list:

  • In May, Park Yong Chol, director of North Korea’s Institute for Research into National Reunification, told CNN that the North has the capability to strike the United States with a nuclear missile, and would do so if the U.S. “forced their hand.”
  • In February, officials warned that North Korea would cause the “final ruin of the US” with its “precision and diversified nuclear striking means.”
  • In 2014, following an alleged North Korean cyberattack on Sony Pictures, a North Korean official threatened attacks on  “the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland” if the United States retaliated.
  • In 2013, North Korea warned it could attack Guam, Hawaii and the U.S. mainland with rockets.
  • In 2009, North Korea announced that it had “tremendous military muscle and its own method of strike able to conquer any targets in its vicinity at one stroke or hit the U.S. on the raw, if necessary.”
  • In 2005, a North Korean official said that if war broke out, the country would “first of all strike all bases of US imperialist aggressors and turn them into a sea of fire.”
  • In 2002, following their inclusion in President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman warned that “the option to ‘strike’ impudently advocated by the U.S. is not its monopoly” and that North Korea could “mercilessly wipe out the aggressors.”

Most experts still argue that a North Korean nuclear strike remains extremely unlikely. “There is a near zero chance of a premeditated North Korean nuclear attack,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told NK News earlier this year, though Kimball added that a miscalculation by either side could pose a serious risk.

[Washington Post]

Jangmadang Sedae: The black-market generation of North Korea

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Yeonmi Park’s family paid around 3,000 North Korean won for a pack of DVDs that contained a bootleg of Titanic. In the early 2000s, she remembers, that was the cost of several pounds of rice in her home city of Hyesan—a significant sacrifice in a starving country.

But of all the tween girls who became obsessed with the star-crossed romance of Jack and Rose, Park was one of the very few who saw it as downright revolutionary. “In North Korea they had taught us that you die for the regime. In this movie it was like, whoa, he’s dying for a girl he loves,” she says. “I thought, how can anyone make this and not be killed?”

Titanic was hardly Park’s only foreign-­video experience. Her mother sold DVDs. Her family would put its tapes and discs in a plastic bag and bury it beneath a potted plant to hide it from the police.

But of all those illegal encounters with foreign culture, Titanic was somehow the film that made Park ask herself questions about freedom and the outside world. “It made me feel like something was off with our system,” she says in fluent English, which she perfected by watching the entire run of Friends dozens of times.

Park escaped from North Korea in 2007. Now a 21-year-old activist based in Seoul, she’s part of what’s known in Korea as the jangmadang sedae: the black-market generation.

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Mideast company fires North Koreans citing labor exploitation

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A construction company in Qatar has fired 90 North Korean laborers — nearly half of its entire North Korean workforce — for breaching its labor regulations.

The decision by Qatar’s Construction Development Company (CDC) came after repeated violations of local laws and regulations by the workers and inhumane treatment of the workers by their supervisors, according to the minutes of a meeting between representatives of the company and North Korean officials that was exclusively obtained by the VOA Korean Service.

“The Korean supervisors responsible for the well-being of their workers have been continuously forcing them to work more than 12 hours a day. The food provided to their workforce is below standards. Site health and safety procedures are ignored regularly,” said one representative of the company, according to the document.

The company had initially sought to dismiss all the North Korean workers, but later reduced the number of workers to be fired at the request of North Korean officials.

CDC builds luxury hotels and government facilities in Qatar, with its annual revenue amounting to $300 million.

Currently, there are about 3,000 North Korean laborers in Qatar. It is estimated that some 50,000 North Koreans are working in 16 countries around the world.

[VoA]                                                                                Read more on the subject

The jangmadang market system of North Korea

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An informative yet entertaining new book, “North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors” by journalists Daniel Tudor and James Pearson is exactly what one would want from people who know a few of the country’s secrets. It reads like a CIA fact sheet mixed with juicy anecdotes—and the authors have reassured readers that everything in it has been verified by three sources.

“The main cause of North Korea’s recent social change is actually a tragic one: the famine of the mid 1990s,” the authors write. That famine, which they estimate caused at least 700,000 people to die from starvation, gutted the control Pyongyang and the government had on the country as a whole. The reason is that when the government could no longer feed its citizens, North Koreans turned to a “quasi-capitalist market economy” to feed themselves. This undermined not only the power of the state, which lost a major source of its power (the collection and redistribution of food), but simultaneously opened up the country to a form of capitalism reliant on the outside world.

In the aftermath of the famine, an illegal but countenanced market system called the jangmadang took root. Under jangmadang, members of a family, usually married women who are exempt from state-mandated work units, sell a variety of goods. These can be family possessions, DVD players, phones, foreign currency, and so on. Families rely on income from these markets, as the official and unofficial exchange rates with foreign currencies have imploded, and the government has left much of the country outside of Pyongyang to fend for itself. The markets are so ingrained in society, the authors claim, that families not known to engage are often suspect because it is assumed they are obtaining wealth from defector relatives. One side effect of these markets is that women are often bringing home more money than their husbands, which undermines the traditionally patriarchal society.

The new North Korea depicted by the authors is dominated by this semi-capitalist form of life, and while most would imagine that would be difficult given the dictatorship’s image as a suffocating leviathan, the country has a new king—cash. Throughout the book, the authors stress that nearly every crime, from political to petty, can be resolved with a bribe. Get caught trying to cross the border? Pay the guard a bribe. Caught with foreign DVDs? Pay the inspector a bribe. Need anything? Pay a bribe.

[The Daily Beast]       Read more

How North Koreans make money

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A lawless form of marketization has replaced the iron rice bowl of work in state companies, and many North Koreans think in terms of trade and profit.

There are a variety of ways one can make money in North Korea. For government officials (whose official salaries are neglible) it is access to things like the diplomatic pouch (for smuggling), the army (which is used more for construction projects than fighting), foreign North Korean-owned restaurants, weapons deals, or food rations that can be turned into cash.

For the average citizen, the entrepreneurial spirit is pretty astounding. In various neighborhoods in every major city, the authors claim, there is a middle-aged woman who rents apartments for sex by the hour. “Her preferred time will be in the afternoon, when her children are at school, and her husband is at work,” they write.

Or one can learn to perform a plepharoplasty, which is the surgery that gives people fold lines along the eyelids. “Those who do it well,” the authors note, “will benefit from word of mouth, and be able to make a good living.”

There are also those who have managed to get a Chinese phone that connects to the Chinese network. “Over half of those who have made calls out of North Korea with Chinese phones do not actually possess one themselves,” the authors explain. Instead there are phone owners who make their living renting out time on their illegal phones.

“North Korea’s new ‘system’ is unfair and Darwinian,” the authors write, “but at least gives the average person a sense of agency.”

[The Daily Beast]          Read more

Dispelling the myth of a brainwashed North Korean populace

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Dispelling the myth of a brainwashed populace is one of the main goals of the book “North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors”.

Despite horrific prison camps, lack of Internet, and a national fabric called “vinylon,” most people still take the risk to watch a foreign film, regularly consume South Korea pop culture, party, and even argue with the police.

The authors claim that, contrary to what one might expect, young people actually look forward to that time when they are sent away for compulsory agricultural labor because “it is an opportunity to party every night and meet members of the opposite sex.”

All of this, of course, raises the question of the country’s future. The authors Tudor and Pearson spend a chunk of the book outlining and explaining the North Korean power structure largely orchestrated by Kim Jong Il, from the Kim family itself to the shadow government dubbed—with true Communist rhetorical flourish—the Organization and Guidance Department.

Despite the slight erosion of central power, the authors don’t really think the regime is going away anytime soon. In fact, the authors compare the current shift to that which took place in the 16th and 17th centuries in Korea. At that time, the kingdom was under assault from both the Japanese and the Chinese, which partially cleared the decks among the ruling aristocracy and allowed the rise of a new group of merchants. Instead of trying to take over, however, the merchant chose to marry aristocratic families that had fallen on hard times, giving the new money status and the old fresh cash and blood.

Today, the authors contend, “The new, rising capitalist class generally seeks to join the existing elite through marriage and business ties, rather than undermine it.” But then again, this is North Korea, so who really knows what will happen.

[The Daily Beast]

Addressing North Korean clichés and half-truths: Ignorance about the World

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Excerpts from “North Korea: Markets and Military Rule” by Hazel Smith, as printed in The Guardian:

Perhaps the most pervasive myth is that North Koreans are ignorant of the world outside, and believe everything the government tells them. This is extended by the assumption that North Koreans are educationally backward, and lack the sophistication to understand the world beyond their borders.

North Koreans are anything but ignorant. With almost universal literacy, and despite economic deterioration, school enrolment – for girls and boys – remains near universal. About 35% of high school graduates went on to university education in 2002.

North Koreans are indeed subject to a relentless socialization campaign that glorifies the exploits of the Kim family and inflicts sanctions on those who criticize the country’s rulers. Yet despite the best efforts of the North Korean government, the picture of the DPRK as an absolutely closed society is far from the truth today.

The North Korean government works hard to prevent the free flow of information into the country. Students studying in Pyongyang have access to the major state libraries in the capital, which contain foreign books and films, but are only permitted to access these resources if they can demonstrate a “need” to do so, while access to the internet is limited.

However, a small number of students study abroad – about 500 were in Asia and Europe in 2002; in 2012, 96 North Korean students were studying at China’s Northeastern University alone.

Chinese traders and local trading networks have also provided routes for non-state sanctioned information for nearly a quarter of a century. Many Chinese traders and visitors are of Korean ethnicity, and three of North Korea’s north-eastern provinces border the Chinese prefecture of Yanbian, which is populated by ethnic Koreans of Chinese nationality.

Pyongyang’s population of three million frequently come into contact with foreigners in the service sector – hotels, shops, bars – and workplaces where foreigners also work. Outside Pyongyang, the port towns of Nampo, Chongjin and Rajin also host foreigners; so too has the southern tourist development zone of Kumgangsan, and the South Korea-sponsored free-trade zone of Kaesong.

It’s true that short-term visitors to the country are carefully “minded” by accompanying North Korean officials, but long-term residents have more freedom. They are permitted to obtain North Korean driving licenses, learn Korean and freely operate without permanent watch.

Addressing North Korean clichés and half-truths: The Omniscient Criminal State

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Excerpts from “North Korea: Markets and Military Rule” by Hazel Smith, as printed in The Guardian:

North Korea is, allegedly, a criminal state for three reasons: firstly, because state representatives are alleged to systematically abuse diplomatic immunity to smuggle counterfeit currency, narcotics, counterfeit cigarettes, endangered species and other illicit goods across borders. Secondly, because state-owned companies manufacture counterfeit currency, cigarettes and narcotics for sale abroad.

Thirdly, this activity is apparently directed by the North Korean leadership for personal gain. These criminal acts, it is argued, should be understood as state-sponsored, and are managed by a shadowy party organization called Bureau 39. But the caricature of an omniscient state guided by a leader sitting in central Pyongyang planning day-to-day how to maneuver 24 million people to commit criminal activity for his sole benefit misses the point.

The US government and international media reports derive from a small number of US government publications that are in turn largely founded on allegations from defectors and unnamed US officials.

Such reports acknowledge the tentative nature of the evidence: “Data should be considered a ‘far cry’ from anything that might be remotely considered as evidence in a US court of law”, an official US report said on the DPRK’s alleged drug trafficking.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the vehemence in the west’s belief of North Korean state criminality, there have been only a few international court cases where North Korean nationals have been charged and found guilty of producing counterfeit goods or smuggling.

The cartoon picture of the country obscures important changes in North Korean society, and handicaps our understanding of their political consequences.

North Korean merchant shipping fleets mask North Korean weapons trade

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North Korea has developed sophisticated ways to circumvent United Nations sanctions, including the suspected use of its embassies to facilitate an illegal trade in weapons, according to an United Nations report.

North Korea has also gone to great lengths to mask the origin of its merchant shipping fleet by reflagging and renaming ships, the report said, particularly after the introduction of tightened U.N. sanctions in early 2013 that followed the country’s third nuclear test. Most of the registered owners of the ships are small companies that rarely own more than five vessels, meaning Pyongyang is able to keep its fleet running if a ship or shipping company is seized or has its assets frozen.

The report said North Korea was also making use of more complicated financial countermeasures and techniques “pioneered by drug-trafficking organizations” that made tracking the isolated state’s purchase of prohibited goods more difficult.

Under the myriad U.N. sanctions, North Korea is banned from shipping and receiving cargo related to its nuclear and missile programs. The importation of some luxury goods is also banned, along with the illicit transfer of bulk cash.

[Reuters]

Mexico holds North Korean freighter over UN weapons sanctions

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A 430-foot-long North Korean freighter Mu Du Bong was riding high in the water when the vessel slammed into a coral reef in Mexican waters in the Gulf of Mexico last July 14, thudding to a halt. Salvage vessels pulled the freighter off the reef 12 days later and brought it to port in Tuxpan, where it’s been idle for nine months, moored to a wharf on the Tuxpan River. North Korea has declined to repatriate the 33 crew members.

Arms-trafficking practices led the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on a North Korean concern, Ocean Maritime Management Co. Ltd., that counts the Mu Du Bong among its 14 oceangoing freighters. Another of the company’s vessels was intercepted in Panama nearly two years ago, its cargo holds piled high with sacks of Cuban sugar. When inspectors removed the sacks, they discovered two MiG-21 fighter jets, 15 jet engines and radar control systems for missile launches. Cuba claimed the war materiel was being sent to North Korea to be refurbished and was to be returned.

“Thus far, 13 of the 14 vessels controlled by OMM have been renamed, their ownership transferred to other single ship-owner companies . . . and vessel management transferred to two main companies,” said a preliminary U.N. report dated Feb. 23.

William J. Newcomb, a visiting scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University who’s a former member of the U.N. Security Council’s panel of experts on North Korea sanctions, noted that the Mu Du Bong’s travels were similar to the activities of the Chong Chon Gang before it was caught carrying Cuban weapons. “It had all the earmarks of an arms transfer,” he said.

[McClatchy]