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Merrill Newman home from North Korea

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An 85-year-old American man detained and later let go by North Korean authorities described his time in custody as comfortable.

Merrill Newman, who returned to the United States this weekend, told the Santa Cruz Sentinel in California that he was kept in a hotel room, not a jail cell, and fed traditional Korean food during his detention. If anything, he was “bored,” the newspaper reported he said.

For weeks, the North Korean government offered no explanation as to why they were holding Newman. An explanation finally came last month, when state media published and broadcast what they described as the Korean War veteran’s “apology.” The word was written atop the first of four handwritten pages detailing his alleged indiscretions.

When asked about the apology, Newman gave a smirk, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “Obviously, that’s not my English,” he said.

A senior administration official said that Newman’s release was the result of direct contact between Washington and Pyongyang. The official said the North Koreans had told the Obama administration in a telephone call that they were releasing Newman; no explanation was offered.

UN committee slap at North Korea for rights abuses

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A UN General Assembly committee on Tuesday expressed concern about human rights violations in North Korea and 3 other countries.

The North Korean draft resolution expressed “very serious concern at the persistence of continuing reports of systematic, widespread and grave violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.”

The draft resolutions were approved by the 193-nation assembly’s Third Committee, which focuses on human rights, and will be put to formal votes next month in the General Assembly. They are expected to pass with similar support.

The resolutions deepen international pressure and further isolate those states but have no legal consequences.

A North Korean U.N. delegate said that Pyongyang totally rejected the resolution and said “there are no human rights violations in my country as mentioned in this draft resolution. …Regrettably we have not seen a single instance called into question when serious human rights violations are committed by Western countries.”

[Reuters]

Mongolian president stuns North Korea with call for freedom

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Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj stunned North Korean elite students at Kim Il-sung University when he visited Pyongyang last month by telling them, “No tyranny lasts forever.”

According to a transcript of the speech posted on the Mongolian presidential website on Friday, Elbegdorj told the students, “It is the desire of the people to live free that is the eternal power. … Freedom enables every human to discover and realize his or her opportunities and chances for development. This leads a human society to progress and prosperity.”

Elbegdorj told the students, “Mongolia holds dear the fundamental human rights — freedom of expression, right to assembly and the right to live by his or her own choice… Mongols say, ‘better to live by your own choice however bitter it is, than to live by other’s choice, however sweet.'”

He also hinted that the North Korean regime should abandon its nuclear ambitions. “Twenty-one years ago, Mongolia declared herself a nuclear-weapon-free zone,” he said.

He also pointed out that Mongolia scrapped capital punishment in 2009. North Korea still holds public executions.

The Mongolian presidential office said Elbegdorj offered to take questions after his speech but none were asked, although he received “lengthy applause.”

Elbegdorj is a former journalist who founded Mongolia’s top privately-owned newspaper, Ardchilal, in 1990. That same year he played a pivotal role in democratic protests ending communist rule in his country. He became a lawmaker and, in May 2009, Mongolia’s fifth president.

Contrary to expectations, Elbegdorj did not meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during his trip from Oct. 28 and 31, and the publication of the speech prompts speculation that his remarks sent Kim Jong-Un into a sulk.

[Chosun Ilbo]

S. Korean returnees had hoped for better lives in North Korea

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Six South Koreans, aged between 27 and 67 recently repatriated from North Korea, had sneaked into the North in search of better lives but ended up detained for up to 45 months for illegal entry, Seoul officials said Monday.

South Koreans defecting to impoverished, totalitarian North Korea are rare. In contrast, more than 25,000 North Koreans have fled to the South for political and economic reasons since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea sent back the six men and a woman’s corpse on Friday in an unusual action seen as an attempt to improve strained ties between the rival countries.

A South Korean security official said Monday that the men told investigators they entered North Korea between 2009 and 2012 by walking over frozen rivers from China, or swimming after jumping off a Chinese cruise ship on a border river.

The men had vague hopes that they could have better lives in North Korea after suffering business failures and family troubles, or engaging in pro-North Korea activities in South Korea, said the official, who requested anonymity because an investigation is still under way.

The six men were separately detained in North Korea for 14-45 months for questioning. One said he was constantly held in solitary confinement, while another said he didn’t receive medical treatment for a kidney stone, according to the South Korean official.

South Korean authorities are seeking a warrant to formally arrest the six men for a more thorough investigation, the official said. In South Korea, anyone who defects to North Korea can be punished by up to 10 years in prison under the country’s anti-North security law.

[Wichita Eagle] 

The Role of Women in North Korea

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Kim Il Sung’s communist regime passed a gender-equality law two years before it enacted a constitution. In 1965 almost 55% of the labor force were women, thanks in part to the carnage of the Korean war in the early 1950s. But Sonia Ryang, an anthropologist at the University of Iowa, points out that the formal commitment to gender equality, transplanted from the Soviets, did not take root. Kim was soon urging women to carry the double burden of production and reproduction, fulfilling their output quotas and also raising “the successors to our revolutions and the reserves of communist builders”. Visitors noted that at home the typical North Korean male did not lift a finger to help.

The breakdown of North Korea’s planned economy in the mid-1990s thrust women into a new role. Men had to show up at their assigned work units, but the state turned a blind eye to women who did not report for duty. This allowed women to build the informal market economy that partially replaced the collapsing planned economy. Women became retailers, petty traders and peddlers. In a survey of North Korean defectors by Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, 76% of the women had been involved in trading before they left, compared with 63% of the men. Almost half the women said they had got all their income from the market.

Those who engage in these markets still run risks. The government has criminalized a range of market activities. Those convicted face up to two years in a so-called “labor-training” facility, which are grim but less harsh than the political prison camps for which North Korea is famous. Of the women who left after 2005, 95% report paying bribes to stay out of trouble.

Women’s lives have become less regimented but no less arduous. They are now often the breadwinners, and men are doing more housework, says Hazel Smith of Cranfield University in her forthcoming book on North Korea. But as the market economy has grown, she finds, the biggest cut has gone to the Chinese trading networks that span the border, and to the wholesalers with connections in North Korea’s regime. Messrs Noland and Haggard note that as the state has thrust women into the market, “the increasingly male-dominated state preys on the increasingly female-dominated market.”

Drudgery remains the lot of many of North Korea’s women.

[Excerpts from The Economist]

Crystal meth epidemic in North Korea

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Within secretive North Korea, there appears to be an epidemic of crystal meth so widespread that, in some communities, more than 50 per cent of people are users, according to a report released by two Seoul-based academics.

Professor Kim Seok-hyang, of the Department of North Korean Studies at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University, says little is known about the drug’s harmful effects in North Korea, and so many myths have developed about its medical benefits, that parents often give it to their children oblivious to the harm they may be doing. In small doses, crystal meth relieves pain and induces a feeling of euphoria and well-being.

The report, “A New Face of North Korean Drug Use” by Kim and Andrei Lankov, an associate professor at Kookmin University’s College of Social Studies, found that there has been a dramatic upsurge in methamphetamine use in rural northern areas of North Korea since 2005, which, they say, now constitutes an epidemic. The testimony of 21 defectors – combined with official reports from North Korea and China – presents what the academics say is “a worrying picture of escalating drug abuse in what was once one of the world’s most strictly supervised and controlled societies”. The report was written for the academic journal North Korea Review.

Throughout the Korean war and cold war years, soldiers were reportedly fed methamphetamine made in state-run factories to bolster their endurance and help them stay alert for days on end. The practice endured long after the years of direct conflict. North Korea became notorious for its production and distribution of drugs. For decades, defectors have testified that methamphetamine was produced at plants in Hamhung, South Hamgyong province, and Sangwon, near Pyongyang, both for illicit export to China, to generate hard currency, and for officially sanctioned domestic use, largely among the country’s military.

Around 2004, however, everything changed. Either because of a lack of money or in an attempt to clean up the country’s image, production of the drug at government- run pharmaceutical plants was scaled down or stopped altogether – a development that triggered an explosive growth in the number of private “kitchen labs” in Hamhung and other areas. The drug, now being produced on a far greater scale, is being made, it is claimed, by the technicians and scientists who once worked in state factories.

Crystal meth then became popular among professional men in their 30s and 40s who wanted to increase their endurance because of their work or status, testimony suggests. As talk of its medicinal and recreational benefits spread in North Korea, the drug began to be used by the broader population, who reasoned that, if it was being used by rich people, it must be safe and beneficial. Finally, in 2009-10, the habit spread to the young – high school and college students.

Defectors interviewed by the Seoul academics spoke of “at least 50 per cent” of people in some communities in the north of the country as being users. And most people remain convinced of its benefits.

[South China Morning Post]

A brief history of nuclear threat on the Korean peninsula, as viewed by North Koreans

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According to declassified and other US government documents, some released on the 60th-anniversary of the Korean War, the United States has repeatedly pondered the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea.

• The United States introduced nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula as early as 1950.

• During the Korean War, US president Harry Truman announced that the use of nuclear weapons was under active consideration; US Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over Pyongyang; and US commander General Douglas MacArthur planned to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs across the northern neck of the Korean peninsula to block Chinese intervention.

• In the late 1960s, nuclear-armed US warplanes were maintained on 15-minute alert to strike North Korea.

• In 1975, US defense secretary James Schlesinger acknowledged for the first time that US nuclear weapons were deployed in South Korea. Addressing the North Koreans, he warned, “I do not think it would be wise to test (US) reactions.”

• In February 1993, Lee Butler, head of the US Strategic Command, announced the United States was retargeting hydrogen bombs aimed at the old USSR on North Korea (and other targets.) One month later, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

• On July 22, 1993, US president Bill Clinton said if North Korea developed and used nuclear weapons “we would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate. It would mean the end of their country as we know it.”

• In 1995, Colin Powell, who had served as chairman of the US joints chiefs of staff and would later serve as US secretary of state, warned the North Koreans that the United States had the means to turn their country into “a charcoal briquette.”

• Following North Korea’s first nuclear test on October 9, 2006, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice reminded North Korea that “the United States has the will and the capability to meet the full range—and I underscore full range of its deterrent and security commitments to Japan.”

• In April 2010, then US defense secretary Leon Panetta refused to rule out a US nuclear attack on North Korea, saying, “all options are on the table.”

• On February 13, 2013, Panetta described North Korea as “a threat to the United States, to regional stability, and to global security.” He added: “Make no mistake. The US military will take all necessary steps to meet our security commitments to the Republic of Korea and to our regional allies.”

As the North Koreans put it, “no nation in the world has been exposed to the nuclear threat so directly and for so long as the Koreans. … For over half a century since early in the 1950s, the US has turned South Korea into the biggest nuclear arsenal in the Far East, gravely threatening the DPRK through ceaseless maneuvers for a nuclear war. It has worked hard to deprive the DPRK of its sovereignty and its right to exist and develop….thereby doing tremendous damage to its socialist economic construction and the improvement of the standard of people’s living.”

[Excerpt of article by Stephen Gowans]

South Korean killed attempting to cross into North Korea

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South Korean soldiers on Monday shot and killed a man they believed was trying to cross into North Korea at the heavily armed border, officials said.

A man dressed in civilian clothes ignored guards’ warnings to return to South Korea and was shot after he jumped into the Imjin River, which runs through the border. The incident occurred near the western portion of the border in Paju, north of Seoul.

The man was first seen near a wire fence near the river. Border guards told him to turn back, but he ignored them and went into a part of the river where there was no wire fence, the officials said. It was later found that he had tied buoys around himself and was carrying cookies, officials said.

The man’s South Korean passport identified him as Nam Young-ho,  born in 1966, and deported from Japan in June.

South Koreans have previously tried to defect to the impoverished, authoritarian country, but it is rare. North Korea’s state media made no immediate comment about the shooting.

The Spanish aristocrat who works for North Korea

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Alejandro Cao de Benos-north-koreaAlejandro Cao de Benos, 38, is believed to be the only Westerner ever employed by the North Korean government. He’s a Spanish aristocrat, born to a family of landed gentry in northeast Spain, where he agreed to meet NPR for an interview one recent afternoon.

“I consider myself as [much] Spanish as Korean 50-50. This is my country of birth, and North Korea is my country of adoption,” says Cao de Benos, who also goes by the Korean name Cho Son Il, which means “Korea is one.”

For the past 11 years, he has held the title of special delegate for North Korea’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. It’s an unpaid gig. He earns money as an IT consultant, working in the past in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Spanish capital, Madrid. He pays his own way to North Korea, where he works six months a year as a minder for foreign visitors. The rest of the year he gives presentations about North Korea at universities across Europe, and tries to drum up business for the ailing regime. It’s an uphill battle, he admits.

Cao de Benos adopted North Korean ideology as a teenager, after his family fortune was squandered. His grandfather had made a series of bad investments. So his dad went from a nobleman to someone who had to find a job. The family moved to Andalusia, in southern Spain, a socialist stronghold at the time, when he was 15.

“While my friends were interested in football and things like that, I was much more interested in philosophy and politics,” he said. “Obviously first I got knowledge of Marxism and Leninism, but I heard that there was a country which had another kind of socialism another kind of experiment based on their own culture and history and that was North Korea.”

Cao de Benos speaks passionately about what draws him to Pyongyang year after year. He has an apartment there, where he sometimes even celebrates Christmas. “Society and life is completely different. In North Korea, there is no stock market, there is no gambling, there is no prostitution, and there are no drugs. Everybody leads a humble life, but with dignity,” he said. “You see the big difference? I was working in Palo Alto, Calif. and what I witnessed was yes, there are some beautiful houses and people with great cars, but there are a few people taking control over the properties and the companies, and they are the ones getting richer while the majority of the people the workers are getting poorer.”

He also acknowledges seeing a darker side of the isolated Communist country. “I’ve been in Pyongyang without electricity 24 hours [a day] without water,” Cao de Benos recalls. “I’ve been going with my comrades to pick up buckets of water that we will share among six or seven people and I have seen the situation. I have seen the starvation.”

But he blames that on natural disasters and most of all, Western sanctions. He says he believes that North Korean communism if left alone would do justice for a greater number of people than capitalism.

Read full NPR article