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Sugar to North Korea in payment for weapons repairs

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Officials fearing some sort of modern-day Cuban Missile Crisis could only have been relieved to find out that what Cuba describes as an assortment of antique Soviet weapons discovered aboard a North Korean ship are more suited to a Cold War museum than they are to being used as weapons in the 21st century.

Cuba says the weapons, which were en route to North Korea for repairs, are “obsolete.” And experts who identified early Cold War relics like the Soviet-designed SA-2 air defense system among the ship’s cargo say that’s not far from the truth.

“We are talking about really old stuff — that technology was designed in the 1940s and 50s,” said James O’Halloran, editor of Jane’s Land Based Air Defence and Jane’s Strategic Weapon Systems. “Very few countries still employ the SA-2 system as a frontline defensive weapon.”

Cuba requires repairs on old systems like the SA-2, which went out of commission decades ago, and the MiG-21 jet, which was last produced in 1985 and is now mostly kept by long-time Russian allies for spare parts, according to O’Halloran at Jane’s.

In the meantime, experts don’t expect the episode will have a lasting effect diplomatically on either country — North Korea is already “sanctioned to the hilt,” says Mike Elleman, Senior Fellow for Regional Security Cooperation at IISS, and Cuba’s relations with the U.S. are thawing after decades of tension.

The more lasting impression of the raid on ship could, in the end, be the 10,000 tons of brown sugar found on-board the ship. Experts believe the sugar could be Cuban payment to cash-strapped North Korea in exchange for the weapons repairs.

“This will be much ado about nothing, except telling the world just how bad a shape Cuba and North Korea are in today — bartering early Cold War materials for sugar, that speaks volumes,” said Ellemann.

CNN

Mystery of military equipment discovered on North Korean boat

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What was the massive military equipment hidden under hundreds of thousands of sacks of brown sugar on a North Korean boat? Where did it come from? And where was it going before investigators seized the vessel near the Panama Canal?

Hours after Panama said it would ask U.S. and British officials for help solving the puzzle, Cuba gave an answer Tuesday night.

In addition to 10,000 tons of sugar, Cuba’s Foreign Ministry said, the shipment contained “240 metric tons of obsolete defensive weapons” sent to North Korea “to be repaired and returned to Cuba.”

The equipment was manufactured in the mid-20th century and included two anti-aircraft missile systems, nine missiles in parts and spares, two MiG-21 jets and 15 motors for this type of airplane, the foreign ministry said.

Because it is supposedly pursuing nuclear weapons, North Korea is banned by the United Nations from importing and exporting most weapons.

Panamanian investigators are asking the United States and the United Kingdom to send teams to help them identify the weapons, and will invite a special commission from the United Nations to determine whether the shipment violates the organization’s North Korea weapons ban.

Investigators spotted the boat going through the Panama Canal to Havana and then back toward the canal, according to two senior U.S. officials who said the United States had been tracking the ship along with the Panamanians for some time.

CNN

North Korean social media

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In North Korea, where people have almost no Internet contact with the outside world, “North Korean social media” sounds like an oxymoron. But on February 25, Jean H. Lee of the Associated Press became one of the first people to tweet from North Korea when she posted a message on the country’s new 3G wireless network, available only to foreigners.

“Hello world from comms center in ‪#Pyongyang,” she wrote. Lee has since been active from North Korea on Instagram as well, posting snapshots of street scenes, food and government propaganda posters.

Lee is joined in her social media updates from Pyongyang by AP photographer David Guttenfelder, who posts images often to his 71,000 Instagram followers.

As the AP’s bureau chief for both South and North Korea, Lee is the only American news reporter granted regular access to the secretive nation, which she has visited more than 20 times. She offers a rare glimpse of digital life beyond the DMZ.

The country lags behind much of the world when it comes to digital adoption, but there are signs that North Korea is trying to catch up, Lee said. The new Koryolink 3G network — jointly owned by the North Korean government and an Egyptian company — that launched last month marks a shift in policy for Kim Jong Un’s regime, which also has recently begun to allow foreigners to bring their cellphones into the country.

“We are starting to see more openness,” she said. “We’re talking baby steps. They’re a long way from being a free and open society.”

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A glimpse into the North Korean soul

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So bad boy basketball star Dennis Rodman left Pyongyang Friday after stunning the diplomatic world with his basketball diplomacy. Rodman upstages the US State Dept, a US Governor and a top Google executive by being granted exclusive downtime with Kim Jong-un!  After watching an exhibition game with a laughing Kim, dining and drinking with him, even hugging the regime strongman, Rodman offered his home-boy homily and praise for Kim and his father and grandfather.

No other American as far as anyone can tell has met with Kim since he assumed command of North Korea following his father’s death in 2011. (And despite his access to Kim, apparently Rodman will not be debriefed by American diplomats?)

Complicated North Korean politics aside, this encounter does makes one wonder what the North Koreans are really like as people. Simply people. Here’s an interesting perspective by Illya Szilak, written after a visit to the country:

“I joined hundreds of intrepid tourists heading to Pyongyang for Kim Il-sung’s centenary birthday celebration. Most were seeking adventure. I was doing research for my next novel, which uses the ideological conflict between the U.S. and North Korea to explore the construction of national identity.

“Every nation has its mythology – a reason why it is uniquely destined for greatness. For many in the United States, that reason is our Constitution and the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

“The North Koreans also believe in their country’s greatness. Central to their myth is the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung and Juche, his philosophy of militant self-reliance. In North Korea, leader-worship is not a cult of personality – it’s a full-fledged religion. Images of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il are everywhere. Going to the annual art show is like following the Stations of the Cross: Kim Il-sung as a child, Kim Il-sung fighting the Japanese, Kim Jong-il at the factory with the workers. Around the country, their words – common-sense platitudes like “Plant more crops, harvest more rice” – are inscribed like the Ten Commandments on two-ton slabs of rock.

“Judging from her offhand remarks, our local guide, Miss Song, is a true believer. When I question her in private about the repressiveness of the government, she flatly disagrees. Intelligent, educated, friendly, she is not a robot, and she certainly doesn’t act like she is afraid. Trying to put myself in her place, I imagine what it must be like to have your country occupied for 40 years, to be forced to speak another language, even to take a different name. Then the oppressor (Japan) leaves, and two other countries (the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.) come in, and literally divide your country in two.

“Touring the demilitarized zone, with its acres of barbed wire and machine-gun-armed soldiers, I remember that the U.S and North Korea are still at war. No peace agreement was signed, only an armistice. Millions of Koreans died compared with some 36,000 Americans, and every form of industry in North Korea was completely destroyed. The U.S. also contemplated the use of nuclear weapons at the time.

“Why did the U.S. [military troops remain stationed in South Korea] after World War Two? Did we suddenly realize that Korea was a sovereign nation and decide to help the fledgling democracy in the South (which was not actually a democracy)? Did we feel guilty that in 1918 we rebuffed Korean nationalists, who, inspired by our own President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, asked for help against Japan? Or did we think that Korea, situated between China and the Soviet Union, was too strategically and economically important to govern itself?

“Miss Song’s desire to believe in a certain version of history is no different from my own.

“The difference is that I have access to information and experiences that might contradict it, and most North Koreans do not. Without Internet or alternative news sources, unable to travel freely, and with little or no interaction with foreigners, the average person simply has no grounds to question the system, or hope for anything else.”

US missile defense program response to North Korean nuclear test

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North Korea claims it has built a “smaller and light” bomb. If that’s true, Pyongyang is one step closer to developing an atomic warhead small enough to fit atop one of its long-range missiles.

North Korea’s latest nuclear test, coupled with its successful long-range rocket launch in December, is prompting renewed attention to the state of U.S. missile defenses. In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Barack Obama called North Korea’s nuclear test a “provocation” and said the United States is strengthening its missile defense system.

The United States has been working for years to make sure that it will be able to intercept such a missile if one is ever fired at its territory. Outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta referred to about 30 ground-based missile interceptors, almost all of which are deployed in Alaska.

Two Washington-based analysts told VOA they are not sure how effective the interceptors will be. “These interceptors in Alaska and California are believed to have some capability against a rudimentary intercontinental ballistic missile warhead of the kind that you would expect North Korea to have initially,” said Steven Pifer, head of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Pifer said plans are underway to build more missile silos in Alaska. Also, the U.S. Navy has a missile called the SM3 that can intercept short- to medium-range ballistic missiles.

According to James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Obama administration has been focusing on stationing interceptors in northeast Asia to defend against North Korean missiles and conventional shorter-range Chinese missiles. He said the administration also has been working on a defense system in Europe to defend allies, and in the longer run the continental U.S., from Iranian missiles.

Most analysts believe North Korea is several years away from developing a missile that can hit the United States, but that improvements in the missile defense program will remain a top U.S. priority.

[VoA]

North Korea’s third nuclear test

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North Korea drew worldwide condemnation Tuesday after it announced it had successfully conducted its third nuclear test, in direct defiance to U.N. Security Council orders to shut down its atomic activity or face more sanctions and international isolation.

Experts say North Korea’s successful detonation of a miniaturized nuclear device is concerning because it indicates the country may be getting closer to the ability to put a nuclear device on a missile.

North Korea expert Andrei Lankov told Fox News that possession of such a “miniaturized” device would be necessary to create a nuclear warhead. “It shows they are advancing their nuclear technology,” Lankov said. He also noted the significance of the timing of the test, which came just months after North Korea’s successful intercontinental ballistic missile test. “It seems they are very close to being able to put a device on a missile,” Lankov said.

Peter Beck, an expert for Asia Society, tells Fox News the blast appears to be “significantly greater” than North Korea’s past nuclear tests. He, too, said the test “…shows a greater commitment by North Korea to marry the missile and nuclear programs.”

Earlier Tuesday, South Korean, U.S. and Japanese seismic monitoring agencies said they detected an earthquake in North Korea with a magnitude between 4.9 and 5.2.

The timing will be seen as significant. The test came hours before President Obama was scheduled to give his State of the Union speech, a major, nationally televised address. It’s also only days before the Saturday birthday of Kim Jong Un’s father, late leader Kim Jong Il, whose memory North Korean propaganda has repeatedly linked to the country’s nuclear ambitions. This year also marks the 60th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea said the atomic test was merely its “first response” to what it called U.S. threats, and said it will continue with unspecified “second and third measures of greater intensity” if Washington maintains its hostility.

Third North Korea nuclear test imminent

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North Korea has been signaling that a third nuclear test is imminent, and speculation of a major advance has been fueled by the assertion of its top military body, the National Defense Commission, that any test will be of a “higher level”.

Numerous analysts believe this could point to the first-time test of a uranium device. The North’s two previous tests in 2006 and 2009 used plutonium for fissile material. The test will offer a rare chance to gauge where its nuclear program is headed, with most expert attention focused on what type of device is detonated and how.

“It’s not that a uranium test would reflect any great technical achievement,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the non-proliferation program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “But it would confirm what has long been suspected: that the North can produce weapons-grade uranium which doubles its pathways to building more bombs in the future,” Fitzpatrick said.

A basic uranium bomb is no more potent than a basic plutonium one, but the uranium path holds various advantages for the North, which has substantial deposits of uranium ore. North Korea revealed it was enriching uranium in 2010 when it allowed foreign experts to visit a centrifuge facility at its Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Another red flag raised by a uranium device relates to proliferation, according to Paul Carroll, program director at the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation based in California. “Highly enriched uranium is the preferred currency of rogue states or terrorist groups,” Carroll said. “It’s the easiest fissile material to make a crude bomb out of and the technical know-how and machinery for enriching uranium is more readily transferred and sold,” he added.

[Read full article]

Background of the North Korean caste system songbun

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For more than a half-century, a mysterious caste system has shadowed the life of every North Korean. It can decide whether they will live in the gated compounds of the minuscule elite, or in mountain villages where farmers hack at rocky soil with handmade tools. It can help determine what hospital will take them if they fall sick, whether they go to college and, very often, whom they will marry.

It is called songbun, a word that translates as “ingredient” but effectively means “background,” first took shape in the 1950s and ’60s. It was a time when North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, was forging one of the world’s most repressive states and seeking ways to reward supporters and isolate potential enemies.

Historians say songbun was partially modeled on Soviet class divisions, and echoes a similar system that China abandoned in the 1980s amid the growth of the market economy there.

In North Korea, songbun turned a fiercely hierarchical society upside down, pushing peasants to the top of the caste ladder; aristocrats and landlords toward the bottom. The very top was reserved for those closest to Kim: his relatives and guerrillas who had fought with him against Korea’s Japanese occupiers.

[Huffington Post]

North Korean caste system part of new market economy

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Reluctantly, the North Korean government has allowed the establishment of informal markets, with ordinary people setting up stalls to sell food, clothes or cheap consumer goods.

But in the murky economy where nearly any major business deal requires under-the-table payments, most analysts believe it is the same songbun elite that profits in the business world. They are part of an informal club that gives them access to powerful contacts. If they need help finalizing a black-market business deal, they have people to call.

“Who gets the bribes?” asked Bob Collins, who wrote an exhaustive songbun study released recently by Washington’s Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, who believes the caste system remains deeply entrenched. “It’s the guys at the upper levels of songbun,” a mysterious caste system has shadowed the life of every North Korean.

[Huffington Post]

The changing role of women in North Korean society

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According to Marcus Noland, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, North Korean women were traditionally pushed out of employment in core state organizations. “And that is why they ended up in the market,” he adds. “Certainly, there was no intention on the part of North Korea decision-makers to raise the role of women relative to men. Just the opposite.”

“Women, because of their prominence in the market, are at the forefront of acts of civil disobedience,” Noland says, emphasizing that civil disobedience is still extremely unusual in North Korea. “The protests are generally reactive and defensive in nature, but women are very prominent in them.”

The extra burden women carry is beginning to have social consequences, with young women hoping to delay marriage to avoid taking on a husband. For men, their emasculation within their own households is now a fact of life.

“Whatever your wife tells you to do, you do,” says Mr. Kim, despairing. “If women say it’s a cow, it’s a cow. If they say it’s a giraffe, it’s a giraffe. We are slaves, slaves of the women. Women’s voices have become louder. …  Men without wives become beggars. They become so hungry that they can’t go to work. Then they have to go to market to beg. This has happened to between five and seven men I know.”

And North Korean women now have a new figurehead: the fashionable wife of the young leader Kim Jong Un, first lady Ri Sol-ju. North Korean women hope her high-profile role might translate into gains for them.