Category: Uncategorized

79 percent of South Koreans see North Korea war a possibility

Posted on by

The Korean Herald sites a survey that suggests almost eight out of 10 South Koreans still see a possibility of war breaking out with the North sixty years after the Korean War ended in a ceasefire.

According to the survey by the veterans‘ agency, 78.7 percent of South Korean adults said another war with the communist rival may take place on the peninsula, while 15.7 percent thought the war was effectively over and only 4.2 percent considered the war completely over.

45.7 percent expected the two Koreas will remain divided for the next 20 years, while 25 percent said the current status will last for the next decade and 10.2 percent said it will last for 15 more years.

To promote peace in the region, the respondents demanded the government pursue efforts to raise security awareness among the public, push for reconciliation with Pyongyang, strengthen national security, promote diplomacy with other countries and strengthen the military alliance with the United States.

The Internet from North Korea

Posted on by
2

Students at North Korea’s premier university showed Google’s executive chairman Tuesday how they look for information online: they Google it.

But surfing the Internet that way is the privilege of only a very few in North Korea, whose authoritarian government imposes strict limits on access to the World Wide Web.

University students at exclusive North Korean institutions like Kim Chaek University of Science and Technology, and the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, have carefully monitored Internet access — and are under strict instructions to access only educational materials — most North Koreans have never surfed the Web.

Computers at Pyongyang’s main library at the Grand People’s Study house are linked to a domestic Intranet service that allows them to read state-run media online and access a trove of reading materials culled by North Korean officials. North Koreans with home computers can also sign up for the Intranet service.

But access to the World Wide Web is extremely rare and often is limited to those with clearance to get on the Internet.

North Korea songbun background

Posted on by

A caste system called songbun, effectively translating as “background“, has shadowed the life of every North Korean.

Bob Collins, who wove together smuggled documents, interviews with former North Korean security officials and discussions with an array of ordinary North Koreans,wrote an exhaustive songbun study released this year by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. While the songbun system theoretically allows for movement within the hierarchy, Collins said most families’ standing today remains a reflection of their ancestors’ position in the 1950s and ’60s.

Despite its power, songbun is an almost-silent presence. Few people ever see their own songbun paperwork. Few “low-caste” families speak of it at all, exiles say, left mute by incomprehension and fear. It’s only when young people stumble into glass ceilings, normally when applying to universities or for jobs, that they begin to understand the years of slights.

Eventually, most grow to understand and accept its power, but they rarely have more than a general idea of where they fit into the pecking order, experts said. In a country where secrecy is reflexive, the state simply denies it exists.

To be caught at the bottom, defectors say, is to be lost in a nightmare of bloodline and bureaucracy. “My family was in the lowest of the lowest level,” said a former North Korean coal miner who fled to South Korea in 2006, hoping to give his young sons opportunities outside the mines. “Someone from the state was always watching what we were saying, watching what we were doing … The state treated us as if they were doing us a favor simply by allowing us to live.”

The man, like other North Korean refugees interviewed for this story, spoke on condition he not be named, fearing that relatives still in the North would be punished.

Read more

North Korean songbun caste system

Posted on by
1

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 is called songbun. And officially, it does not exist at all.

Today it is also quietly fraying, weakened by the growing importance of something that barely existed until recently in socialist North Korea: wealth.

“There’s one place where songbun doesn’t matter, and that’s in business,” said a North Korean soldier-turned-businessman who fled to South Korea after a prison stint. “Songbun means nothing to people who want to make money.”

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 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.

Very quickly, though, songbun became a professional hierarchy. The low caste became farmers and miners. The high caste filled the powerful bureaucracies. And children grew up and stepped into their parents’ roles.

Cautious South Korea appears open to dialogue with North

Posted on by

Emerging from victory, Park Geun-hye who will become the next, and the first woman, president of South Korea. Concerning North Korea, Park has said she will try to find a middle ground between the two much-criticized approaches of previous presidents — Roh Moo-hyun, who showered North Korea with unconditional aid, and the outgoing Lee Myung-bak, who treated the North as an adversary.

Pyongyang managed to exploit both approaches, continuing with its weapons program — and conducting its first nuclear test — during a long period of South-led engagement, and later turning more violent, launching two fatal attacks on the South, when that engagement was yanked away.

Park has stressed that she will use “robust deterrence” to counter the North Korean military threat. But she says she is also open to meeting with 29-year-old North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, “if it helps in moving forward North-South relations.”

Three in five Koreans, according to a recent government poll, believe that Lee took too hard a line against the North during his soon-to-end five-year term. He ended almost all humanitarian aid and economic projects, saying everything would be restored if the North gave up its weapons. He also talked often about the “inevitability” of unification, hinting that the North was unstable and soon to collapse.

Lee had hoped his stance would pressure the North, turning it desperate and compliant. Instead, the North drastically increased its ties with China and continued with its nuclear tests and long-range rocket launches, the latest coming earlier this month.

Park’s approach is more dovish than Lee’s but still much more stern than the “Sunshine Policy” — introduced by Kim Dae-jung in 1998 and continued by Roh — that liberal candidate Moon Jae-in promised to reinstate. No matter the North’s behavior, Park says, she will resume political dialogue and provide some sort of humanitarian aid. She also plans to restore some small-scale economic projects and cultural exchanges, although she has stayed vague about specifics.

But for the South to provide anything more significant, Park says, the North must begin to dismantle its nuclear weapons — something it has vowed will never happen.

South Korea one of the world’s great success stories

Posted on by

Sixty years ago, South Korea was an economic wasteland. Today, it is not only the world’s 11th largest economy, but also a vibrant democracy and an emerging cultural force.

Daniel Tudor, the Korea correspondent for the Economist, suggests “South Koreans have written the most unlikely and impressive story of nation-building of the last century.”

Korea has one of the lowest levels of welfare spending in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is due to Korea having been a developmental, high-growth country where things were sacrificed to barrel ahead. It was a matter of growth above all else.

If you go back to the 1950s and the early 1960s, Korea was really one of the poorest places in the world. People didn’t expect it to survive, and many people expected North Korea to take it over eventually. An adviser to former South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee said, “We were the poorest, most impossible country on the planet.”

For South Korea to have gone from this sort of messed-up, disorderly, broke country into a wealthy democracy — it would have been impossible to imagine. But the Korean people have done it.

Thanks in part to its neighbors though, South Korea is all too often overlooked. Korea probably gets overshadowed by China, Japan and North Korea. China is a massive growth story. Japan is famous as a cultural powerhouse. North Korea is just famous for being a pretty extreme dictatorship. By comparison, South Korea struggles to stand out.

And to South Koreans who are 20 years old, they don’t know much about North Korea, they don’t know anybody from North Korea, and they can’t go there, so it is simply not a reference point for them.

 

Satellite photo of North Korea at night

Posted on by

In this image from Sept. 24, 2012 provided by NASA, the Korean Peninsula is seen at night from a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite.

City lights at night are a fairly reliable indicator of where people live. But this isn’t always the case, and the Korean Peninsula shows why.

As of July 2012, South Korea’s population was estimated at roughly 49 million people, and North Korea’s population was estimated at about half that number. But where South Korea is gleaming with city lights, North Korea has hardly any lights at all, just a faint glimmer around Pyongyang.

The wide-area image shows the Korean Peninsula, parts of China and Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the Sea of Japan.

Photo: NASA / AP

Tools of the trade of North Korean assassins

Posted on by
1

Investigators in Seoul have revealed some of the gadgets they claim are used by their bitter rivals from North Korea to assassinate political enemies in the South. The murderous catalogue of secret weapons reads like something from James Bond’s collection. The first weapon looks like an innocuous electric torch, except it is able to fire three bullets. The second is a ballpoint pen with a poisoned needle. The third is another “poison pen”, containing a bullet that both punctures the skin and releases a deadly toxin.

The weapons were found on a failed Pyongyang assassin last year, whose target was Park Sang-hak, an activist who has angered Pyongyang by sending helium-filled balloons containing propaganda leaflets into North Korea.

Pyongyang sent a former commando, known as “Ahn” and disguised as a defector, to Seoul to kill Mr Park. He pretended to be keen to join Mr Park’s activist movement, but was foiled by intelligence services and jailed for four years in April. Ahn had been in South Korea for 17 years before the assassination attempt, having worked with numerous groups opposing the government in North Korea.

In 2010, two North Korean army officers tried to assassinate activist Hwang Jang-yop, a former official from North Korea who defected to South Korea, which seriously angered the late leader of the North, Kim Jong-il. Mr Hwang subsequently died of a heart attack, although there are question marks over what might have caused it.

Similar activities previously included:

On 21 January, 1968, a group of 31 North Korean commandos infiltrated the Blue House, the official residence of the president of South Korea, Park Chung-hee, to “slit his throat” as the only commando captured alive described his mission.

In 1974 the mother of South Korea’s current presidential election candidate, Park Geun-hye, was killed by North Korean assassins, who tried for a second time to kill her father, then President, as he delivered a speech.

In 1983, North Korean assassins struck again, this time in Burma, when they exploded a bomb during a ceremony. President Chun Doo-hwan, who was on an official visit to Rangoon, escaped but 21 people were killed.

Source: The Independent

A Swiss view of North Korea

Posted on by

According to former Swiss federal councillor’s Peter Vollmer, just back from a trip to North Korea with a group of Swiss politicians, “North Korea has a cell phone network with its own frequency, and there is internet service, but it’s very limited. You can make a phone call, but it’s complicated. You don’t see any satellite dishes”.

The tour group visited a number of Swiss-funded aid projects, such as an agricultural one with a focus on cultivation methods for steep slopes. In addition, Switzerland has been supplying milk powder which is enriched with vitamins and distributed to infants, schools, hospitals and day care centres through the World Food Programme (WFP). “The project makes sense and helps the population,” Vollmer said.

There is little traffic outside Pyongyang and hardly any private transport. “On the highway, our bus was all alone. There were potholes, and we also drove on dirt roads – where corn was being dried and pedestrians and cyclists were travelling, too. It was pretty demanding for our driver; it took two hours to cover 60 kilometres.”

“Some of North Korea looks like Switzerland’s Emmental. Gently rolling hills plus steep slopes and many mountains with little arable farmland.” Although North Korea’s landscape is similar to that of the Emmental, he adds “the country is still a far cry from a democratic civil society”.

According to Vollmer, an atmosphere of change had prevailed there during his last visit in 1985. “At that time, agricultural mechanization was taking off there, and North Korea was developing its own tractors. But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union brought on a total collapse. From one day to the next, Russia turned off the oil spigot and only delivered in exchange for hard currency, while the North Korean economy was on the brink of ruin. Then came the great famine – a huge setback,” Vollmer said.

Today the country is heavily de-industrialised; productivity is low, crop yields modest and infrastructure obsolete. You see factories that no longer operate, and because of international sanctions, there are no spare parts.

“People are constantly walking somewhere briskly, often carrying heavy loads. They march for 20 or 30 kilometres, sometimes with ox carts,” Vollmer said. He says the little-developed railway network is mainly used for the transport of goods, while people often travel in 50-year-old open trucks.

“We were able to take photos of everything except military installations. Earlier, there was a soldier stationed at every intersection, bridge and tunnel, but this is no longer the case,” Vollmer said.

Vollmer is aware that his group only saw a tiny part of the country during its short visit. And the chaperones were omnipresent. But in his opinion, North Korea is a poor country that is trying to meet the basic needs of its population – albeit at a very low level.

The Information Age stifled in North Korea

Posted on by

With one million cell phones in North Korea and a government-sponsored intranet, the regime believes it can survive the advent of information technology by restricting its use to the most elite of the population who have the largest stake in the survival of the regime as it currently exists.

North Korea intentionally restricts access to information to control its population.  TV and radios in North Korea are hardwired to only receive government-controlled media. Foreign newspapers and periodicals are forbidden.

North Koreans are not free to travel within the country without government permission. Foreigners who visit North Korea are carefully controlled by their (two) minders who keep them from interacting with the North Korean populace. In short, North Korea has traditionally viewed controlling the flow of information to its population as a fundamental necessity to ensure the survival of the state.

It is surprising then to see that the North Korea state has sanctioned the use of cell phones and other information technology. There are now more than 1 million third-generation cell phones in North Korea, as part of the Koryolink cell phone system. These phones can call other members of the Koryolink network, but cannot make calls outside of the country.

There is also a state-sponsored intranet in North Korea, called Kwangmyong. The intranet is restricted to elites in North Korea with good social standing. The intranet features message boards, chat functions, and state sponsored media; its use has also been encouraged among university students, technical experts and scientists, and others to exchange information.

Very few North Koreans have access to the unfiltered Internet. Andrei Lankov, a leading North Korean expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, estimated this number to be “a few dozen families” including Kim Jong-Un’s clan. Other select North Koreans may have restricted and/or monitored access to the Internet to gather data on the U.S. and South Korea, find content to populate the intranet, and maintain the North Korean government’s propaganda web sites.