Trump’s defense chief in Seoul to show solidarity on North Korea threat

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s defenses secretary told South Korea on Thursday the two allies would stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” to face the threat from North Korea, in a message of reassurance after Trump questioned aspects of the alliance in his campaign.

Jim Mattis’ two-day visit comes amid concern that the North may be readying to test a new ballistic missile, in what could be an early challenge for Trump’s administration. Mattis, in his first trip abroad as Pentagon chief, vowed to strengthen ties in talks with South Korea.

In his New Year’s speech, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had said his nation was close to test launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). North Korea appears to have restarted operation of a reactor at its main Yongbyon nuclear facility that produces plutonium that can be used for its nuclear weapons program, according to a U.S. think-tank, 38 North.

Mattis’ trip to the region, which will include a stop in Japan, is the first foreign trip by any of Trump’s cabinet secretaries. U.S. officials have said the trip is meant to reaffirm ties with South Korea and Japan, U.S. allies hosting nearly 80,000 American troops, and the importance of the region overall.

Both South Korea and the United States on Thursday recommitted to plans to deploy a U.S. missile defenses system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), in South Korea later this year.

[Reuters]

Is North Korea’s collapse imminent?

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Despite a growing narrative that North Korea might be teetering on the verge of collapse, there is a lack of consensus among U.S. experts on the imminent downfall of the reclusive regime.

Talks of a possible near-term regime collapse resurfaced among North Korea watchers when Thae Yong Ho, a high-level defector, said recently that the influx of information from outside the country and expansion of market activities within it are sapping traditional structures of the North Korean system. The regime is “crumbling” and the days of Kim Jong Un’s leadership are “numbered,” said North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom, prior to defecting with his family to South Korea in 2016.

“Low-level dissent or criticism of the regime, until recently unthinkable, is becoming more frequent [among North Korea’s elite],” Thae said at a news conference in Seoul last week. “We have to spray gasoline on North Korea and let the North Korean people set fire to it.”

Following Thae’s comments, a Wall Street Journal editorial suggested the Trump administration should “make regime change an explicit policy goal for North Korea.”

Joseph DeTrani, former U.S. nuclear envoy and intelligence official, said that while Thae’s claims are “significant commentary” based on the diplomat’s knowledge base, there is virtually “no indication that the regime’s collapse is imminent.” While saying that his views are based on limited information, DeTrani said he sees “a functioning government” in the North: private markets are functioning and people have access to food.

Ken Gause, who monitors the Kim regime, is also skeptical of Thae’s prediction of regime change. Notwithstanding increasing international sanctions, he says, Pyongyang’s economy is faring relatively well. Even with its chronic food shortage, the country is “not as in serious situation as it was in the 1990s when there was mass starvation.”

[Read full VoA article]

North Korea demands UN assist with repatriation of waitresses

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North Korea sent a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres requesting assistance in repatriating a group of North Korean waitresses who defected from China.

North Korea has previously claimed the waitresses were abducted to South Korea.

North Korea’s Ambassador to the U.N. Ja Song Nam sent the letter to Guterres last Friday: “We cannot but express our disappointment at the fact that no action has been taken by the U.N. until now as we have entered 2017 without even a reply to our letters,” Ja wrote, according to KCNA. “How to deal with this case will be a touchstone testing the true stand of the U.N. for the promotion and protection of human rights.”

The letter also demanded the repatriation of Kim Ryen-hi, a North Korean defector living in the South who has claimed she was kidnapped in June 2011, according to South Korean newspaper Maeil Business.

The group of waitresses escaped from Ryugyong restaurant in Ningbo, China, then entered South Korea.

Choi Sung-ryong, a rights activist in South Korea, said a source in North Korea informed him Pyongyang plans to send envoys to the annual meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

[UPI]

Kim Jong Un’s leverage in discouraging other diplomats from defecting

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Thae Yong Ho was number two in the North Korean embassy in London before defecting with his family last July.

When asked about relatives back in North Korea, Thae’s voice drops. He admits they may be sent to prison camps as punishment for his defection, or may even be used by the regime against him.

He knows he was extremely lucky to have his wife and both children with him in London, and that it’s unlikely to happen to any other diplomat again.

He says North Korean diplomats will remain in place rather than defect because their children are back in Pyongyang. “The children are used by Kim Jong Un as kind of hostage,” he says.

When Thae finally revealed to his wife and sons of his intention to lead them all to safety, he says they were “very grateful.” He says he could not miss the opportunity to “cut off this slavery chain” for his sons, knowing they would never have forgiven him if, in the future, they knew he had not taken the chance for their freedom.

But still defection is bittersweet for Thae Yong Ho. “It made my life very miserable because I spent 50 years of my life on the wrong side.”

[CNN]

Former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong-ho on plotting his defection

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Before his defection, Thae Yong-ho was a career diplomat for North Korea, fluent in English, who had served in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, often delivering passionate speeches glorifying the Kim family that has ruled North Korea for seven decades.

Mr. Thae, now affiliated with South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank arm of the National Intelligence Service, has vowed to spend the rest of his life trying to bring down the North Korean government.

The former diplomat said he had come up with a detailed plan for his defection, first ensuring that his two sons joined him and his wife in London. (North Korean diplomats are required to leave a child in the North, a measure intended to prevent their defection.)

While in London, his sons began asking questions, like why the North Korean government executed people in public without a proper trial, Mr. Thae said. Their English friends taunted them with questions, like why Mr. Kim had smoked a cigarette inside a nursery.

Further than that, Thae declined to reveal details of his defection plan and the circumstances.

“When we got out of the embassy, I told [my sons] that now I’m going to cut the chain of slavery and you are free,” Thae said. His 19- and 26-year-old sons’ first concern was whether they could freely browse the Internet.

[New York Times]

Diplomat: “I’ve known that there was no future for North Korea for a long time”

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The decision that North Korean diplomat Thae Yong-ho made to defect from a regime he had spent his whole life defending did not happen overnight. His misgivings had been simmering for two decades, even as he went around Europe espousing the superiority of the North Korean system.  “I’ve known that there was no future for North Korea for a long time,” Thae told The Washington Post.

In the 1990s, as a relatively young diplomat, Thae Yong-ho was posted to Denmark, where his youngest son was born, and after that to Sweden. In Scandinavia, home to the flagbearers of European socialism, Thae’s eyes began to open. “During my first foreign posting in Denmark, I came to doubt and question whether North Korea could say that it was a true socialist or communist system,” he said.  “North Korean society doesn’t have the concept of comparing,” he said. “The more time you spend in the outside world, the disbelief in your system grows more and more.”

During this second stint in London, in the second year of Kim Jong Un’s regime, Thae’s concerns started to become unbearable. “Not only me but other North Korean elites were hopeful that because Kim Jong Un had studied abroad and was young, he might change the policy direction and modernize North Korea,” he said. But his doubts heightened after Kim had his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, executed at the end of 2013. Although executions are not rare in North Korea, there was something disturbingly arbitrary about this one, Thae said.

Still, he continued his duties in London, voicing the idea that North Korea was a “people’s paradise” with free housing, health care and education. But at home, Thae’s youngest son, who was still in high school and hoped to study computer science at a top London university, was asking why North Korea doesn’t allow the Internet, why North Koreans are not allowed to watch foreign films, why North Koreans can’t read any books they want. “As a father, it was hard for me to tell lies, and it started a debate within the family,” Thae said.

Last July, after much preparation and as the end of his posting was approaching, Thae defected with his wife and both their sons.

[Washington Post]

Kim Jong Un would like to meet Trump

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Thae Yong Ho, who was number two in the North Korean embassy in London before defecting with his family, says after his initial surprise that President Donald Trump won the US election, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un now sees it as “a good opportunity for him to open a kind of compromise with the new American administration.”

But Thae insists Kim will only talk on his terms, pointing to the leader’s New Year’s Address. In the address, Kim made it clear that if the US continued its current policy against North Korea, he would continue to add nuclear weapons to the country’s military capability.

During his campaign, President Trump said he would be open to meeting Kim.* Thae makes a plea for the president to reconsider, saying it would give the North Korean leader legitimacy he currently doesn’t have in his own country.

“Even Chinese President Xi Jinping and even Russian President Putin — they haven’t even met Kim Jong Un,” he says.

Thae claims that despite commanding loyalty through fear, Kim is still struggling to secure the legitimacy enjoyed by his father Kim Jong Il and grandfather Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea.

[CNN]

*As a candidate, Donald Trump called North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un a “bad dude” and a “maniac,” but also offered to meet him over a hamburger to discuss how the two nations might get along peacefully.

North Korean sanctions have been taking effect says diplomat defector

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Thae Yong Ho, who was number two in the North Korean embassy in London before defecting with his family, says sanctions passed last March by the United Nations Security Council against North Korea — described at the time as “ground-breaking” and “unprecedented” — are working.

Thae says Kim Jong Un had wanted to establish 14 special economic zones inside North Korea and set up two ministries to encourage foreign investment, but these two ministries have since been dissolved.

He also says the sanctions are a “very, very strong factor” in the North Korean economy and have a “psychological effect on North Korean people and high ranking officials.”

But they’re not enough.

In keeping with President Trump’s line, Thae says China needs to be persuaded to do more. He says it needs to prevent natural resources being smuggled across the border from North Korea for cash, and also has to take North Korea’s nuclear program more seriously.

Thae even goes one step further — saying that nuclear weapons aren’t only a threat to the US and South Korea. “According to international geopolitics there is no eternal enemy or friend… nobody can predict if one day Kim Jong Un may want to blackmail China,” he says.

[CNN]

Diplomat defector: “Greatest threat to the North Korean government is information”

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Thae Yong-ho, North Korea’s former deputy ambassador in London who defected to South Korea in July, says the greatest threat to the North Korean government is information from the outside world, not only critical news reports and oppositional political messages, but also movies and TV series that show how the outside world has developed.

“North Korea will collapse on its own when enough external information introduced through the internet reveals the truth of the Kim regime to the residents,” he said.

The advocacy group Human Rights Watch has criticized Kim for tightening controls on citizens through the country’s borders, increasing efforts to restrict expression and preventing outside information from entering the country.

[VoA]

Top North Korean defector says information flow will help bring down Kim Jong Un

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What makes North Korea feel so oppressive? If you ask its highest-ranking defector in decades, the answer is censorship. Thae Yong Ho, who was until last summer a Pyongyang envoy in London, argues that increasing the flow of information into the North is what can sow the seeds of popular discord to bring down the Kim Jong Un regime.

In North Korea, fewer than 1 percent of the population has Internet access. Foreign books, films and information are banned — and TV only broadcasts propaganda. Breaking down the censorship and surveillance state from within, Thae believes, is the only way to bring down North Korea’s nuclear weapons-obsessed leader.

With information comes education, Thae says — and that can lead to a popular uprising. “Once they are educated to that level, I am sure they will stand up,” Thae told reporters.

A shortwave radio station called Free North Korea Radio has been delivering information from outside the country since 2005, broadcasting from the second floor of a multipurpose building just outside Seoul. “The power of radio has been huge in advancing the cause of freedom and human rights,” says Suzanne Scholte, head of the American group that partners with the station.

This kind of tactic is far more effective than any military action, Thae, the defector, said. And the power of information explains why the Pyongyang regime is so resistant to moves like propaganda loudspeakers on the border, he said. The many tactics to spread information into the North are working, he said. “The leaflets, USBs with films [stored on them] can be introduced to North Korea. So the ways of educating North Korean people for people’s uprising is also evolving,” Thae said.

[NPR]