In search of Kim Jong Un’s motive …Survival

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North Korea watchers haven’t been getting much sleep this year. With all the bluster of late, what does Kim Jong Un want?

“There are a lot of debates about ‘What North Korea wants,’ ” says Sheena Greitens, a fellow in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies and an assistant professor at the University of Missouri. “First, what matters are the interests of the very top leadership, which is narrower than ‘North Korea’ or even ‘the North Korean government.’ Second, North Korea might use a range of strategies … but we should remember that they’re all aimed at the same underlying, fundamental objective: ensuring Kim’s political survival.”

March is always a time of heightened tensions. This is when the U.S. and South Korea stage their annual joint military exercises, involving hundreds of thousands of troops. This year, the North has been especially demonstrative as it lays the groundwork for a major strategy meeting, its first Workers Party Congress since 1980.

The Chinese Communist Party holds these summits every few years to chart strategy, a common practice of communist states. In North Korea, the party congress framework was dropped under Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled from 1994 until his death in 2011. Soon to be revived under his son, the congress is expected to roll out the next phase of Kim’s rule.

“The stakes are always higher in the first few years of a dictator’s time in power, and the first few years are almost always more [internally] violent,” Greitens says. “The rules of the game under the new leader are still being established — both inside the country and externally — so it makes uncertainty higher.”

As the third-generation leader of the family dynasty, Kim needs to establish his own legitimacy, and that means standing up to enemies and advancing the nuclear program.

“I don’t think it’s all scientific tests,” Hanham says. “I think a lot of this is political.”

[NPR]

North Korea’s record on human trafficking top focus of House hearing

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The soon-to-be-released U.S. State Department’s 2016 trafficking report will be the topic of a hearing planned by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, Chairman of the House congressional panel that oversees global human rights issues. Smith is the author of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a law which mandates the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report.

“Get It Right This Time: A Victims-Centered Trafficking in Persons Report,” is the title of the hearing to be held before the House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee on global human rights.

[Christian Newswire] 

North Korea: Flash drives for freedom

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Smuggling 20,000 USB sticks loaded with the latest Hollywood films might seem like an unlikely way to try to overthrow the North Korean regime – but that’s exactly what Flashdrives for Freedom has in mind.

Launched by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and Silicon Valley non-profit Forum280, organizers ask Americans to donate their unwanted USB sticks, which will then be loaded with a selection of films and TV shows and smuggled across the DPRK’s sealed borders.

Although it’s not the first project to smuggle in information, campaigners say the need to support and engage citizens has grown in recent months. Tong Kim, who has worked in US-Korea diplomatic relations for more than 25 years, says this is partly because international sanctions often isolate North Koreans even more.

Sharon Stratton, programme officer at the North Korea Strategy Centre which is helping to distribute the drives, says popular culture from elsewhere is a powerful way to reach out to ordinary citizens.

[The Guardian]

China’s thinking on North Korea

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The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, lauded China last week for joining Washington in what is probably the toughest response North Korea has faced in twenty years. But such praise may well have been premature. Last week, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Beijing opposed any unilateral punishments against North Korea.

The grim reality is that Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un decided that North Korea must have nuclear weapons, and that China has thus far decided that, as far as Beijing is concerned, the benefits of that program outweigh the costs.

China has made many pledges on North Korean sanctions in the past, but has always failed to honor them and to systematically enforce its commitments. China may be keeping the regime afloat through its provision of economic and military resources—better after all to feed North Koreans in North Korea than risk a massive refugee exodus into China if the regime collapses—and can rationally justify this as a good investment on these grounds.

Front and center on the cost side of the ledger is Beijing’s concern that North Korea’s nuclear tests, missile tests, saber rattling and occasional limited uses of force will cause South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons to deal with the menace that Pyongyang represents. This is the outcome that China above all seeks to avoid.

Short of this, but still deeply problematic, is that North Korea’s provocations push Seoul and Tokyo deeper into Washington’s embrace. For a country bent on, at minimum, increasing the costs of U.S. influence in East Asia and/or impeding U.S. activity in its littoral seas through anti-access and area denial capabilities and actively expanding its influence and territory, improving Washington’s security relationship with Japan and South Korea is the last thing Beijing wants.

Beijing has thus far decided that the benefits of a nuclear North Korea outweigh these costs. But as Pyongyang pushes closer to its ultimate goal of being able to target the mainland United States with strategic nuclear missiles, these calculations will become harder.

[The National Interest]

Why analysts of North Korea aren’t laughing

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Bruce Klingner knows better than anyone how dangerous North Korea really is. He spent years analyzing the Hermit Kingdom for the CIA, and he now works as a Northeast Asia analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

And yet even he finds himself having an occasional chuckle at the North’s absurdity. The bombastic rhetoric and over-the-top propaganda is “kind of like 1950s Soviet Union on steroids,” he says.

But over the past few months, the experts have pretty much stopped laughing. That’s because North Korea has undertaken an unusual number of tests in the first quarter of 2016, everything from detonating a nuclear bomb underground to launching a satellite on a rocket that could be converted to a ballistic missile.

Keeping up with the pace of activity is “exhausting, to be honest,” says Melissa Hanham, a North Korea analyst at the East Asia Nonproliferation Program of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey California.

What’s clear, both analysts say, is that the North is working quickly towards its ultimate goal: a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). And they’re making pretty good progress.

A series of photos released by North Korea’s propaganda apparatus earlier this March is perhaps the best example of how views are changing. It shows the country’s current dictator, Kim Jong Un, the son of Kim Jong Il, posing in front a shiny silver ball placed atop chintzy red table cloth.

As experts started to analyze the pictures more closely, they weren’t laughing. The ball on the table was obviously a model, but many of the details were reasonably close to a real miniaturized warhead.

“They definitely know what a bomb looks like,” Hanham says. “I mean, that model didn’t come out of thin air. … It has roots in the truth.”

Adm. Bill Gortney, who heads the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told lawmakers: “It’s the prudent decision on my part to assume that [Kim Jong Un] has the capability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon and put it on an ICBM.” This is a change in tone from just a few years ago, when the U.S. intelligence community stated that North Korea didn’t have all the tools it needed to send a nuke over American soil.

Both Klingner and Hanham say there’s no need to panic. North Korea’s newest ballistic missile is untested, and they have yet to prove they have vital reentry technology that would allow their warhead to reach its target without burning up in the atmosphere. But Klingner also says it’s clear that North Korea is making lots of progress.

 [NPR]

After more than twenty years of sanctions against North Korea

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The economy and people of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has suffered through decades of international sanctions.

The health system of DPRK has been one of the most impacted sectors. International aid organizations and aid workers who are active in DPRK have been quite straightforward and linked the collapse of the vital public services to the international sanctions. Surgery anesthetics, common antibiotics, obstetric medicines, spare parts of medical devices and laboratory supplies cannot be imported or are significantly delayed to enter the country if some of their parts or substances are listed as prohibited goods.

Even a product which is almost entirely made in a third country but it has a component or a spare part made by a US based company, cannot be imported to North Korea without the permit of the US authorities. Those restrictions apply to everything, from the import of much needed technology to modernize public services, to spare parts of agricultural machinery, fertilizers and pesticides.

Even the donation of soccer balls is considered a breach of the international sanctions because the 1874 resolution of the UNSC includes all sports goods in its list of luxury items. Accordingly, in the autumn of 2013 the cargo of an American Charity was confiscated; it contained 1000 soccer balls to be donated to two North Korean orphanages.

The years of 2013 and 2014 were probably the worst for aid organizations working in DPRK. The sanctions against the Bank of Foreign Commerce of North Korea had frozen all financial transactions and the aid groups were unable to pay salaries to their staff, rent and utilities bills. Even the World Food Program (WFP) had to suspend production in five out of its seven factories producing fortified biscuits for malnourished children. More than half a million children were dependent on the WFP ratio for their daily nutritional needs.

But as far as the country’s elite, even with the sanctions they have never really suffered. Chanel goods, Italian wines, foreign cigarettes, Swiss watches were still largely available in Pyongyang and the major cities and the nuclear program continued to develop.

The question is: Is there any justification for the international sanctions besides their political significance?

[Read full CounterPunch article by Fragkiska Megaloudi]

Harrowing reality of North Korean labor camps

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Korean citizens who have survived the ordeal of North Korean political prison camps and escaped the regime emerge with harrowing tales of the compatriots and family members who didn’t make it – most killed off by the cruel combination of prolonged near-starvation and slavish forced labor.

“Conditions are horrific. People are worked for 14, 15 or 16 hours every day with just a handful of corn to live on and they are intentionally starved and worked to death,” said Suzanne Scholte, chairman of the North Korea freedom coalition, a group of organizations based in Washington DC assisting defectors and campaigning for improved human rights. “Torture is common, there is no medical aid and the sanitation is horrible. They wear the torn uniforms of old prisoners and sleep crammed together in a room.”

North Korea denies the existence of vast political prison camps, but according to a 2014 UN special commission report, a combination of satellite imagery and extensive human testimony proves they are still in operation and are used to perpetrate “unspeakable atrocities” on hapless citizens, who simply disappear with no word to their families even if they subsequently die in detention.

The UN reported systematic starvation, torture, rape and many executions at such camps, which hold an estimated total of 80,000 to 120,000 prisoners in the most wretched conditions.  “The commission estimates that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in these camps over the past five decades,” the report said.

A 2009 legal report from South Korea cited prisoners being fed starvation rations of a few ounces of rotten corn and some kind of thin “salt soup”. “They lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist … they live and die in rags, without soap, socks or underwear,” the Washington Post reported at the time.

Former prisoners sentenced to just 18 months hard labor recalled fellow inmates not surviving amid the constant beatings and malnutrition. They often work in the fields, logging in forests, down mines with no safety measures or crude factories where injuries are rampant, Scholte said.

And in another account, a man who was arrested as a teenager trying to sneak out of North Korea, Hyuk Kim, recalled subsisting at a lower-level labor camp by catching rats, drying them out and eating the flesh raw. “If you tried to cook the rats, the guards would smell the meat or fire, catch you and beat you mercilessly,” the 33-year-old defector later said.

 [The Guardian]

US State Dept responds to American student being sentenced by North Korea to 15 years hard labor

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After North Korea sentenced an American student, Otto Frederick Warmbier, to 15 years of hard labor for removing a political banner from a hotel, the U.S. State Department fired back Wednesday, saying the punishment doesn’t fit the alleged crime.

Greg Scarlatoui, executive director for the Committee for Humans Rights in North Korea said Warmbier may be forced to work in agriculture, which happened with other American prisoners.  “He may spend his day planting apple trees. It will be fairly grueling forced labor,” Scarlatoui said.

The sentence of 15 years of hard labor against University of Virginia student Otto Frederick Warmbier is “unduly harsh,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, calling for his release. The United States urges North Korea “to pardon him and to grant him special amnesty and immediate release on humanitarian grounds,” Toner said.

The State Department spokesman accused North Korea of politicizing the arrests of U.S. citizens, saying, “It’s increasingly clear from its very public treatment of these cases.”

Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told The New York Times he met with two North Korean diplomats on Tuesday to lobby for American student Otto Warmbier’s release. Richardson is a longtime diplomat and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich has also been pushing behind the scenes for Warmbier’s release, an aid to the governor told CNN.

Analysts say it’s possible Warmbier will be released at some point, but very likely Kim Jong Un’s regime could use the student as leverage — and will want a VIP from the United States to travel to North Korea to get him.

[CNN]

American student Otto Warmbier receives harsh sentence in North Korea

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North Korea’s highest court sentenced an American tourist to 15 years in prison with hard labor on Wednesday for subversion.

Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia undergraduate, was convicted and sentenced in a one-hour trial in North Korea’s Supreme Court. He was charged with subversion under Article 60 of North Korea’s criminal code. The court held that he had committed a crime “pursuant to the U.S. government’s hostile policy toward (the North), in a bid to impair the unity of its people after entering it as a tourist.”

The 21-year-old from Wyoming, Ohio, said he had tried to steal a propaganda banner as a trophy.

Trials for foreigners facing similar charges in North Korea are generally short and punishments severe. Warmbier was arrested as he tried to leave the country in early January. He was in North Korea with a New Year’s tour group.

Warmbier had been staying at the Yanggakdo International Hotel. It is common for sections of tourist hotels to be reserved for North Korean staff and off-limits to foreigners.

[CBS]

North Korea nuclear threat not all bluff

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Skeptics of North Korea’s nuclear threat, and there are many, have long clung to two comforting thoughts. While the North has the bomb, it doesn’t have a warhead small enough to put on a long-range rocket. And it certainly doesn’t have a re-entry vehicle to keep that warhead from burning up in the atmosphere before it could reach a target like, as it has suggested before, Manhattan.

North Korea on Tuesday suggested it will soon show the world it has mastered both technologies. That would require a huge jump in the North’s suspected nuclear capabilities, so it may be just the latest case of Pyongyang propaganda. But if it delivers, it will put to rest one other comforting thought: that it’s safe for policymakers in Washington and elsewhere to take North Korea’s claims as mainly just bluster.

Kim Jong Un supposedly ordered the commencement of preparations for a “nuclear warhead explosion test” and test-firings of “several kinds of ballistic rockets able to carry nuclear warheads” to be conducted soon. As with all such reports, it’s hard to separate Pyongyang’s wishful thinking from the current reality.

Seoul, meanwhile, was holding to its skeptical line. Its Defense Ministry said Tuesday it remains unconvinced the North has achieved re-entry vehicle technology. Spokesman Moon Sang Gyun said the assessment is based on South Korean and U.S. intelligence. He refused to elaborate.

[Read full AP article]