Rival Koreas masters at pulling back from the brink

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If history is any judge, the Koreas always seem to find a way to save face and avert the war that both sides have been threatening since 1953:

December 2010: North Korea backs off from an earlier threat of “catastrophic retaliation” after South Korea defiantly goes ahead with live-fire drills near the country’s disputed western sea boundary.

May 2010: North Korea threatens “all-out counterattacks” after Seoul moves to resume psychological warfare operations to punish the North over a torpedo attack that reportedly killed 46 South Korean sailors earlier in the year.

Early 2000s: In what has been called the “second North Korean nuclear crisis,” animosity soars after Washington says the North, after being confronted in 2002 by a U.S. envoy, admits privately that it has a secret nuclear fuel program, a violation of an earlier nuclear accord. North Korea denies this and, already angry at being lumped earlier by President George W. Bush into an “Axis of Evil,” says in early 2003 that it has withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. South Korea, meanwhile, tries to better ties with the North under two liberal presidents, including Kim Dae-jung who is awarded the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote peace on the Korean Peninsula.

1992-94: The “first North Korean nuclear crisis” includes North Korean threats to withdraw from the NPT and Washington’s exploration of possible air strikes amid U.S. government estimates that the North is pursuing large-scale nuclear bomb fuel production. There’s also the North’s 1994 threat, for the first time, to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire.”

1968: A team of 31 North Korean commandos slips undetected across the border and comes within striking distance of the Seoul palace of President Park Chung-hee, the dictator father of current President Park Geun-hye. Furious, Park establishes a secret commando team tasked with demolishing Kim Il Sung’s presidential mansion. Despite this drama, the rival Koreas eventually sign a major accord in 1972 to work toward peaceful reunification.

[AP]

S. Korean girl bands used for North Korean psychological warfare

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The South Korean Defense Ministry is apparently considering the use of songs and music videos by manufactured girl bands such as Girls’ Generation, Wonder Girls, After School, Kara and 4minute in so-called psychological warfare against North Korea.

An official in charge of psy ops at the Joint Chiefs of Staff said … the content of propaganda broadcasts will not be limited to girl bands.

The JCS official said he is unsure how effective the work of girl bands will be. But the revealing outfits worn by the performers and their provocative dances could have a considerable impact on North Korean soldiers.

[Chosun Ilbo]

North Korea and South Korea de-escalate tensions

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North Korea and South Korea have reached an agreement to de-escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula, South Korea’s national security chief, Kim Kwan-jin, announced Tuesday.

South Korea will get the apology it demanded over recent military escalation by the North, and the South will stop broadcasting propaganda that infuriated the North.

North Korea says it “regrets” that South Korean soldiers were injured by landmines and lifts its “semi-state of war” under an agreement by the two countries, the Yonhap News Agency reported.

[CNN]

North Korean “dual tactic” of “war and peace strategies”

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South Korea’s defense ministry said Sunday it had detected “unusual” North Korean submarine activity, telling NBC News the submarine movement was a sign that North Korea was using a “dual tactic” of “war and peace strategies” as envoys met in the Panmunjom truce village inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the border.

The nations entered a second day of talks on Sunday after the North entered a “quasi state of war” over South Korean propaganda being blasted across the border via loudspeaker.

A South Korean defense official said about 70 percent of the North’s submarines were not in their usual positions. However, it was not clear how many submarines that represented.

“We are detecting unusual movement from North Korean submarines, in that they have left their bases and also North Korea has doubled artillery power along the border,” said an official from Seoul’s Defense Ministry.

[NBC]

North Korean troops on “fully armed state of war”

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered his troops onto a war footing after a Friday afternoon deadline passed. He is demanding Seoul halt anti-North propaganda broadcasts or face military action.

On Thursday, Kim Jong Un had convened an emergency meeting as the two Koreas exchanged fire. Then today North Korea’s state-run television KRT released still photographs of Kim and North Korean high ranking military officials at an emergency meeting of Central Military Commission of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK).

During the emergency meeting, Kim put his troops on a “fully armed state of war” starting from 5 p.m. (0830GMT) on Friday and had declared a “quasi-state of war” in frontline areas, KRT added.

Such language is often used by North Korea in times of tension with the South.

[Reuters]

North and South Korea exchanges fire

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In an escalation of the tense situation in the region, North and South Korea exchanged fire over their heavily fortified border Thursday, the South Korean Defense Ministry said.

South Korea detected a projectile, assumed to be a small rocket, that was fired toward the western province of Gyeonggi, a Defense Ministry official told CNN. The South Korean military responded by firing a few dozen shells at the area from which the North Korean projectile was fired, the official said.

The U.S. believes North Korea deliberately placed mines in the path of a South Korean patrol in the demilitarized zone between the two countries, sparking the exchanges, the official said. Tensions spiked on the Korean Peninsula after two South Korean soldiers were seriously wounded by landmines on August 4 in the demilitarized zone.

Seoul vowed a “harsh” response to the landmines and resumed blaring propaganda messages over the border from huge loudspeakers. The move infuriated North Korea, which called the broadcasting “a direct action of declaring a war.” Over the weekend, it warned of “indiscriminate strikes.”

[CNN]

Report of latest purge of senior North Korean official

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South Korea said Wednesday it is closely monitoring the whereabouts of a ranking North Korean official dealing with inter-Korean affairs amid a local media report that he might have been purged.

Won Tong-yon, the vice head of the United Front Department of the Workers’ Party, is believed to have been purged and forced to undergo “revolutionary education,” a kind of punishment handed down to North Korean officials who commit wrongdoing, under which they must perform hard labor, according to a media report.

Won, a veteran official handling inter-Korean affairs, represented the North’s delegation during high-level talks with South Korea held in February 2014.

If confirmed, the case would be the latest in a series of purges and executions ordered by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who is tightening his grip on power through a so-called reign of terror.

[Korea Herald]

North Korean spokeman denies persecution of Christians

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When asked about the persecution of Christians inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a spokesman for the regime responded “absolutely false”.

Alejandro Cao — the Special Delegate of North Korea’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries — publically denied that Christians are being persecuted under Kim Jong Un’s communist regime.

But as many as 100,000 Christians are estimated to be held in North Korean labor camps where they are frequently subjected to torture and are even executed for their faith because the DPRK views Christianity as a threat to “Juche”: the regime’s official ideology that demands dependence on the absolute leadership of the ruling member of the Kim family.

[Worthy News]

North Korea’s latest threatened US attack

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On Monday, South Korea and Washington launched an annual joint military drill that Pyongyang routinely describes as a rehearsal for an invasion. In response, North Korean officials have leveled serious threats against the United States. RT reports that a spokesman for North Korea’s National Defense Commission warned that it had weapons “unknown to the world” that made it an “invincible power,” while the state news agency KCNA warned that “if [the] United States wants their mainland to be safe” they should end the military exercises.

Why don’t we take threats from North Korea seriously? Part of it is a simple boy-who-cried-wolf situation. North Korea has threatened to attack the United States many, many times before. Here’s just a short list:

  • In May, Park Yong Chol, director of North Korea’s Institute for Research into National Reunification, told CNN that the North has the capability to strike the United States with a nuclear missile, and would do so if the U.S. “forced their hand.”
  • In February, officials warned that North Korea would cause the “final ruin of the US” with its “precision and diversified nuclear striking means.”
  • In 2014, following an alleged North Korean cyberattack on Sony Pictures, a North Korean official threatened attacks on  “the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland” if the United States retaliated.
  • In 2013, North Korea warned it could attack Guam, Hawaii and the U.S. mainland with rockets.
  • In 2009, North Korea announced that it had “tremendous military muscle and its own method of strike able to conquer any targets in its vicinity at one stroke or hit the U.S. on the raw, if necessary.”
  • In 2005, a North Korean official said that if war broke out, the country would “first of all strike all bases of US imperialist aggressors and turn them into a sea of fire.”
  • In 2002, following their inclusion in President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman warned that “the option to ‘strike’ impudently advocated by the U.S. is not its monopoly” and that North Korea could “mercilessly wipe out the aggressors.”

Most experts still argue that a North Korean nuclear strike remains extremely unlikely. “There is a near zero chance of a premeditated North Korean nuclear attack,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told NK News earlier this year, though Kimball added that a miscalculation by either side could pose a serious risk.

[Washington Post]

Jangmadang Sedae: The black-market generation of North Korea

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Yeonmi Park’s family paid around 3,000 North Korean won for a pack of DVDs that contained a bootleg of Titanic. In the early 2000s, she remembers, that was the cost of several pounds of rice in her home city of Hyesan—a significant sacrifice in a starving country.

But of all the tween girls who became obsessed with the star-crossed romance of Jack and Rose, Park was one of the very few who saw it as downright revolutionary. “In North Korea they had taught us that you die for the regime. In this movie it was like, whoa, he’s dying for a girl he loves,” she says. “I thought, how can anyone make this and not be killed?”

Titanic was hardly Park’s only foreign-­video experience. Her mother sold DVDs. Her family would put its tapes and discs in a plastic bag and bury it beneath a potted plant to hide it from the police.

But of all those illegal encounters with foreign culture, Titanic was somehow the film that made Park ask herself questions about freedom and the outside world. “It made me feel like something was off with our system,” she says in fluent English, which she perfected by watching the entire run of Friends dozens of times.

Park escaped from North Korea in 2007. Now a 21-year-old activist based in Seoul, she’s part of what’s known in Korea as the jangmadang sedae: the black-market generation.

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