North Korea vice-premier Choe Yong-gon executed?

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South Korea’s government says it is monitoring reports that North Korea’s vice-premier Choe Yong-gon was killed in May on orders of Kim Jong-un. Mr Choe was executed after he “expressed discomfort against the young leader’s forestation policy”, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports.

The BBC has not been able to verify the claims. North Korea rarely confirms the South’s reports of executions.

In April, South Korea’s intelligence agency said Kim Jong-un had ordered the execution of 15 officials in the first four months of the year. Among them was a forestry official who complained about the leader’s forestation plan, the agency said at the time, but it is not clear if this man was Choe Yong-gon.

Choe Yong-gon was formerly deputy minister of construction and building material industries, and had represented North Korea in trade talks in Seoul in the mid-2000s. He was appointed as one of seven vice-premiers in June last year, and his promotion was seen by one analyst as a sign Pyongyang was keen to maintain close ties with the South.

[BBC]

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Kim Jong-un’s purges continue

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North Korea’s vice-premier has reportedly been executed by firing squad after voicing discontent with the forestry policies of Kim Jong-un, the country’s young dictator. Choe Yong-gon, 63, was killed after less than a year in his job, South Korean media reported, the latest casualty in a series of high-level purges within the isolated communist nation.

North Korean has not officially confirmed the execution, reported to have taken place in May, but Mr Choe has not been seen in public since December and Pyongyang announced his replacement in July.

Reports of Mr Choe’s death come close on the heels of the execution of Hyon Yong-chol, the defense minister, who was said to have been killed in front of a large crowd of government officials as a way of setting an example to Mr Kim’s other subordinates.

North Korean vice premier Choe Yong Gon, pictured in 2005

Mr Choe is reported to have taken office in June last year. He once led the North Korean delegation in economic co-operation talks with South Korea. He was also a former member of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the North Korean parliament. South Korea’s ministry of unification, which is responsible for relations with its neighbor, said it was “closely monitoring the possibility of any changes in Choe’s circumstances”.

The dictator’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was killed in 2013 after being described as “despicable human scum” by state media and charged with treason and corruption. Unlike other purges, which happen in secret, Mr Jang’s death was publicly trumpeted by the North Korean regime, which accused him of having “perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery”.

[The Daily Telegraph]

Drought statistics for North Korea

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Health, nutrition and sanitation conditions have deteriorated for citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) due to “a long period of abnormally dry weather,” according to the UN’s emergency aid coordination body OCHA. In a report released Wednesday, OCHA warned that a continued lack of rainfall will have a severe impact on the autumn harvest.

While UN agencies say the government has made major agricultural reforms over the past decade, and the famines of the past are unlikely now, mass hunger remains a threat that has been exacerbated by 18 months of low rainfall.

Here are some key figures:
• 600,000 – 2.5 million: Estimates of the number of people who died from famine in the 1990s
• 70: The percentage of the DPRK’s 24.6 million people whom the World Food Programme (WFP) deems “food insecure and highly vulnerable to shortages in food production”
• 27.9: The percentage of the population that is chronically malnourished and subject to stunted growth (2012 Nutrition Survey)
• 4: The percentage of the population that is acutely malnourished and subject to wasting (2012 Nutrition Survey)
• US $1,800: GDP per capita (CIA World Factbook)
• US $645,800,000: The estimated amount North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jon-un spent on luxury goods in 2012 (UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK)
• 106: The percentage increase in diarrhoea incidence between January and June in 2015 compared with 2014 in the four provinces hardest hit by the drought (OCHA)
• 36: The percentage received by August of the US $117 million the UN says it needs to address humanitarian needs
• 100: The number of years the state-owned Korean Central News Agency says it has been since the country faced a drought of these proportions

[IRIN]  

Why North Korea’s disregard of its international relations?

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If one looks at recent trends in North Korean foreign policy, it is becoming increasingly clear that the North Korean government is not all that interested in improving its relations with the outside world.

Relations with China are as bad as they have ever been in the last 20-odd years. While China remains North Korea’s major supplier of aid, as well as its main trade partner, the North Korean side has taken a number of deliberate steps that have offended China and kept it at a distance. Very recently, one has to admit, North Korea has demonstrated some interest in improving relations with China. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether these half-hearted attempts will produce any results.

The last two years have been marked by unusually vocal diplomatic overtures to Russia. It seems that the North Korean side wishes to attract Russian trade and investment as a potential substitute for Chinese money. It is highly unlikely though that they will succeed. Russia has neither the desire, nor the ability, to subsidize North Korea on the scale that Pyongyang would consider sufficient.

What are the reasons for [North Korea’s] attitude? To some extent, it might reflect the personal style of the new, young leader [Kim Jong-un]. However, to a much greater extent, this change of line might be connected with the recent improvement in North Korea’s economic situation. In 2013-14, North Korea’s harvests were nearly sufficient to feed the population. Now, in spite of the widely-reported drought, there are no immediate signs of a food crisis.

[North Korea’s] improvement in economic fortunes may be fragile and could be short-lived, but it may have led North Korean leaders to believe that for the time being, they do not need to squeeze more aid from the outside world. However, if they do not need aid, they are likely to take a more isolationist stance, since interactions with the outside world are often seen as politically dangerous.

[Radio Free Asia]

North Korea, in Year 104, now creating new time zone

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North Korea, which was already out of sync with much of the world, announced last Friday that it would take that a step further. The isolated, authoritarian country said it would create its own time zone–“Pyongyang time”–and set its clocks 30 minutes behind those of South Korea and Japan.

The change is to go into effect on Aug. 15, the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, which liberated a then-unified Korea from decades of Japanese colonial rule. Anti-Japanese resentment runs deep in the Koreas, but the North enshrines hostility toward Japanese and other foreign “imperialists” in its Constitution, and it forms the core of the country’s ruling philosophy of “juche,” or self-reliance. North Korea traces its birth as an independent nation to its founder, Kim Il-sung, who like other Korean peasants engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Japanese.

Kim Il-sung, a godlike figure among North Koreans, is the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, the current leader. Since taking power in 2011, Kim Jong-un has been striving to highlight his ties to his grandfather, emphasizing his grandfather’s themes of self-reliance and dignity.

Chang Yong-seok, a North Korea expert at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University, saw the North’s time change as a reiteration of those themes for domestic consumption.

For years, North Korea has even been on a different calendar from both South Korea and the rest of the world. In 1997, it adopted a “juche” calendar based on the year Kim Il-sung was born, 1912. According to official documents, and much of the North’s population, this is the year 104.

[New York Times]

American missionary arrested in Thailand for “trafficking” North Korean refugees

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An American Christian missionary who allegedly smuggled seven North Korean nationals into the country has been arrested in Chiang Mai in northern Thialand.

In the case alleging smuggling of North Koreans, police identified the suspect as Isaac Byungdo Lee, 41, a US national of South Korean origin and long-time resident of Thailand. According to police, Mr Lee has lived in Thailand for around 19 years. He was a shareholder of a hotel in New York and established the Samphat Jai Foundation in Chiang Mai to spread the Christian faith among locals.

Lee allegedly told police he was contacted by another US citizen to pick up seven North Koreans, six women and one man, in Ban Pa Sak of Si Chiang Mai district in June.

After picking up the Koreans, he dropped off five members of the group at a post office and the remaining two women in Chiang Mai to board a plane to the US. The five dropped in Si Chiang Mai ended up in police custody. Police believe they were hoping to be arrested and deported to South Korea.

[Bangkok Post]

North Korea marches captive Canadian pastor in front of cameras

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On Thursday, North Korea marched a Canadian Christian hostage out in front of cameras, so he could admit to crimes against the glorious State—specifically, the crime of placing God above the “Dear Leadership.”

NKNews.org reports that Reverend Hyeon-soo Lim, a Canadian citizen of South Korean birth, was arrested in January during a missionary visit to North Korea, read a statement confessing to “serious crimes,” including that he “severely slandered and impaired the supreme dignity and system of this country and perpetrated a scheme to overthrow the state.”

“In order to create the impression that it is God, and not the Worker’s Party and this country’s government which give things to eat and provide means to live we intentionally drew the cross and wrote the name of the church and Bible phrases on the sacks of provisions that were donated to several parts of the country such as Chongjin and Jagang Province,” said Lim.

“The purpose that I traveled about several parts of the country on the pretext of ‘aid’ was to build a base to overthrow the system of the country and create a religious state, taking advantage of the policies of the U.S. and and South Korean authorities,” Lim continued. “The basic purpose that I was so active in the (provision of) aid to this country in the past was to remove loyalty in the hearts of the North Korean people to their authorities. I deeply, deeply apologize from my heart for my heart, for my indescribable treason.”

Lim’s family, and his Light Presbyterian Church of Toronto, maintain that he has made over 100 trips to North Korea over the past 20 years out of “tremendous love for the people of the DPRK,” because he is a “compassionate and generous man.”

[Breitbart]

Canadian pastor detained in North Korea ‘admits to subversive plots’

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A South Korean news agency is reporting that a Canadian pastor detained in North Korea has confessed to “subversive plots” against the Communist state during a televised news conference.

Yonhap says Rev. Hyeon Soo Lim of the Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Mississauga, Ontario, is quoted by the Korean Central News Agency as saying he was “a servant of the U.S. imperialists and South Korean puppet group.”

A church spokeswoman says Lim was on a humanitarian mission to North Korea when he was detained in early February. Lisa Pak says the 60-year-old Christian missionary left Canada on Jan. 27 with stops in South Korea and China before crossing into North Korea on Jan. 31.

She says Lim’s family remains hopeful he will be released at some point, but didn’t want to comment on the reports of his alleged confessions. A Foreign Affairs spokeswoman says the government is “deeply concerned” and continues to try to arrange consular access and a find resolution to his case.

At Thursday’s news conference, Lim reportedly said that he travelled to several parts of the country pretending to deliver aid, but his real purpose was “to build a base to overthrow the system of the country and create a religious state.” He then went on to apologize for his “indescribable treason.”

Pak says the pastor has a deep love for the North Korean people, which is the reason he has visited the country more than 100 times. Lim’s family has previously said that much of his work has focused on the impoverished country’s northeastern region of Rason. Pak said he has also helped out schools, an orphanage and a nursing home.

[Brandon Sun]

Kang Chol Hwan and three-generation re-education for treason

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Kang Chol Hwan was 9 years old when his grandfather, a high-level government official and ethnic Korean immigrant from Japan, suddenly disappeared. Within a few weeks, soldiers came for the rest of his family, summarily stating that Kang’s grandfather had been convicted of “high treason” but giving no details. The entire three-generation family would immediately be sent to a reeduca­tion camp. The government confiscated the family’s house and nearly all its possessions, though the soldiers took pity on the tearful Kang and allowed him to carry out an aquarium of his favorite tropical fish. Soon after the family’s arrival at the Yodok concentration camp in the country’s northeastern mountains, the fish floated dead in their tank.

The family would spend the next decade in one of Kim Il-sung’s most notorious gulags. Kang’s daily life alternated between school—rote memorization of communist propaganda—and slave labor in the camp’s cornfields, lumberyards, and gold mines. For a time, Kang’s work detail included burying the corpses of prisoners who died daily from starvation or perished in mine cave-ins and dynamite accidents.

Children who disobeyed even slightly were beaten. Adult transgressors spent days, or even months, in the sweatbox, a tiny windowless shack in which victims could only crouch on hands and knees. Sometimes prisoners, including Kang, would be required to witness executions. Once he and other inmates were ordered to stone the hanging corpses of would-be escapees. “The skin on the victims’ faces eventually came undone and nothing remained of their clothing but a few bloody shreds,” Kang would later describe it. “I had the strange feeling of being swallowed up in a world where the earth and sky had changed places.”

As the years passed, Kang became a resourceful survivor. He learned to eat wild salamanders in a single swallow and catch rats with a lasso he designed out of wire. Their meat sustained him and several family members on the verge of starvation through winters at subzero temperatures.     Continued 

Kang Chol Hwan discovers the outside world through radio

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When Kang Chol Hwan was 18, the guards announced one day without preamble that his family would be released from the Yodok concentration camp as a demonstration of leader Kim Il-sung’s generosity. Except Kang’s grandfather—he had been assigned to a different camp, his treason still unexplained. Kang never saw him again.

In his postprison life as a deliveryman in the western county of Pyungsung, Kang harbored few illusions about the corruption of the North Korean regime. But it wasn’t until around three years later that he accessed the information that crystallized his contempt. It came from a pirate radio.

A friend gave Kang two radio receivers. Kang paid a bribe to avoid registering one with police, and he learned how to disassemble its case and remove the filament that hardwired it to official regime frequencies. He and his closest confidants would huddle under a blanket—to muffle the sound from eavesdroppers—and listen to Voice of America, Christian stations, and the South’s Korean Broadcasting System. “At first I didn’t believe it,” he says. “Then I started to believe but felt guilty for listening. Eventually, I couldn’t stop.”

Under their blanket, they relearned all of North Korea’s history, including the fact that the North, not the South, had started the Korean War. Beginning in 1989, they followed the breakdown of Soviet Eastern Europe and the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, a close friend of Kim Il-sung. They heard the music of Simon and Garfunkel and Michael Jackson, even learning the lyrics and softly singing along. “Listening to the radio gave us the words we needed to express our dissatisfaction,” Kang would later write. “Every program, each new discovery, helped us tear a little freer from the enveloping web of deception.”       Continued