New North Korean leadership not following past patterns

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Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who is experienced in negotiations with North Korea, says that North Korea’s detention of Americans Merrill Newman and Kenneth Bae signals a change.

According to Richardson, the two American hostages are being used as pawns in a game with the United States — but the stakes remain unclear. “The North Koreans are up to something. … Hopefully, they’ll make a move soon and we’ll get these two Americans out,” Richardson said.

Richardson, author of the new book, “How to Sweet-Talk a Shark: Strategies and Stories from a Master Negotiator,” said the detentions show Kim Jong Un “getting himself firmly in control — and I don’t think we should underestimate him. … He’s young, but he’s purged a lot of the old military leaders that were loyal to his father. He’s bringing his own people in, consolidating power.”

“… This new leadership, they’re not following the patterns that they had before like when I was negotiating,” the former governor said.

Richardson said he had helped get several hostages out of North Korea in the past. “But there was always a pattern. The pattern was there’s a confession, they apprehend them, but then they negotiate with high-profile people and they leave,” he said.

“In this case, there are two American detainees and the North Koreans, they’re acting very strange.”

“I went to North Korea in February with the head of Google, with Eric Schmidt, but the North Korean leader wouldn’t see us. He saw [basketball bad boy] Dennis Rodman.”

[Newsmax] 

The revamping of the North Korean power structure

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Besides ousting his uncle and guardian Jang Song-taek, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears to be completing revamping the power structure of the regime, now having replaced about half of the top cadres in the Workers Party, government and military in the year and 10 months since he took power.

According to the South Korean Unification Ministry, Kim has replaced 97 of 218 party heads, government ministers and senior military officers since his father Kim Jong-il died in December 2001.

And some 44 percent of military commanders have also been ousted, replacing elderly officers from Kim Jong-il’s time to younger officers (in their 50s).

South Korean Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae told lawmakers rumors that Jang Song-taek’s closest confidants Ri Yong-ha and Jang Su-gil were publicly executed in late November for damaging the Workers Party have been confirmed.

Jang’s brother-in-law, the North Korean Ambassador to Cuba, Jon Yong-jin, is apparently set to return to Pyongyang on Thursday. A diplomatic source in Beijing said Jon appears to have been recalled. Jang’s nephew and Ambassador to Malaysia Jang Yong-chol has already been recalled.

The Unification Minister said no harm appears to have come to Jang himself, though his whereabouts are a mystery.

Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is apparently away from Pyongyang, judging by a sighting of his personal train.

Challenging North Korean human rights policy

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There is no more vexing issue than the challenge of how to support the improvement of human rights in North Korea, a country that has consistently ranked at the bottom of international indices rating human freedom around the world.

The U.S. Congress passed the North Korea Human Rights Act almost a decade ago, the United Nations has appointed a rapporteur to examine the human rights situation inside North Korea for almost as long, and the Korean Institute for National Unification has published an ever-growing annual white paper on North Korean human rights since 1996.

This year the UN Human Rights Council appointed a Commission of Inquiry that has held public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London, and Washington, DC; the commission will report back to the UN Human Rights Council with its assessment and recommendations by spring of next year.

But the stream of North Korean refugee testimony to unspeakable atrocities and evidence of systemic abuses inside North Korea continues to grow.

[Council on Foreign Relations]

Kim Jong Un sacks powerful uncle Jang Song Thaek

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is believed to have dismissed a powerful uncle, a man key to his rise to power, from his posts, South Korean lawmakers said on Tuesday, a move that could help consolidate his power base with a younger guard of aides.

Jang Song Thaek was likely sacked as vice chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission and as a department head of the ruling Workers’ Party, lawmaker Jung Cheong-rae said, citing a senior South Korean official with the National Intelligence Service (NIS).

Analysts who watch the North’s power structure say Jang’s removal would not have been possible without the approval of the third Kim to rule in the family dynasty, Kim Jong Un.

There was no immediate mention of Jang’s fate on North Korea’s KCNA news agency. Two members of the South Korean parliament’s Intelligence Committee told separate news briefings that the NIS had confirmed the public execution of two close aides to Jang in the North’s ruling Workers’ Party for corruption.

The removal of Jang, a key figure in the power transition following the 2011 death of Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, could tip the balance in the fiercely competitive group of confidants surrounding the current leader but was unlikely to impact on Kim Jong Un’s hold on power, experts said.

Koh Yu-hwan of Dongguk University in Seoul, a leading expert on the North’s leadership, said, “I think the young elite had Kim get rid of Jang, meaning that he will rule without a guardian.”

[Reuters]

North Korea looking for concessions similar to Iran?

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The U.S. government pleaded Saturday for North Korean authorities to release 85-year-old Merrill Newman, with a spokeswoman saying officials are “deeply concerned” about him and another American Kenneth Bae being held in the isolated East Asian nation.

So how did an elderly retired financial consultant and Korean War veteran become the central figure in an international dispute? Why is there such animosity still tied to a conflict, the Korean War, that ended six decades ago? And why is this all unfolding now?

University of California Berkeley professor Steven Weber characterized it as “highly scripted political theater.” Weber, a former consultant to the U.S. Commission on National Security, has a theory: “They are trying to get the Western media to pay attention.”

Largely shut itself off from the rest of the world, North Korea’s leaders and state media often use saber-rattling rhetoric to unite citizens against what Weber described as “nasty outsiders” — which, not coincidentally, are chiefly South Korea and the United States, just as during the Korean War.

The discord in recent years has centered mostly on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, with the international community taking punitive measures such as economic sanctions to hold Pyongyang in check.

North Korea hasn’t been alone. Iran, too, has long been an international target because of its nuclear program, though that landscape has changed with the recent diplomatic accord. That fact may not be lost on Pyongyang, said Weber, who surmised North Korea may be particularly eager to get the world’s focus and, ideally, concessions in the process.

Added Weber: “If the Iran thing gets settled peacefully, then guess who’s left?”

[CNN Wire]

North Korea’s prison camps according to Shin Dong-hyuk

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One of the most powerful accounts of North Korea’s prison camps comes from Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known surviving escapee from Kaechon re-education camp 14, into which he was born in 1983.

Shin tells of guards lighting a fire under his back and forcing a hook into his skin to prevent him struggling, when he was just 13. He still bears the scars. His arms are deformed from being hung upside down; he suffers nightmares.

Shin’s story is especially remarkable because he had no comprehension of life outside the prison camp – he thought the world was like that.

Children beaten and starved, used as forced laborers, working in freezing conditions in threadbare clothes, surviving on grass and rats, seeing their parents killed, made to act as informers against their own families.

The prisoners are treated lower then animals, women routinely subjected to sexual violence and, if pregnant, their babies killed.

In 2005, at 23, urged on by an older prisoner, he miraculously escaped and now works with human rights groups such as Liberty in North Korea to expose these atrocities.

This back-from-hell defector puts all of us to shame for closing our eyes to North Korea’s persecution and control of its people for so long. His story must become as well known as The Diary of Anne Frank.

[Canberra Times]

The horrors of North Korea’s prison camps

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A small and very hungry girl is searched by her teacher who finds five grains of wheat in her pocket. He beats her to death in front of her classmates.

A teenage boy witnesses the public execution of his mother and brother.

A man is made to help load the corpses of prisoners dead from starvation, put them in a pot and burn them.

A mother is forced to drown her baby in a bucket.

Are these the accounts of witnesses to crimes against humanity in a concentration camp or torture chamber of the past? Something from Auschwitz perhaps or acts committed under Stalin or Pol Pot?

No, these acts were committed in the 21st century in the modern-day prison camp ludicrously named the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. These horrors are inflicted daily on up to 200,000 prisoners. North Korea’s camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and 12 times as long as the Nazi extermination camps. Yet we’ve barely noticed.

Millions have died in these black holes, through imprisonment, forced labor, starvation and torture.

At last, thanks to the first UN commission of inquiry into North Korea’s human darkness, light is being shone on this secretive totalitarian state. Australian former High Court judge Michael Kirby, who is chairing the inquiry, said the testimony of almost 80 witnesses, defectors and experts at public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington in recent months evoked reactions similar to the discovery of concentration camps in Europe during World War II.

[Canberra Times]

The influence of songbun on North Korean society

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Associated Press journalist Tim Sullivan explains songbun, the caste system of North Korea, and the role it continues to play in North Korean society:

I find songbun really fascinating. Basically, every person has an ideological purity that is traced through their family, and there’s a deep belief in that your purity is linked to your father’s and to your grandfather’s. And what songbun did is basically turn hierarchy on its head with landowners and aristocrats at the very bottom and peasants at the very top.

Songbun has become an ingrained way for the Korean Workers’ Party to become entrenched because while these people’s grandfathers or great-grandfathers may have been peasants, their children became generals or admirals or top party bureaucrats and they simply handed that power down to their sons and grandsons.

At the same time, if you talk to exiles, people who have fled North Korea because of their miserable lives, many of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were landowners or part of the educated class.

So songbun has become this way of keeping things from not really changing there.

But legally, songbun does not exist. North Koreans insist to me up and down it does not exist. However those outside the country who could speak openly, say it still exists.

And so in North Korea, when you apply for a job, you still list your songbun. You list your father’s job, your grandfather’s job and your great-grandfather’s job, which tells them exactly who you are.

In absolute irony, Ko Young-hee, the mother of present leader Kim Jong-un, was born in Osaka, Japan, which would make her part of songbun’s “hostile class” because of her Korean-Japanese heritage. Furthermore, her grandfather worked in a sewing factory for the Imperial Japanese Army.

There were three attempts made to idolize Ko. The building of a cult of personality around Ko encounters the problem of her bad songbun, as making her identity public would undermine the Kim dynasty’s pure bloodline. Ko’s real name or other personal details have not been publicly revealed (her origins could be figured out, as she worked with Mansudae Art Troupe in Pyongyang). The complications of Ko’s songbun were such that after Kim Jong-il’s death, her personal information, including name, became state secrets.

North Korean infrastructure growth under Kim Jong Un

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North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has presided over a construction boom since he took office two years ago with the aid of funds from China, the North’s major backer, and Russia, a former Cold War ally.

A stronger focus on the economy is a major change in policy for the third Kim to rule North Korea. The “military first” policy of Kim Jong Il, the young leader’s father, plunged North Korea into famine in the 1990s. But thanks to years of this policy, which prioritized investment in the armed forces, the young Kim can now draw on a 1.2 million strong army to realize his goals. These “soldier-builders” are often seen constructing apartment blocks and laying roads. And much of the land belongs to the state, removing another major cost from projects.

Chinese money paid for a $300 million suspension bridge across a one kilometre-wide stretch of the Yalu River, according to Chinese media reports, linking China’s port city of Dandong and its North Korean equivalent, Sinuiju.

Russia in September reopened a 54-km (34-mile) railway track from its eastern border town of Khasan to the North’s port of Rajin. And satellite imagery shows work is under way on a 100-km (60-mile) highway along North Korea’s east coast linking Hamhung to a tourist zone planned for the port city of Wonsan.

“It appears one goal is to link all the provincial capitals to Pyongyang by paved highway (and) increase road transport integration with the Chinese economy,” said Curtis Melvin, a researcher at the U.S.-Korea Institute at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who spotted foundations for the Wonsan-Hamhung road using satellite imagery.

Improving roads will also underpin plans to turn North Korea into a tourist attraction – a move with potential economic gains in the short term that avoids restructuring ailing industrial plants that are starved of cash and electricity. One widely publicized public project is the Masik Ski Resort in the mountains to the west of Wonsan. North Korea aims to make $43.75 million in annual profit from the resort.

Kim Jong Un also made multiple trips to a new water park that opened on Oct. 15, which covers 110,000 square metres (27 acres) on the bank of the Taedong River that runs through the capital Pyongyang. His frequent appearances at fun parks and equestrian centres have been mocked in foreign media, but they tie into the other development projects by targeting Chinese tourists, for whom the North is a cheap destination.

[Reuters]

Governor Bill Richardson involved with North Korea re: US prisoner negotiations

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The United States on Thursday signaled North Korea could improve its strained ties with Washington by releasing U.S. citizens, as former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson became involved in the case of an 85-year-old American held by Pyongyang.

North Korea last month detained Merrill Newman, a veteran of the Korean War and a retiree from Palo Alto, California, taking him off a plane as he was about to leave the reclusive Asian country, which he had been visiting on a tourist visa.

North Korea has also held Korean-American Christian missionary Kenneth Bae since November 2012, sentencing him to 15 years of hard labor. His detention followed a long series of acrimonious exchanges between North Korea and the United States over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Richardson, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the 1990s, has revived his role as periodic troubleshooter on North Korean issues, including efforts to free detained Americans. Asked by email whether Richardson was looking into the Newman’s detention, spokeswoman Caitlin Kelleher told Reuters: “Governor Richardson is involved in that he is in touch with his North Korean contacts.”

“North Korea could send a very different signal about its interest in having a different sort of relationship with the United States were it to take that step of releasing our citizens, and it’s a matter of some wonderment to me that they’ve haven’t yet moved on that,” Glyn Davies, U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, told reporters in Beijing.

[Reuters]