Deteriorating Kenneth Bae moved to hospital

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Kenneth Bae, the American citizen sentenced to 15 years in a North Korean labor camp, has been moved to a hospital after a serious deterioration in his health, his sister said.

Detained in North Korea in November and sentenced in April for “hostile acts to bring down its government,” Bae is now suffering from severe back and leg pain and has lost more than 50 pounds, his sister Terri Chung told CNN late Sunday.

Chung said she received the information from the U.S. State Department, which told her the Swedish ambassador to North Korea had visited Bae in the hospital on Friday. Sweden represents U.S. interests in North Korea because the United States has no diplomatic presence in the secretive state.

Kenneth Baeimprisoned Kenneth BaeDetention in North Korea has taken a heavy toll on Bae, who has already been dealing with other health problems, including diabetes. In a video released early last month, Bae had stated, “Although my health is not good, I am being patient and coping well,” his head shaved and face noticeably thinner than in earlier photos. in that interview, he spoke of health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver and a back problem.

“I think the last three months in the labor camp have certainly been very trying on both his mental and physical health,” Chung said by phone from the Seattle area. The eight hours per day of farm labor, which Bae had never done before, appear to have worsened his symptoms, she said, adding that “he’s also under a tremendous amount of stress.” Other problems he’s suffering from include kidney stones, dizziness, blurred vision and loss of vision.

The family is “extremely concerned” about the situation and is pleading with the U.S. government to help Bae’s case, Chung said.

North Korea has so far showed no sign of budging on the case of Bae, who they call Pae Jun Ho, his Korean name.

 

North Korean defector meets Australian benefactor

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Hyeonseo Lee fled North Korea three years ago, making the treacherous journey through China to South East Asia. Her family crossed into Laos, but Hyeonseo’s mother and brother were detained at the border and put in prison.

Desperate, in tears and with no money she was spotted in a café by Australian backpacker Dick Stolp, who gave her £645 ($981) to pay prison officials to get her family released.

They went their separate ways, but Hyeonseo has always wanted to thank Mr. Stolp in person.

An Australian TV program looking at North Korean issues recently brought the pair back together in an emotional surprise reunion. The associate producer of SBS Television’s Insight program, Luan McKenna, explained, “It was worth it to see her face when she met Dick in the SBS foyer. … After all, not only did his money get Hyeonseo, her mother and her brother to safety – it was also an act of kindness that restored her faith in humanity.”

Hyeonseo now lives in Seoul where she helps other North Korean refugees, and gives lectures around the world about the difficulties facing the friends and family she left behind.

Stolp says he is happy to see her making a difference. “I’m meeting someone who is now doing good things, and inside I can’t help but feel ‘Hey! I helped this lady to go out and change her life’,” he said. “People have been touched (by the story) and hopefully they will go and do something.”

Sky News

UN provides food aid to North Korean flood victims

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The World Food Program (WFP) spokeswoman Nanna Skau said corn is being provided to North Korean households that have been hit hard by recent flooding caused by torrential rain, Radio Free Asia reported. She added that assistance is being offered because flooding has caused extensive damage to farmlands and irrigation systems.

The WFP also said support will be provided to 38,067 people in 10 cities and counties in Pyongan, Hwanghae and Hamgyong provinces.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said torrential rains that caused flooding and landslides left 33 North Koreans dead and displaced roughly 50,000 people from their homes. In places such as Anju in South Pyongan Province, some 80 percent of the city was flooded, resulting in extensive damage to homes and buildings.

Related to the international food effort underway, Korean Sharing Movement, a South Korean non-governmental organization, said it wanted to send emergency food aid to the North and requested permission from Seoul’s Ministry of Unification, which oversees inter-Korean affairs.

[Yonhap News]

Don’t forget incarcerated American Kenneth Bae

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Kenneth Bae, an American man from Washington State, has spent more than nine months imprisoned in North Korea. That’s longer than any other American recently held there.

While the US has called for Bae’s immediate release, North Korean scholar Charles Armstrong explains part of the dilemma for US officials dealing with the situation. “They don’t want to encourage this type of behavior from North Korea,” said Armstrong, professor of Korean studies at Columbia University and director of the school’s Center for Korean Research. “They don’t want to be seen as giving in to pressure from the North Korean government, but there’s also a strong humanitarian interest in getting an American citizen released.”

Since 2009, North Korea has detained at least six Americans, then released them only after visits from prominent US dignitaries. Armstrong suspects that’s what the reclusive Asian regime is after.

Based out of China since 2006, Kenneth Bae traveled frequently to North Korea as a tour operator and Christian missionary. In November, he was arrested, then later convicted of “hostile acts” against the North Korean government. Details about his alleged crimes are still unclear.

“All I know is my brother is a good man,” his sister says.  “He has a huge heart to help people in the nation of North Korea. He is religious, and his religious convictions may have been overzealous and may have been deemed, and seen, as hostile against the state.”

His sister adds they try to stay hopeful, through the dark moments. One of the darkest came in May, when CNN aired a video of Kenneth in prison. He appears in a stained prison uniform, his eyes downcast and tearful. “He looks so sad and panicked,” his mother Myunghee Bae said. “He’s not my son I remember. He looks totally broken. It’s the worst moment of my life.”

From the video, Myunghee Bae noticed her son had lost a lot of weight. He’s since told her that his health is failing, possibly from diabetes-related complications.

In recent months, Kenneth Bae has been able to call home four times and send several letters.

KUOW 

 

The sensitive case of North Korean defector Kim Kwang-ho

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North Korean defector Kim Kwang-ho originally defected to South Korea in 2009 with his wife and had a daughter there, but for obscure reasons returned to North Korea and ended up paraded before the state media in January this year in an effort to denounce life in South Korea. He was later arrested for stating he ate better in South Korea.

North Korean defector Kim Kwang hoRecently, Kim fled North Korea again, this time with his sister- and brother-in-law. They went to China, where they were caught on July 14 and are being held.

The South Korean government will make the case that Kim remains a South Korean citizen and will ask China to send his in-laws to South Korea on humanitarian grounds.

“Although Kim and his wife returned to the North after settling in the South, they are clearly South Korean citizens,” said a government official on Monday. “We believe the Chinese government will consider this fact. If it sends a South Korean citizen to North Korea, the decision could turn into a major diplomatic problem.”

A spokesman for activist group NK Refugees Human Rights Association of Korea, who helped the family defect again, said Kim and his relatives are being held in China’s Yanbian Province. Other activists said Chinese security forces conducted a massive manhunt to capture them, and they were captured on Sunday in the mountains surrounding Yanji.

Activists believe North Korea must have sought China’s help to catch Kim and his family. When it was reported that Kim succeeded in fleeing North Korea again by bribing border guards, North Korea belatedly started tracking the Kims down and asked China to arrest them.

A government source in Seoul said Sunday, “It seems the Chinese government is trying to buy time in handling Kim Kwang-ho’s case. The reason they’re refusing the South Korean consul’s requests to interview Kim’s family is because it has not determined Kim’s nationality.”

If Beijing allows the South Korean consul to interview Kim and his family, it means it recognizes them as South Korean, and that puts China under pressure given that the case is sensitive for both Koreas.

[Chosun Ilbo]

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un mobbed by screaming women

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It’s a scene more often associated with the likes of Justin Bieber or Harry Styles, but it appears it’s not just good-looking pop stars that get mobbed by screaming females as they walk down the street.

Earlier this week, it was the unlikely figure of North Korean despot Kim Jong-un who was set upon by adoring crowds of women as he toured a mushroom farm in the country.

Kim Jong Un mobbed by womenIn a photograph released by the state-controlled Central News Agency, a smiling Kim Jong-un is seen surrounded by a large group of women wearing white boiler suits.

Many of the women, who are assumed to be workers on the mushroom farm, are seen crying with joy as the dictator is led through the crowd by a stern-looking female soldier.

[The Independent]

The Spanish aristocrat who works for North Korea

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Alejandro Cao de Benos-north-koreaAlejandro Cao de Benos, 38, is believed to be the only Westerner ever employed by the North Korean government. He’s a Spanish aristocrat, born to a family of landed gentry in northeast Spain, where he agreed to meet NPR for an interview one recent afternoon.

“I consider myself as [much] Spanish as Korean 50-50. This is my country of birth, and North Korea is my country of adoption,” says Cao de Benos, who also goes by the Korean name Cho Son Il, which means “Korea is one.”

For the past 11 years, he has held the title of special delegate for North Korea’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. It’s an unpaid gig. He earns money as an IT consultant, working in the past in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Spanish capital, Madrid. He pays his own way to North Korea, where he works six months a year as a minder for foreign visitors. The rest of the year he gives presentations about North Korea at universities across Europe, and tries to drum up business for the ailing regime. It’s an uphill battle, he admits.

Cao de Benos adopted North Korean ideology as a teenager, after his family fortune was squandered. His grandfather had made a series of bad investments. So his dad went from a nobleman to someone who had to find a job. The family moved to Andalusia, in southern Spain, a socialist stronghold at the time, when he was 15.

“While my friends were interested in football and things like that, I was much more interested in philosophy and politics,” he said. “Obviously first I got knowledge of Marxism and Leninism, but I heard that there was a country which had another kind of socialism another kind of experiment based on their own culture and history and that was North Korea.”

Cao de Benos speaks passionately about what draws him to Pyongyang year after year. He has an apartment there, where he sometimes even celebrates Christmas. “Society and life is completely different. In North Korea, there is no stock market, there is no gambling, there is no prostitution, and there are no drugs. Everybody leads a humble life, but with dignity,” he said. “You see the big difference? I was working in Palo Alto, Calif. and what I witnessed was yes, there are some beautiful houses and people with great cars, but there are a few people taking control over the properties and the companies, and they are the ones getting richer while the majority of the people the workers are getting poorer.”

He also acknowledges seeing a darker side of the isolated Communist country. “I’ve been in Pyongyang without electricity 24 hours [a day] without water,” Cao de Benos recalls. “I’ve been going with my comrades to pick up buckets of water that we will share among six or seven people and I have seen the situation. I have seen the starvation.”

But he blames that on natural disasters and most of all, Western sanctions. He says he believes that North Korean communism if left alone would do justice for a greater number of people than capitalism.

Read full NPR article  

North Korean refugees in Myanmar held by Burmese rebels

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South Korean NGOs face a dilemma over how to rescue 64 North Koreans held by Myanmar rebels and forced to work on a drug farm.

The North Koreans have been taken to a rebel camp northeast of Tachilek, a town along the border between Myanmar and Thailand, over the past nine years, Pastor Kim Hee-Tae told AFP. The refugees were caught while attempting to travel on their own through rebel-held territory to Thailand in order to defect to South Korea after fleeing their poverty-stricken homeland.

He said NGOs were unable to launch a campaign to raise the money, that is $5,000 ransom for each of the hostages, or to ask for Seoul to intervene as the hostage takers were extremely publicity shy.

“We need very quiet negotiations to pull it through”, he said.

About 80 percent of the North Koreans were women and were forced to work at alcohol manufacturing or drug processing plants. “Some of them are forced into prostitution”, he said. Male captives were used to grow poppies.

Myanmar is the world’s second largest producer of opium — the raw ingredient for heroin — after Afghanistan, accounting for 10 percent of global production, according to UN data.

[Sinchew]

No trace of North Korean refugees held near Burma border

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Burmese government officials said they are unable to confirm reports that 64 North Korean refugees are being held by rebel groups near the border town of Tachilek in Shan State.

“The last we heard of North Koreans on their way to Thailand was four years earlier,” a security officer was quoted as saying. “They had mistaken the Burmese shore north of Tachilek for Thai territory and had embarked there. We told them to return to where they came from.”

A South Korean activist claimed recently that the refugees had been held for years and were subject to forced labor and prostitution.

[Irrawaddy]

Sugar to North Korea in payment for weapons repairs

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Officials fearing some sort of modern-day Cuban Missile Crisis could only have been relieved to find out that what Cuba describes as an assortment of antique Soviet weapons discovered aboard a North Korean ship are more suited to a Cold War museum than they are to being used as weapons in the 21st century.

Cuba says the weapons, which were en route to North Korea for repairs, are “obsolete.” And experts who identified early Cold War relics like the Soviet-designed SA-2 air defense system among the ship’s cargo say that’s not far from the truth.

“We are talking about really old stuff — that technology was designed in the 1940s and 50s,” said James O’Halloran, editor of Jane’s Land Based Air Defence and Jane’s Strategic Weapon Systems. “Very few countries still employ the SA-2 system as a frontline defensive weapon.”

Cuba requires repairs on old systems like the SA-2, which went out of commission decades ago, and the MiG-21 jet, which was last produced in 1985 and is now mostly kept by long-time Russian allies for spare parts, according to O’Halloran at Jane’s.

In the meantime, experts don’t expect the episode will have a lasting effect diplomatically on either country — North Korea is already “sanctioned to the hilt,” says Mike Elleman, Senior Fellow for Regional Security Cooperation at IISS, and Cuba’s relations with the U.S. are thawing after decades of tension.

The more lasting impression of the raid on ship could, in the end, be the 10,000 tons of brown sugar found on-board the ship. Experts believe the sugar could be Cuban payment to cash-strapped North Korea in exchange for the weapons repairs.

“This will be much ado about nothing, except telling the world just how bad a shape Cuba and North Korea are in today — bartering early Cold War materials for sugar, that speaks volumes,” said Ellemann.

CNN