The curious timing of North Korea’s rocket launch

Posted on by
1

The curious timing of North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket launch, outside of its usual spring-summer launch window, raises questions about the political motivations behind Pyongyang’s attention-grabbing move.

On Wednesday morning, just before 10 a.m. local time, South Korean news agency Yonhap and the Japanese government reported that the rocket had been launched. It came just days after North Korea extended the launch window due to technical issues.

Taking heed of launch and the usual caveats about reading North Korean government behavior, we can discern three motives underlying Pyongyang’s latest move: international bargaining, domestic legitimacy and strategic leverage.

With Barack Obama’s re-election in Washington and Xi Jinping named as the new Chinese President, the region awaits the outcomes of the Japanese election on December 16 and the South Korean presidential poll on December 19. Proliferation-related negotiating activity is on hold, leaving a diplomatic vacuum until the new governments are settled.

External aid fills gaps in the domestic economy and satisfies vital needs such as food and energy that the regime cannot provide for indigenously. The gambit fails if there are no negotiations. While North Korea appears to have no intention of relinquishing its nuclear or missile capabilities, its habitual tactic of engineering crises to leverage aid from the international community in exchange for de-escalation or proliferation freeze agreements is predicated on negotiations actually taking place.

A December rocket launch sends a strong signal from Pyongyang to its regional interlocutors to ensure that North Korea does not get overlooked amid the bureaucratic maelstrom that usually follows changes in government.

CNN

On agricultural reform in North Korea

Posted on by

North Korea has long relied on socialized agriculture, placing several families on a common piece of land to farm for the state.  The result has been malnutrition and even starvation.

Reforms reportedly have been adopted to reduce the number of families per plot, and establish a production quota above which farmers can keep the excess. The objective however may not be greater freedom but reordered regulation.

There are indications that the regime is manipulating prices in an attempt to eliminate private markets and seizing privately farmed plots of land for collective use.

Open Radio for North Korea reported that “North Korean citizens, who experienced the similar situation in 2002, are preparing for Kim Jong-un’s New Economic Management System.  To prepare for the prices skyrocketing, they are hoarding Chinese money, and prices and the exchange rate keep rising.”

 

North Koreans ready for liberalization and change?

Posted on by

The North Korean people appear ready for change.  Certainly ever fewer believe DPRK mythology that they live in a world of plenty compared to an impoverished South Korea.

Refugees who have experienced life in China and regime elites spread information about the outside world.  DVDs of Chinese and South Korean television programs circulate; some observers describe a “mania” for South Korean culture.  A million North Koreans own cell phones.  Famine forced many people into the black market to survive.

The regime is aware of the risks of liberalization and has embarked upon what author Scott Thomas Bruce called “the ‘mosquito net’ strategy, meaning that Pyongyang will allow foreign investment … while blocking potentially harmful news and culture from the outside world.”  This strategy is risky, since the multi-headed genie cannot easily be put back into the bottle.

Indeed, the regime has tightened border enforcement along the Yalu and enhanced punishment of would-be refugees, targeting their families as well.

Nevertheless, Kim Jong Un’s rhetoric may raise expectations without yielding results, setting the stage for further unrest.

Forbes

 

South Korea one of the world’s great success stories

Posted on by

Sixty years ago, South Korea was an economic wasteland. Today, it is not only the world’s 11th largest economy, but also a vibrant democracy and an emerging cultural force.

Daniel Tudor, the Korea correspondent for the Economist, suggests “South Koreans have written the most unlikely and impressive story of nation-building of the last century.”

Korea has one of the lowest levels of welfare spending in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is due to Korea having been a developmental, high-growth country where things were sacrificed to barrel ahead. It was a matter of growth above all else.

If you go back to the 1950s and the early 1960s, Korea was really one of the poorest places in the world. People didn’t expect it to survive, and many people expected North Korea to take it over eventually. An adviser to former South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee said, “We were the poorest, most impossible country on the planet.”

For South Korea to have gone from this sort of messed-up, disorderly, broke country into a wealthy democracy — it would have been impossible to imagine. But the Korean people have done it.

Thanks in part to its neighbors though, South Korea is all too often overlooked. Korea probably gets overshadowed by China, Japan and North Korea. China is a massive growth story. Japan is famous as a cultural powerhouse. North Korea is just famous for being a pretty extreme dictatorship. By comparison, South Korea struggles to stand out.

And to South Koreans who are 20 years old, they don’t know much about North Korea, they don’t know anybody from North Korea, and they can’t go there, so it is simply not a reference point for them.

 

Satellite photo of North Korea at night

Posted on by

In this image from Sept. 24, 2012 provided by NASA, the Korean Peninsula is seen at night from a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite.

City lights at night are a fairly reliable indicator of where people live. But this isn’t always the case, and the Korean Peninsula shows why.

As of July 2012, South Korea’s population was estimated at roughly 49 million people, and North Korea’s population was estimated at about half that number. But where South Korea is gleaming with city lights, North Korea has hardly any lights at all, just a faint glimmer around Pyongyang.

The wide-area image shows the Korean Peninsula, parts of China and Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the Sea of Japan.

Photo: NASA / AP

Born and raised in a North Korean prison camp

Posted on by
1

A brutal North Korean prison camp was all that Shin Dong-hyuk knew for the first 23 years of his life. CNN journalist Anderson Cooper, after interviewing him, said, “Shin Dong-hyuk isn’t just somebody who was sent to a concentration camp. This is somebody who was born into a concentration camp. And for the majority of his life up until he was probably 22 or 23, had no idea that there was another kind of way to exist.”

Anderson Cooper: Growing up, did you ever think about escaping?

Shin Dong-hyuk: That never crossed my mind.

Anderson Cooper: It never crossed your mind?

Shin Dong-hyuk: No. Never. What I thought was that the society outside the camp would be similar to that inside the camp.

Anderson Cooper: You thought everybody lived in a prison camp like this?

Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.

Anderson Cooper: Did anybody ever explain to you why you were in a camp?

Shin Dong-hyuk: No. Never. Because I was born there I just thought that those people who carry guns were born to carry guns. And prisoners like me were born as prisoners.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know America existed?

Shin Dong-hyuk: Not at all.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know that the world was round?

Shin Dong-hyuk: I had no idea if it was round or square.

Read transcript of full interview with Shin Dong-hyuk

 

North Korean Survivor Shin Dong-Hyuk

Posted on by
5

Little is known about the prison camps of North Korea where it is estimated that 200,000 are imprisoned. Many are born in the camps and generations of families are imprisoned because one of their relatives has been detained.

Shin Dong-Hyuk is one such case. He was born 26 years ago in Camp 14 in Pyeongan province, known as a ‘complete control district’, where the only sentence is life.

For most of his life all he knew was the camp, working 12 to 15-hour days mining coal, building dams or sewing military uniforms. If inmates were not executed they were killed in work-related accidents or died of an illness usually triggered by hunger.

In his own words Shin Dong-hyuk tells us about life inside one of North Korea’s notorious political prison camps, how he was tortured and how he was forced to watch his mother’s and brother’s execution.

But after the execution of his mother and brother, Shin Dong-Hyuk decided to try and escape. No one born into a North Korean prison camp has ever escaped before.

Shin escaped from the camp, leaving his father behind, in 2005. Now, he lives a new life in South Korea having discarded his original name Shin In Keun. A message to his father

Watch Anderson Cooper interview with Shin Dong-Hyuk

 

The continued desperation of North Korean refugees

Posted on by

It’s rare for North Korean defectors to set sail for Japan, but last September, a group of nine North Koreans, who have since resettled in South Korea, was discovered drifting about 15 miles off the coast of Noto peninsula.

In 2006, four other North Koreans also successfully floated to northern Japan. And previously, in 1987, a family of 11 drifted from North Korea to west Japan.

This group was not so fortunate. A small wooden boat was discovered early morning Wednesday off the western island of Sado in Japan contained decomposing bodies, according to local police. The boat was badly damaged and contained faint markings on the side that appeared to be Korean characters.

Police would not say exactly how many bodies were found on the boat, but said that some bodies had decomposed to the point where only skeletons remained. Local Japanese media reported five bodies were found.

CNN NewSource

 

Latest high-profile appointment by Kim Jong Un

Posted on by
1

North Korea has replaced its defense minister with a hardline military commander believed responsible for deadly attacks on South Korea in 2010, diplomats in Pyongyang said Thursday. It is the latest in a series of high-profile appointments leader Kim Jong Un has made since he took power nearly a year ago.

Diplomats in Pyongyang told the Associated Press that they were informed that Kim Jong Gak had been replaced as armed forces minister by Kim Kyok Sik, commander of the battalions linked to two deadly attacks in 2010 blamed on North Korea. South Korean officials said they also received similar information about the North Korean personnel changes.

The move comes amid speculation that North Korea may be preparing a long-range rocket launch. North Korea says its launches are meant to put a satellite into orbit.

The appointment of a hawkish general could mean North Korea wants to show a tough face to Washington and Seoul, said analyst Hong Hyun-ik at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea.

Baek Seung-joo, an analyst at the state-run Korea Institute for Defence Analyses in Seoul, said Kim Jong Un is trying to put his stamp on the military by building loyalty with troops and also by creating tension among generals through personnel changes.

In July, Kim dismissed military chief Ri Yong Ho, who was seen as one of his key mentors, and named little-known vice marshal Hyon Yong Chol as his new General Staff chief.

In April, Kim also reshuffled top Workers’ Party posts by taking on top party posts held by his father and giving other high-level posts to close associates.

In recent months, North Korea has also reshuffled top Cabinet members such as the ministers of sports, electronics industry and agriculture, according to Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea denounces UN human rights resolution

Posted on by

Xinhua reports on North Korea denouncing a human rights resolution adopted by the Third Committee of the 67th UN General Assembly:

“The DPRK flatly rejects and vehemently denounces the anti-DPRK  ‘human rights resolution’ which the hostile forces adopted to bring down the Korean-style socialist system centered on the popular masses by abusing the noble idea of human rights, prompted by their sinister political purposes,” a foreign ministry spokesman was quoted as saying.

From their perspective, the Western forces are blindly following the United States’ hostile policy toward the DPRK “out of inveterate repugnance” toward its socialist system, the spokesman said, adding that the “absurd political chicanery” is aimed at playing down the increasing international prestige of North Korea.