Privileged Pyongyang a political strategy

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A mix of underground trading, investment funds, particularly from China, and the growth of government-authorized commercial enterprises has helped reshape North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, with its 3 million residents.

The capital is a complex mixture of facade and reality: blackouts remain commonplace in many neighborhoods; backstreets are dusty and potholed; the outsides of many apartment buildings are splattered with patches of mold.

But life is also far less grim than in the rest of the country. If nothing else, there is the appearance of opportunity.

Top officials in the ruling party, the government and the military live in gated neighborhoods closed to outsiders. They shop in stores filled with goods, and sing karaoke in wood-paneled restaurants. They live and work in constant proximity to power, opening up channels for professional promotion, business opportunities and black market profits.

“The government is privileging Pyongyang as a political strategy,” said Glyn Ford, a former European Union parliamentarian and international consultant who travels regularly and widely in North Korea. “The people who live in the capital are the people who count. They’re the people who underpin the regime.”

Their support is particularly important right now, with the ascension of third-generation leader Kim Jong Un, who clearly sees his political survival linked to improved standards of living. With Kim Jong Un’s abrupt rise to power, Pyongyang is getting even more.

In just the past few months, the regime has opened the Dolphinarium (which also required a new 30-mile pipeline to pump in fresh seawater), a $19 million amusement park and an elaborate pool-and-water-slide complex. All are filled with adults, and all are wildly popular.

Outside of Pyongyang though, there are no $19 million amusement parks. Asked what Kaesong residents do for enjoyment, a city official paused to think. There’s the pool, Kim Ryong Mun said eventually, though it’s really just for children. Finally, he had something: “Many people go outside and have picnics.”

Kim, with his faded, blue-striped tie and digital camera hanging from his wrist as a sign of his success, blames international sanctions, imposed because of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, for the lack of development.

North Koreans shorter than South Koreans due to malnutrition

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The biggest hurdle for many North Korean refugees trying to assimilate into South Korean society was not just that they faced a language barrier but that, quite simply, they also looked different. First, they are shorter.

According to UNICEF, because of malnutrition, by the age of 7 there’s already a 4.7-inch gap in height between North Korean and South Korean children — and that difference may reach 7.8 inches.

Another sign is malnutrition. Many young refugees from North Korea have heads that appeared to be slightly oversize on their frames. It was hard to notice, until they are standing next to a South Korean their age — or unless you are South Korean.

”We live under the myth of homogeneity, of oneness here in Korea,” Byung-ho Chung, an anthropologist, told me, ”but these kinds of distinctive physical markings are a scar. The fear is that the scar will become a social stigma affecting many generations to come.”

–Excerpt of an article by Michael Paterniti, GQ magazine

The elite mystery of Pyongyang

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North Korea can appear outwardly stagnant, a country frozen by poverty and Soviet economic policies, but a small but resonant market economy has taken root over the past 15 years or so. While the country still has a per capita GDP of just $1,800 per year, according to U.S. figures, this new economy – a mix of underground trading, investment funds, particularly from China, and the growth of government-authorized commercial enterprises – has helped reshape its capital Pyongyang.

Pyongyang is a closed city, sealed off by security forces that monitor movement at dozens of checkpoints. North Koreans cannot move there, or even visit, without official permission. Its estimated 3 million residents have been vetted for their ideological purity, or at least their connections to the inner circle.

Today, the Pyongyang rich, spending their dollars, euros and Chinese yuan, can buy everything from high heels to imported watches. They have bought enough cars in the past couple years to cause the occasional traffic jam. But few of these changes have gone beyond the capital, and the elite who live there. That contrast, between Pyongyang and every other city in the country, reflects an ever-growing chasm between North Korea’s elite and the daily struggles of everyone else.

The urban divide can be seen in the industrial city of Hamhung, where the skies above the handful of working factories are filled with gray soot, and workers are ferried to the beach on their day off in crowded, cobbled-together trucks powered by wood-burning stoves. It’s visible on the “Youth Hero Highway” outside the port city of Nampho, where there are so few cars on the eight-lane road that it looks like an empty parking lot stretching toward the horizon.

It’s in the province around Chongjin, where U.N. data shows the rate of abnormally short children – a key indicator of chronic malnutrition – is 50 percent higher than around Pyongyang.

You can also find the urban divide in the hospitals of the other second-tier cities, according to people who have fled North Korea. They say desperate doctors struggle to treat patients with almost no medicine, using equipment that can be decades old.

North Korean defectors recount nightmare of prison camps

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Chosun Ilbo reports on unimaginable suffering at the core of testimonies from former inmates of North Korea’s political concentration camps. Three briefs:

“I ate whatever I could put into my mouth, except stones,” recalled an inmate at the Yodok camp between 2000 and 2002. “As starving inmates surreptitiously ate seeds, security guards sprayed pesticides on the seeds, so many died from eating the poisoned seeds.”

Of 250 inmates he met at the camp, 80 starved to death or were executed in public after being arrested for attempting to flee the Stalinist country. He himself was held on espionage charges after being caught with a Bible smuggled in from South Korea.

A female defector recalled how she languished at the Kaechon political prison camp for 28 years after being taken into custody at age 13 for “guilt by association”, related to a crime committed by one of her relatives. She said, “I saw a starving woman eat the flesh of her son who had died of a disease.”

Another was detained at Kaechon Women’s Prison for attempting to flee the North twice, in 2003 and 2005. “Once we stood in line in the hallway of a detention house where a security guard was kicking a pregnant woman,” she recalled. “Some time later, this woman returned and lay bleeding with an empty womb. But nobody was allowed to do anything to help her.”

A possibly tougher China defers North Korean leader’s trip

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China quietly deferred a request by North Korea for its young leader to visit last month because the Chinese leadership was preoccupied with its once-in-a-decade leadership change and a host of other distractions, two independent sources said.

The move also suggests that China, North Korea’s main food and oil supplier, may be seeking an assurance from the isolated state that it drops its nuclear ambitions, one source said, after it ignored warnings from Beijing not to go ahead with a rocket launch in April.

Kim Jong-un’s desire to visit China in September was relayed by his powerful uncle, Jang Song-thaek, when the latter met Chinese leaders on a visit to Beijing in August.

But China discreetly put off the request, which was never publicized.

“Kim Jong-un wanted to come but it was not a convenient time,” a source familiar with China’s foreign policy said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who died in December, made six visits to China from 2004 to 2011.

Escape from a North Korean concentration camp

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–A brief account byYong Kim, who escaped from a political prison camp in North Korea and after living as a refugee in China, 1 year later arrived safely in South Korea, via Mongolia

On September 28, I made a miraculous escape from [my concentration] camp of death on a coal train. I passed through various North Korean provinces, finally crossing the Tumen River in December [escaping into] China. I wandered in Yanji not knowing where to go in the strange Chinese land.

The sad fate of North Koreans in China as a poor homeless race came home to me. The women are sold for rape and forced into prostitution by Chinese and Korean-Chinese. Some women try to go back to North Korea with the money they earned to feed their families, only to be caught and imprisoned in police detention centers.

Pregnant women often suffer the most, as officers would kill the fetuses while in the womb by kicking the women’s belly. In the market in Yanji, you see North Korean children whose fingers have been cut off for stealing food.

There is a pecuniary reward for every North Korean defector captured, and the Korean-Chinese go all out searching for North Koreans in hiding, to hand them over to the Chinese police. The arrested North Koreans are strung together with a wire that is pierced through their noses. And in groups of fifty, these people are deported.

Chronicling the escape from North Korea

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Christianity Today features a review of Melanie Kirkpatrick’s new book, excerpts following:

In Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad (Encounter), Hudson Institute senior fellow Melanie Kirkpatrick labors … to set the record straight on survivors who have fled North Korea. She tells a story of bravery, luck, disappointment, and death; of Christian activists and money-hungry brokers united behind a simple Mosaic invocation: Let my people go.

Until the mid-1990s, there wasn’t much to be gained by rushing the 880-mile border with China. With borders sealed and news of the outside world scarce, few ordinary North Koreans escaped. But when a crippling famine struck and a sudden Chinese prosperity beckoned, the trickle of refugees swelled to nearly half a million, its path smoothed by a relaxation of restrictive internal policies. Freedom, religious or otherwise, never entered their political vocabulary. Most fled simply out of hunger.

Yet North Korea receives less international attention than other failed states. It does not have the status of an “Asian Darfur.” Nor is the degradation of its people widely understood, even among South Koreans or Korean Americans.

Culpability for this apathy and ignorance, argues Kirkpatrick, belongs at least partly to South Korean presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, whose “Sunshine” policy (1998-2008) muted official criticisms of the Pyongyang regime in an effort to build good will. Activists and aid workers now call this period the “Lost Decade.”

Chinese intransigence makes the situation still worse. In contravention of international law, it remains official Chinese policy to hand North Korean refugees back to North Korea, where they face torture, incarceration, and possibly death.

Here is a rare book that puts human faces on the numbers, a lamentation over policies and duplicities that have haunted a people terribly divided.

 

How the North Korean parliament functions

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Virtually all legislators of North Korea’s parliament, the Supreme People’s Assembly, are members of the Kims’ party who ran unopposed in the last nationwide election, leading many outside observers to consider the body a rubber stamp for the regime’s policies.

North Korea’s Constitution allows political parties, but politics is overwhelmingly dominated by the Workers’ Party, founded by Kim Il Sung, grandfather of the current ruler.

Here’s a look at the Supreme People’s Assembly and how it works:

  • The current 12th parliament formed in 2009 has 687 legislators, or deputies, of which 107 are women. The number of deputies is determined by the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly in proportion to the country’s population.
  • The assembly meets at the austere Mansudae Assembly Hall in the capital, Pyongyang.
  • Deputies are elected after a committee of more than 100 people from each district recommends candidates to represent the constituency in the parliament. Even though the law provides no limits on the number of candidates who can run from each district, almost all candidates ran unopposed in the last election in March 2009.
  • According to Kim Song Chun, a parliamentary official, deputies meet to discuss and pass laws and establish the country’s domestic and foreign policies. They also can appoint or dismiss officials at top state organizations and confer titles. For example, at the last session in April, Kim Jong Un was made first chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission.

Parliament typically met only once a year under Kim Jong Il, the now-deceased father of the current leader Kim Jong Un. With a second parliamentary session having been convened in the first year of Kim Jong Un’s reign, this could mark a return to the more active role that parliament played under Kim Il Sung, who often held two sessions a year, said John Delury of Yonsei University in South Korea.

“… A general trend under Kim Jong Il [was] holding less frequent and less regular meetings of key party and government organs,” Delury said. “The striking thing is that Kim Jong Un seems to be reversing that trend by regularizing and re-institutionalizing governance.”

 

North Korean parliament holds second session this year

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North Korea’s parliament convened Tuesday for the second time in six months, passing a law that adds one year of compulsory education for children in the socialist nation, the first publicly-announced policy change under leader Kim Jong Un.

The Supreme People’s Assembly’s second meeting of the year was notable mainly as a departure from how Kim’s father did business. Before he died in December, Kim Jong Il convened his legislature just once in most years. And during one three-year period after his own father’s death it didn’t meet at all.

By adding a year to North Korea’s state-funded educational system, from 11 to 12 years, Kim may be trying to cultivate loyalty among younger generations as he consolidates his power base.

Kim Jong Un himself attended Tuesday’s session, which was adjourned after a single day, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. Foreign reporters were denied access.

North Korea’s Constitution allows political parties, but politics is overwhelmingly dominated by the Workers’ Party, founded by Kim Il Sung, grandfather of the current ruler. Virtually all legislators are members of the Kims’ party who ran unopposed in the last nationwide election, leading many outside observers to consider the body a rubber stamp for the regime’s policies.

North Korean missile launch pad pause

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North Korea has stopped construction on a launch pad where intercontinental-range rockets could be tested, an interruption possibly due to recent heavy rains and that could stall completion up to two years.

Despite the setback, however, Pyongyang is also refurbishing for possible future use another existing pad at the same complex that has been used for past rocket launches, according to the analysis of August 29 images provided to reporters by 38 North, the website of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

While the renovations don’t mean a launch is imminent, they indicate North Korea is preparing the site for possible future rocket tests, according to the 38 North special report written by Nick Hansen.

North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, but experts don’t believe Pyongyang has yet mastered the technology needed to shrink a nuclear weapon so it can be mounted onto the tip of a long-range missile

There are worries, however, about North Korea’s rocket and missile programmes. The United States, South Korea and others have said North Korea uses rocket launches, including a failed effort in mid-April, as covers to test banned missile systems that could target parts of the United States. North Korea says recent rocket launches were meant to put peaceful satellites into orbit.

North Korea has repeatedly vowed to push ahead with its nuclear program in the face of what it calls US hostility that makes a “nuclear deterrence” necessary.