ROK Drop favorite Park Sang-hak and his group have continued with their propaganda balloon campaign against North Korea in the wake of the Kim regime’s repeated weapons tests:
An organization made up of North Korean escapees and a conservative civic group have distributed some 100-thousand leaflets denouncing the North’s nuclear and missile tests across the border.
Amid the heightened inter-Korean tension, Fighters for Free North Korea and the National Action Campaign for Freedom and Democracy in Korea distributed the leaflets on Monday in Paju, Gyeonggi Province near the border.
The organizations said that the people have the obligation to chastise Kim Jong-un’s threats and provocations regardless of whether or not the South’s government and military engage in psychological warfare.
The organizations then called on the public to join movements to send balloons containing leaflets to the North.
Last Saturday, Fighters for Free North Korea distributed 80-thousand leaflets condemning the North from Gimpo and Paju, as the day marked the sixth anniversary of the sinking of the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan torpedoed by Pyongyang.
Park Sang-hak, the head of the group, said that the organization will continue to send what will be a combined ten million leaflets critical of Pyongyang over the next three months. [KBS World Radio]
How many nations openly discuss assassinating the leader of a neighboring nation like the North Koreans do? The rhetoric from North Korea recently seems to have reached a new level which makes me wonder if the sanctions really are beginning to bite?:
North Korea threatened Wednesday to wage a retaliatory war against President Park Geun-hye in the latest show of defiance against tougher U.N. sanctions and joint military drills between Seoul and Washington.
North Korea vowed to “launch a retaliatory battle of justice to resolutely eliminate” the United States and Park, warning that it is ready to turn South Korea’s presidential office into a sea of fire.
“The powerful large-caliber multiple rocket launching systems of invincible Korean People’s Army artillery units are highly alerted to scorch Cheong Wa Dae… in a jiffy,” the North’s committee handling inter-Korean affairs said in a statement carried by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency. [Yonhap]
It looks like South Korean students will no longer be dressed in clothes made by quasi-slave labor:
Tens of thousands of secondary school students may not be able to wear school uniforms for the upcoming semester, as suppliers based in the Gaeseong Industrial Complex (GIC) are unable to deliver the goods in time after the complex was shut down due to strained inter-Korean relations.
Those students may have to wait for up to two more months to buy new uniforms, while the new semester begins on March 2.
A day after South Korea announced the shutdown of the inter-Korean industrial park on Feb. 10, North Korea expelled all South Korean workers from the complex.
According to Mansun, a uniform subcontractor to Hyungji Elite, the largest school uniform manufacturer here, more than 80,000 sets of uniforms were left behind in its factory in Gaeseong.
“When we were forced out, we were not allowed to take our products with us,” an official from Mansun said. “Not only us but three other subcontractors for school uniform manufacturers were prevented from bringing the products, causing the uniform supply shortage.” [Korea Times]
The North Koreans keeping getting more and more lewd in regards to their comments about South Korean President Park Geun-hye:
North Korea responded to an unusually harsh verbal attack by South Korea’s president against the North’s leader and its recent nuclear test and rocket launch with a characteristically colorful invective of its own Saturday, calling her policy traitorous and adding that Washington’s newly enacted sanctions are “laughable.”
The North’s official reaction — including the insult “senile granny” — was expected, though it took several days for Pyongyang to announce it through its state-run media.
North Korea regularly condemns South Korean President Park Geun-hye through sexist and violent language, saying recently that she lives upon “the groin of her American boss.” [Associated Press]
A ROK Drop favorite Park Sang-hak and other North Korean defectors have had security measures improved for them when the ROK National Intelligence Service (NIS) learned of specific information about North Korean terror and assassination attempts within the ROK. In the case of Park Sang-hak the North Koreans have tried to kill him before:
Following the latest intelligence assessment that North Korea is planning terrorist attacks against the South, security measures to protect high-value targets including influential defectors have been beefed up.
The National Police Agency has reinforced the security detail for former North Korean diplomat Ko Young-hwan, vice president of the Institute for National Security Strategy of the National Intelligence Service (NIS). He was put under the highest level of monitoring, as the intelligence community obtained a death threat from the North.
Ko served in the North’s Foreign Ministry from 1978 to 1991. He defected from his post as the first secretary of the North Korean Embassy in the Republic of Congo in 1991.
“I was told by the police that they had obtained specific threats,” Ko told Yonhap News Agency. “I was normally guarded by two agents, but the number has increased to eight.”
The police also improved security measures for Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector currently leading the campaign to send anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border using balloons.
The North has previously assassinated a high-profile defector in the South. Yi Han-yong, nephew of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s mistress Song Hye-rim, defected to the South in 1982 while studying in Switzerland. He was shot in February 1997 by two assailants suspected of being agents from North Korean special forces. He died in a hospital later that month.
The NIS informed the government and the ruling party Thursday that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had ordered the country’s intelligence agencies to prepare for terror attacks against the South. In addition to threats on cyberattacks and attacks on public facilities, assassination and kidnapping of high-value targets were also feared. [Joong Ang lbo]
South Koreans are asking their citizens to not eat at North Korean sponsored restaurants overseas to cut hard currency going to the Kim regime. Should the US government takes this mentality a step forward and ban travel to North Korea by its citizens to also cut hard currency going to the regime, not to mention stopping the constant trickle of American detainee issues that have to be dealt with:
South Koreans’ stomachs are the latest front in the standoff with North Korea.
South Koreans have been told not to eat at North Korea’s restaurants around the world, although such visits aren’t illegal, the South’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.
Most of the restaurants are in China, and Chinese and other nationalities frequent them more than South Koreans do, so analysts see little impact. But the move is symbolic of a tougher stance from the South since North Korea’s nuclear test last month and its recent rocket launch, which many outsiders see as a banned test of ballistic missile technology. [Associated Press]
This has been something I have been saying for years that the Kaesong Industrial Complex is a cash cow for the Kim regime which further helps them build the very weapons they use to threaten South Korea and the international community with:
South Korea said Wednesday it has decided to “completely” shut down a joint industrial complex in North Korea in response to the North’s recent nuclear test and long-range rocket launch.
The Unification Ministry announced that it will suspend the operation of the Kaesong Industrial Complex in the North’s border city of the same name, the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean reconciliation.
Seoul’s move is part of its “bone-numbing” measures against North Korea’s nuclear test on Jan. 6 and its long-range missile launch earlier this week.
On Sunday, the North launched a long-range rocket carrying a satellite, which Seoul and Washington view as a cover for a banned test of intercontinental ballistic technology.
“Despite our efforts to support the Kaesong complex, the factory zone is seen as being used for North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles,” Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo said in a press briefing. “We’ve decided to halt the operation of the Kaesong complex to prevent South Korean money from being funneled into the North’s nuke and missile developments and to protect our companies.” [Yonhap]
You can read the rest at the link, but I think the Park administration has left Kaesong open as something of a bargaining chip to make the North Koreans behave. This clearly has not worked and finally the Park administration has had enough and shut it down.
