Category: Inter-Korean Issues

The North Koreans claim that the two South Koreans they have detained were not kidnapped from China, but instead detained inside of North Korea:

South Korea on Friday urged North Korea to immediately release two of its citizens detained in the country over alleged espionage, the latest in a series of arrests in the North of foreign nationals.

The North’s state media said late Thursday that the two were detained last year for allegedly collecting confidential state information and attempting to spread “bourgeois lifestyle and culture” in the North at the order of South Korea’s spy agency and the U.S. It identified the men as Kim Kuk Gi and Choe Chun Gil and said the two acknowledged their acts during what was described as a news conference in Pyongyang.

North Korea has occasionally detained South Koreans, Americans and other foreigners on accusations of spying in what analysts say are attempts to wrest outside concessions. Authorities in Pyongyang in the past staged news conferences, during which foreign detainees appeared before the media and made statements that they recant after their releases.

On Friday, South Korea’s Unification Ministry confirmed that Kim and Choe were South Korean citizens but denied they were engaged in espionage operations. Ministry officials could not explain how the two ended up in the North.

“We strongly demand North Korea to quickly release our citizens Kim Kuk Gi and Choe Chun Gil and repatriate them without hesitation,” ministry spokesman Lim Byeong Cheol told reporters in Seoul.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the country’s main spy agency, denied the North’s accusations of spying.

The North’s Korean Central News Agency said Kim was detained in September in Pyongyang and Choe near the border with China in December.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but if true that they were detained inside of North Korea than I believe the ROK government shouldn’t feel pressured to have them released.  If people are stupid enough to travel inside North Korea than they need to be prepared to accept the consequences.

Via reader tip comes news that the North Koreans have arrested two alleged South Korean spies:

 

North Korea said late on Thursday it had arrested two South Koreans based in the Chinese border city of Dandong, accusing them of spying for South Korea.

The North’s official KCNA news agency showed images of two middle-aged men it identified as Kim Kuk Gi and Choe Chun Gil speaking at a news conference in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

The two men were South Korean nationals working as spies for Seoul’s National Intelligence Service from the Chinese border city of Dandong, it said.

“They zealously took part in the anti-DPRK smear campaign of the U.S. imperialists and the puppet group of traitors to isolate and blockade the DPRK in (the) international arena,” the agency said, using North Korea’s official DPRK acronym for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  [Reuters]

You can read more at the link, but the real question is how were they arrested?  Did the Chinese arrest them and send them to North Korea?  Doubtful.  Were they kidnapped by the North Koreans and brought to North Korea?  The North Koreans have done this before.  If so the South Korean government should be putting pressure on China to get them back.

Secondly are these people really spies?  They are apparently Christian missionaries assisting North Korean refugees fleeing North Korea.So they may have just been kidnapped just like Reverend Kim Dong-sik was a few years ago simply to stop the underground railroad assisting North Korean refugees.

The North Koreans figure they can probably just wait out the Park administration and eventually have the sanctions removed without taking responsibility for the murder of the 104 South Korean sailors:

North Korea on Tuesday ruled out any apology over the 2010 sinking of the South Korean navel corvette Cheonan, and demanded Seoul lift sanctions imposed after the incident in which Pyongyang has always denied involvement.

Two days ahead of the fifth anniversary of the sinking, in which 46 South Korean seamen died, the North’s top military body, the National Defence Commission (NDC), condemned Seoul’s steadfast insistence on the “cock-and-bull” idea that Pyongyang was responsible.

The Cheonan was carrying 104 personnel when it sank near the disputed Yellow Sea maritime border between North and South Korea on March 26.

A South Korean-led investigation involving a team of international experts concluded it was sunk by a North Korean submarine torpedo.

Despite Pyongyang’s heated denials, Seoul responded with the so-called “May 24 measures” — which amounted to an effective trade embargo on North Korea which remains in place today.

South Korea has insisted it will only consider lifting the sanctions after the North acknowledges its responsibility and apologises.

The NDC statement on Tuesday demanded the immediate end of the trade embargo, arguing that it had been “cooked up under the absurd pretext of the … fictitious story” of North Korean involvement in the Cheonan sinking.

“The South should clearly understand that its sophism that ‘apology’ and ‘expression of regret’ have to precede the lifting of the ‘step’ can never work,” a spokesman for the NDC’s policy department said in the statement carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency.

Calling for an apology in such circumstances amounted to an “intolerable mockery” of the North’s dignity, the spokesman said  [AFP]

You can read the rest at the link.

It appears that the South Koreans are giving into the unilateral wage hikes the North Koreans having been demanding to provide so called “Social Security” to their workers at the Kaesong Industrial Complex:

As the North has rejected formal talks, the South is seeking a resolution through the Kaesong Industrial District Management Committee, a quasi-government organization, according to a senior unification ministry official.

“We are positively considering consultations between the committee and the (North’s) Central Special Development Guidance Bureau,” he told reporters on background.

The committee is ostensibly a North Korean organ but headed by South Korean government officials. Kim Nam-sik, South Korea’s former vice unification minister, chairs the committee.

The ministry official said it’s urgent to resolve the wage problem as 124 South Korean firms there will begin to pay March’s wages to around 53,000 North Korean employees on April 10.

“Once the wage issue is resolved, we can discuss the problem of the general labor rules,” he said.

His comments suggested the possibility of the South accepting the North’s decision on the 5.18-percent wage hike in a bid to buy time for dialogue on how to operate the Kaesong zone, which is susceptible to Pyongyang’s unpredictable measures.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Like I said before when this plan was first hatched if the North Koreans allow this to happen there is some kind of propaganda value for them effectively making these people useful idiots for the Kim regime:

Gloria Steinem and 30 other women including two Nobel peace laureates have announced plans for a rare walk across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea to call for reunification.

The DMZ is the world’s most fortified border, with the two countries still technically at war. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers face off across the heavily mined zone.

Organizers of the effort called WomenCrossDMZ.org said on Wednesday they hope for 30 women to cross from North Korea to South Korea on May 24, which is International Women’s Day for Disarmament.

The walk also marks the 70th anniversary of the division of the Korean Peninsula.

The women say they are still seeking approval from both countries and the United Nations. [The Guardian]

You can read more at the link, but why is there an International Women’s Day for Disarmament?

You have to hand it to the North Koreans for being creative here and showing how to take money from people and then claim it to be a Social Security program like we do here in the US:

North Korea has notified South Korea of its unilateral decision to raise the minimum wage for its workers at the Kaesong Industrial Complex by 5.18 percent, the unification ministry said Thursday.

In a fax message sent Tuesday, the North said it would increase the minimum wage from $70.35 to $74 starting on March 1, a ministry official told reporters.

In addition, the North announced that it would collect 15 percent of their basic wage plus overtime payments as “social security,” he said. Currently, the South’s firms pay 15 percent of the basic wage alone.

The North Korean workers’ average wage amounted to $141.4 per month in 2014, according to the ministry’s data.

Under Pyongyang’s plan, South Korean firms will have to pay $164 on average for a North Korean worker a month, up 5.53 percent from the current $155, said the official.

He stressed that the South’s government can’t accept the North’s move.

“The two sides are supposed to set wages for workers at the complex and other working conditions through mutual consultations,” he said. “The government will advise our firms to pay the current level of wages until the issue is settled through consultations between the related authorities of the two sides.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

I think former ROK President Lee Myung-bak was right to squash any summit hopes with such outrageous demands as this from the North Koreans:

When former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung met with the late Kim Jong-il on North Korean soil in 2000, it was seen as a landmark event and a huge step towards possible reunification. Whatever optimism the meeting inspired, however, was quashed when it was revealed the South Korean administration secretly paid hundreds of millions of dollars to make the summit happen.

According to former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, Pyongyang set even steeper demands for a summit when Lee began his own term, which ran from 2008-2013. In his memoir The Times of the President, which is set to be published next week, Lee writes that Pyongyang demanded $10 billion in cash and half a million tons of food as part of a deal for Lee to meet Kim Jong-il.

“The document looked like some sort of standardized ‘summit bill’ with its list of assistance we had to provide and the schedule written up,” Lee writes, according to excerpts obtained by Reuters.

The “conditions for a summit” included 400,000 tons of rice, 100,000 tons of corn and 300,000 tons of fertilizer. The $10 billion would go towards setting up a development bank.

Lee flat out refused. “We shouldn’t be haggling for a summit,” he wrote.  [KoreAm Journal]

You can read the rest at the link, but President Lee’s predecessor Roh Moo-hyun was able to get a summit with Kim Jong-il because he was actually paying the North Koreans more per year than what the ROK was contributing to the US-ROK alliance at the time.

All I can think about when I read about this plan is a train full of potential hostages whenever the Kim regime needs to use them:

The Park Geun-hye administration unveiled Monday a series of new proposals for inter-Korean projects, including an ambitious plan to operate trains from Seoul to cities in the North this summer by linking severed railway lines.

Four government offices including the unification, foreign and defense ministries briefed Park on their proposals for unification preparation and projects they would like to push this year. The briefing was arranged after the government stated that this year should be a turning point in the unification of the two Koreas.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule and the subsequent national division.

“President Park declared her intention to prepare for unification at the New Year’s press conference on Jan. 12, and the ministries also agreed that the time has come to look back on seven decades of national division and prepare for unification,” a senior government official said.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

Remember when everyone in the media was highlighting Kim Jong-un’s offer of high level talks as some great thing?  Like I said then he was just playing the media to frame the US and the ROK as the bad guys when the North Koreans like they always do make demands to stop US-ROK military exercises:

North Korea called on South Korea Sunday to stop all military exercises, including joint drills with the United States, if it really wants to improve inter-Korean ties.

“If the South is truly determined to improve inter-Korean relations through dialogue and negotiations … it should stop all kinds of war schemes, including reckless military exercises carried out jointly with foreign forces,” Minju Joson, North Korea’s cabinet newspaper, said. “War rehearsals and dialogues cannot coexist.”

The North Korean newspaper also warned that if Seoul sticks to the joint war rehearsals against the North, inter-Korean relations will get much worse and the South Korean government will have to take all the responsibility for it.

The Sunday warning is the latest in the North’s recent desperate efforts to stop rounds of military exercises conducted annually between South Korea and the U.S.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

U.S. reiterates support for improved inter-Korean relations http://t.co/Sh58UWa43i

— Yonhap News Agency (@YonhapNews) January 1, 2015