Category: North Korea

The usual caveats apply when it comes to these unnamed sources out of North Korea because it is so hard to independently verify what they are saying.  This source could just be telling a journalist looking for a click bait headline what they want to hear:

An artificial earthquake caused by a North Korean nuclear test in September reportedly caused buildings to collapse and killed scores of people, including schoolchildren, South Korean media reported this week.

On Sept. 3, North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test, successfully detonating a hydrogen bomb — one that could fit onto an intercontinental missile (ICBM).

The blast produced two shallow earthquakes in the Punggye-ri region, where North Korea’s nuclear test facility is located, U.S. and Chinese government seismologists reported at the time. Authorities in Japan, South Korea and numerous nongovernment experts in the United States confirmed that the earthquakes were likely the result of a nuclear test.

An unnamed source, who recently visited a village about 8 kilometers from Punggye-ri, described the damage to the South and North Development (SAND), a research institute that works with defectors from the North, according to the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

The source said houses and a school collapsed in the village of Sindong-ri and that dozens of people were killed and injured, the paper reported.

“September 3 was a Sunday, but some 150 students were waiting in their classrooms to do some work,” the source said, according to Chosun Ilbo. “Casualties occurred when half of the school building crumbled.”  [Voice of America]

You can read more at the link, but if this is true the team at 38 North who analyze commercial satellite imagery should be able to confirm if there has been collapsed buildings in the days after the nuclear test. So far I have seen no reports from them confirming damaged buildings after the earthquake in North Korea.

I was a bit surprised that the North Korean guards at the JSA did not try to go across the MDL and drag the defector back across and maybe that is what the Kim regime expected them to do as well:

North Korea suffered acute embarrassment on November 13 when a border guard fled first by jeep and then on foot across the joint security area (JSA) with South Korea.

The defector, identified only by his surname Oh, sped in a jeep towards the South before losing control and crashing into a ditch. He sprinted the final few metres as North Korea guards opened fire.

Now those border guards are believed to be taking the full force of Kim Jong-un’s fury for the incident – with all believed to have lost their positions.

Yonhap News, a Seoul-based news agency, believes all border guards have been replaced at the border in a huge security overhaul.

And they said an intelligence source had told them the guards were also in danger of cruel punishment at the hands of Kim’s security agents.

The unnamed source told the agency: “Signs were detected that North Korea has replaced all border security officials following the defection.  [UK-Express]

You can read more at the link, but imagine some very senior Kim regime officials are displeased with this defection and people will be held accountable for letting it happen.  In addition the soldier’s family will be held accountable as well for his defection and are probably already in a labor camp somewhere as punishment.

The Jeep the solider drove to JSA is a Chinese-made vehicle: BJ2020. There is high probability that the defector is a driver, who served at least the rank of a battalion cadre/above. Unlike ROK, where nearly every adult knows how to drive, that's often not the case in NK. pic.twitter.com/x4Hlk4CnR8

— Seongmin, Ink. (@SeongminInk) November 22, 2017

This comes as no surprise. I wouldn’t be surprised that the DPRK is ‘mining’ it’s own bitcoins with its… https://t.co/TyOMNw5uKx

— tomcoyner (@tomcoyner) November 22, 2017

This is something that should have been done a long time ago, but it took using a nerve agent in an international airport before finally getting relisted:

North Korea bristled at the United States on Wednesday for re-listing Pyongyang as a state sponsor of terrorism, calling the move by Washington a “serious provocation.”

The North’s foreign ministry spokesman told its state media that Pyongyang would continue to strengthen its deterrent force against the U.S. hostile policy.

U.S. President Donald Trump put North Korea back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism for the first time in nine years, stepping up pressure on the North to give up its nuclear weapons ambition.

A day after the re-listing, Washington on Tuesday imposed new sanctions targeting Chinese and North Korean entities and vessels suspected of aiding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

North Korea said the U.S. re-listing is “a serious provocation and a violent infringement upon our dignified country.”

“The U.S. will be held entirely accountable for all the consequences to be entailed by its impudent provocation to the DPRK (North Korea),” the North Korean ministry spokesman said.  [Yonhap]

The North Koreans were removed from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list in 2008 for denuclearization promises which they have never kept.  The State Department has refused to add them back to the list ever since despite them never answering for terrorist incidents against South Korea to include a hijacking where ROK citizens are still held hostage in North Korea.  It seems the North Koreans should have never been taken off the list until they came clean and paid reparations for these prior crimes.

Um, no. I will not be downloading Adobe Flash Player from KCNA.kp pic.twitter.com/4gIElOQg5q

— Curtis Melvin 커티스 멜빈 (@CurtisMelvin) November 16, 2017

The Washington Post has an article published that features interviews with 25 recently defected North Koreans that explains what life is like under the Kim Jong-un regime.  I did not read anything I did not already know, but it is an interesting article none the less:

When Kim Jong Un became the leader of North Korea almost six years ago, many North Koreans thought that their lives were going to improve. He offered the hope of generational change in the world’s longest-running communist dynasty. After all, he was so young. A millennial. Someone with experience of the outside world.

But the “Great Successor,” as he is called by the regime, has turned out to be every bit as brutal as his father and grandfather before him. Even as he has allowed greater economic freedom, he has tried to seal the country off more than ever, tightening security along the border with China and stepping up the punishments for those who dare to try to cross it. And at home, freedom of speech, and of thought, is still a mirage.

In six months of interviews in South Korea and Thailand, The Washington Post talked with more than 25 North Koreans from different walks of life who lived in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea and managed to escape from it. In barbecue restaurants, cramped apartments and hotel rooms, these refugees provided the fullest account to date of daily life inside North Korea and how it has changed, and how it hasn’t, since Kim took over from his father, Kim Jong Il, at the end of 2011. Many are from the northern parts of the country that border China — the part of North Korea where life is toughest, and where knowledge about the outside world just across the river is most widespread — and are from the relatively small segment of the population that is prepared to take the risks involved in trying to escape.  [Washington Post]

You can read the rest at the link, but a major theme from the interviews is that the market economy is providing for the daily needs of people and not the regime.  Also people are leaving North Korea now not because of hunger but of disillusionment brought on by the regime’s activities and information from the outside world.  I look at this as validation of why an aggressive information war should be fought within North Korea to cause further disillusionment with the regime.

Mr. Shea Cotton who is a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies noticed something that North Korea watchers have known for a long time, missile testing tends to slow in the winter:

Tuesday, November 14 marked 60 days since North Korea’s most recent missile test. Earlier this year, between March and May, North Korea was launching an average of one missile every two weeks. Now after about two months, the silence seems deafening.

Can we credit the slow down to America’s policies working? Was there a diplomatic breakthrough with the regime? Or has Kim Jong Un seen the error of his ways and is abandoning or backtracking on his missile program? Probably not.

Instead, this is likely part of an annual slowdown in testing we’ve observed now in North Korea for several years.

A look back at missile testing in North Korea under Kim Jong Un demonstrates the trend. The table below depicts a quarterly breakdown of North Korea’s nuclear capable missile tests since 2012.

A few things are clear from this. First, Kim Jong Un stepped on the gas pedal in 2014. In fact, Kim Jong Un has carried out more tests than his father and grandfather combined. Second, and more important to this topic, North Korea slows things down in the fourth quarter of every year. On average, we see about an 80% drop in tests from Q3 to Q4. Every so often North Korea will conduct a test in Q4, but that number is only a small fraction compared to past quarters.

Harvest season

But what then, explains this consistent drop? While difficult to say for sure, the most likely explanation we have is that North Korea’s resources are tied up in the harvest.  [Forbes]

You can read more at the link, but the priority on the annual harvest is part of the reason for the decrease in missile testing, there are a few other reasons as well.

Mr. Cotton in his article says the trend analysis shows that testing will pick up again in February.  February just so happens to be the lead to the annual Key Resolve military exercise.  Every year Key Resolve starts tends to start an annual provocation cycle with North Korea then the UFG exercises tends to be when the provocation cycle slows down.  For example this year the last missile test occurred on September 14th; the annual UFG military exercise concluded in early September.

There are other reasons as well, but the long gap between major US-ROK military exercises, the annual harvest, the winter training cycle for the North Korean military, as well as poor weather all play into the decrease in missile testing.

New satellite imagery shows most prisoner housing in Yodok Camp No. 15 is demolished, deteriorated or uninhabited. Administrative/security infrastructure mostly unchanged so far. More here (but imagery dates are wrong): https://t.co/AqjvuUbxlr pic.twitter.com/joxU6900Sa

— Curtis Melvin 커티스 멜빈 (@CurtisMelvin) November 16, 2017

As much as I don’t like Kim Jong-un I don’t think it is fair to blame him for a parasite epidemic when it wasn’t too long ago when South Koreans were doing the same thing and having the same problems:

The hermit nation’s leader issued an instruction to farmers in 2014 telling them to use human faeces with animal waste and organic compost on their fields. With a lack of livestock to provide animal fertilizer, agriculturists poured the human excrement, also known as “night soil”, on their fields.

Kim’s pronouncement further precipitated  the falsehood in North Korea that human waste was the best fertilizer for crops despite the dangerous parasites and worms found within in it, Reuters reported.

The nutrition and widespread health problems that blight North Korea have been highlighted by one North Korean soldier who has recently defected to the south. The army sergeant was found to have dozens of flesh colored parasites in his digestive tract, one of which measured 10.6 inches in length.  [Newsweek]

You can read the rest at the link, but I can remember about 20 years ago I was out near the Imjim River in South Korea during a military training exercise.  From my Bradley Fight Vehicle we could see this old Korean woman in the distance walk into a rice paddy pull her pants down, squat, and take a dump right there in the field.  And no she did not wipe afterwards.  Seeing that made me laugh nearly as hard as when I was flashed by a Korean transvestite while driving in a HMMWV in Dongducheon.