In the least surprising news of the day North Korean soldiers are reportedly malnourished:
North Korean soldiers suffering from malnutrition are beginning to channel their grievances against the repressive regime, even blaming the inability of the military’s top political official, U.S.-based Radio Free Asia (RFA) said Wednesday.
A North Korean resident in Jagang Province told RFA that he was shocked by the news that his son, who entered the army in March, was suffering from malnutrition.
He said the rations given to ordinary soldiers are so poor that most are in a serious state of undernourishment.
The North Korean informant said that since his son went to the army, he ate only boiled corn with a soup of salted wild greens.
Another military source in Ryanggang Province said in the units he knew, the military food supply is not so bad as to cause malnutrition, but added that troops are starving due to deep-rooted corruption and greed for private profits by officers.
More often than not, army commanders embezzle food and even kitchen oil from the military, forcing soldiers into extreme undernourishment, the source said. [Yonhap]
Over at One Free Korea there is a good article posted about the legal “lawfare” being used by leftists in South Korea against North Korea defectors:
North Korean restaurant workers that defected.
I wish I could say that South Korea’s hard left, most prominently represented these days by the lawyers’ group Minbyun, had also lost its faith in Kim Jong-un. Sadly for South Korean history, Minbyun is no fringe group; it has already produced one South Korean president and one presidential candidate. Once, it defended human rights against right-wing South Korean dictators, but since then, it has lost its way. Today, Minbyun wages lawfare for North Korean dictators. It fraudulently represents itself as a human rights group while abusing the law to deny North Korean refugees their human rights. It has taken to doing this by bullying 12 young North Korean women who had the courage to flee the from a restaurant in China, where their government had effectively impressed them into forced labor.
Minbyun has demanded the right to interrogate the women — publicly, before the eyes of the North Korean authorities who hold their loved ones as hostages — about their intentions to defect. This would be in flagrant violation of a refugee’s absolute right to confidentiality, a right the U.N. High Commission for Refugees has long affirmed. When the judge correctly dismissed Minbyun’s petition, Minbyun demanded that the judge be removed from the case. Since then, an appellate court has refused to remove the judge.
The justification for Minbyun’s legally frivolous petition is North Korea’s factually absurd claim that the South Korean intelligence service kidnapped the women. [One Free Korea]
I recommend reading the whole article at the link, but I would not be surprised if there were Pyongyang agents working in conjunction with the Minbyun group some how.
Via a reader tip comes this article about a guy that clearly has some mental issues if he thinks Pyongyang is country worth emulating:
North Korea may be isolated in the international community but it now has a modest ally on the Spanish coast — the Pyongyang Cafe, a small bar founded to support Kim Jong-Un’s strongman rule.
Located in the Mediterranean city of Tarragona where Roman ruins vie for attention, the establishment sports a huge North Korean flag behind the bar, where tea typical from the country and Asian beers are served.
Socialist propaganda posters brought all the way from Pyongyang adorn the walls of the modern bar, and in a corner stands a bookshelf full of works by leaders of the Kim dynasty that has ruled North Korea since 1948, translated into Spanish.
“North Korea is the world’s big unknown,” says Alejandro Cao de Benos, founder of the bar that opened mid-July and also president of the Korean Friendship Association, which has delegates in more than 30 countries and is officially recognised by Pyongyang.
While North Korean restaurants complete with traditional food and dancing have popped up across Asia, the 41-year-old says this is the only such Western establishment.
A restaurant opened in Amsterdam in 2012, but closed several months later.
“We want to break with all the myths, manipulation. And as not many people can go to Korea, because it’s complicated and far, they can come to our cafe,” says Cao de Benos. [AFP]
You can read more at the link, but Benos claims to be a communist; you would think he would have realized by now that North Korea is not a communist regime. It is an authoritarian dictatorship that rules with a personality cult.
More of the typical North Korean rhetoric in response to the US deployment of B-1 bombers to Guam which I have assume is in preparation for the upcoming UFG exercise in Korea where North Korea always seems to act up:
North Korea has accused Washington of planning a pre-emptive nuclear strike, after the US announced it would deploy its B-1 bomber in the Pacific for the first time in a decade.
The strategic aircraft were to be deployed on Saturday on the US island of Guam, the US military said last month, describing the operation as a routine rotation with the B-52 bomber.
Tensions have been running high since North Korea carried out its fourth nuclear test in January, followed by a barrage of missile launches that this month reached Japanese waters directly for the first time.
Pyongyang accused Washington of “becoming all the more pronounced in their moves to topple down the DPRK by mobilizing all nuclear war hardware,” using North Korea’s official title.
“The enemies are bluffing that they can mount a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the DPRK by letting fly B-1B over the Korean peninsula within two-three hours in contingency,” said an English-language statement on state media.
“Such moves for bolstering nuclear force exposes again that the US imperialists are making a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the DPRK a fait accompli.” [AFP]
It seems to me that if the South Africans were banned from the Olympics because of their Apartheid policies than why is North Korea with its far worse human rights violations allowed in the Olympics?:
North Korea made a restrained, orderly entrance at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics on Friday.
The North Korean delegation, with male weightlifter Choe Jon-wi as its flagbearer, marched into Maracana Stadium as the 156th country in the “Parade of Nations” as per the Portuguese alphabet.
Choe was followed by Yun Song-bom, the chef de mission, and several other members trailed them, waving their national flag.
They weren’t carrying mobile phones or camcorders to capture the moment, as most other athletes or officials did.
Choe Ryong-hae, the powerful vice chairman of Pyongyang’s State Affairs Commission, rose from his seat to greet the delegation.
North Korea has 31 athletes competing in nine sports here, including weightlifting and judo. It won four golds at the 2012 London Olympics, three from weightlifting, and finished 20th place overall in the medal standing. [Yonhap]
Remember all the talk about how China was really serious this time with enforcing sanctions against North Korea? Well the data shows that to not be true:
The latest U.N. Security Council sanctions on North Korea are having little impact on the country’s economy, a U.S. expert said, citing trade data between the North and its biggest economic partner, China.
William Brown, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and non-resident fellow at the Korea Economic Institute in Washington, also said in a recent report that the sanctions do not appear to be affecting the North’s domestic economy.
The latest sanctions, which were adopted on March 2 in response to the North’s fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month, have been billed as the harshest-ever sanctions imposed on the communist regime.
The sanctions require mandatory inspection of all cargo going in and out of the North, regardless of whether by land, sea or air, while banning its exports of coal, iron and other mineral resources, a key source of hard currency that accounts for nearly half of the country’s total exports.
“The March 2 U.N. sanctions are having little impact so far on North Korea’s economy although they may be making Pyongyang even more dependent on China. Trade with countries except China seems to be slipping but, because it was so low to begin with, the significance pales in comparison to the large and generally flat pace of China-North Korean trade,” Brown said in the report. [Yonhap]
