Shown is Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, accompanying the leader to an orphanage in Pyongyang on Jan. 1, 2015. She wears a finger ring amid speculation she recently married a son of Choe Ryong-hae, a senior secretary of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party seen as the North’s second-most powerful man. (Yonhap)
So does anyone think this latest sanctions announcement will do anything to change North Korean behavior?:
The United States is hitting North Korea with a new set of economic sanctions after determining the country was behind last month’s computer hack at Sony.
The White House said new rules would prevent leaders in North Korea’s government from accessing property and entering the United States. The isolated nuclear regime, which has denied involvement in the Sony hack, was already subject to a strict set of U.S. economic restrictions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has maintained that North Korea was behind the broad computer breach at Sony, despite evidence from some technology experts that points instead to former employees of the studio. [CNN]
You can read more at the link, but I doubt the leaders of North Korea do much sight seeing and the buying of vacation condos in the US, but I could be wrong.
ROK Drop favorite Park Sang-hak is living up to his word and has decided to drop “The Interview” over North Korea via balloon:
North Korean defector Park Sang Hak stands with activists who plan to send anti-North Korea leaflets during a rally near the Imjingak Pavilion near the border village of Panmunjom, in Paju, north of Seoul, South Korea, Saturday, Oct. 25, 2014. North Korea opened fire on Oct. 10 after activists floated propaganda balloons across the border, following through on a previous threat to attack. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
A South Korean activist said Wednesday that he will launch balloons carrying DVDs of Sony’s “The Interview” toward North Korea to try to break down a personality cult built around dictator Kim Jong Un.
The comedy depicting an assassination attempt on Kim is at the center of tension between North Korea and the U.S., with Washington blaming Pyongyang for crippling hacking attacks on Sony Entertainment. Pyongyang denies that and has vowed to retaliate.
Activist Park Sang-hak said he will start dropping 100,000 DVDs and USBs with the movie by balloon in North Korea as early as late January. Park, a North Korean defector, said he’s partnering with the U.S.-based non-profit Human Rights Foundation, which is financing the making of the DVDs and USB memory sticks of the movie with Korean subtitles.
Park said foundation officials plan to visit South Korea around Jan. 20 to hand over the DVDs and USBs, and that he and the officials will then try to float the first batch of the balloons if weather conditions allow. [Associated Press]
You can read more at the link, but I guess we will see if North Korea tries to send out their leftist allies in South Korea to try and stop this balloon launch later in the month.
It looks like the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park who has made international headlines about her defection from the country has been exaggerating some of the tales she has been telling:
You’d have to have been inhuman not to be moved. But – and you’re going to hear a lot of “buts” – was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t. Whether this matters is up to the reader to decide, but my concern is if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed. We need to have a full and truthful picture of life in North Korea if we are to help those living under its abysmally cruel regime and those who try to flee.
“Celebrity Defector”
I met Yeonmi Park a few months ago when I spent two weeks filming a story about her and her family for Australia’s SBS Dateline. We called the story, “Celebrity Defector.”
Back in South Korea where she now lives, Park is one of the stars of a television program featuring a cast of North Korean women. It’s called “Now On My Way To Meet You” and it daringly satirizes the Kim Dynasty. The women tell personal anecdotes about their lives in North Korea and their journey to the south. A number of the women were introduced to us as having been homeless and starving – the reason they fled.
Buried in the shows archives are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience. [The Diplomat]
You can read the rest at the link, but it is a very convincing case that Park has exaggerated circumstances of her defection to possibly help raise awareness and funding for the North Korean human rights organizations she has been working with.
Here is Yeonmi Park’s response to this article:
I want to thank Mary Ann Jolley for caring so much about the terrible situation in North Korea that she would point out any inconsistencies in my quotes and how my story has been reported. Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it). And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape. There are many more examples like this.
But one very important thing to correct: I do not have a foundation. The website was a dummy site built by a friend, and it was not supposed to be live. There was no way it could accept money, and I haven’t taken any. I am so sorry for the confusion. The site has been taken down.
Also, I apologize that there have been times when my childhood memories were not perfect, like how long my father was sentenced to prison. Now I am checking with my mom and others to correct everything. I am also writing a book about my life in North Korea, my escape through China and and my work to promote human rights. It is where I will be able to tell my full story.
In the meantime, I thank you all for your patience and kindness to me.
I think most of the inconsistencies are pretty minor that could be explained by poor memory and English language skills other than the story of her mother being raped. If that is not true then that is a flat out lie. The organizations that promote defector testimony like this need to be very careful to not have defectors exaggerate or lie because this just plays into the hands of the Kim regime and its apologists. The truth about North Korea is bad enough, there is no need to lie about it.
There technically is an Internet that only a very small fraction of the population, including government employees or select university students, can access.
When they do, they likely only go to about the 10 to 15 “government-blessed” sites that computers in the country would be able to access, which would inevitably be monitored, said Martyn Williams, who runs a North Korean tech blog.
“They’re quite good at self-censoring,” Williams told ABC News. “They know what sites they should and shouldn’t go.”
New government-approved sites are added “every few months” but some examples that have been accessible outside of North Korea recently include a cooking website with different recipes for rice.
The Korea National Insurance Corporation has a rotating slideshow of pictures, including one that shows snow-covered artillery guns.
“Not many people have used it but it’s a lot of smoke propaganda,” Williams said.
The websites with servers that are based in North Korea and are visible outside its borders end in the .kp domain, though there is an entirely separate intranet system that residents are able to access through some library and university computers, Williams noted.
“That for most people is the closest they’ve come to a computer,” he said.
Williams estimated that the number of people who regularly use the Internet in North Korea was probably somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people, and since Monday’s attack took place in the evening hours local time, the number of people who noticed would be far less. [ABC News]
