Category: North Korea

A ROK Drop favorite, Park Sang-hak and his group Fighters for Free North Korea have just launched their latest balloon campaign:

A group of activists launched big balloons carrying leaflets across the border with the North, condemning the communist regime’s recent series of missile and artillery firings.

The 10 propaganda balloons, launched by seven North Korean defector-turned-activists at the border city of Paju toward the North, carried anti-Pyongyang leaflets as well as one thousand U.S. dollar bills, meant to entice North Koreans.

Banners saying “What Kim Jong-un really fears is 20 million North Korean people getting to know the facts and the truth” also dangled from the balloons in protest against the North’s repeated military provocations.

The North fired about 100 artillery shells near the inter-Korean East Sea border a day earlier after test-launching two short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea the previous day in its recent series of military provocations near the border.

“Since the start of this year, the North fired missiles and artillery shells on dozens of occasions, firing away (money) worth three months of food for North Korean people,” Park Sang-hak, the head of the activist group Fighters for Free North Korea, said. “We decided to launch the anti-Pyongyang leaflets since the government did not take any action.”  [Yonhap via One Free Korea]

ROK Heads may remember that Park Sang-hak is the North Korean defector turned activist who the Kim regime has repeatedly threatened, sent their South Korean leftist lackeys to assault him, and even tried to assassinate him a few years ago due to his balloon launch efforts.  Despite all this Park continues to send his balloons into North Korea which must be having an effect considering the reactions of the Kim regime to the launches.

A ROK Drop favorite Dr. Andrei Lankov has an article published that discusses how the Kim regime prevents dissent within North Korea:

However, terror alone does not explain the remarkable staying power of the regime in Pyongyang. The presence and role of daily surveillance must not be underestimated. North Koreans have good reason to believe that even a minor deviation from the officially approved political line will be noticed and punished by the authorities. Punishment, like the misdemeanour itself, might be quite mild. However, it is the ubiquity of surveillance which is important.  (……)

Perhaps, one should first mention the neighbourhood watch groups, known as the inminban (literally, people’s group). Each inminban consists of 15-30 families living side-by-side in a village, urban block, or multi-story building. Such a group is headed by a junior official, whose task is to look for all suspicious activities within her (this is always a woman’s job) jurisdiction. She is also charged with the registration of overnight visitors because one cannot stay overnight even with friends or relatives without giving prior notice to the authorities. The official is required to have intimate knowledge of all families under her jurisdictions: their occupation, income level, family relations and even work routine. At their briefings with police, the inminban heads have always been reminded that they should know “how many chopsticks are in any given household” – and this oft-repeated sentence is not a joke.

Another responsibility of the “people’s group” and its head is to ensure that no forbidden items are kept in private houses. The list of such items includes, above all, tunable radio sets and DVDs of South Korean as well as some Western movies.  [Aljazeera]

You can read the rest at the link, but Dr. Lankov also discusses how the regime uses indoctrination as a means of political control.  There is really nothing new in Dr. Lankov’s analysis for people who closely follow North Korea, but it should make for interesting reading for those who do not.  On this topic I highly recommend reading Babara Demick’s book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” which goes into great detail through interviews of North Korean defectors how the caste system, inminban, and indoctrination systems work.

Here is another indication of an impending provocation cycle from the North Koreans:

Blue: UN declared western sea boundary
Red: North Korea’s declared western sea boundary
1–Yeonpyeong Island
2–Baengnyeong Island
3–Daecheong Island

Thousands of North Korean propaganda leaflets fell yesterday on a frontline South Korean island, warning of an attack on soldiers stationed there, a report said. A South Korean marine unit based on Baengnyeong Island in the Yellow Sea had collected the leaflets which were carried across the border, Yonhap news agency said. The South’s military declined to confirm the report.

The leaflets carried threats of bombings, describing the marines as the first target to be wiped out.
The North also warned in the leaflets that its troops were always ready to strike the island with their “unprecedented” fire power and turn it into “a large graveyard”, Yonhap said.  [The Daily Star]

This is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the number of North Korean spies in South Korea, but at least they put four of them away in jail:

Four South Koreans were jailed for up to nine years Thursday for spying for North Korea and passing on the information to Pyongyang’s agents in Japan and China.

The Seoul Central District Court gave a fifth person a suspended jail term, a court spokeswoman told AFP.

The five were arrested last July on charges of violating the South’s security law.

The court passed a nine-year sentence on a 49-year-old man surnamed Kim, and jail terms ranging from five to seven years on the other three.

The five were convicted of collecting intelligence on South Korean political circles as well as on the activities of pro-North Korean groups in the South.

The prosecutors had demanded life imprisonment for Kim, citing his alleged long-term direct ties with North Korea and reluctance to repent.  [Asia One]

You can read more about these convicted spies at these prior ROK Drop postings here and here. As usual these spies had ties to the South Korean academic and political left.

If this is true, the North Korean regime has a lot more hard cash in reserve than I thought:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has US$4 billion hidden in secret accounts in European banks to continue his lavish way of life if he is forced to flee the country, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

“The money is the profits from impoverished North Korea selling its nuclear and missile technology, dealing in narcotics, insurance fraud, the use of forced labour in its vast gulag system, and the counterfeiting of foreign currency,” the British daily said. “Much of the money was held in Swiss banks until authorities there began to tighten regulations on money laundering.”

“Kim’s operatives then withdrew the money — in cash, in order not to leave a paper trail — and transferred it to banks in Luxembourg,” it added.

Swiss banks kept customers’ account information in closely guarded secret even in the case of criminals until Switzerland signed information exchange agreements with the U.S., France and other countries after the G20 summit in London last April warned that sanctions could be imposed on nations that refuse to cooperate.  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but it is ridiculous that these banks are not sharing information in regards to the ill gotten money of the North Korean regime.

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