Tag: North Korea

I found the report of Kim Yong-chol being purged hard to believe considering he is the Butcher of the Cheonan which has been one of North Korea’s most successful operations in recent years:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched an art troupe’s performance, along with his top aides, including Kim Yong-chol, who was rumored to have been purged after the no-deal summit in Hanoi, Pyongyang’s media reported Monday.

The leader attended the show “given by amateur art groups of the wives of officers of units of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) selected in the seventh round of the second-term contest of art groups of KPA officers’ wives,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.

He appeared with his wife Ri Sol-ju and other top officials, including Kim Yong-chol, the North’s counterpart to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in denuclearization negotiations with the U.S., the KCNA revealed.

Rumors have circulated that Kim Yong-chol might have been punished in the leader’s move to purge officials responsible for the no-deal summit with President Trump after the Chosun Ilbo, a major conservative newspaper, reported that Kim Yong-chol was punished with hard labor and another negotiator Kim Hyok-chol, a former North Korean envoy to the U.S. was executed citing anonymous sources last week.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

The fact that the North Koreans are so strongly protesting the seizure of their ship at the UN demonstrates this is an area they are vulnerable:

North Korea’s top envoy to the United Nations (UN) warned that the U.S. seizure of a cargo ship earlier this month could endanger future denuclearization negotiations in a rare news conference in New York on Tuesday. 

“The United States should deliberate and think of the consequences that its outrageous act might have on future developments,” Kim Song, the North Korean ambassador to the UN, said at a press conference at the UN headquarters Tuesday. “And also, the United States must return our cargo ship without delay.” 

The U.S. Justice Department on May 9 announced it had impounded the 17,061-ton Wise Honest bulk carrier and accused it of exporting North Korean coal in violation of U.S. and UN Security Council sanctions. Along with coal shipments, it was also used to import heavy machinery from Yantai Port in China’s Shandong Province to Nampo Port in North Korea, the Justice Department said. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but seizing ships involved in illicit shipments from North Korea is something I have long advocated. After being seized the cargo and the ship itself I believe should be auctioned with the proceeds going to families who have lost loved ones due to North Korea’s terrorism acts over the years.

Here are the modern day comfort women that you never hear the left in South Korea ever talk about. Instead they bash Japan for things that happened nearly 75 years ago while saying nothing about the modern day Korean comfort women in China:

The sexual exploitation of North Korean women and girls generates an estimated $105 million annually for Chinese criminal networks, according to a report released by a London-based human rights group Monday.

The Korea Future Initiative, a non-governmental human rights organization, described a year-long study of thousands of North Korean women and girls forced into marriages and pregnancies, organized prostitution and cybersex work in China. 

The report found that the victims, generally between the ages of 12 and 29 and overwhelmingly female, could be trafficked directly from North Korea or coerced, sold or abducted in China. They are subject to abuse thanks to a demand for sex slaves in China. 

Some victims – including a nine-year-old girl – were trafficked into Chinese cybersex dens, where they are sexually assaulted or forced to perform graphic acts in front of webcams live-streamed to a paying global audience – including South Korean men. A single live-stream session featuring a North Korean pre-teen can cost as much as $110. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

You can always count on the Chinese to bust international sanctions:

China has provided rice and fertilizer to North Korea, Chinese data showed Sunday, amid U.N. Security Council (UNSC) sanctions against the North that prohibit any large-scale economic assistance.

According to data from China’s customs office, Beijing provided 1,000 tons of rice, worth about US$1 million, to the impoverished North between May and October of 2018.
The data showed Beijing also provided 162,000 tons of fertilizer, worth more than $55 million, to the North.

The shipments of what appears to have been free assistance followed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s visit to China in March 2018, when he held his first summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but China is providing this free aid to a country that purchased $640 million in luxury goods from them.

The #MoonJaein administration wants to give rice aid to #NorthKorea. But "People have never seen rice from the South before, so they don’t care whether it comes or not."https://t.co/OVlNAFJkxu

— Tara O (@DrTaraO) May 17, 2019

Someone should ask Mr. Beasley why there is a food shortage in North Korea?:

e head of a U.N. food agency said Monday he is “very concerned” about food shortages in North Korea and called for donations to the impoverished communist nation, affirming that the agency will try to make sure aid will reach those intended.
World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley made the remarks to reporters after he met with South Korean Unification Minister Kim Yeon-chul to discuss North Korea’s worsening food situation.
“We are very concerned about the situation there and we are hopeful that we can come up with some solutions,” Beasley said. “Whatever we do, we will assure the donors that the food or any assistance will meet their objectives. We’ll have monitoring systems in place.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but any malnourishment in North Korea is sponsored by the regime. They have the money and resources to feed their people, but have made a conscious decision not to. Instead they have prioritized funding for nuclear weapons and missile programs.

I hope no one really thought a deal on this issue was going to be reached because I never did:

 In a new sign of troubled relations with North Korea, the Pentagon said Wednesday it has suspended its efforts to arrange negotiations on recovering additional remains of U.S. servicemembers killed in the North during the Korean War.

In a statement Wednesday, the Pentagon’s Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency said it has had no communication with North Korean authorities since the Hanoi summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in February. That meeting focused on the North’s nuclear weapons and followed a June 2018 summit at which Kim committed to permitting a resumption the recovery of U.S. remains, which had been suspended by the U.S. in 2005.

“As a result, our effort to communicate with the Korean People’s Army regarding the possible resumption of joint recovery operation for 2019 has been suspended,” the agency said. “We have reached the point where we can no longer effectively plan, coordinate, and conduct field operations in the DPRK during this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2019.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but the only way a deal was getting done was if the US paid North Korea an exorbitant amount of money to recover the remains as has been done in the past.

The North Koreans know exactly where the bulk of the remains are because the US military buried a large number of casualties in marked cemeteries before evacuating North Korea after the Chinese intervened in the war.

To be able to repatriate these remains to their family members the North Koreans have been demanding inflated prices which just shows how low the Kim regime is willing to go to make money.  The work to recover the remains ended in 2005 and so far does not look like it will begin again any time soon.

I guessed that the North Koreans would next fire short range missiles and sure enough they did:

North Korea fired two apparent short-range missiles on Thursday, South Korea’s military said, less than a week after the communist state launched a missile into the sea off its east coast.
The move threatened to raise tensions as the main U.S. envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, was visiting Seoul in an effort to get stalled nuclear talks with the North back on track.
South Korea’s presidential office expressed concern about the launches, saying they were “not helpful at all to to efforts to try to improve inter-Korean relations and ease military tension” on the divided peninsula.
“Noth Korea fired two unidentified projectiles estimated to be short-range missiles” in an eastern direction from the northwestern area of Kusong, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but at least the ROK government is now calling these “missiles” instead of “projectiles”:

North Korea fired what were believed to be two short-range missiles on Thursday, South Korea’s military said, just five days after the communist nation launched a barrage of projectiles into the East Sea.
The projectiles were fired from the northwestern area of Kusong in an easterly direction, one of them at 4:29 p.m. and the other at 4:39 p.m., and flew about 420 kilometers and 270 km, respectively, with their altitude reaching around 50 km, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said, adding they splashed into the East Sea.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link. I don’t expect the Kim regime to move up and fire an Intermediate Range Missile and especially and Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile until talks with the U.S. have basically collapsed. Testing those two weapons is clearly directed at the United States since IRBMs are used to target Guam and ICBMs the US mainland, Alaska, and Hawaii.

If the North Koreans want to increase tensions further look for them to start firing missiles closer to Japan’s territorial waters or even eventually into them.