So I am to believe that the Kim regime is so poor that they need the international community to provide them humanitarian assistance, but some how they have enough funds to support this?:
The 105-story Ryugyong Hotel has long been a blot on the Pyongyang skyline. The world’s tallest unoccupied building has towered over North Korea’s capital since 1987, a grand but empty pyramid entirely dark except for the lone aircraft warning light at its top. Outsiders saw the unfinished building as the epitome of failure, while people inside the country took care to rarely mention it at all. That is, until light designer Kim Yong Il made the building once again the talk of the town. In a brilliant flip of the script, the Ryugyong has been reborn as a symbol of pride and North Korean ingenuity. For several hours each night, the building that doesn’t have electricity inside becomes the backdrop of a massive light show in which more than 100,000 LEDs flash images of famous statues and monuments, bursts of fireworks, party symbols and political slogans.
This photo, captured from North Korean state TV, shows leader Kim Jong-un delivering a New Year’s address on Jan. 1, 2019.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said Tuesday he is firmly committed to denuclearization and ready to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump at any time, but warned he could seek an alternative course if the U.S. misjudges his patience and sticks to sanctions. Kim made the remarks during his New Year’s speech broadcast by the country’s state television, also urging the U.S. to take corresponding measures in exchange for denuclearization steps the communist nation has taken so far. Kim also said he is willing to reopen the now shuttered inter-Korean industrial park in the North’s border city of Kaesong and resume a suspended tour program to Mount Kumgang on the North’s east coast “without any preconditions.” That could suggest Kim wants the resumption of the two projects as sanctions relief from the U.S. “I am always ready to sit down again with the U.S. president at any time and will make efforts to produce an outcome that the international community would welcome,” Kim said. “(But) we could be left with no choice but to seek a new way if the U.S. does not make good on its promises, misjudges our patience, while seeking to force things unilaterally and clinging to sanctions and pressure,” he said.
You can read more at the link, but the Kim regime is hoping they can get the second meeting with President Trump where Kim Jong-un can convince him to drop the sanctions on the Kaesong Industrial Park and the Mt. Kumgang Resort for superficial and easily reversible concessions that we have seen before.
Dropping of sanctions would allow a surge of investment in North Korea that will line the pockets of the Kim regime that they can then use to further develop their nuclear and other weapons programs. The only real concessions from North Korea that I believe would warrant dropping of any sanctions is when they release a complete list of their nuclear sites, allow inspections, and begin shipping nuclear material out of the country. I have seen no indications the Kim regime is even considering this.
Just another example of the hypocrisy from North Korea. The only reason the Japanese are going all in on missile defense is because the threat from the Kim regime. Just last year the North Koreans fired a missile over Japan:
North Korea’s state media on Saturday criticized Japan for conducting a test of a new missile interceptor system, which is being co-funded by the United States and Japan, arguing that the move could chill the “peace atmosphere” on the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. and Japan have jointly developed the SM-3 Block IIA interceptor, and they successfully conducted a test of the new interceptor in Hawaii earlier this month. In an English-language commentary, the North’s Korean Central News Agency said, “Japan’s incitement of the bellicose atmosphere is a serious act of harassing peace to chill the peace atmosphere on the Korean peninsula and the region and strain the situation.” “It is the revelation of the crafty trick of the Japanese reactionaries to further ratchet up the tension on the Korean peninsula and meet their own interests,” the commentary said.
NK didn’t pursue nukes to achieve deterrence; it used its deterrence to pursue nukes. Nukes as purely defensive is nonsense, as is the Libya canard NK throws out and the West holds tightly like a security blanket to rationalize NK’s nuclear ambition. NK’s intentions are coercive. https://t.co/6iwYbfZflR
Xmas Mass in NKChristmas Mass is being held at a cathedral in North Korea at an undisclosed date in this photo provided by the Korea Faith & Order Council on Dec. 25, 2018. (Yonhap)
For any North Korea apologist out there reading this, can you tell me why the Kim regime cannot afford Tamiflu, but they can afford a nuclear weapons program?:
South Korea will send the flu medicine Tamiflu to North Korea as part of an inter-Korean cooperation project on influenza prevention.
Seoul’s Unification Ministry unveiled this plan on Friday and said it will notify the North on related plans in the near future and begin working-level talks to discuss details.
Speaking to reporters after working group discussions with the U.S. held in Seoul Friday, chief nuclear envoy Lee Do-hoon said the issue of providing Tamiflu to North Korean residents has been settled.
In N. Korea, we had 3 cards to play: – "maximum pressure" (then Trump dialed it back to "medium") – deterrence (then Trump canceled US-ROK exercises) – KJU's pariah status because of crimes against humanity (then Trump "fell in love" with him) He gave it all away for nothing. https://t.co/GJGiPTw4b2
#MoonJaein, just because he was elected #SouthKorea's president, obviously thinks he has a mandate to end the existence of the South Korean state. I suspect most voters don't want to surrender their freedoms to him or his buddy, #KimJongUn. https://t.co/ywVEVJuxl6
The Korea Times has a compilation of opinions from North Korean defectors on what they think about the current North Korean peace initiative:
Mikyung, female, escaped from North Korea in 2016 and arrived in 2016
I am amazed that South Koreans have high expectations that Kim Jung-un is seeking peace. It should be clear to anyone who understands the regime that it is seeking survival on its own terms, not to compromise. At last, more people are recognizing that he will not give up his nuclear weapons. The next realization needs to be that he won’t give up control of North Korea, that he will continue trying to exert complete control over everyone within North Korean territory and maybe even the entire Korean Peninsula.
We can see that even though he seems to be opening up, he still isn’t allowing North Koreans to talk with the outside world, to visit South Korea, or to even Skype with their elderly relatives in the South. It is a human tragedy, not just a North Korean tragedy.
South Koreans will be disappointed later when it is clear that he won’t change, and hopefully they will start to recognize that soon.
Eunji, female, escaped from North Korea in 2015, arrived in 2015
After I escaped to South Korea, I was shocked to learn that it was North Korea that had attacked South Korea in 1950. When I was in North Korea, I had learned the opposite, and so many other things that clearly were not true. There are some things that only North Korea believes. Sometimes it seems that South Koreans have been learning the North Korean version of history. I won’t be surprised if some South Koreans start insisting that it was South Korea that attacked North Korea.
And the people who are welcoming Kim Jung-un? They are crazy people. Some of my South Korean friends and colleagues have asked me about this, some of them even believe that I should welcome Kim Jung-un. I tell them, “Kim Jung-un’s supporters need to go to a mental hospital to have their brains checked. They need to live in North Korea, then they can learn what a real dictator is like.”
South Koreans hated Park Geun-hye, she was removed through the constitutional process and even jailed, so she was not a real dictator. But now the people who held candle-light vigils against President Park are now welcoming a real dictator? When I was in North Korea, I had an excuse for being ignorant about the outside world because I was taught only the truth according to the Kim family. If you live in South Korea, with so much information available everywhere, then you have no excuse.
You can read articles, books and even see videos showing both sides of an issue, instead of the situation of North Korea where only one side is presented. If Kim Jung-un truly changes and North Koreans can become free, then even I would welcome him. Before we can welcome Kim Jung-un, there needs to be truth about North Korea, there needs to be freedom for North Koreans. A murderer and dictator should not be welcomed as a hero.
She is absolutely right, anyone championing Kim Jong-un is not only crazy but should be considered treasonous considering how many South Koreans the Kim regime has murdered, injured, and kidnapped over the years that they have never been held responsible for.
You can read more opinions from North Korean defectors at the link.
Of course North Korea is going to use child and slave labor, they will just be smart enough to not use it front of the cameras to give them plausible deniability. The more slave labor they use, the more money that will be pocketed by the Kim regime to fund their nuclear program and extravagant lifestyle:
The ‘chain gang’ of children works along a stretch of railway (Image: Daily Mirror)
North Korea’s economy – and construction industry, in particular – is built on slave labor. For decades, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are dragooned into dolgyeokdae, literally “stormtrooper,” work crews for little or no pay, barely fed enough to survive and often forced to sleep in makeshift housing they built themselves, according to rights groups and reports by the State Departmentand others. Today, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is talking boldly of building road and railway links inside North Korea as a first step toward European Union-style regional economic integration. In September, Moon took his country’s business elite, including the head of the national railway company, to Pyongyang to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that the South was ready to invest as soon as U.N. sanctions are lifted. But human rights activists are asking: Could Moon’s ambitious plans help undermine North Korea’s entrenched system of forced labor? Or will they inadvertently fuel and encourage that system? “The South Korean government and companies chomping at the bit to get into North Korea need to consider the kind of reputational damage they will suffer if it’s found their investments are being supported by forced labor,” wrote Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. “South Korea has so far been shamefully negligent in doing real due diligence on labor rights grounds for proposed projects in North Korea.”
