Aijalon Gomes is a name that is a blast from the past due to his time in 2010 when he crossed border into North Korea for religious reasons. Well now he is back in the news after experiencing a horrible death:
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter with Aijalon Gomes in 2010
Aijalon Gomes stepped on the world stage eight years ago when he walked across a frozen river into North Korea.
Months later, he again made headlines when a former president secured his release from the communist nation.
His death on Friday also drew attention, when an off-duty officer found him engulfed in flames in a dirt field not far from Fiesta Island. He was 38.
Investigators suspect Gomes’ death was either an accident or a suicide, San Diego police said Tuesday.
An off-duty California Highway Patrol officer was driving west on Pacific Highway near Sea World Drive about 11:30 p.m. when he saw Gomes on fire, running then collapsing, homicide Lt. Todd Griffin said.
Gomes had recently moved to the San Diego area from Boston, Griffin said, but it is unclear exactly where he was residing. [San Diego Union Tribune]
You can read more at the link, but I always thought Gomes had mental issues when he decided to walk across the border to North Korea. It appears that he did have mental issues according to a family member:
An uncle said Gomes was distant from the family before he left the East Coast. They were not sure why he was in San Diego.
A friend of Gomes posted a statement on Facebook reflecting on the time she spent with him and suggested he had mental health issues.
“I say all of this to say that we should move away from mental health issues being such a stigma in our community. If you need help or your mood isn’t what you feel it should be, don’t be embarrassed to seek help and if you know someone who may be suffering, offer them a kind word as it just may make all the difference. Seeking professional help doesn’t make you strange; it makes you human. Rest In Peace Aijalon!” Marshalette Wise posted. [Fox5SanDiego]
You can read more at the link, but condolences to his family because this is definitely a horrible way to have to deal with the loss of a loved one.
These finding are unsurprising based off what has already been reported about this incident:
A North Korean soldier runs toward the south side of the Joint Security Area (JSA) after getting out of a vehicle stuck along a row of JSA buildings in this surveillance camera footage released by the United Nations Command, Wednesday. / Courtesy of United Nations Command
North Korean troops violated an armistice agreement last week when they were chasing a fellow soldier defecting to South Korea through the Joint Security Area (JSA) at the truce village of Panmunjeom, the United Nations Command (UNC) announced Wednesday.
Releasing video clips lasting around seven minutes showing the incident, the UNC said the (North) Korean People’s Army (KPA) violated the Armistice Agreement twice when its border security guards fired weapons across the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) after the defector had entered the South and when one KPA soldier temporarily crossed the line for a few seconds. [Korea Times]
Here are the details of the incident:
Closed-circuit television footage the UNC released starts with the defector approaching in a vehicle across the 72-hour Bridge, with the CCTV timeline that reads “2017-11-13 15:11.”
After the vehicle driven by the defector in a KPA uniform became stuck along a row of JSA buildings, he got out and ran south across the MDL.
While the defector was running south, four North Korean guards, armed with pistols and rifles, engaged him with direct fire, during which time some of the gunshots flew over the MDL, and one soldier briefly crossed the line before returning back to the north side of the JSA.
Separate footage from a thermal observation device showed two members of South Korea’s JSA security battalion crawling along the ground to recover the wounded defector lying against a wall, while one member covered the retreat, prior to his evacuation for medical treatment.
The UNC said its investigation team determined JSA security battalion personnel took appropriate actions during the incident, which resulted in a “de-escalation of tension and no loss of life.”
You can read more at the link and below is the video:
The biggest take away I saw from the video was that I was surprised the North Koreans had no vehicle checkpoints on the way to their side of the JSA. This soldier came very close to being able to drive across the Military Demarcation Line within the JSA if his vehicle did not get stuck. I would imagine vehicle checkpoints have since been put into place by the North Koreans to prevent this from happening again.
This is something that should have been done a long time ago, but it took using a nerve agent in an international airport before finally getting relisted:
North Korea bristled at the United States on Wednesday for re-listing Pyongyang as a state sponsor of terrorism, calling the move by Washington a “serious provocation.”
The North’s foreign ministry spokesman told its state media that Pyongyang would continue to strengthen its deterrent force against the U.S. hostile policy.
U.S. President Donald Trump put North Korea back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism for the first time in nine years, stepping up pressure on the North to give up its nuclear weapons ambition.
A day after the re-listing, Washington on Tuesday imposed new sanctions targeting Chinese and North Korean entities and vessels suspected of aiding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
North Korea said the U.S. re-listing is “a serious provocation and a violent infringement upon our dignified country.”
“The U.S. will be held entirely accountable for all the consequences to be entailed by its impudent provocation to the DPRK (North Korea),” the North Korean ministry spokesman said. [Yonhap]
The North Koreans were removed from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list in 2008 for denuclearization promises which they have never kept. The State Department has refused to add them back to the list ever since despite them never answering for terrorist incidents against South Korea to include a hijacking where ROK citizens are still held hostage in North Korea. It seems the North Koreans should have never been taken off the list until they came clean and paid reparations for these prior crimes.
My thoughts on China's "tough" position on North Korea – this time the changes seem to be more serious than it has been in the past decade or so https://t.co/JSanpBSiLE
The Washington Post has an article published that features interviews with 25 recently defected North Koreans that explains what life is like under the Kim Jong-un regime. I did not read anything I did not already know, but it is an interesting article none the less:
When Kim Jong Un became the leader of North Korea almost six years ago, many North Koreans thought that their lives were going to improve. He offered the hope of generational change in the world’s longest-running communist dynasty. After all, he was so young. A millennial. Someone with experience of the outside world.
But the “Great Successor,” as he is called by the regime, has turned out to be every bit as brutal as his father and grandfather before him. Even as he has allowed greater economic freedom, he has tried to seal the country off more than ever, tightening security along the border with China and stepping up the punishments for those who dare to try to cross it. And at home, freedom of speech, and of thought, is still a mirage.
In six months of interviews in South Korea and Thailand, The Washington Post talked with more than 25 North Koreans from different walks of life who lived in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea and managed to escape from it. In barbecue restaurants, cramped apartments and hotel rooms, these refugees provided the fullest account to date of daily life inside North Korea and how it has changed, and how it hasn’t, since Kim took over from his father, Kim Jong Il, at the end of 2011. Many are from the northern parts of the country that border China — the part of North Korea where life is toughest, and where knowledge about the outside world just across the river is most widespread — and are from the relatively small segment of the population that is prepared to take the risks involved in trying to escape. [Washington Post]
You can read the rest at the link, but a major theme from the interviews is that the market economy is providing for the daily needs of people and not the regime. Also people are leaving North Korea now not because of hunger but of disillusionment brought on by the regime’s activities and information from the outside world. I look at this as validation of why an aggressive information war should be fought within North Korea to cause further disillusionment with the regime.
Mr. Shea Cotton who is a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies noticed something that North Korea watchers have known for a long time, missile testing tends to slow in the winter:
Can we credit the slow down to America’s policies working? Was there a diplomatic breakthrough with the regime? Or has Kim Jong Un seen the error of his ways and is abandoning or backtracking on his missile program? Probably not.
Instead, this is likely part of an annual slowdown in testing we’ve observed now in North Korea for several years.
A look back at missile testing in North Korea under Kim Jong Un demonstrates the trend. The table below depicts a quarterly breakdown of North Korea’s nuclear capable missile tests since 2012.
A few things are clear from this. First, Kim Jong Un stepped on the gas pedal in 2014. In fact, Kim Jong Un has carried out more tests than his father and grandfather combined. Second, and more important to this topic, North Korea slows things down in the fourth quarter of every year. On average, we see about an 80% drop in tests from Q3 to Q4. Every so often North Korea will conduct a test in Q4, but that number is only a small fraction compared to past quarters.
Harvest season
But what then, explains this consistent drop? While difficult to say for sure, the most likely explanation we have is that North Korea’s resources are tied up in the harvest. [Forbes]
You can read more at the link, but the priority on the annual harvest is part of the reason for the decrease in missile testing, there are a few other reasons as well.
Mr. Cotton in his article says the trend analysis shows that testing will pick up again in February. February just so happens to be the lead to the annual Key Resolve military exercise. Every year Key Resolve starts tends to start an annual provocation cycle with North Korea then the UFG exercises tends to be when the provocation cycle slows down. For example this year the last missile test occurred on September 14th; the annual UFG military exercise concluded in early September.
There are other reasons as well, but the long gap between major US-ROK military exercises, the annual harvest, the winter training cycle for the North Korean military, as well as poor weather all play into the decrease in missile testing.
New satellite imagery shows most prisoner housing in Yodok Camp No. 15 is demolished, deteriorated or uninhabited. Administrative/security infrastructure mostly unchanged so far. More here (but imagery dates are wrong): https://t.co/AqjvuUbxlrpic.twitter.com/joxU6900Sa
A medical professional describes the worms found inside the body of the North Korean soldier who underwent surgery at a hospital in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, on Nov. 15, 2017. The soldier suffered serious injuries from being shot by North Korean soldiers while defecting to South Korea through the truce village of Panmunjom the previous day. (Yonhap)
