Via a reader tip comes news that Kim Jong-un may have given up smoking. Considering that this is based off of public pictures this could just be a propaganda campaign by North Korea where pictures of Kim Jong-un smoking are no longer allowed to be published:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is not known for a clean, healthy lifestyle. This is a young man whose ballooning waistline and sudden removal from the public eye almost two years ago was widely (if dubiously) attributed to a powerful addiction to Swiss cheese. Now, however, there is widespread suspicion that the North Korean supreme leader may have finally kicked one of his nastiest habits: smoking.
According to reports in South Korean news outlets like Yonhap and Korea Herald, Kim hasn’t been pictured with a cigarette for at least two months. A quick look at recently released pictures appears to confirm this: The last hint of a cigarette was in mid-May, when Kim was shown sitting next to an ashtray.
There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious about the idea that the North Korean leader may have given up his beloved smokes, however. South Korean media reports on the North are often unreliable. Additionally, Kim’s relationship with cigarettes goes back a long time: He is thought to have begun smoking when he was 15 years old. Over the years, he has frequently been photographed chain-smoking at official functions, much like his father, the late Kim Jong Il, had been before him. [Washington Post]
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un tours a tree nursery in Pyongyang with some officals in this combined image released on May 15, 2016, by the Rodong Sinmun, the organ of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. It marks Kim’s second public outing since the closing of the party’s congress on Monday. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap).
Via a reader tip comes the below article about how a progressive legal team is trying to gain access to the 13 North Korean restaurant workers that defected to South Korea:
North Korean defectors arriving in the South on April 7. The defectors in custody have not had contact with legal counsel, according to a group of South Korean attorneys. File Photo courtesy of Republic of Korea Ministry of Unification
A progressive South Korean legal organization has been denied access to the 13 North Korean defectors who fled a state-run restaurant in China.
Lawyers for a Democratic Society had requested interviews with the North Korean waitresses and their manager, but after being rejected at the defector custody center is planning to take legal action, Yonhap reported.
During a press conference Monday, the lawyers said they were told by an intelligence official that access was not allowed because the “North Korean workers had entered South Korea out of their own free will.”
“If that is correct, the government must grant them their right to counsel,” the lawyers told reporters. [UPI]
You can read the rest at the link, but it is likely that the ROK intelligence officers are concerned that the lawyers like some other progressive groups in South Korea are influenced by North Korean handlers. The Kim regime has been launching a vigorous propaganda campaign against the defectors and I would not put it past them to use these lawyers to pass messages about how their family members are being threatened back in North Korea by their defection and to come back.
This just proves what I have always said, that action speak louder than words when it comes to Chinese government claims they are complying with sanctions on North Korea:
An oil storage and pipeline facility is located in the Chinese border town of Dandong, Liaoning Province, from which crude oil from China is sent into North Korea through a 30.3-kilometer (18.8-mile) pipeline across the border. [SHIN JIN-HO]While the Chinese government claims in official trade figures that it no longer exports oil to North Korea, a JoongAng Ilbo reporter visited a pipeline facility located in the outskirts of the border city of Dandong and witnessed crude oil being loaded into the pipeline for transport across the border.
Located on the China-North Korea border along the Yalu River, this facility is where crude oil goes through a last inspection before being transported across the river.
When the reporter visited the pipeline facility, crude oil was being loaded into the pipeline from oil tankers. The crude oil, which comes from the Daqing Oil Field – the biggest oil field in China located in Heilongjiang Province – was transported there by train and would be piped to a storage facility in Baekma, North Pyongan Province, from which it will be distributed among state agencies, military bases and transport-related factories in the energy-hungry country. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but I have never believed that the Chinese government would fully comply with sanctions because even though the Kim regime is a foreign policy headache for them, a collapsed North Korean state would be even worse.
Over at The DMZ War there is a very interesting document posted that is a transcript of a 1976 phone conversation between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Kissinger and Scowcroft talk about a lot of interesting things in regards to the US response to the killing of two US Army officers during the DMZ Axe Murder Incident. For example Kissinger believed that the North Korean barracks inside of the Joint Security Area (JSA) should have been bombed. Something else I did not know was that the two officers killed in the attack had their bodies shipped home in coffins made from the wood of the tree that was chopped down:
You can read the rest of the transcript at this link.
North Korean residents use machines to transplant rice seedlings for the first time this year at a collective farm, southwest of the country’s capital Pyongyang, in this photo released on May 13, 2016, by the Rodong Simmun, the organ of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)
Over at Rimjin-gang they have an interview posted with one of their North Korean contacts in regards to the recent Workers’ Party Convention. The interview concludes with the North Korean explaining why the Kim regime will never implement Chinese style reforms that would improve the well being of the people:
The reporters for the congress should report only about ‘the developing Pyongyang.’ Ordinary people in Pyongyang earn a living through a business. A woman in the photo is selling Chinese made sausages. Taken by Koo Gwang-ho at Moranbong District on June 2011. (ASIA PRESS)
Q: What is your expectation from Kim Jong-un regime?
A: I hope that they would open the door like China. Frankly speaking, if they do so, there would be no people who flee from their hometown (North Korean defectors). I don’t know why they fear so much about opening, or reform. While drinking, an official, one of my acquaintances, said: “If we open like China, we would be overthrown. So the top never open our door.”
Q: Do you mean that they don’t try to reform since they know their regime to be overthrown even if the opening would bring better off for the people?
A: Absolutely! Those son-of-bitches (Kim Jong-un and his followers) think that they should survive to the last. That is why they don’t. (open the door) [Rimjin-gang]
