Tag: North Korea

This is really not a surprise at all because the truth about how these reunions came about to stop the ROK’s propaganda broadcasts is not something that the Kim regime can have the average North Korean learn about:

When it comes to news, the two countries could hardly be more different, as evidenced by Wednesday’s papers.

South Korea has more than 100 newspapers and even more online news outlets, and South Koreans are constantly on their smart phones checking the latest headlines.

In the North, however, there’s the state-run wire service, the Korean Central News Agency, the official TV station, Korean Central Television and the main newspaper, the Rodong Sinmum. And all of them feature a heavy diet of Kim Jong Un news.

But what was reported about the reunions also differed sharply.

South Korean outlets focused on the personal stories of the separated families, especially on the reunion of Lee Soon-gyu, who got to see her husband Oh In Se for the first time since 1950, when she was 19 and six months pregnant.

But North Korean state media used the occasion to trumpet their “socialist system” and the wise leadership of Kim Jong Un.

“Those from the north told their separated families and relatives from the south about the fact that they and their families are enjoying a happy and worthwhile life in the Korean-style socialist system,” KCNA reported.

Uriminzokkiri, a Web site affiliated with North Korea, also ran with the same message about how great life is in Kim Jong Un’s socialist paradise.

And of course, North Korea took the credit for the reunions happening at all (only scant mention of the South Korean Red Cross, which did the organizing, or the fact that these reunions happened so Kim Jong Un could stop potentially destabilizing broadcasts from the South.)  [The Washington Post]

You can read the rest at the link.

Front pages in South Korea and North Korea today. All you need to know about differing priorities on the peninsula. pic.twitter.com/SpLPwVc8iq

— Alastair Gale (@AlastairGale) October 21, 2015

The AP has an article posted about the rise of non-governmental North Korea analysts with names some ROK Heads may recognize:

 In an anonymous office building in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, in a part of Colorado where cattle ranches fade into strip malls, a gravel-voiced man with a Brooklyn accent is moving through the streets of Pyongyang.

Joe Bermudez is staring into a computer screen at a detailed satellite image, maneuvering his cursor past guarded checkpoints and into restricted neighborhoods where the North Korean elite live behind high concrete walls. Looking down on the city from more than 250 miles up, he lingers over what he believes is the private airport of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young leader, pointing out a pair of VIP helicopters and a Soviet-era biplane. He moves north, jumping across the countryside and picking out hidden tunnels, walled compounds and a small flotilla of military hovercraft designed to storm South Korea’s beaches.

“Driving around,” he calls it when he follows roads in search of something new, humming absent-mindedly as his eyes flick across the screen.

Bermudez is a watcher, one of the largely anonymous tribe of researchers who study North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated nations. There’s Michael Madden, a largely self-taught analyst with an encyclopedic knowledge of the government elite, and Curtis Melvin, whose research ranges from monetary policy to electricity grids and who shambles through the buttoned-down Washington think tank where he works in jeans and a frayed T-shirt. There’s Adam Cathcart at Britain’s University of Leeds and Cheong Seong-Chang at the Sejong Institute outside Seoul. There’s the longtime U.S. intelligence officer, a man quietly revered by many in these circles, who now writes Pyongyang crime novels under the pseudonym James Church.

They are university professors, think tank analysts and writers for a string of North Korea-centric websites. They are collaborators and competitors. They are the Kremlinologists of Pyongyang.

And they insist North Korea is nowhere near as mysterious as you think it is. At least not always.

“North Korea is a very secretive place. But it’s not as secretive as many people believe,” says Andrei Lankov, a Russian-born professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. “It’s much, much easier now to get information.”  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link.

For those that have followed the North-South family reunions before the news that strict controls on what the South Korean families can discuss and the fact that the North Korean relatives are closely monitored should be no surprise:

The Koreans tearfully reuniting this week after being torn apart by war for six decades yearn for details about their loved ones. But with strict rules and constant hovering by North Korean officials, the brief reunions have often ended with deep regrets over questions not asked and future meetings never to come.

Participants from democratic, wealthy South Korea travel with a guidebook warning about what not to say to relatives from impoverished, authoritarian North Korea: nothing about food shortages and economic malaise; nothing that questions the competence of three generations of Kim dictators.

“I just looked at their faces and asked questions like how many family members were still living in the North,” said Jang Choon, 83, who was reunited with his younger brother and sister at the last round of the reunions before this week’s. “We should have been given more time,” said Jang, who still weeps whenever he thinks about the siblings he saw in February of last year but knows he’ll likely never see again.

After the tears and hugs, genuine conversation is often tough, maybe impossible, during the reunions at North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort.

Here’s a look at what past participants say happens when the journalists covering the reunions, which end Monday after two three-day rounds, leave and long-lost families from two starkly different countries have time to themselves:  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link.

The popular military site, We Are the Mighty has published a list of the 10 worst armies in the world and on it they claim the North Koreans are the third worst:

On the outside, the North Korean Army looks like its the priority for the Kim regime. In many ways, it is. The border towns of Panmunjom and Kaesong, as well as Nampo (where a series of critical infrastructure dams make a concerted military effort necessary) and DPRK newsreel footage boast tall, strong-looking North Korean troops with new equipment, weapons, jeeps, and full meals. Deeper inside the Hermit Kingdom, however, the Army starts to look a bit thin. Literally. On a 2012 trip to North Korea, the author found most Korean People’s Army (KPA) troops to be weak and used mainly for conscripted labor. It would have been a real surprise if they all had shoes or could walk in a real formation. Most units appeared lightly armed, if armed at all.  [We Are the Mighty]

Just because the North Koreans have mandatory conscription which allows the regime to use the military as free labor does not mean the whole military is horrible.  The North Koreans have a very large special operations force of 180,000 troops which is larger than most militaries in the world.  Just keeping those personnel trained and equipped is enough to meet their defense needs while using the rest of the conscripts for work projects and border security.

It looks like since the rocket test got squashed for whatever reason the North Koreans are going back to their other popular provocation in their playbook which is a nuclear test:

South Korea’s spy service believes North Korea is preparing for a fourth nuclear test but not in the immediate future, according to South Korean lawmakers who attended a closed-door meeting with agency officials Tuesday.

The office of lawmaker Lee Cheol Woo said the National Intelligence Service made the assessment after monitoring activities at North Korea’s main Nyongbyon nuclear complex.

Lee and another lawmaker, Shin Kyung-min, said the spy agency didn’t say how it obtained the information. Shin said it also didn’t elaborate on what test preparations meant. The spy agency’s public affairs office said it could not confirm the reported assessment.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link.

Due to the Korean War there are many more families like this one that have remained separated for decades.  It is good they have finally been able to see each other:

The long-awaited reunions of some 530 members of 96 families separated for over six decades following the Korean War (1950-53) kicked off Tuesday at Mount Kumgang in North Korea in a flurry of tears of joy and sorrow over the time together stolen from them.

Lee Sung-kyu, from Changwon in North Chungcheong, was separated from her husband Oh In-se in June 1950 at the outbreak of the war. She was just 19 years old.

Lee was one of 389 South Korean participants eager to reunite with 141 North Koreans at the reunion center on Mount Kumgang at around 3:20 p.m.

Some were anxious over whether they would recognize the faces of a child, spouse, sibling or parent after more than half a century had passed, in the first round of the 20th inter-Korean family reunions that will run until Thursday.

Lee, now 85, was accompanied by her and Oh’s son and daughter-in-law. Her eyes swelled with tears upon seeing her 83-year-old husband in a gray suit, a fedora hat and hearing aids.

Their 65-year-old son Oh Jang-kyun uttered the salutation “Father” for the first time in 65 years.

“I tried to live proud to be your son,” said Oh, who was born during the war and never knew his father in North Korea. “We look alike.”

His father beckoned him, said, “Come nearer,” and stroked his son’s face. It was their first conversation.

Jang-kyun and his wife proceeded to give a deep bow to his father, a sign of respect to elders.

For 37 years, Lee thought her husband was dead and even conducted memorial services for him every year.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the whole thing at the link.

I guess we will see if the Kim regime manufactures a reason to cancel these reunions at the last minute, but it appears these reunions are pretty much set to happen this time:

South Korean families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War gathered at a resort on the country’s east coast Monday to prepare for reunions with their North Korean relatives later this week, officials said.

The first batch of the nearly 400 South Koreans, part of 96 families, stopped in the city of Sokcho on their way to the scenic resort on Mount Kumgang for the reunions with their family members in North Korea from Tuesday to Thursday.

The upcoming event, the first since February 2014, is the result of the deal South and North Korea reached in August to defuse military tension and resume the family reunions.

The second round of the reunions involving some 250 South Koreans, part of 90 families, will be held from Saturday to next Monday at the North Korean resort, which is about a half-hour drive from Sokcho.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Very interesting read in the Joong Ang Ilbo about Hwang Jang-yop and his aide Kim Dok-hong who are the highest level Kim regime officials to ever defect to the South.  What was most interesting was that after defecting they promised to assist the ROK with democratizing North Korea, but during the Sunshine Policy years the so called democracy advocates of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations had so effectively isolated Hwang that he feared for his life and considered defecting to the US:

Hwang Jang-yop, the architect of North Korea’s Juche ideology who defected to the South in 1997, considered seeking asylum from the U.S. government because he feared for his life in Seoul, according to his former aide Kim Dok-hong.

In an exclusive interview with the JoongAng Ilbo on Saturday, the 67-year-old Kim, who left Pyongyang along with Hwang, the highest North Korean to defect to the South to date, spoke up for the first time about the defection process.

Kim recalled that Hwang, a former secretary of the Workers’ Party, claimed that he was behind the Juche, or self-reliance, ideology rather than North Korea founder Kim Il Sung or his son Kim Jong-il, and that this “slip of the tongue” led him to seek asylum.

On his way back from a trip to Japan to give a special lecture on Juche, Hwang went to the South Korean Embassy in Beijing on Feb. 12, 1997, to seek political asylum.

At the time, Hwang was the Worker’s Party secretary in charge of international affairs, and he defected with his aide, Kim, a businessman with connection to China and an official with the Workers’ party that managed resources.

At the time of the defection in February 1997, Kim described that then President Kim Young-sam in a personal letter promised to treat Hwang with the respect due a minister-level official and Kim as a vice-minister-level official, and pledged to help support activities to democratize North Korea.

“But that promise was not kept by the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations,” he recalled.

“Former Secretary Hwang was deemed an ‘enemy’ by the Kim Dae-jung government’s National Intelligence Service,” said Kim. “And feeling threatened that the NIS may kill him, he even requested asylum from the U.S. government.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read much more at the link.

Some further images of KN-08 updated version. @ArmsControlWonk @mhanham @DaveSchmerler pic.twitter.com/5KueKpQZTz

— Nathan J Hunt (@ISNJH) October 16, 2015