North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (R) holds hands with Liu Yunshan, the Chinese Communist Party’s fifth-ranked leader, as they respond to the crowd during a large-scale military parade at Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square on Oct. 10, 2015, to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, in this image captured from the North’s Korean Central TV Broadcasting Station. (Yonhap)
In this image captured from the North’s Korean Central TV Broadcasting Station on Oct. 8, 2015, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (front) visits the northern free-trade city of Rason, which has been devastated by a flood caused by Typhoon Goni. The broadcaster did not report when he made the visit. Among Kim’s entourage was Ma Won-chun, director of the design department at the North’s powerful National Defense Commission in his first public appearance in a year to quell rumors of his purge. Kim reportedly purged Ma, who spearheaded the construction of a new airport terminal in Pyongyang which opened in July. (Yonhap)
I guess we will see if these family reunions happen or not, but I think the Kim regime is hoping these reunions will open the door to the South Korean government reopening the Kumgang Resort on the North Korean side of the DMZ. This resort was a good source of foreign currency for the regime before South Korea discontinued the joint venture after a North Korean soldier shot a South Korean tourist in the back:
South and North Korea Thursday exchanged the final list of family members separated by the 1950-53 Korean War to join the upcoming reunions, the Unification Ministry said.
South Korea’s Red Cross handed over a list of 90 South Koreans hoping to meet their relatives living in the North, the ministry said. In return, North Korea delivered a list of 97 North Korean family members to the South.
Last month, South and North Korea agreed to hold the reunions for 100 separated family members from each side on Oct. 20-26 at a scenic resort on Mount Kumgang on the North’s east coast.
But the actual number of people to join the reunions will be less than 100 as living separated families, mostly in their 80s and older, suffer from health problems or their beloved ones living across the border have already died.
The upcoming event is the outcome of the two Koreas’ landmark deal that was reached on Aug. 25 to ease military tension and follow through with the family reunions. [Yonhap]
Photographer Mihaela Noroc is on a mission to document diverse beauty by photographing women in every country of the world. Last month, that odyssey took her to North Korea.
“When entering North Korea you step in a different world,” Noroc wrote in a description of the series for The WorldPost. “You already know that you will see huge monuments, statues and communist celebrations but you almost know nothing about North Korean women.”
Noroc, 30, quit her job in Romania to work on the “The Atlas of Beauty” photography project, which has taken her to dozens of countries, from Ethiopia to Iran. [Huffington Post]
You can see her photos of North Korea women at the above link.
Recent satellite imagery shows no signs of North Korea making rocket or nuclear test preparations, rendering it impossible for such a test to happen on or before a key national holiday this week, a U.S. research institute said Monday.
Concerns have persisted that the North could conduct such tests around the 70th anniversary on Oct. 10 of the country’s ruling Workers’ Party in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions after Pyongyang strongly hinted at such possibilities.
But commercial satellite imagery, taken as recently as Sept. 27, shows that there is no such preparation going on at the North’s Sohae Satellite Launching Station or the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, making it impossible for such tests to take place this week, said Joel Wit, editor of the website 38 North.
“I think the bottom line here is that all these reports about possible long-range rocket or nuclear tests on or before Oct. 10th are just all wrong, all speculation. No evidence to support it whatsoever,” Wit said at a press briefing.
“I would even go as far to say that the North Koreans are probably having a lot of fun with their periodic interviews, talking about how it’s their right to launch a space-launch vehicle and explore space and everyone runs off and writes a story about it as if it’s going to happen tomorrow and it isn’t,” he said. [Yonhap]
A North Korean refugee recently gave a radio interview to PRI.org which focused on why North Koreans like South Korean clothes and beauty products as well as the importance of black markets in the country:
Would you wear skinny jeans if they were illegal? As it turns out, the answer is yes, at least for one young North Korean woman.
Danbi and I are browsing through a South Korean market, when she stops to admire a pair of slim fitting pants. “Girls just love these back home!” she declares. By home, she means a city in far-off North Korea.
She flips her hair dramatically, and laughs heartily, as she tries on a sparkly hair clip. She recalls, “We all wanted to be able to run our fingers through our hair like this. Like we saw in a South Korean TV show. But we couldn’t. Because we didn’t have enough shampoo in North Korea, so your fingers would just get stuck!”
Danbi is a 24-year-old North Korean refugee, who paints a picture of the totalitarian regime that’s quite different from the one we’re used to seeing, but an account supported by other defectors and those working with North Koreans. Yes, the country is rife with human rights abuses and grinding poverty. But Danbi, who took on her new name after fleeing, is from a city near the Chinese border — which has become surprisingly porous, and so she’s grown up in this presumably closed nation with a window to the outside world.
She says she shopped in black markets with smuggled foreign goods and watched American and South Korean TV shows, via smuggled USB sticks, since she was a kid. So by the time she entered junior high, Danbi says what she learned in school — that Americans can’t be trusted and South Koreans are poor — she doubted its truth. [Global Voices]
Analysts at 38North have a good posting up about why the Unha-3 rocket that North Korea has threatened to launch again is likely intended for space launch purposes:
But if the Unha-3 is intended for use as an ICBM, it’s not a very good one. The second- and third-stage engines don’t have enough thrust to efficiently deliver heavy warheads; a militarized Unha might deliver 800 kilograms of payload to Washington, DC. The North Koreans can probably make a nuclear warhead that small, but it would be a tight fit. With bigger upper-stage engines, which we know the North Koreans have, they could deliver substantially larger payloads. This would allow bigger and more powerful warheads, more decoys to counter US missile defenses, and a generally tougher and more robust system.
The Unha is also too heavy and cumbersome to be survivable in wartime. Too big for any mobile transporter, it can only be launched from fixed sites. Its highly corrosive liquid propellants require hours of pre-launch preparations. That’s a bad combination for North Korea; their fixed launch sites are going to be watched very closely, and particularly in a crisis, any indication that an ICBM is being prepared for launch could trigger a pre-emptive strike.
The same could be said of the old Soviet R-7. As an ICBM, it was pretty much a dud—the USSR never deployed more than 10, and retired them after less than a decade. As a space launch vehicle, its descendants are still in service today.
The North Koreans could press the Unha-3 into limited service as an ICBM, just as the USSR did with the R-7—a temporary measure, until something better is available. They can almost certainly build something better, and they appear to be trying. The KN-08 missile mock-ups, twice paraded through Pyongyang, are exactly the sort of thing a nation like North Korea would build if it wanted to use its eclectic mix of early 1960s rocket technologies to build an ICBM. It is small enough to be mobile and therefore survivable but with the performance (barely) to reach the enemy’s homeland. The Unha-3, by comparison, looks like it was designed to launch satellites rather than warheads. [38North]
I have no sympathy for idiots like this guy who cross into North Korea for their own selfish reasons and then when the going gets tough they willingly make themselves propaganda tools of the Kim regime and want South Korea and the US to get them out:
Joo Won-moon, a South Korean student at New York University, is escorted by a South Korean official into the South Monday at the border village of Panmunjom. Joo’s return ended a five-month detainment in Pyongyang after he illegally entered North Korea by crossing the Yalu River from China in April. Provided by the Ministry of Unification
North Korea Monday repatriated a South Korean student who had been detained for five months, an unexpected conciliatory gesture toward South Korea.
Joo Won-moon, a 21-year-old student at New York University and a green card holder for the U.S., was handed over to South Korean authorities at the border village of Panmunjom at around 5:30 p.m. Monday. Joo’s release followed a surprise announcement earlier in the day by the state-run Korean Central News Agency saying he would be freed. The announcement didn’t elaborate on what led it to the decision.
Joo crossed the Yalu River from China into North Korea in April and was arrested by North Korean guards. In an interview with CNN in May, he said he hoped his journey “could have a good effect in the relationship.”
Joo reappeared before cameras in a Sept. 25 press conference in Pyongyang at which he read what was seen as a carefully drafted statement praising North Korea and denying international accusations that the Pyongyang regime was responsible for gross human rights violations. He also called for a shift in the U.S.’s North Korea policy to engage the country more. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
