Taken from a program aired on the North’s Korean Central TV Station on Oct. 27, 2015, the photo shows North Korean modern dancers performing during a celebration marking the 70th anniversary of the country’s ruling Workers’ Party. The broadcast carried 220 minutes of the recorded event. (Yonhap)
That is what the below article in the Daily Beast is speculating on. I have said this for a long time that if the Kim regime was to collapse the South Koreans are going to have immediately move to secure North Korea before the Chinese do. It should also be done without US troops. US troops moving north just legitimizes Chinese intervention into North Korea. Once the Chinese are in the ROK government may never get them out:
At the beginning of last week, Seoul launched a new round of China diplomacy to encourage Beijing to play a “constructive role” in denuclearizing North Korea. Optimally this marks a new era of cooperation between Seoul and Beijing, but it could also be part of a process leading to China’s colonization of the North.
The move follows President Park Geun-hye’s controversial trip to the Chinese capital in early September to participate in the military parade marking the 70thanniversary of the end of World War II. Washington, worried that South Korea was making itself a Chinese satellite, had tried to discourage her from attending the event.
Short of extraordinary measures, there is little the U.S. can do about Park’s increasingly visible tilt to China. Her mission is to seek the peaceful reunification of the two Koreas—her so-called Dresden Initiative announced in March of last year—and she has moved to enlist the Chinese by charming them into cooperation, seeking to engage them at every opportunity.
Park’s efforts to woo China look like they are paying off. Seoul, not Pyongyang, is Beijing’s friend these days on the Korean Peninsula. It is telling that Xi Jinping traveled to Seoul in July 2014, the first time a leader of the People’s Republic visited the South before going to the North. And in fact, he has yet to visit Pyongyang, the capital of his country’s only formal military ally, in his position as China’s president.
Despite all the smiles, the fear in Seoul is that China will frustrate Park’s vision of a unified Korean nation by sending its army south and either leaving behind a puppet regime or even colonizing North Korea. [The Daily Beast]
You can read the rest at the link.
Buses carrying South Koreans to reunions with their North Korean relatives travel along the east coast on their way to the North’s Mount Kumgang on Oct. 24, 2015. (Yonhap)
It looks like the normal probing that occurs along the NLL by the North Koreans:
A North Korean patrol ship crossed the maritime border into the South on Saturday during a beefed-up crackdown on Chinese fishing boats operating near the border, the South Korean military said Sunday.
The South Korean Navy ship fired five warning shots with a 40 mm-caliber gun. The ship retreated to the North 18 minutes after the shots were fired. No damage was seen on the ship, Seoul authorities said.
Pyongyang called the South’s use of the gun a “deliberate military provocation,” warning that the inter-Korean relations could return to the point before the two sides struck a comprehensive deal on Aug. 25 to defuse cross-border tensions.
The North’s vessel came some 700 meters into the South Korean waters at around 3:30 p.m., according to Seoul authorities. At the time, the vessel was carrying out a stepped-up clampdown on some 100 Chinese vessels operating near the Northern Limit Line, the de facto sea border.
“In the process of (the North) making its retreat, there was no naval clash or anything,” said a military official on condition of anonymity. “We are keeping closer tabs on the North Korean military’s movements and strengthening our readiness posture.” [Korea Herald]
You can read more at the link.
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.
