Tag: North Korea

Considering that North Koreans officials are reportedly being executed for not listening to the regime; I would have to believe that the scene these diplomats made was ordered by the regime leadership:

A U.S.-organized event on North Korea’s human rights briefly turned into chaos at the U.N. on Thursday as North Korean diplomats insisted on reading a statement of protest, amid shouts from defectors, and then stormed out.

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, tried to quiet the diplomats at the event that featured more than 20 defectors. She called North Korea’s statements “totally self-discrediting.”

The North Korean diplomats did not comment as they left the chamber after diplomat Ri Song Chol read out a statement in protest of the event, even as North Korean defectors stood and shouted in their faces.

Nuclear-armed North Korea has been on the defensive ever since a groundbreaking U.N. commission of inquiry detailed vast rights abuses there. North Korea has repeatedly referred to defectors who cooperated in the inquiry “human scum.”

Defectors stood up and shouted in Korean as Power and others called for calm and a U.N. security team assembled. An observer who speaks Korean said the shouts included “Shut up!” ”Free North Korea!” ”Down with Kim Jong Un!” and “Even animals know to wait their turn.”  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link.

Here we go again with North Korean soldiers allegedly murdering Chinese civilians:

China verified three Chinese nationals were killed on Saturday, in a region bordering North Korea, as some Chinese and South Korean media outlets reported the suspects were desperate North Korean soldiers.

The victims included a 55-year-old man with the surname Zhao, his daughter, 25, and a 67-year-old man with the surname Sun, reported South Korean news agency Yonhap.

Two of the victims died immediately and one died while receiving treatment at a nearby hospital, according to locals in Jilin province.

China’s Beijing News reported three suspects wearing North Korea military uniforms entered northeastern China’s Jilin province. There, they killed the three Chinese nationals residing in a sub-district of Helong, a city with an ethnic Korean majority less than 25 miles from the North Korea border.

China’s foreign ministry spokesman Hong Le said Beijing has confirmed the killings and the police were investigating, reported The New York Times.

The incident is the third of its kind in this region closest to North Korea.

Last September a North Korean civilian who crossed into China killed a family of three while attempting a robbery, and in December an armed North Korean soldier killed four Chinese citizens because he was hungry – which drew formal complaints from Beijing.

Military personnel in North Korea are given food priority but low-level soldiers go hungry, making prosperous China an easy target for desperate North Koreans.  [UPI]

You can read the rest at the link.

Since this is coming from the South Korean spy agency it is likely that they did receive some pretty good intelligence that this did happen:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered the execution of 15 senior officials this year as punishment for challenging his authority, South Korea’s spy agency told a closed-door parliament meeting on Wednesday.

A vice minister for forestry was one of the officials executed for complaining about a state policy, a member of parliament’s intelligence committee, Shin Kyung-min, quoted an unnamed National Intelligence Service official as saying.

“Excuses or reasoning doesn’t work for Kim Jong Un, and his style of rule is to push through everything, and if there’s any objection, he takes that as a challenge to authority and comes back with execution as a showcase,” Shin said.

“In the four months this year, fifteen senior officials are said to have been executed,” Shin cited the intelligence official as saying, according to his office.  [Reuters]

You can read more at the link, but I wonder what the Vice Minister of Forestry was complaining about?  The lack of trees to manage?

Here is another interesting story from the former ROK Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil who served in the Korean government through some of its most interesting times in the country’s modern history.  Here is another interesting story he tells of how a North Korean spy came to South Korea on a mission believed to be from Kim Il-sung to meet with him or Park Chung-hee:

This is the latest in a series of articles on the life and times of Kim Jong-pil, a two-time prime minister, based on extensive interviews with the 89-year-old.It was just past 3 a.m. on Oct. 15, 1961, when I received a phone call from my mother-in-law. Picking up the phone, I had a sense of foreboding. Calls at that time of the morning are rarely good news.

“Something bad has happened,” my mother-in-law, Jo Gui-bun, murmured without elaborating.

I urged her to tell me what was going on.

“I don’t think you know about him. There’s a man named Hwang Tae-song, a friend of your father-in-law’s. He went up to North Korea before the war and now he is back here in the South. He asked me to arrange a meeting with you and Park Chung Hee.” To her, Park, then-Chairman for the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, was a brother in-law.

I could sense the anxiety in her voice. It was understandable given the high sensitivity of the matter. She was calling from the Gumi Police Precinct using an emergency phone line. The head of the precinct let her use the phone knowing that her son-in-law was the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

I tried to calm her down.

I had never heard of Hwang Tae-song before. I had no idea how or why he made his way to her in the South and why he wanted to meet Park and me. There were many questions about him I had to find out right away using all of my resources as the top man at the intelligence agency.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link, but I was curious to whatever happened to Hwang Tae-song and discovered this article from the venerable Andrei Lankov that explains how Kim Il-sung thought that since Park Chung-hee was an authoritarian that he may be more amiable than his predecessors with cooperating with North Korea.  Hwang was sent to arrange a summit between Kim and Park followed by a gradual easing of tensions.  Instead of meeting with Hwang, Park had him arrested, tried, and shot as a spy.  Park wanted to erase any doubts about his own communist past and Hwang simply became the perfect example for him to show his US allies that he was all in against communism.

it looks like Kim Jong-un can now add climbing a snowy mountain peak in a black trench coat and loafers to his resume of incredible feats:

Kim Jong Un scaled Mount Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean peninsula, on Saturday, according to North Korea’s state-controlled newspaper, Rodong Sinmun.  The Rodong Sinmun further reported that Kim delivered a speech, three days after the celebration of Kim Il Sung’s 103rd birthday, on the significance of Mount Paektu.

Climbing the 2,744 m (9,003 ft) Mt. Paektu is no mean feat; doing so in a double-breasted wool overcoat and oxfords is… wait for it… legend-ary.

The western press has lapped up Kim Jung-un’s precious use of pabulum as reported in the Rodong Shinmun:  “When one climbs snow-stormy Mt. Paektu and undergoes the blizzards over it, one can experience its real spirit and harden the resolution to accomplish the Korean revolution. Climbing Mt. Paektu provides precious mental pabulum more powerful than any kind of nuclear weapon and it is the way for carrying forward the revolutionary traditions of Paektu and giving steady continuity to the glorious Korean revolution.”  [The Marmot’s Hole]

You can read the rest at the link,such as how amazed I continue to be at how poor the North Korean propaganda department’s photoshop skills are.  Isn’t there like a 16-year old teenager in China they can outsource this to?

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt describes what the Internet is like in North Korea http://t.co/C0jH1ybPHA pic.twitter.com/2Dj6d3HH7J

— Business Insider (@BusinessInsider) April 22, 2015

If the report is true this just goes to show that when ever the collapse or final showdown with North Korea ever does come, it is going to even deadlier and messier then anyone wants to deal with now; that is why everyone’s foreign policy with North Korea is to just keep pushing the can down the road:

North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability may be larger and advancing more rapidly than either the United States or China had estimated, according to Chinese experts cited in a US news report.

A report by the Wall Street Journal says Chinese specialists on North Korea who met with US officials in February told them “that North Korea may already have 20 warheads, as well as the capability of producing enough weapons-grade uranium to double its arsenal by next year.”

US officials have warned over the past year about the North’s progress in “miniaturizing” its nuclear arsenal to fit atop a missile, as well as its gains in three separate long-range rocket programs. One such rocket is an intercontinental missile designed to carry a payload more than 5,000 miles, theoretically putting it within range of California.

Sigfried Hecker, a Stanford professor who attended the meeting in February, confirmed the contents of the presentation. Pyongyang allowed Mr. Hecker to visit in 2010, when he reported seeing a large uranium-enrichment facility.

“Some eight, nine, or 10 years ago, they had the bomb but not much of a nuclear arsenal,” the Journal quoted Hecker as saying. “I had hoped they wouldn’t go in this direction, but that’s what happened in the past five years.”  [Christian Science Monitor]

You can read the rest at the link.

I hope the US government vigorously goes after North Korean assets in order to pay this restitution:

A U.S. court has ordered North Korea to pay US$330 million in compensation to the family of a late Korean-American pastor abducted by the North in 2000 while trying to help North Korean defectors in China.

The Washington D.C. District Court delivered the verdict earlier this month, bringing the total amount of damages North Korea has to pay as results of a series of lawsuits in the U.S. so far to about $777 million, according to diplomatic sources.

Rev. Kim Dong-shik was taken by a North Korean kidnapping squad in 2000 from Yanbian in northeastern China, apparently due to his support for North Korean defectors in China. Kim is believed to have died the following year.

Kim’s family in the U.S. filed the lawsuit in 2009.

“This is an important human rights decision that will be utilized in all political abduction cases going forward,” said the Israel Law Center, known as Shurat HaDin, in a statement. The Israeli civic group filed the suit on behalf of Kim’s family.

Few expect North Korea to comply with the verdict and pay the damages, but Shurat HaDin is seeking to seize North Korean assets the U.S. government has frozen as part of a series of financial sanctions over Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction development and other bad behavior.  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link, but you can read more at the Kim Dong-shik kidnapping at this link and this link.

Robert Farley who is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce shares his views on how North Korea would try and attack South Korea:

The clearest path to North Korean victory in war depends on a quick defeat of South Korean forces, providing the United States and Japan with a fait accompli that Pyongyang will expect Beijing to back.

The North Korean attack would likely involve a classic 20th century combined arms assault, using artillery to disrupt RoK defenses and soften up positions (as well as create civilian panic), infantry to break holes in the South Korean lines, and mechanized forces to exploit those gaps.  The North Koreans could well add special forces (potentially deployed to South Korea before the initiation of hostilities) and regular forces deployed by tunnel to South Korean rear areas.

The Korean People’s Air Force is ancient, and has received no significant infusion of Russian or Chinese technology in years.  The force has very little counter-air capability relative to the Republic of Korea Air Force, and its fighters would find themselves easy prey for well-trained South Korean pilots flying sophisticated aircraft.  The KPA can expect very little ground support, either on the tactical or operational scales, and would likely struggle under South Korean air attacks.  [The National Interest]

You can read the rest at the link, but North Korea’s success during a war with South Korea relies heavily on the use of ballistic missiles to attack airfields and seaports in an effort to deny reinforcements from the US military.  Is it any wonder why the THAAD missile defense system is such a hot topic in South Korea right now for the US military and the North Korean stooges in South Korea are trying so hard to stop its deployment.

I think everyone except the Air Force senior leadership realizes it is crazy to think the F-35 can provide the same capability as the A-10:

The commander of U.S. forces in South Korea said Wednesday that the retirement of the A-10 aircraft will leave a gap in the ability to take out enemy tanks from the air.

Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti made the comment under questioning by House lawmakers and said he would compensate for the change by using air and ground forces differently if war breaks out on the peninsula.

The Air Force is pushing a controversial plan to retire the 1970’s-era close air support stalwart, which can shoot tank-busting depleted uranium rounds, and replace it with the F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter, which remains in development and will have limited combat capability when it first goes into operation this summer.

“It would open a gap in terms of that aircraft with that specific capability,” said Scaparrotti, who along with other defense officials warned Wednesday of an increasingly belligerent North Korea.

The testimony comes a day after the Pentagon told lawmakers that the first version of the F-35 will not be able to outdo the A-10 Warthog and its powerful nose cannon on the battlefield.

The Block 2B set to got to the Marine Corps this summer will only be able to carry four bombs and not have any guns. Future variants are expected to have improved weapons but still face high development hurdles.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.