Tag: North Korea

Maybe they are spies or are just making a false confession under duress, but the fact that the North Koreans are publicizing this shows that they want to use them as bargaining chips in future negotiations:

Two South Koreans detained in North Korea told CNN on Sunday that they spied for South Korea.

South Korea has flatly rejected the accusations and urged Pyongyang to release them.

The interviews came after North Korea announced on Saturday that it arrested a South Korean student studying in the U.S. on charges of illegal entry into the country, the fourth South Korean citizen detained in the North.

South Korean missionary Kim Jung-wook has been held there since October 2013.

Sunday’s interviews as well as the new detention could be an attempt by Pyongyang to pressure South Korea to shift its policy toward the communist nation. The North could also use the detainees as a negotiating chip should inter-Korean talks reopen.

When announcing last month the arrest of the two CNN interviewees — Kim Kuk-gi and Choe Chun-gil — North Korea accused them of working as spies for South Korea’s main intelligence agency National Intelligence Service (NIS), branding them “heinous terrorists.”

In Sunday’s interviews, both Kim, 61, and Choe, 56, admitted to the charges against them and said they would accept any punishment the North Korean government decided. North Korean minders were present during the interviews, CNN said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Without high resolution imagery I don’t think this image is a smoking gun in regards to reported mass executions in North Korea.  For all we know these could just be wooden targets they put up for training purposes:

A U.S. civic group has released satellite images of North Korea that appear to show a public execution.

Radio Free Asia reported Thursday that the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea published an analysis of photos taken last October from above a military training area near Pyongyang.

Analysts identified six anti-aircraft machineguns lined up across from some blurry objects, with distinct shadows that appear to be people, also lined up side-by-side on a firing range.

Whatever or whoever was in the images was no longer there in another picture taken nine days later.

The committee says the most plausible explanation is that a public execution took place there.  [Chosun Ilbo]

Whether or not he illegally entered North Korea doesn’t matter to me because this is the chance anyone visiting North Korea takes for going there in the first place:

South Korea confirmed on Sunday that North Korea detained a South Korean student of New York University, but said it was still unclear whether the 21-year-old New Jersey resident attempted to enter the North illegally.

An official from South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles affairs with North Korea, said his department was still trying to gather information on Won Moon Joo’s travels and the circumstances of his arrest.

“Our judgment is that Joo is being held in North Korea, but we are still trying to confirm the details of how he got arrested,” he said on condition of anonymity, citing office rules.

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said Saturday that Joo was arrested on April 22 after trying to illegally enter North Korea by crossing the Amnok River from the Chinese border town of Dandong.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link.

It looks like Kim Jong-un got cold feet and decided not to travel to Russia after all:

South Korea sees no abnormal signs in North Korea which might have caused its leader, Kim Jong-un, to cancel his planned trip to Russia next week, a Defense Ministry official said Friday.

On Thursday, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters that the North Korean leader will not visit Moscow for a celebration to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, saying that the decision “is related to internal Korean affairs.”

South Korean and Russian officials had expected the leader of the reclusive nation to attend a military parade and hold a bilateral meeting with Putin. It would have been his first foreign trip since taking office in 2011 upon the death of his father, Kim Jong-il.

“We don’t believe that any notable internal affairs are taking place in North Korea (that are) serious enough to cause Kim not to attend the event,” the official said, requesting anonymity.  [Korea Times]

You can read the rest at the link, but experts think that Kim Jong-un decided not to go because he is not ready to share the stage with many other national leaders.

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