Tag: North Korea

The North Koreans claim that the two South Koreans they have detained were not kidnapped from China, but instead detained inside of North Korea:

South Korea on Friday urged North Korea to immediately release two of its citizens detained in the country over alleged espionage, the latest in a series of arrests in the North of foreign nationals.

The North’s state media said late Thursday that the two were detained last year for allegedly collecting confidential state information and attempting to spread “bourgeois lifestyle and culture” in the North at the order of South Korea’s spy agency and the U.S. It identified the men as Kim Kuk Gi and Choe Chun Gil and said the two acknowledged their acts during what was described as a news conference in Pyongyang.

North Korea has occasionally detained South Koreans, Americans and other foreigners on accusations of spying in what analysts say are attempts to wrest outside concessions. Authorities in Pyongyang in the past staged news conferences, during which foreign detainees appeared before the media and made statements that they recant after their releases.

On Friday, South Korea’s Unification Ministry confirmed that Kim and Choe were South Korean citizens but denied they were engaged in espionage operations. Ministry officials could not explain how the two ended up in the North.

“We strongly demand North Korea to quickly release our citizens Kim Kuk Gi and Choe Chun Gil and repatriate them without hesitation,” ministry spokesman Lim Byeong Cheol told reporters in Seoul.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the country’s main spy agency, denied the North’s accusations of spying.

The North’s Korean Central News Agency said Kim was detained in September in Pyongyang and Choe near the border with China in December.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but if true that they were detained inside of North Korea than I believe the ROK government shouldn’t feel pressured to have them released.  If people are stupid enough to travel inside North Korea than they need to be prepared to accept the consequences.

The United Nations is once again highlighting North Korea abysmal human rights record which includes the kidnapping of up to 200,000 foreign nationals:

The UN Human Rights Council on Friday strongly criticised North Korea for the “systematic abduction” of foreigners, after a UN investigation found the country had snatched up to 200,000 foreign nationals.

The resolution, he told the council, was “intended to bring down the system and ideology” of his country.

The adopted text decried North Korea’s “systematic abduction, denial of repatriation and subsequent enforced disappearance of persons, including those from other countries, on a large scale and as a matter of state policy”.

A UN-mandated investigation issued a searing report in February 2014 accusing North Korea of committing human rights violations “without parallel in the contemporary world”, including the abductions of an estimated 200,000 foreign nationals from at least 12 countries.

Most of them were South Koreans left stranded after the 1950-1953 Korean War, but hundreds of others from around the world have since been taken or disappeared while visiting the secretive Stalinist state.  [AFP]

You can read the rest at the link, but the report is timely since they have just kidnapped two more foreign nationals this past week.

Resettlement Program for Defectors Needs Total Overhaul – Editorial http://t.co/CiBZuoLiVS via @EnglishChosun

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) March 26, 2015

Here is another example of how subversive media is continuing to spread within South Korea:

A $50 portable media player is providing many North Koreans a window to the outside world despite the government’s efforts to keep its people isolated – a symbol of change in one of the world’s most repressed societies.

By some estimates, up to half of all urban North Korean households have an easily concealed “notel”, a small portable media player used to watch DVDs or content stored on USB sticks that can be easily smuggled into the country and passed hand to hand.

People are exchanging South Korean soaps, pop music, Hollywood films and news programs, all of which are expressly prohibited by the Pyongyang regime, according to North Korean defectors, activists and recent visitors to the isolated country.

“The North Korean government takes their national ideology extremely seriously, so the spread of all this media that competes with their propaganda is a big and growing problem for them,” said Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an organization that works with defectors.

“If Pyongyang fails to successfully adapt to these trends, they could threaten the long-term survival of the regime itself.”   [Reuters via the Marmots Hole]

You can read more at the link, but subversive media is better than any sanctions in my opinion at undermining the Kim regime.

Via reader tip comes news that the North Koreans have arrested two alleged South Korean spies:

 

North Korea said late on Thursday it had arrested two South Koreans based in the Chinese border city of Dandong, accusing them of spying for South Korea.

The North’s official KCNA news agency showed images of two middle-aged men it identified as Kim Kuk Gi and Choe Chun Gil speaking at a news conference in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

The two men were South Korean nationals working as spies for Seoul’s National Intelligence Service from the Chinese border city of Dandong, it said.

“They zealously took part in the anti-DPRK smear campaign of the U.S. imperialists and the puppet group of traitors to isolate and blockade the DPRK in (the) international arena,” the agency said, using North Korea’s official DPRK acronym for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  [Reuters]

You can read more at the link, but the real question is how were they arrested?  Did the Chinese arrest them and send them to North Korea?  Doubtful.  Were they kidnapped by the North Koreans and brought to North Korea?  The North Koreans have done this before.  If so the South Korean government should be putting pressure on China to get them back.

Secondly are these people really spies?  They are apparently Christian missionaries assisting North Korean refugees fleeing North Korea.So they may have just been kidnapped just like Reverend Kim Dong-sik was a few years ago simply to stop the underground railroad assisting North Korean refugees.

Blaine Harden writing for the Washington Post explains one of the ways that the Kim regime is able to manufacture hate of the United States to justify their rule:

Where does the hate come from?

Much of it is cooked up daily in Pyongyang. Like all dictatorial regimes, the Kim family dynasty needs an endless existential struggle against a fearsome enemy. Such a threat rationalizes massive military spending and excuses decades of privation, while keeping dissenting mouths shut and political prisons open.

The hate, though, is not all manufactured. It is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.

The story dates to the early 1950s, when the U.S. Air Force, in response to the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, bombed and napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North. It was mostly easy pickings for the Air Force, whose B-29s faced little or no opposition on many missions.

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the New Yorker in 1995. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.  (………..)

“It is still the 1950s in North Korea and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on,” says Kathryn Weathersby, a scholar of the Korean War. “People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened.”

There is real value in understanding this paranoid mindset. It puts the calculated belligerence of the Kim family into context. It also undermines the notion that North Korea is merely a nut-case state.  [Washington Post]

Harden concludes his article that some day the US should apologize for the bombing of North Korea.  Using that mindset should the US then apologize for Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the fire bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities as well?  Anyway the Korean War was a United Nations action, so shouldn’t the UN be the ones apologizing?

N Korea broke 5 UNSC resolutions, 2 agreed frameworks, 1 leap day deal & 1 armistice, ergo, let's do a peace treaty! http://t.co/TdDK7eMlve

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) March 22, 2015

The North Koreans figure they can probably just wait out the Park administration and eventually have the sanctions removed without taking responsibility for the murder of the 104 South Korean sailors:

North Korea on Tuesday ruled out any apology over the 2010 sinking of the South Korean navel corvette Cheonan, and demanded Seoul lift sanctions imposed after the incident in which Pyongyang has always denied involvement.

Two days ahead of the fifth anniversary of the sinking, in which 46 South Korean seamen died, the North’s top military body, the National Defence Commission (NDC), condemned Seoul’s steadfast insistence on the “cock-and-bull” idea that Pyongyang was responsible.

The Cheonan was carrying 104 personnel when it sank near the disputed Yellow Sea maritime border between North and South Korea on March 26.

A South Korean-led investigation involving a team of international experts concluded it was sunk by a North Korean submarine torpedo.

Despite Pyongyang’s heated denials, Seoul responded with the so-called “May 24 measures” — which amounted to an effective trade embargo on North Korea which remains in place today.

South Korea has insisted it will only consider lifting the sanctions after the North acknowledges its responsibility and apologises.

The NDC statement on Tuesday demanded the immediate end of the trade embargo, arguing that it had been “cooked up under the absurd pretext of the … fictitious story” of North Korean involvement in the Cheonan sinking.

“The South should clearly understand that its sophism that ‘apology’ and ‘expression of regret’ have to precede the lifting of the ‘step’ can never work,” a spokesman for the NDC’s policy department said in the statement carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency.

Calling for an apology in such circumstances amounted to an “intolerable mockery” of the North’s dignity, the spokesman said  [AFP]

You can read the rest at the link.

I wonder if the North Koreans intentionally set this fire or not?

A fire broke out on North Korea’s side of the heavily guarded demilitarized zone (DMZ) on Monday afternoon, South Korean authorities said.

The fire spread through the barbed-wire fence separating the two Koreas at 1:15 p.m., reaching the Dora Observatory in Paju City, Gyeonggi Province.

“The fire started in North Korean territory and spread south,” an official said.

The northern region of Gyeonggi Province recently issued a drought warning.

Seven fire engines and about 50 firemen fought the blaze.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

This just shows that North Korea’s threats work and that is why they continue to make them:

A defector-turned-activist said Monday he will halt his campaign of sending anti-Pyongyang propaganda via balloons over the demilitarized zone into North Korea after it caused escalating military tension at the inter-Korean border.

“I can see the North’s fear of the leaflets,” said Park Sang-hak, founder of the rights group Fighters for a Free North Korea. “We won’t send the leaflets for some time.”

Earlier this month, the group said it would send leaflets carrying messages critical of the Kim Jong-un regime and 5,000 DVDs of the Hollywood comedy “The Interview,” which depicted an assassination of the young ruler, over the border by balloons sometime around Thursday. Thursday is the fifth anniversary of the North’s sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, although Pyongyang has denied responsibility.

Park demanded Monday that the North apologize for sinking the Cheonan, and if it doesn’t, his group will eventually dispatch the leaflets and DVDs.

Tension between the two Koreas’ militaries reached a new peak over the weekend as a result of Park’s plan. On Sunday, the North threatened to use “all the firepower means” to destroy the balloons. The North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency released a warning from frontline units of its military.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but I am sure Park Sang-hak was under a lot of pressure from the South Korean government to suspend the balloon launches due to the talks over the Kaesong Industrial Complex they are trying to have with the North Koreans.