There is a difference between open to talks and actually talking. If the Kim regime feels they can get something for little to nothing in return then they will talk. Kim Jong-il for the first Inter-Korean summit received $500 million for little to nothing in return. In the mean time they can claim they are open to talks and look like the reasonable ones in the media and for their leftist supporters. However, if the South Koreans do not give them what they want they can blame US-ROK military exercises or some other excuse to call their proposal. In other words don’t get too excited by this announcement this is just business as usual for the North Koreans:
Could an inter-Korean summit happen soon? That’s what the South Korean government is hoping, in light of the North Korean leader’s latest speech.
“We see North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s speech as sincere and significant. Our government is looking forward to any form of inter-Korean talks in the near future.”
In Kim Jong-un’s [ ] nationally televised New Year’s speech, he said he’s open to talks with Seoul, even possibly with President Park Geun-hye.
“If the atmosphere and environment are right, there is no reason not to hold a high-level summit. We will make every effort to advance dialogue and cooperation.”
As North Koreans rang in the new year, Kim used his third annual address to speak on different issues, but spent the most time talking about improving ties with South Korea. Seoul is now urging Pyongyang to take steps to normalize relations, such as responding to its earlier proposal to hold talks this month. The North Korean leader, however, also criticized South Korea’s military exercises with the U.S., calling them a source of tension. [Arirang News]
ROK Drop favorite Park Sang-hak is living up to his word and has decided to drop “The Interview” over North Korea via balloon:
North Korean defector Park Sang Hak stands with activists who plan to send anti-North Korea leaflets during a rally near the Imjingak Pavilion near the border village of Panmunjom, in Paju, north of Seoul, South Korea, Saturday, Oct. 25, 2014. North Korea opened fire on Oct. 10 after activists floated propaganda balloons across the border, following through on a previous threat to attack. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
A South Korean activist said Wednesday that he will launch balloons carrying DVDs of Sony’s “The Interview” toward North Korea to try to break down a personality cult built around dictator Kim Jong Un.
The comedy depicting an assassination attempt on Kim is at the center of tension between North Korea and the U.S., with Washington blaming Pyongyang for crippling hacking attacks on Sony Entertainment. Pyongyang denies that and has vowed to retaliate.
Activist Park Sang-hak said he will start dropping 100,000 DVDs and USBs with the movie by balloon in North Korea as early as late January. Park, a North Korean defector, said he’s partnering with the U.S.-based non-profit Human Rights Foundation, which is financing the making of the DVDs and USB memory sticks of the movie with Korean subtitles.
Park said foundation officials plan to visit South Korea around Jan. 20 to hand over the DVDs and USBs, and that he and the officials will then try to float the first batch of the balloons if weather conditions allow. [Associated Press]
You can read more at the link, but I guess we will see if North Korea tries to send out their leftist allies in South Korea to try and stop this balloon launch later in the month.
Via One Free Korea comes this Yonhap article that explains how missile defense is one area the US can use to pressure China to reign in North Korean provocations:
The deployment of ballistic missile defense systems around North Korea by the United States and its allies could be an effective way to change China’s strategic thinking about Pyongyang, a U.S. congressional report said.
The Congressional Research Service made the point in a recent report, “North Korea: U.S. Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation,” saying Beijing would find it not in its national interest if provocative actions by the North lead to increased military deployments in the region.
When North Korea fired a long-range rocket in April 2012, a key focus of Chinese media coverage of the case was Patriot missile deployments that were made by the U.S. and its allies in response to the North’s launch, the report noted.
A subtext of those reports was that the North’s actions are feeding military developments that are not in China’s interests, it said.
“As part of the efforts by the United States and its allies to change China’s strategic thinking about North Korea, the BMD (ballistic missile defense) deployments may have an impact,” the report said. “Many observers, particularly in the United States and Japan, argue that continued North Korean ballistic missile development increases the need to bolster regional BMD capabilities and cooperation.” [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link as well as over at One Free Korea who also believes that South Korea and Japan should also move towards developing their own nuclear arsenals to further pressure China.
A South Korean man (C) is being repatriated at the truce village of Panmunjeom on Dec. 26, 2014. The 52-year-old, identified only by his surname Ma, illegally entered North Korea in November. (Yonhap)
This is nothing new and par for the course in regards to provocative bluster from the North Koreans, however it still isn’t right:
On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of “The Interview.” It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
It wasn’t the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama and other top U.S. and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, the North called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey.”
The defense commission also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, which happened after the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack. The U.S. government has declined to say if it was behind the shutdown. [Associated Press]
You can read more at the link, but President Obama actually got off pretty light compared to the ambassador of Botswana of all places that the North Koreans called a “black bastard”.
The highly controversial movie “The Interview” was released yesterday despite threats from North Korean sponsored hackers and that means more reviews of the movie are in. Like some of the initial screening reviews I read these reviews are not good either:
The Hollywood Reporter’sTodd McCarthy calls it “an intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In the relatively sparse annals of irreverent major studio comedies that pissed off foreign nations, for big laughs this one doesn’t rate anywhere near Borat or Team America: World Police. … As political satire goes, The Interview has the comic batting average of a mediocre-to-average Saturday Night Live sketch, with a few potent laughs erupting from an overall mash of sex, drugs and TV broadcasting jokes that feel rooted in a sense of humor primarily characterized by a frat-boy/altered state/prolonged adolescence mind-set.”
Additionally, “if you set up as provocative a premise as do the makers of The Interview, you ultimately have to deal with all its implications; let’s just say that what concludes the film is rote action, simplistic wish-fulfillment stuff that feels cheap and naive and more concerned with looking coolly kick-ass than with any real-world consequences. Even if one part of the film is sincere in wanting to highlight North Korea’s negatives (famine, ideological orthodoxy, cult of personality, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, et al.), the larger part is devoted to very Western-style sexual grossness, deterministic outrageousness, self-satisfied obliviousness and contended immaturity.” Alongside Franco and Rogen, “Park brings great energy and enthusiasm to his tricky job of portraying the world’s least known big-deal ruler — there are even scenes of him getting the famous Kim haircut and selecting a suit from a closet full of identical ones.” [The Hollywood Reporter]
You can read more reviews at the link, but this movie appears to be pretty horrible. I think I will pass on watching it even if it is supposed to be my patriotic duty now to do so. Has any ROK Heads seen this film and can verify how bad it is?
It looks like the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park who has made international headlines about her defection from the country has been exaggerating some of the tales she has been telling:
You’d have to have been inhuman not to be moved. But – and you’re going to hear a lot of “buts” – was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t. Whether this matters is up to the reader to decide, but my concern is if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed. We need to have a full and truthful picture of life in North Korea if we are to help those living under its abysmally cruel regime and those who try to flee.
“Celebrity Defector”
I met Yeonmi Park a few months ago when I spent two weeks filming a story about her and her family for Australia’s SBS Dateline. We called the story, “Celebrity Defector.”
Back in South Korea where she now lives, Park is one of the stars of a television program featuring a cast of North Korean women. It’s called “Now On My Way To Meet You” and it daringly satirizes the Kim Dynasty. The women tell personal anecdotes about their lives in North Korea and their journey to the south. A number of the women were introduced to us as having been homeless and starving – the reason they fled.
Buried in the shows archives are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience. [The Diplomat]
You can read the rest at the link, but it is a very convincing case that Park has exaggerated circumstances of her defection to possibly help raise awareness and funding for the North Korean human rights organizations she has been working with.
Here is Yeonmi Park’s response to this article:
I want to thank Mary Ann Jolley for caring so much about the terrible situation in North Korea that she would point out any inconsistencies in my quotes and how my story has been reported. Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it). And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape. There are many more examples like this.
But one very important thing to correct: I do not have a foundation. The website was a dummy site built by a friend, and it was not supposed to be live. There was no way it could accept money, and I haven’t taken any. I am so sorry for the confusion. The site has been taken down.
Also, I apologize that there have been times when my childhood memories were not perfect, like how long my father was sentenced to prison. Now I am checking with my mom and others to correct everything. I am also writing a book about my life in North Korea, my escape through China and and my work to promote human rights. It is where I will be able to tell my full story.
In the meantime, I thank you all for your patience and kindness to me.
I think most of the inconsistencies are pretty minor that could be explained by poor memory and English language skills other than the story of her mother being raped. If that is not true then that is a flat out lie. The organizations that promote defector testimony like this need to be very careful to not have defectors exaggerate or lie because this just plays into the hands of the Kim regime and its apologists. The truth about North Korea is bad enough, there is no need to lie about it.
