The American held in North Korea, Matthew Miller, begins his six-year sentence of hard labor on Thursday. A North Korean government official released a photo of Miller, taken on Wednesday. Dressed in a blue-gray prison garment with the number 107 and his head shaved, Miller is seen with his eyes downcast, staring away from the camera. Details about where he’ll serve his sentence or what labor he will be required to do were not released. (CNN)
It looks like the North Koreans have determined that Kim Jong-un’s gout is not going away and thus have begun a campaign to make excuses for it:
Young North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is suffering from “discomfort”, state media has said in the first official acknowledgement of ill health after a prolonged period out of the public eye.
Kim, 31, who is frequently the centrepiece of the isolated country’s propaganda, has not been photographed by state media since appearing at a concert alongside his wife on Sept. 3, fuelling speculation he is suffering from bad health.
He had been seen walking with a limp since an event with key officials in July and in a pre-recorded documentary broadcast by state media on Thursday appeared to have difficulty walking.
“The wealth and prosperity of our socialism is thanks to the painstaking efforts of our marshal, who keeps lighting the path for the people, like the flicker of a flame, despite suffering discomfort,” a voice over for the hour-long documentary said. (Reuters)
Via One Free Korea comes this article from a ROK Drop favorite Bruce Klingner
Unilateral US actions against Iran, combined with diplomatic pressure, led other nations to impose their own financial and regulatory measures against Tehran. Collectively, the international sanctions have isolated Iran from the international banking system, targeted critical Iranian economic sectors, and forced countries to restrict purchases of Iranian oil and gas, Tehran’s largest export.
Just as strong measures induced Iran back to the negotiating table, more robust measures are needed to leverage North Korea. The United States should use its action against Iran as a model for imposing the same severity of targeted financial measures against North Korea.
Targeted financial measures are directed against entities that violate U.S. laws by exploiting their need to access the global financial network. Even the most isolated regime is vulnerable given the centrality of the U.S. financial system. The U.S. dollar is the global currency of choice for international trade, and the requirement that any dollar-denominated transaction anywhere in the world must go through a U.S. Treasury Department-regulated bank give Treasury the power to exclude North Korea and its third country enablers from the U.S. financial system.
Compared with trade sanctions, targeted financial measures are precision guided munitions against violators, rather than economic carpet bombing against a population. For banks, wire services, and insurance companies, there are catastrophic risks to facilitating – even unknowingly — illicit transactions. [Korea Economic Institute]
I highly recommend reading the whole thing at the link, but I agree with One Free Korea’s opinion that the old ideas in regards to North Korea have failed. The targeted financial measures that Klingner mentions were proven to change North Korean behavior when one looks back at the 2005 freezing of North Korean money in the Macau bank Banco Delta Asia. The bank was hit with targeted financial measures because it was being used to launder counterfeit US dollars. After the money was frozen there was a noticeable change in the short term in North Korean behavior until the ill-gotten money was returned. Since then North Korea has found new ways to launder and move money around. Imagine the affect on Kim regime behavior if they continually faced Banco Delta Asia type of crisis from targeted financial measures. Unlike Banco Delta Asia I would hope the US would not give North Korea their ill-gotten money back either.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” lang=”en”><p>A scrap from Matthew Miller's all-caps 'confession' / failed application for full 'fellow-traveller' status in DPRK. <a href=”http://t.co/SlgDm6Orzs”>pic.twitter.com/SlgDm6Orzs</a></p>— Adam Cathcart (@adamcathcart) <a href=”https://twitter.com/adamcathcart/status/511459634914144256″>September 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
A young American man has been caught trying to swim across a river border into North Korea, a government source said Wednesday.
The man was arrested by Marine sentries at around 11:55 p.m. on Tuesday while he was swimming across the Han River, which borders with North Korea, the source said.
The river cuts through the South Korean capital of Seoul and its adjacent county of Gimpo into the Yellow Sea.
During an interrogation following the arrest, the U.S. citizen of Arabic descent said “I was trying to go to North Korea in order to meet with supreme leader Kim Jong-un,” according to the source. [Yonhap]
From the North’s perspective why would they want to globalize the Kaesong Industrial Complex? It has worked as a great bargaining chip for them over the years to get what they want from the South Koreans:
South Korea called on North Korea to be more cooperative in luring foreign investors to their joint industrial complex in the North on Monday, the eve of the first anniversary of its reopening.
Seoul’s unification ministry said the operation of the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) has been almost fully normalized despite a six-month hiatus from March last year.
The North, however, has maintained a lukewarm attitude toward agreed-upon working-level meetings to discuss ways to develop the facilities, where 125 South Korean firms employ more than 52,000 North Korean workers, according to the ministry.
“The globalization of the KIC has made little progress due to North Korea’s uncooperative stance,” it said in a press release. “North Korea will have to do what it should do for dialogue (on the future of the KIC) and its globalization.” [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but to the South Koreans globalizing Kaesong likely means getting as many Chinese companies as possible in there to make it harder for the North Koreans to shut down again.
South Korea’s military confirmed Sunday it has detected signs of North Korea’s development of a submarine-based ballistic missile launch system.
In a report to an opposition lawmaker, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said there is an indication that the North is developing a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM).
“There is no intelligence yet that North Korea has an SLBM in operation. But the possibility of a North Korean submarine equipped with an SLBM has been detected recently,” the JCS said in the document submitted to Rep. Jin Sung-joon of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but developing a submarine based missile launch capability is very difficult and why so few nations have this capability. It just makes me wonder if the North Koreans are just putting out fake mock ups in order to confuse intelligence analysts. They have been accused of doing this in the past.
