Tag: North Korea

A ROK Drop favorite, Park Sang-hak and his group Fighters for Free North Korea have just launched their latest balloon campaign:

A group of activists launched big balloons carrying leaflets across the border with the North, condemning the communist regime’s recent series of missile and artillery firings.

The 10 propaganda balloons, launched by seven North Korean defector-turned-activists at the border city of Paju toward the North, carried anti-Pyongyang leaflets as well as one thousand U.S. dollar bills, meant to entice North Koreans.

Banners saying “What Kim Jong-un really fears is 20 million North Korean people getting to know the facts and the truth” also dangled from the balloons in protest against the North’s repeated military provocations.

The North fired about 100 artillery shells near the inter-Korean East Sea border a day earlier after test-launching two short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea the previous day in its recent series of military provocations near the border.

“Since the start of this year, the North fired missiles and artillery shells on dozens of occasions, firing away (money) worth three months of food for North Korean people,” Park Sang-hak, the head of the activist group Fighters for Free North Korea, said. “We decided to launch the anti-Pyongyang leaflets since the government did not take any action.”  [Yonhap via One Free Korea]

ROK Heads may remember that Park Sang-hak is the North Korean defector turned activist who the Kim regime has repeatedly threatened, sent their South Korean leftist lackeys to assault him, and even tried to assassinate him a few years ago due to his balloon launch efforts.  Despite all this Park continues to send his balloons into North Korea which must be having an effect considering the reactions of the Kim regime to the launches.

A ROK Drop favorite Dr. Andrei Lankov has an article published that discusses how the Kim regime prevents dissent within North Korea:

However, terror alone does not explain the remarkable staying power of the regime in Pyongyang. The presence and role of daily surveillance must not be underestimated. North Koreans have good reason to believe that even a minor deviation from the officially approved political line will be noticed and punished by the authorities. Punishment, like the misdemeanour itself, might be quite mild. However, it is the ubiquity of surveillance which is important.  (……)

Perhaps, one should first mention the neighbourhood watch groups, known as the inminban (literally, people’s group). Each inminban consists of 15-30 families living side-by-side in a village, urban block, or multi-story building. Such a group is headed by a junior official, whose task is to look for all suspicious activities within her (this is always a woman’s job) jurisdiction. She is also charged with the registration of overnight visitors because one cannot stay overnight even with friends or relatives without giving prior notice to the authorities. The official is required to have intimate knowledge of all families under her jurisdictions: their occupation, income level, family relations and even work routine. At their briefings with police, the inminban heads have always been reminded that they should know “how many chopsticks are in any given household” – and this oft-repeated sentence is not a joke.

Another responsibility of the “people’s group” and its head is to ensure that no forbidden items are kept in private houses. The list of such items includes, above all, tunable radio sets and DVDs of South Korean as well as some Western movies.  [Aljazeera]

You can read the rest at the link, but Dr. Lankov also discusses how the regime uses indoctrination as a means of political control.  There is really nothing new in Dr. Lankov’s analysis for people who closely follow North Korea, but it should make for interesting reading for those who do not.  On this topic I highly recommend reading Babara Demick’s book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” which goes into great detail through interviews of North Korean defectors how the caste system, inminban, and indoctrination systems work.

Here is another indication of an impending provocation cycle from the North Koreans:

Blue: UN declared western sea boundary
Red: North Korea’s declared western sea boundary
1–Yeonpyeong Island
2–Baengnyeong Island
3–Daecheong Island

Thousands of North Korean propaganda leaflets fell yesterday on a frontline South Korean island, warning of an attack on soldiers stationed there, a report said. A South Korean marine unit based on Baengnyeong Island in the Yellow Sea had collected the leaflets which were carried across the border, Yonhap news agency said. The South’s military declined to confirm the report.

The leaflets carried threats of bombings, describing the marines as the first target to be wiped out.
The North also warned in the leaflets that its troops were always ready to strike the island with their “unprecedented” fire power and turn it into “a large graveyard”, Yonhap said.  [The Daily Star]

Here is an article that provides the left’s view on the UPP spy scandal in South Korea:

As the debate over the NIS in the National Assembly intensified and militant mass demonstrations continued to call for reform, the National Intelligence Service struck back on August 28, raiding the homes and offices of 18 members of the Unified Progressive Party. Three party officials were arrested and charged with treason. As the principal target for vengeance, Lee Seok-ki would later be arrested after a vote in the National Assembly stripped him of immunity.

Wild claims were made, as the NIS charged that Lee headed a group called the “Revolutionary Organization,” which it said was planning an armed uprising in the event of war with North Korea. The quotations attributed to Lee were provocative, and were said to originate from a recording provided by an informer who attended two meetings of a local branch of the Unified Progressive Party on May 10 and 12.

In a familiar pattern, the NIS illegally leaked selected excerpts to the New Frontier Party and media outlets. The result was as intended, and a furious trial by media ensued, even though the courts had not yet ruled on the admissibility of the transcript as evidence. Lee claimed that he was innocent of all charges, and the NIS had fabricated the quotations it had attributed to him. He charged the NIS with engaging in “political persecution” against his party.

Lee Jung-hee, chairperson of the Unified Progressive Party, announced at a press conference, “The Blue House, facing an unprecedented crisis, and the National Intelligence Service, on the eve of its dissolution after being exposed of rigging the last election, are conducting a Yushin era witch hunt in the 21^st century. This is an attempt to silence the candlelight protests as the truth of the fraudulent crimes of the National Intelligence Service are exposed, and voices demanding accountability from President Park Geun-hye intensify.” Lee warned, “Just as they accused all citizens who supported the opposition in the last election as ‘pro-North sympathizers’, they will try to crush and eliminate all democratic forces by labeling them criminal insurgents.”

There were those who questioned the timing of the raid. The NIS claimed that it had been investigating Lee Seok-ki for three years, and the meetings that provided its rationale took place three and a half months beforehand. Why was this moment chosen, they wondered? The NIS was on the ropes. The National Assembly had completed its investigation of the NIS, and the opposition parties were demanding that the NIS should be banned from domestic intelligence gathering. According to a source familiar with the functioning of the NIS, “This investigation looks suspiciously like an attempt by the NIS to justify its existence. It may be intended to block efforts to reduce and eliminate the agency’s domestic and investigative branches, which are at its heart.”  [CounterPunch]

You can read much more at the link that provides the UPP’s side of the story that everything was taken out of context.  I always suspected that the claims the NIS made of the spy ring plotting to overthrow the government were exaggerated in response to the Korean left’s attempts to reform the NIS.  However, does the UPP deny that Lee was requesting classified documents and then leaking them in an effort to harm the US-ROK alliance?  Why was Lee also trying to get his hands on US-ROK war plans?  As I said before Lee and the UPP are just a political extension of the North Korean stooges in the Korean left that inhabit organization such as the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Korea Teacher’s Union. These organizations have long been pro-North Korean and anti-US.  That is why I said this whole UPP spy scandal is just a continuation of the Ilshimhoe Spy Scandal and not some new organization trying to overthrow the government.  These groups coordinate with North Korea in order to cause political and social unrest within South Korea.  That is why I have also said that the UPP should not be banned in South Korea like some have suggested.  By having the UPP all the pro-North Korean politicians are all in one party and you know who they are.  What needs to be done is to ensure that state secrets are not given to them.