Tag: North Korea

If you do anything this weekend, I recommend reading this entire posting over at One Free Korea about the Ningpo 12. They were the group of North Korean waitresses that defected from their restaurant in China to South Korea in 2014. The Kim regime has claimed they were kidnapped by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.

The lawyer group called Minbyun launched a lawsuit against the government essentially on the behalf of Kim Jong-un to validate this theory. Most ROK Heads know this, but for new readers it is important to understand that the Minbyun group are hard core leftists.  In the past they have attacked the USFK base relocation, tried to bring back the US beef issue, and tried to have North Korean defectors forcibly returned to North Korea.  Below is an excerpt from the OFK article that shows why the restaurant manager named Heo Gang-il changed his story about why they defected after meeting with Minbyun:

Heo claims that at the meetings, Jang offered him and three of the ex-waitresses a stipend of 300,000 to 500,000 won per month. Heo says that Jang also told him he could earn “a lot more money” by suing the South Korean government for coercing a defection under false pretenses. Jang also began to suggest that the four refugees go back to North Korea. He asked Heo to tell this story at a press conference. At one point, Minbyun lawyers handed some of the women photographs of their family members back in North Korea, posing before lavish banquets, which they had obtained from their “clients.” They also gave the women letters from their families, urging the women to return to the “open arms” of their motherland. Heo also recently told Yonhap TV that Kim Sam-seok urged them to go back to North Korea to save their families.

One Free Korea

JTBC the news network behind the fraudulent tablet computer story that was a major factor in the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye, was chosen to interview Heo for his new story about the defections. Major international media outlets like the New York Times ran articles that essentially supported North Korea’s view of events based on Heo’s change of story. Now we know that Heo was on the take from Minbyun. Incredibly Heo was meeting with Minbyun lawyers at the comfort women house now making headlines in South Korea that was run by the disgraced Yoon Mee-hyang:

Last month, South Korea’s largest-circulation daily, the right-leaning Chosun Ilbo, also found Heo in his new country of residence and interviewed him. Heo told the Chosun Ilbo that in June 2018, after the JTBC interview, Yoon Mee-hyang and Kim Sam-seok invited him and at least three of the 12 ex-waitresses to a weekend retreat at a shelter for the wartime rape survivors. It was the first of a series of such meetings. Also present at the meetings were representatives of various “civic groups,” including the Japan-based North Korean front group Chongryon, a “prisoners of conscience” organization, and Minbyun. The most notable Minbyun attendee was a lawyer named “Jang.” It may also have been around this time that at least some of the Ningpo 12 began volunteering at the Council’s shelter and befriending the elderly survivors.

Yoon Mee-hyang is married to Kim Sam-seok who is a convicted North Korean spy and she is accused of using comfort women to raise money for her own personal use. Now she is tied to the Ningpo-12 scandal as well. Incredibly Yoon is a newly appointed lawmaker for the South Korean ruling party.

Once again I highly recommend reading the whole article at the link.

This is how the Kim regime negotiates with the South:

North Korea will take its next step against South Korea, for what it claims to be Seoul’s betrayal and crimes against the communist state, it said Saturday, adding that its army has been entrusted to plan and take any necessary action.

“I feel it is high time to surely break with the South Korean authorities. We will soon take a next action,” Kim Yo-jong, first vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), said in a statement carried by the North’s Korean Central News Agency.

Kim is also younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“By exercising my power authorized by the Supreme Leader, our Party and the state, I gave an instruction to the arms of the department in charge of the affairs with enemy to decisively carry out the next action,” the statement said.

She added, “the right to taking the next action against the enemy will be entrusted to the General Staff of our army.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but I continue to believe the Kim regime is trying to squeeze concession out of the Moon administration. President Moon faces no political hurdles after his ruling party decisively won April’s parliamentary elections, so the Kim regime may be wondering what the hold up is in regards to investment into North Korea and the curtailing of sanctions.

This latest attempt to create a crisis is also clearly being used to build up Kim Yo-jong’s leadership profile within the regime and internationally. It will be interesting to see in the coming months if she continues to take a major role in regime messaging like she is currently doing.

It looks like North Korea wants to stay in the headlines and dump on Trump like everyone else it seems like now a days:

North Korea on Friday again vowed to build up its military force to counter what it perceives as U.S. threats and said there would be little reason for a personal relationship between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump if Washington persists with sanctions and pressure.

On the two-year anniversary of the leaders’ first summit, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon said the North would never again gift Trump with high-profile meetings and concessions he could boast as foreign policy achievements unless it gets something substantial in return.

“The question is whether there will be a need to keep holding hands shaken in Singapore, as we see that there is nothing of factual improvement to be made in the DPRK-U.S. relations simply by maintaining personal relations between our supreme leadership and the U.S. President,” Ri said in a statement carried by state media, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Associated Press

You can read more at the link.

It is pretty clear that the Kim regime is just putting pressure on the Moon administration to see how much concessions they can extract out of him:

North Korea’s decision to sever all official communication channels with South Korea is further weighing on President Moon Jae-in, who was already frustrated by Pyongyang’s lack of response to his inter-Korean peace initiative.

Experts advise Seoul to take a “timeout” from repeatedly offering something to engage the Kim Jong-un regime, while bracing for any possible fallout from increasing tension on the Korean Peninsula.

On Tuesday, the North cut off all cross-border communication lines, including the hotline between Moon and Kim, due to its apparent anger over the South’s “failure” to prevent North Korean defectors and activists from sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border tethered to balloons. In addition, the North said “the work toward the South should thoroughly turn into the one against an enemy.”

At the start of the year, the Moon administration emphasized the importance of inter-Korean exchanges and cooperation. In March, the President offered cross-border healthcare cooperation and made another proposal last month to deal with inter-Korean projects that could be carried out separately from the North’s denuclearization negotiations with the United States. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but what does the Kim regime have to lose by playing hard to get? They know the Moon administration will bend over backwards to accommodate them thus they will keep the pressure on them to maximize concessions.

It appears that the Moon administration wants to treat the balloon launch human rights activists like they do conservative journalists by threatening them with jail:

The unification ministry said Wednesday that it will file a complaint with police against two North Korean defector groups for sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border, a day after the North cut off all inter-Korean communication lines over such leafleting. 

The ministry said that it will also take action to revoke business permits granted to the groups, Fighters for Free North Korea and Keunsaem, accusing them of putting the safety of people living in border regions at risk by sending leaflets into the North.

“They have violated public interests by heightening tensions between the South and the North and by running squarely against the agreements reached by the leaders of the two Koreas, and also caused danger to the lives and safety of residents in the border regions,” the ministry said in a press release.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this is once again another example of how South Korea is a rule by law nation and not a rule of law nation. These activists have been doing this for years and one of their leaders Park Sang-Hak has faced assassination attempts by North Korean agents and had leftist thugs assault him to stop his balloon protests. Now with a change of government and complaints from North Korea, what they are doing is suddenly illegal.

It looks like Kim Jong-un is feeling much better after having not been seen publicly in three weeks:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un presided over a Central Military Commission meeting and discussed “new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country,” state media reported Sunday.

Also discussed at the enlarged meeting of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers’ Party were important military steps and organizational and political measures to further bolster up the overall armed forces, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

“Set forth at the meeting were new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country and putting the strategic armed forces on a high alert operation in line with the general requirements for the building and development of the armed forces of the country,” the KCNA said.

It did not elaborate what the “new policies” for nuclear deterrence were.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

North Korea has renewed its claims that it did not hijack Korean Air flight YS-11 back in 1969:

After half a century, North Korea still insists it did not kidnap the South Korean passengers aboard Korean Air Lines flight YS-11 in 1969, according to a letter released by a United Nations human rights agency Monday.    
   
The incident in question refers to the hijacking of Korean Air Lines (KAL) flight YS-11, which was carrying four crew members and 46 passengers, on Dec. 11, 1969. The plane was destined for Gimpo International Airport, but after taking off from Gangneung, Gangwon, a North Korean spy aboard the plane forced the pilots to redirect the plane to land near Wonsan in North Korea that afternoon.    
   
Pyongyang claimed the pilots had voluntarily defected in protest of the military junta that ruled South Korea at the time.    
   
Thirty-nine passengers were repatriated back to the South two months later, but 11 never returned.   

Joong Ang Ilbo via a reader tip

You can read more at the link, but the North Koreans made this same claim immediately after the hijacking. The North Koreans even put the two pilots, Yu Byong-ha and Choe Sok-man on radio where they confirmed this claim.  However, these claims were dismissed by the ROK authorities because the two pilots were both decorated ROK Air Force veterans who the investigation determined had no reason to defect. 

In fact the ROK authorities investigated the backgrounds of all 46 passengers on board the plane and cleared everyone except for two men, Han Chang-gi and Paek In-yong.  The ROK authorities could not find any background information on these two men leading them to believe they were the hijackers. The pilots’ so called confession on the radio was likely due to the threats made against them by the North Koreans. 

This hijacking ended up causing a huge uproar within South Korean society because this provocation was directed solely at civilians unlike past provocations that were primarily directed at military and government targets. What is really sad about this, is that today in South Korea there is probably a good amount of people who actually believe North Korea’s claim.

You can read much more about this hijacking at the below link: