Tag: South Korea

The free agency in international sporting competitions continues to grow:

An American forward is set to play for South Korea men’s national basketball team, having completed the naturalization process on Monday.

Ricardo Ratliffe, who plays for the Seoul Samsung Thunders in the Korean Basketball League (KBL), passed his citizenship interview with the Ministry of Justice for special naturalization in the area of sports. He will be now eligible to play for the national team.

Ratliffe, a Virginia native, is considered one of the top foreign players in the KBL. The 28-year-old won the league championship in three consecutive seasons with Ulsan Mobis Phoebus from 2012 to 2015, before moving to the Thunders.

For the last six seasons, Ratliffe averaged 18.3 points and 10.3 rebounds per game. He also won the KBL’s top foreign player award twice.

Ratliffe is the fourth foreign basketball player to earn South Korean citizenship through the special naturalization process, following Moon Tae-young, Moon Tae-jong and Kim Han-byeol. However, since the previous players all had South Korean mothers, Ratliffe is the first naturalized player not of Korean descent  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

I wonder if the North Korean delegation was even able to see this protest?  I am willing to bet the ROK authorities kept the North Koreans out of view of this protest:

Conservative protesters on Monday burned a picture of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the North’s national flag, in a rally against its participation in next month’s PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

The activists, led by the far-right Korean Patriots Party, held a press conference in front of Seoul Station at around 11 a.m., when a group of North Korean officials arrived at the train station from the eastern city of Gangneung, on the second day of their two-day trip for inspection of performance venues.

“The PyeongChang Winter Olympics is turning into ‘Kim Jong-un’s Pyongyang Olympics’ that effectively recognizes its nuclear armaments and propagates the North Korean regime,” they said. [Korea Times]

The North Korean delegation is visiting the ROK to view locations where the Moranbong Band will perform and hopefully not sing about the greatness of the Kim regime:

A North Korean delegation arrived in Gangnueng, an eastern South Korean city, Sunday to check the venues for its proposed art performances at next month’s PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

The trip came amid brisk inter-Korean contact on the North’s participation in the Olympic Games to open in three weeks.

The seven-member team is led by Hyon Song-wol, head of the North’s Samjiyon Orchestra, and known as one of the most influential women in the secretive communist nation.

She also serves as director of the Moranbong Band, the country’s well-known all-female musical group, reportedly created at the order of leader Kim Jong-un. There’s a rumor that she is an ex-girlfriend of Kim.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but a ROK delegation is supposed to go to North Korea and view the Mt. Geumgang Resort and ROK skiers are supposed to go train at the Masik Ski Resort.  This is all clearly intended to be an opening effort to get the tours restarted at Mt. Geumgang which was once a cash cow for the regime until it was closed after a grandma was shot in the back and killed by a North Korean soldier.

Opening the tours again would also circumvent the United Nations sanctions on North Korea and encourage other governments to circumvent them as well.  We will see what happens after the Winter Olympics is completed, but it seems to me it is pretty clear what the North Koreans hope to get out of their most recent charm offensive.

South Korea can hardly contain his joyfulness while North Korea looks as if he could give a damn pic.twitter.com/3toVOxXTz7

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) January 20, 2018

I think the critics are definitely right that the Kim regime has once again stolen the spotlight from South Korea:

 

An agreement between South and North Korea to march under a unity flag and field a joint ice hockey team at next month’s Olympics was met sharp criticism by many in the South on Thursday, highlighting changing attitudes toward the country’s northern neighbor.  (…..)

 

“North Korea was all about firing missiles last year, but suddenly they want to come to the South for the Olympics? Who gets to decide that?” Kim Joo-hee, a translator, told Reuters during a coffee break on a chilly Seoul afternoon. “Does North Korea have so much privilege to do whatever they want?”

Moon’s office declined to comment beyond saying the two countries would be coordinating logistics for the Olympics, which begin on Feb. 9.

Opinion polls released since the plans became public have shown limited support for some of Seoul’s proposals.

Only 4 out of 10 respondents said they favor the plan to march together under a flag symbolizing a unified Korea, according to a survey released on Thursday by the South Korean pollster Realmeter.

Tens of thousands of people took to social media to vent their disgust after plans for the joint activities were announced on Wednesday, with one commenter saying the Korean peninsula flag is “not my [expletive] flag.”

Others complained that “the Pyeongchang Olympics have already become the Pyongyang Olympics.”  [Christian Science Monitor]

This quote from a ROK Drop favorite Michael Breen is very true because once these Olympics are over and the Key Resolve exercise comes up we all know what will happen next:

“South Koreans feel sorry for the athletes who have trained so hard for the Olympics and are now being kicked out of the team to make way for North Koreans,” he said.

“They think there must be a better way, especially as a few months from now we all know we will be back to where we were with North Korea.”

It looks like the Moon administration has found another way to evade UN sanctions on North Korea, paying to use North Korea’s ski resort and restarting Mt. Geumgang Tours:

While the Koreas will discuss further details through document exchanges at Panmunjeom, there are several aspects of the plans that may clash with the sanctions placed on Pyongyang.

U.N. Security Council sanctions ban the direct provision of cash to North Korea, but South Korean skiers may have to pay to use the ski resort for training.

Meanwhile, tours to Mount Geumgang, which began in 1998, have been suspended since 2008 when a South Korean tourist was shot dead by the North Korean military there due to a violation of tourist zone regulations.

Hosting a joint-cultural event may signal that the Koreas are open to the idea of resuming tours to the North’s scenic mountain, despite the sanctions.

Furthering the dispute is the fact that the South first proposed these plans to the North, which could send a message that Seoul is not complying with the international community’s hard-line stance toward Pyongyang over its nuclear program.

“We proposed these plans to the North in the high-level talks on Jan. 9,” Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung said in a briefing Wednesday.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but this was all very predictable considering President Moon is a big believer in the failed Sunshine Policy.  The original Sunshine Policy was bought and paid for initially with a huge $500 million bribe to the Kim regime.  Follow on bribes described as humanitarian and economic aid continued under the Sunshine Policy.  The aid would total to about a $1 billion a year.  To put this into context the South Koreans were paying more money to the Kim regime annually then what they were contributing to the US-ROK alliance.  The election of the conservative President Lee Myung-Bak changed this dynamic.

The current liberal Moon administration wants to go back to the days of paying off the Kim regime under the Sunshine Policy and the current talks over Winter Olympic participation is just the start.

As expected the Kim regime is continuing their efforts of trying to separate the ROK from the US in their strategy to seek a confederation on North Korean terms:

North Korea has reaffirmed its commitment to ultimately reunite with South Korea, but not before rejecting any involvement by the U.S. and any other foreign powers on their shared East Asian peninsula.

The phrase “By Our Nation Itself” has frequently appeared in North Korea’s official media, attributing it to various bodies of government or its supporters. It was first conceived during a 2000 joint declaration in which the leaders of the two rival states “agreed to solve the question of the country’s reunification independently by the concerted efforts of the Korean nation responsible for it,” as quoted by state-run website Uriminzokkiri, which was named after the phrase. Most recently, it popped up in an article published Wednesday by the official Korean Central News Agency, which included it in the context of current negotiations between the two Koreas.

In remarks attributed to pro-North Korea site Jaju Sibo, described by The Diplomat as the successor to an online outlet shut down by South Korea’s strict anti-communist laws, an individual titled the honorary chairman of the Association for Supporting Prisoners of Conscience of the Family Movement for Realizing Democracy in South Korea “urged the authorities to adhere to the principle of By Our Nation Itself in mending the north-south relations.”

He also said “the authorities should abolish institutional and legal barriers such as repeal of the ‘Security Law,'” or National Security Act, which forbade South Koreans from expressing support for North Korea or communism in general.  [Newsweek]

Yet another example of a stupid criminal getting caught after committing a horrific crime:

Kim Sung-kwan, a Korean who flew to Auckland three months ago after allegedly killing three family members here, said Sunday that he had plotted everything to take his mother’s money.

According to police, he has been arrested on charges of killing his mother, 55, stepfather, 57, and half-brother, 14, with a sharp object on Oct. 21 and stealing 118 million won ($110,000) from the mother’s two bank accounts.

Police have found that Kim owed 60 million won and had no stable job.

Police have also confirmed that for two days before executing the plot, Kim searched information about weapons, how to use them and how a criminal extradition system worked between Korea and New Zealand.

According to police, he first killed his mother and half-brother at her apartment in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, between 2 p.m. and 5p.m. He then killed his stepfather at a parking lot in PyeongChang, Gangwon Province, at around 8 p.m. the same day.

Two days later, he flew to New Zealand with his wife, surnamed Jung, and two daughters ― one aged two years and the other seven months at that time.

But Kim, who has a permanent residency in New Zealand not know he was wanted there for a crime he committed two years ago ― stealing household appliances.

By the time a local court found him guilty of the theft, Korean police learned where he was and asked the New Zealand government to send him back.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but obviously his Internet research on extraditions from New Zealand were not very well executed.  Hopefully this brutal murderer rots in prison for the rest of his life.

Its official the North Koreans will be attending the Winter Olympics:

South and North Korea agreed Wednesday to field a joint women’s ice hockey team for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and march together under a “unified Korea” flag at the opening ceremony.

The North will also send a 230-member cheering squad and a 30-member taekwondo demonstration team to the South, according to a joint statement issued after a working-level meeting at the border village of Panmunjom.

The North’s delegation will use a western land route, marking the opening of the cross-border road for the first time since February 2016, when a joint industrial complex in the North Korean border city of Kaesong was shut down.   [Yonhap]

Not only are the North Koreans attending the Winter Olympics, but South Korea has agreed to help the Kim regime promote the Masikryong Ski Resort:

The two sides also agreed to hold a joint cultural event at Mount Kumgang on the North Korean east coast before the opening of the Feb. 9-25 Olympics and to conduct joint training of skiers at Masikryong Ski Resort in the North.

Probably the most troubling thing to come out these negotiations and likely a sign of things to come is that South Korea has decided to undercut the sanctions on the Kim regime and pay for North Korea’s delegation to come to the Winter Olympics:

Meanwhile, covering the costs for the delegation has garnered attention as Pyongyang has been placed under U.N. Security Council sanctions which ban the provision of cash to the regime.

In a ministerial-level meeting last week, the South agreed to “provide necessary assistance for delegates from the North.”

Based on previous cases, the South will likely be able to cover costs for the North Korean delegation indirectly, through the Inter-Korean Cooperation Fund.

The IOC has also expressed its intention to provide financial assistance, within the boundaries set by the UNSC resolutions.  [Korea Times]

First of all why are the North Koreans even being allowed in an international sporting event when Apartheid South Africa was banned?  As bad as Apartheid was, it was nothing compared to the human rights violations and threat to world peace that the Kim regime is.

Secondly why should Seoul pay for their travel expenses?  If the Kim regime has enough money to build nuclear weapons and ICBMs I am sure they can find the money to pay for the travel to Pyeongchang for their delegation.  This is an example that extortion works.  Clearly South Korea is willing to give in to demands from Pyongyang in order to have the Olympics not be compromised by a North Korean provocation. Plus this sets a precedence that it is okay to undercut the sanctions on the Kim regime.

Wouldn’t it be funny if President Trump sends out a tweet asking the South Korean government to pay for the travel expenses for the US Olympic delegation as well?

Here is the latest complaints from residents who live outside of Rodriguez Range that the 8th Army commander had to apologize for:

A top U.S. commander has apologized to a South Korean mayor for stray ammunition rounds found outside a sprawling training complex near the tense frontier that divides the peninsula.

Lt. Gen. Michael Bills, the Eighth Army’s new commander, made the comments Thursday during an office call with the mayor of Pocheon, the area that is home to Rodriguez Live Fire Range.

“During the meeting he apologized for the Jan. 3 incident that resulted in several ammunition rounds being found in a [South Korean army] motorpool” near the U.S. complex, the Eighth Army public affairs office told Stars and Stripes Friday in an email.

“He reinforced that the safety of the citizens of our host nation is a top priority,” it added.

More than 10 .50-caliber rounds were discovered at the South Korean base, weeks after the U.S. command hosted a town-hall meeting in Pocheon to address public outrage after a bullet from the range was found inside a local home in November.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but from the article it is unclear if these were just stray rounds accidentally left on the ROK base or actual fired rounds.  If these were just stray rounds accidentally left in the ROK base I don’t see what the residents are complaining about since it is not a danger to them?