Maj. Gen. Urs Gerber, who heads the Swiss delegation of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, places a flower in front of the monument to the 1976 ax murders of two U.S. Army officers by North Korean soldiers, during a memorial at the Joint Security Area in the truce village of Panmunjom on Aug. 18, 2015, to pay homage to the victims. (Yonhap)
As it turns out the North Koreans did not fire artillery at the loudspeaker on the ROK side of the DMZ and instead used an anti-aircraft weapon:
The two Koreas traded fire on Thursday after the North launched artillery shells apparently targeting propaganda loudspeakers installed across the border, threatening additional military action against the broadcasts and further heightening tension on the peninsula.
The North fired a 14.5-milimeter anti-aircraft gun once at around 3:53 p.m. at a town in Yeoncheon County, Gyeonggi Province, and then a 76.2-mm direct fire weapon “several times” at 4:15 p.m. within the Demilitarized Zone, military officials here said. Shortly after detection, the Army discharged a 155-milimeter self-propelled gun at 5:04 p.m.
The Army reported no damage. Casualties in the North were not immediately known.
Coincidentally with the exchange of fire, Pyongyang sent two separate letters to the South, calling for a withdrawal of the loudspeakers and threatening military action.
In the letter sent from the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army to South Korea’s Defense Ministry through a border telephone channel at around 4:50 p.m., Pyongyang warned that it would initiate “military action” unless Seoul stops the propaganda broadcasts within 48 hours from 5 p.m.
In a separate letter by Kim Yang-gon, director of the United Front Department in charge of cross-border affairs, to National Security Office chief Kim Kwan-jin, Pyongyang said the broadcasts constitute a “declaration of war” but it is willing to resolve the current situation and “open a way out for the improvement of the relationship.”
Seoul said it has no plan to dismantle the speakers at this point. (………….)
The North’s anti-aircraft gun ammunition appeared to have hit an uninhabited hill located several kilometers away from a loudspeaker set, an official at Seoul’s Defense Ministry said. Yet the North did not appear to have aimed at the equipment, he noted, without elaborating.
“We detected signs that the North Korean military staged two rounds of firearm provocation in the southern part of the Military Demarcation Line, and fired dozens of rounds of a 155-millimeter self-propelled gun as warning shots,” Joint Chief of Staff spokesman Col. Jeon Ha-kyu said at a news briefing. [Korea Herald]
You can read more at the link.
As cheap as plastic surgery already is in South Korea, it is about to get even cheaper:
The plastic surgery capital of the world is stepping up its game to attract even more clients.
South Korea is now offering tax breaks to tourists for undergoing cosmetic surgery procedures. The government plans to give 10 percent of the costs back to these consumers.
The procedures listed in the new policy include breast augmentation, liposuction, nose jobs and liposuction just to name a few according to Bloomberg News.
The motive behind the plan is to boost tourism after the industry was hit hard during the Middle Eastern Respiratory Virus (MERS) outbreak in which 36 lives were lost and hundreds more were infected. In fact, the country saw a 40 percent drop in tourists compared to a year before in the month of June.
Relative to other nations, South Korea has the highest amount of plastic surgeries done per capita — almost double that of the United States, which is second on the list — according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. [Korea Times]
judging by the quick reaction by the ROK forces they were likely ready for what was a pretty predictable action by the North Koreans to try and destroy one of the propaganda loudspeakers:
South Korea fired tens of artillery rounds towards North Korea on Thursday after the North fired a projectile towards a South Korean loudspeaker that had been blaring anti-Pyongyang broadcasts, the defense ministry in Seoul said.
North Korea did not immediately respond to the South’s shots, it said, as tensions rose on the peninsula.
South Korea said its detection equipment had spotted the trajectory of a suspected North Korean projectile launched at around 3:52 pm (0252 EDT), which did not appear to have damaged the loudspeaker or caused any injuries.
“Our military has stepped up monitoring and is closely watching North Korean military movements,” South Korea’s defense ministry said in a statement.
South Korea’s military raised its alert status to the highest level.
There was no mention of the firing in North Korean state media, which does not typically make immediate comment on events.
The suspected North Korean projectile landed in an area about 60 km (35 miles) north of Seoul in the western part of the border zone, the defense ministry said. South Korean residents in the area were ordered to evacuate, according to the South’s Yonhap news agency.
Yonhap reported that the projectile appeared to have landed in a mountainous area near a South Korean military base in the town of Yeoncheon. [Reuters]
You can read more at the link, but this will not be the last of the tit-for-tat along the DMZ as the North Koreans have threatened more military action if the propaganda speakers are not taken down in 48 hours. In preparation for more provocations civilians along the western DMZ are being evacuated.
The murder of Koreans in the Philippines continues:
A South Korean couple living in the Philippines were found dead in their home apparently by gun-inflicted wounds, the foreign ministry said Wednesday.
The bodies of the husband and wife, both in their 60s, were found at around 7 a.m. local time by a neighbor inside their homes located in a village south of Manila, the ministry said.
The two, only identified by their surname Na and Kim, reportedly had gun-inflicted wounds in their necks and chests with their bodies lying in the living room.
Local police suspect armed robbery as the motive but are still considering the possibility of murder driven by personal grudge.
The couple reportedly settled down in the Philippines seven years ago after retirement. [Yonhap]
#ROK stages Nation Wide civil defense drillhttp://t.co/9nQcK9tF6h
— Nathan J Hunt (@ISNJH) August 19, 2015
Here is another one of those reports that a lot of resources is spent on to confirm the obvious:
When Lee Tae-ho, a social worker at the National Child Protection Agency, last year visited a 7-year-old at his home upon request from his school teacher, nothing seemed too out of place at first.
“My mother drinks a lot of water when she’s eating,” the child told him about his single mother.
It didn’t take long for Lee to realize that the “water” was in fact the colorless Korean alcoholic beverage soju.
Unemployed and depressed since her bitter divorce, the mother would drink about 20 bottles of soju a week, and would fail to provide basic care for her young children. The boy and his sister, 6, would skip dinner most days. A number of times, the suicidal mother asked them if it “would be better if they all killed themselves together.”
As a social worker working for a state-run agency, Lee said he has personally witnessed many domestic violence abusers with drinking problems.
Lee’s observation was demonstrated in a recent study, which found a significant connection between alcohol abuse and domestic and sexual violence in South Korea.
The scholarly article from Dongguk University, which surveyed 4,851 arrested individuals for violent crimes last year, showed that 73.1 percent of the domestic violence abusers and 67.9 percent of sex offenders committed their offenses while under the influence of alcohol. [Korea Herald]
You can read more at the link, but one thing of interest in the report is that the researchers recommend that the system of giving more lenient punishment for crimes in Korea for being drunk needs to end. The researchers believe that people with a history of drinking problems should instead get heavier punishments.
Anonymous Joe writing over at the Marmot’s Hole thinks so:
My immediate, one word reaction to Park’s statement is dismay.
Park followed the formula of her previous year’s address and that of her predecessor by ignoring America’s contributions, only crediting the “selfless struggle” of “the Korean people” who “at last achieved the liberation of their fatherland.” She offered not even a hint that America and 8 million American soldiers actually did the liberating in the Korean people’s selfless struggle for liberation.
(Here’s Park’s sole reference to America, Americans, or the United States: “As the recent normalization of ties between the United States and Cuba and the Iranian nuclear deal attest, the international community is in the midst of a sweeping tide of change and cooperation. But North Korea is treading the opposite path.”)
Park’s speech with it’s overarching emphasis on the economy rather than liberation, freedom, and democracy had the nuts and bolts of a state of the union address. Rather than sing to the lofty aspirations of a maturing democratic republic, Park got weighed down by graven consumer goods and electronic gadgets: “Today, we have become a country producing some of the world’s finest electronic goods, automobiles, steel, ships and petrochemical products, and we stand tall as an economic powerhouse with export figures that are the sixth largest in the world.”
Given that Park had omitted America’s role in Korea’s liberation, she obviously could not articulate the role that America played in the miracle on the Han. Apparently, no thanks is necessary. [Marmot’s Hole]
You can read the whole posting at the link, but yes she should have at least mentioned something about the sacrifice of US servicemembers to defeat Imperial Japan. With all the complaining about revisionist history taught in Japan it is little things like this that cause Koreans to have little credibility when they do the same thing. With that all said I am not in the least surprised by Park’s speech. Like many recent ROK leaders she does not want to appear to be an American lapdog as the North Koreans and the leftists in Korea like to paint conservative ROK politicians. Likewise I believe many South Koreans do not like to be reminded that their liberation from the Japanese was the result of foreigners and not by themselves.
What does everyone else think, should President Park have included the US’s role in Korea’s liberation in her speech?
1967 is when the first US-South Korea Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) was signed which handed over legal jurisdiction of crimes committed by US troops while off duty to the Korean authorities. The most serious case that was first tried in a Korean court involving a US servicemember was the 1967 murder of Chun-ja Kim by Private Eugene D. Taylor. Taylor was a cook assigned to Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry DIvision. Taylor was just days away from completing his tour of duty in Korea when he arrested for the murder of his Korean girlfriend on November 5, 1967.
From the November 27, 1967 edition of the Stars & Stripes.
Before redeploying to the US, Pvt. Taylor decided to go on a drunken bender at his girlfriend’s residence. For some reason during his drunken bender he decided to strangle and kill his Korean girlfriend, Chun-ja Kim that he supposedly had plans to return to Korea to marry. He committed this murder two days before redeploying to the US. This just shows that even back in the 1960’s soldiers at high risk of getting in trouble are those within 30 days of going home. It also shows that the old Korean complaint of GIs committing crimes in Korea and then getting away with them by flying back to the US was also not true back then.
From the February 8, 1968 edition of the Stars & Stripes.
The landlord of the home that Ms. Kim lived at discovered the body in the morning along with Taylor bleeding with a neck wound. He claims that when he woke up and discovered Kim’s dead body that he tried to commit suicide by slashing his neck with a piece of broken glass. It appears he was drunk enough to kill someone else, but not drunk enough to kill himself.
From the March 7, 1968 edition of the Stars & Stripes.
Ultimately Pvt Taylor was convicted of the murder of Ms. Kim and sentenced to 8 years in a Korean prison. It seems like a pretty lenient sentence, but the Korean court took into consideration the mitigating circumstances of him being a soldier deployed to defend Korea and the fact he was drunk. So being drunk back in the 60’s was considered a mitigating circumstance just like it is today in Korean courts.
From the April 11, 1968 edition of the Stars & Stripes.
Taylor’s crime is now long forgotten in the dustbins of USFK history, but he does have the dubious distinction of being the first American servicemember convicted and sentenced for murder in a South Korean court. This case shows that US servicemembers were held accountable for the crimes in Korean courts back then and continue to be held accountable today.
Note: You can read more GI Flashbacks articles by clicking on the below link:
(LEAD) Park urges Japan to back up its pledge on history with actions http://t.co/ScYReLvSKO
— Yonhap News Agency (@YonhapNews) August 15, 2015
