Famine in North Korea is estimated to have killed some 2 to 3 million of the nation's 24 million people since 1995. Another 300,000 North Koreans have fled to China to live illegally, risking their lives to flee the mass starvation and brutal oppression of Kim Jong Il’s Stalinist North Korea regime.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Defector gives insights on North Korean military
BBC's Newsnight program spoke to Korean defector Joo-il Kim, who says he was an anti-tank battalion commander in North Korea's army for seven years until he fled the country in 2005.
According to Mr Kim, Pyongyang's lack of access to enough new conventional weaponry is what drives its controversial nuclear programme.
"Conventional weapon-wise, North Korea is better equipped than South Korea. But most of the weapons are outdated and so, to make up for that weakness, the North concentrates on missiles and nuclear arms development."
North Korea is believed to have more than 800 ballistic missiles, including long-range missiles.
"Officially the North Korea armed forces number 1.2 million - these are the official numbers," Mr Kim said. "About 100,000 people are conscripted annually and they serve for 10 years," he added.
"An irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear program"
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak says he and President Obama have agreed to offer North Korea a "grand bargain" aimed at ending the North's nuclear program.
Speaking at a joint news conference with Obama, President Lee Myung-bak said the deal would be similar to his proposal for a package of political and economic incentives in exchange for the one-step, irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear program.
Lee's grand bargain proposal stems from concerns that North Korea would continue to backtrack on promises after winning concessions in negotiations.
Obama said his envoy on North Korea, Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, will travel to the country early next month for the first bilateral talks with the communist regime since he took office.
North Korea has been pushing for bilateral talks with Washington to discuss the standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear program. The U.S. has agreed to the talks but has stressed they must lead to the resumption of six-nation disarmament negotiations.
President Barack Obama arrived late Wednesday in Osan Air base, near the city of Pyeongtaek in Gyeonggi Province, kicking off a two-day visit to South Korea.
During his stay in Seoul, which is to last less than 24 hours, Obama will meet with his South Korean counterpart Lee Myung-bak for a summit early Thursday in a bid to strengthen bilateral ties and to find ways to break through various regional and global issues.
North Korea's nuclear problem will top the agenda.
Obama will then head home late Thursday after visiting a US military base to meet American servicemen there.
North Korea: American expats and NGOs in S. Korea appeal to President Obama
Excerpts of a letter to President Obama from Timothy Peters, Founder/Director of Helping Hands Korea:
Mr. President, we continue to grieve over the extraordinary human rights violations suffered by the North Korean people, including a prison system that begs comparison to the gulags perpetrated by Josef Stalin and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. This is not an abstraction nor hyperbole; more than 20 survivors of the gulag system have made their way to freedom to tell their heart‐rending accounts of prisons in the North. Accounts of three generations of family punishment for judicial sentences that never saw the light of a courtroom abound. Human experimentation of biological and poison gas agents are at times carried out on prisoners who have dared to embrace the Christian faith or express the slightest criticism of the all‐powerful Kim Jong‐il family regime.
Some North Korean citizens, as you know, flee out of desperation to neighboring China to escape the suffocating vacuum of human rights even in the ordinary society of their native land. China, although a signatory of the 1951 Convention for the Protection of Refugees, has for the past 13 years, turned a blind eye to the obligations of this international human rights instrument. By systematically repatriating North Korean refugees to the DPRK government security apparatus, China continues to subject innocent men, women and even children to harsh interrogation, torture, extended imprisonment. In the cases of some trafficked refugee women who are pregnant with children fathered by Chinese men, we hear a drumbeat of testimonies to the horrific nightmare of forced abortion.
How such barbaric practices could continue year after year without a profound challenge from the United States America, not to mention other mature democracies of the world, is simply beyond belief. By ‘profound challenge,’ we do not mean mere speeches, or resolutions or special envoys, but decisions at the highest level of government that indicate that our cherished ideals of human dignity transcend our short‐term economic strategies.
Sir, in the waning months of 2004 your predecessor signed into law the North Korean Human Rights Act that had passed unanimously in the U.S. Congress in October of that year. Despite the overwhelming support for this piece of legislation and the authorization by Congress of resources for NGO’s to help the highly vulnerable North Korean refugees in China, actual inclusion of the authorized funding was never, to our knowledge, included in subsequent national budgets submitted by the George W. Bush Administration.
Given the extraordinary plight of the North Korean refugees in particular, we cannot remotely imagine what justification could be offered for this silence and inaction in the face of an overwhelming Congressional expression of the national will to act.
Mr. President, we earnestly and respectfully encourage you, during your trip to China, to speak out in an uncompromising manner to demand that the Chinese leadership immediately halt the forcible repatriation of North Korean refugees in China.
Chinese President Hu Jintao greeted U.S. President Barack Obama in China's capital on Tuesday, with trade and the thorny issue of North Korea expected to be on their agenda.
China is North Korea's closest ally and has played a key role in the six-party talks aimed at convincing Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
China is an important player in the diplomatic showdowns over nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea and holds one of five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council.
CBS reports French President Nicolas Sarkozy's special envoy to North Korea met with North Korean officials there, including No. 2 leader Kim Yong Nam, about sensitive issues including nuclear proliferation and human rights.
Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, returned this weekend from a five-day mission to explore possible diplomatic ties between France and the communist country.
Asked about the difficult topics of nuclear proliferation and the country's labor camps, Lang said they were "two subjects Korean leaders and I discussed at great length."
Lang said North Korean officials insisted that "today there is no transfer of fissile or ballistic materials outside of Korea." Lang said he was taking the statement seriously.
Lang says his personal opinion on how to engage the regime is to tackle one issue at a time. "If we try to settle everything all at once, we won't settle anything," he said.
President Obama is emphasizing cooperation on his first major trip to Asia, opening with a warning to North Korea that there will be tough, unified action by the U.S. and its Asian partners if the Koreans fail to abandon their nuclear weapons programs.
The hard line on North Korea was a prominent theme of a speech that was intended to showcase a United States that, under Obama's leadership, seeks deeper and more equal engagement in Asia.
Obama said after a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama that "it's absolutely vital" that North Korea bow to international demands that they give up nuclear weapons ambitions.
If the North Koreans comply with the demands, "then they can open the door to a better future," Obama said. "If not, we will remain united in implementing U.N. resolutions that are in place and ... helping to shape a strategy that meets our security needs and convinces Pyongyang to move in a better direction."
L, a North Korean woman who defected to South Korea in 2007 with three sons is reluctant to repeat the details of her own torture and left it to the interpreter to reveal what she had endured.
"She had her nails prised off with pliers, all her lower teeth were pulled out - she now has to wear false teeth - water with hot chillis was put up her nose," the interpreter said.
"I want to raise awareness of what is going on, we have to talk about the situation," said L, now a Christian, who did not want her name revealed as she still has relatives in the north. "It is the only way to make a change."
L, who speaks to her relatives in the North regularly, provides a grim insight into the daily struggle to find food.
"They go to the mountains to find edible roots, grass and soft bark on trees," L said. "Out of 100 people, 70 are going hungry, 30 are better off because they have connections to families in high positions."
L misses home and find life in South Korea hard. L's sons are struggling because of their poor English and have trouble keeping up with computer technology. All say they are waiting for the day when the two Koreas are reunited so they can go back.
Kim Jong-il Ranks 24th on 'Most Powerful People' List
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il ranked 24th on a list of the world's 67 most powerful people released by Forbes magazine. Forbes put Kim above British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (29th), Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama (35th), and French President Nicolas Sarkozy (56th).
Forbes said it assessed people's power using four criteria: the number of people they influence; their ability to project power beyond their immediate sphere of influence; control of or access to significant financial resources (for heads of state the magazine used GDP); and how actively they wield power.
The magazine pointed out that Kim commands the world's fourth-largest standing army and engages in high-stakes nuclear gambles.
Chosun Ilbo reports, on the eve of the visit of U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth, that another U.S. envoy, Philip Goldberg, who is charged with UN sanctions, is still hard at work trying to block North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's cash flow.
South Korean and U.S. intelligence authorities believe that North Korea recently earned a lot of foreign currency by smuggling ivory from Africa and distributing fake Viagra as well as selling drugs and circulating counterfeit dollars. The North allegedly laundered money or operated secret bank accounts with the help of the Russian gangsters after it became practically impossible for the North to carry out normal transactions using the real names of top officials or agencies.
Professor Cho Young-ki of Korea University said, "The U.S.-led financial sanctions will deal a blow especially to Kim Jong-il's slush funds and the North's munitions economy. Unlike in 2005 when it sanctioned Banco Delta Asia, the U.S. now seems to have found a way to inflict pain on the North while not allowing it to openly resist."
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently believes Golberg's efforts have been successful, saying Monday that North Korea now wants dialogue because nations of the six-party talks are taking concerted action in implementing sanctions against the North.
Bosworth will most likely meet with Kang Sok-ju, the first vice foreign minister and an influential foreign policy maker in the North. Kang has dealt with the U.S. at decisive moments in nuclear negotiations over the past 16 years.
The U.S. has made it clear to the North that Bosworth's visit will not constitute talks for talks' sake but is aimed at persuading the North to return to the six-party negotiations. The U.S. turned down a North Korean offer at a preliminary meeting in New York last month to resuming excavation of the remains of U.S. soldiers and a performance by a North Korean orchestra in the U.S.
There is speculation that Kang, instead of offering to return to six-party talks, could attempt to stall for time by calling for mutual nuclear disarmament talks or to cause cracks in the Seoul-Washington alliance.
Tales of Torture from Guang-il Jung, North Korean defector
During a tour of European capitals last week, Guang-il Jung, North Korean defector, shone a personal light on what a UN report recently described as North Korea's "abysmal" human rights record.
In the nine months after his arrest on espionage charges, Guang-il Jung was beaten by North Korean security guards with a thick wooden club, and still bears the scars on the back of his head.In the course of beatings, the guards broke all his teeth, leaving him toothless for four years.
To deprive him of sleep, the guards at the underground prison at Hoeryong city near the Chinese border used "pigeon torture". Jung was handcuffed and tied by his arms to an object behind him so he could not stand or sit. He felt as though his bones were breaking through his chest while the rest of his body was paralyzed.
When he was arrested, Jung, a former North Korean army veteran, weighed 75kg. In the course of the interrogation his weight dropped to 38kg. After nine months at the hands of the security services, Jung made a false confession and was sent to a labor camp in Yodeok, 60 miles north of the capital Pyongyang.
At the camp, those prisoners singled out to die were assigned work they could not finish. When they did not finish the work, their food rations were reduced as punishment. Eventually the combination of heavy work and less food led to death by starvation for many.After three years, Jung escaped to South Korea in 2003.
Any lessons from German reunification for North Korea?
Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall came down. The people of West and East Germany became one, and both countries reunified the following year. It is also an occasion for people of both Koreas to reflect on the stark reality of their national division.
The wealth gap between the former East Germany and West Germany is rapidly narrowing but in 1991, per capita income in the former East Germany was a third of West Germany’s. Though 1.3 trillion euro was spent to rebuild East Germany, the investment ultimately benefited the whole country.
In Korea, the Roh Tae-woo and Kim Young-sam administrations sought to learn from German unification by drawing up their own integration plans. The Kim Dae-jung and Roh Tae-woo administrations, the two left-leaning governments that succeeded them, prioritized devising a policy toward North Korea while putting the reunification question on the backburner.
In the early 1990s, South Korea’s gross national income was six to eight times that of the North, but that gap is now 38 times. South Korea’s trade volume is 384 times more. Worse, the disparity is worsening with time. This has raised fears over the South’s potential financial burden in case of Korean reunification.
Like in Germany, the Korean Peninsula could also see an unexpected reunification. East Germany’s last Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere told reporters, “South Korea will be in big trouble if North Korea sees an abrupt collapse. Ironically, South Korea could feel the need to erect a wall to stem an influx of North Korean refugees.”
North Korea “the best socialist state in the world” about to be scrutinized
Conditions in North Korea face unusually close scrutiny at the U.N. Human Rights Council on December 7, when it goes through a “universal periodic review” (UPR), a mechanism designed to examine one-by-one the rights records of all 192 U.N. member states.
Each review is based on three reports, provided ahead of time by the government, U.N. rights experts and NGOs.
Pyongyang is sensitive to outside criticism, and state media outlets hit back this week, accusing the U.S. and Japanese governments in particular of using human rights as part of “a despicable plot” to apply political pressure against North Korea.
“Those countries that are becoming most vociferous about ‘human rights issues’ are the countries with the most serious human rights records without an exception,” the official KCNA news agency said in an article on Wednesday. “To take the U.S. as an example, the rich get ever richer and the poor ever poorer and the number of the unemployed and the poor is on the steady increase; the right of equality, the right to work and the right to existence – elementary rights of human being – are being ruthlessly violated.”
By contrast, it said, North Korea was “the best socialist state in the world as it is centered on the popular masses.” KCNA said North Koreans “enjoy a genuine life and happiness as human beings, something unimaginable in the capitalist society where a human being is treated as a slave of money."
Amid Berlin Wall commemorations, activists rally for liberation of North Korea
November 9th marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And activists in South Korea will hold a series of events to highlight calls for similarly momentous developments leading to the liberation of North Korea.
Planned events this weekend include a mass human rights and democracy demonstration led by North Korean refugee leaders in Seoul on Saturday; an all-day national day of prayer, fasting and repentance on Sunday; and another demonstration on Monday at the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas, calling for the North’s liberation.
Largely eclipsed by the Kim Jong-il regime’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, the oppression suffered by ordinary North Koreans draws relatively little international attention.
The organizers of the weekend events in South Korea note that an estimated four million North Koreans – of a total of some 22 million – have died since 1995 as a result of starvation resulting directly or indirectly from government policies, despite the provision of enough food aid by the international community to feed to entire population.
A further one million people are believed to have died since the 1970s in Pyongyang’s notorious prison camp system, where abuses reported by surviving inmates include systematic torture, rape, medical experimentation, and forced abortions and infanticide.
Fleeing oppression and starvation, an estimated half a million North Koreans have in recent years crossed into neighboring China, from where some have managed to make their way to third countries, usually ending up eventually in South Korea.
North Korean refugee documentary wins another award
A documentary about North Korean refugees produced by the Chosun Ilbo has won the award for best investigative television documentary by the Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) in London.
The film "Korea: Out of the North" is a 52-minute edited English version of "On The Border" and was aired in BBC in May last year.
"On The Border" was first broadcast in March last year, and has since been aired on 16 channels around the world including the BBC, PBS in the U.S., CANAL+ in France, TBS in Japan, and ARD in Germany. The documentary has drawn worldwide acclaim, winning 14 awards both in South Korea and abroad.
The appearance of two North Korean defectors before MPs and European officials in Britain was timed to bring maximum public pressure on the North Korean government before its human rights record is scrutinized for the first time by the UN human rights council in Geneva.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), which organized the European visit, says that there is a prima facie case that Kim Jong-il's regime has committed crimes against humanity and possibly acts of genocide against religious groups, specifically Christians.
"[North Korean refugees] have experienced suffering and deprivation on a scale that we cannot begin to imagine," said Tina Lambert, CSW's advocacy director. "Their testimony comes at a crucial time, prior to the UN scrutiny of North Korea."
The CSW is calling for a commission of inquiry by the UN to investigate crimes against humanity in North Korea. The UN rapporteur for North Korea, Vitit Muntarbhorn, last month issued a scathing report of North Korea's human rights record, declaring that the "exploitation of the ordinary people" had become "the pernicious prerogative of the ruling elite".
A promise by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to improve the state's broken economy is forcing him to ask for massive aid and may even bring him back to nuclear talks that Pyongyang once declared dead.
Plenty of obstacles remain to reviving the disarmament-for-aid talks, not least the fact that Washington wants Pyongyang to recommit to giving up its nuclear activities before negotiations.
Kim, it appears, has backed himself into a corner after having pledged to turn North Korea into a "strong and prosperous nation" by 2012 to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of his father and the state's founder, Kim Il-sung. The year 2012 may also be the year when Kim Jong-il, 67, announces to his countrymen that he is handing over power to the youngest of his three sons.
Meeting that promise explain why he abruptly stopped raising tensions with the international community after numerous missile launches this year and a nuclear test in May.
"This puts pressure on the regime to get as much aid as it can, as fast as it can," said B.R. Myers, an expert on the North's state ideology at Dongseo University in South Korea. "To say that it will be a strong and prosperous country and to say that will be achieved by 2012, and to raise expectations, is actually a very risky thing."
It would be irrational for Kim Jong-Il to ever to launch a major attack -- the inevitable result would be the end of his regime. The United States and its allies know this.
The only way Kim can leverage his weaker military power is by making his opponents believe he may be crazy enough to launch a war anyway. This strategy not only allows Kim to deter foreign attacks, but also gets him the maximum concessions in talks to give up the nuclear bomb.
Because the other negotiating nations believe the threat Kim would use nuclear weapons cannot be ruled out, they are prepared to offer much more to remove this risk. By signaling that he is irrational and unpredictable, Kim can turn a weak set of cards into a winning hand.
Washington and its allies face the opposite problem -- they are unable to make Kim believe their threats are credible.
So while Kim remains leader of North Korea, the country will remain a constant source of regional scares. Kim's strategy has repeatedly won him concessions, and also helps him maintain his internal grip on power. There is no reason for him to throw away his best cards.
North Korean Defector face-to-face with NK Ambassador
Ma Young-ae, a North Korean defector who now resides in the U.S., was picketing in front of North Korea's Mission at the U.N, urging the International Criminal Court to indict Kim Jong-il.
Who should come on the scene but North Korea’s Ambassador to the UN, Shin Sun-ho. When she confronted him, he and his assistant gave her a brief glance and headed directly into the U.N. Headquarters.
Ma Young-ae followed after them, with her sign board reading, "Kim Jong-il, bring back my husband who you publicly executed."
