120 inmates escape from North Korean concentration camp

Some 120 inmates escaped from a political concentration camp in northeastern North Korea several months ago in an unprecedented prison break. The prisoners escaped from Hwasong camp in North Hamgyong, a province close to the Chinese and Russian borders, in December, the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper reported Wednesday.

The Daily NK report said the area was put in a "state of emergency" after the prison break, calling it unprecedented.

North Korean authorities have since tightened inspections at Hwasong and adjacent cities to catch the fugitives, of whom 21 have so far been caught, the report said. So far, 21 prisoners have been caught, most of whom were found in China and sent back to the communist North after failed attempts to defect to South Korea, the report said.

The Hwasong prison camp -- located deep inside a mountain and encircled by high wire fences -- holds about 10,000 prisoners, Daily NK said. The escape seemed to have been carefully planned with outside help since the escapees drove off in a vehicle waiting outside the prison, according to the report.

Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are believed to be held in prison camps in the communist North for political reasons, according to U.S. government data.

[AP]

Report: North Korean guards defect to China

About 20 North Korean border guards suspected of taking bribes to help defectors to China have fled their posts and entered China, a report says. South Korea's online Daily NK news outlet quoted several sources who did not want to be identified.

"The runaway officers, mostly non-commissioned officers, were suspected of taking money for helping defectors flee to China during a recent audit by the North Korean government," a North Korean resident in Hoeryong told the agency.

Daily NK quoted another source as saying the men were not all from the same military unit, and that two other guards along the border had been found guilty of taking bribes and were scheduled to be executed before the end of the month.

Some human rights organizations in South Korea have claimed as many as 300,000 North Korean defectors are in China, the Korea Times reported.

[UPI]

North Korea Christians Face "Worse Persecution" Than Ever

Persecution of Christians in North Korea "is worse than ever", amid fresh reports of torture and executions, Christian investigators said Friday, February 2.

Netherlands-based Open Doors, an influential human rights group supporting Christians persecuted for their faith, said North Korea is once again number one of its 2006 World Watch List of over 50 nations with the "worst" religious freedom violations.

With 85 points it was even more serous than last year when Open Doors gave the Communist nation 82 points. “It means that the situation is worse than ever," said Open Doors Spokesman Jeno Sebok told BosNewsLife. "In 2006 an increasing number of Christians were detained and many Christian refugees who were repatriated from China were tortured and even killed."

Among those executed was a contact of US-based World Bible Translation Center (WBTC) who apparently possessed and distributed WBTC’s Easy-to-Read Korean Version of the New Testaments, officials told BosNewsLife earlier.

WBTC Vice President for Publishing and Distribution, John Andersen, said it was "the first confirmed death of a Christian martyr who was sharing the Gospel using WBTC’s Scripture texts." He added that, "throughout the history of this ministry, others have been severely beaten and some believers harassed, but this is the first confirmed death."

North Korea’s Stalinist system of carrying out Communism is based on "total devotion" of the individual to an ideology promoted by the late leader Kim Il Sung and his successor and son, Kim Jong Il, according to observers who visited the isolated nation. Christianity is seen as a threat. North Korean authorities have denied wrongdoing and say the North Korean people love to seve the isolated country’s "dear leader."

Open Doors estimates there are up to 70,000 Christians in labor camps, although other observers have said that figure may be even higher.

[Journal Chretien]

Experts Debate North Korea's Future

With North Korean nuclear disarmament talks likely to resume, the question of how to induce the country to abandon such weapons dominated a dinner discussion at the World Economic Forum. Several experts had different ideas on what should be done, and most were opposed to any attempt to topple Kim's reclusive communist regime, saying that could destabilize the region.

Yao Yunzhu, a senior colonel in China's People's Liberation Army, who directs the Asia-Pacific Office at the Academy of Military Science in Beijing: "China is 'very worried' a collapse could send North Korean refugees pouring into Chinese territory", she said, adding that change must come from the inside.

Yuriko Koike, a special adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe: "We have offered lots of carrots, and the carrots were used to develop nuclear weapons and missiles," she said. Koike said almost 20 million North Koreans are in agony and starving and lifting U.N. sanctions "will prolong the agony of those citizens."

Pei Minxin, head of the China program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the best policy is to contain the current regime and see them out. "North Korea's demise is a given,' he said, noting that Kim is 65 and his health is not the best. "He's overweight. He has no heir in his family, and the record of history shows that that kind of regime has an impossible task picking an heir outside the family."

Geun Lee, an international relations professor at Seoul National University, said he would support gradual regime change. He disagreed that Western powers had given the North too much. "So far you see very clear, meaningful and credible sticks coming from the U.S., but you haven't seen very clear, credible and meaningful carrots coming from the U.S," Geun said. He said President Bush should return to the less-muscular approach of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, and offer incentives such as normalizing relations and giving the North security guarantees.

Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, criticized Washington as fickle. "Unfortunately, the United States' policies on North Korea have vacillated between regime change, policy change, regime change, policy change," said Mahbubani, a former U.N. ambassador. "And unless there's some consistency we'll never get a solution."

Alyson Bailes, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden, warned the collapse of North Korea could be a disaster for the entire region. "It's much better to live with the devil you know than with the chaos that you don't know," she said. "So patience and containment - the hardest things for the U.S. to do - are, I think, the natural thing for everybody else in the region to do, and probably the best of the bad solutions that we can get in the near future."

[Excerpt of an article by Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press]

Tantalizing rumor about Kim Jong Il

A tantalizing rumor swept though the thin ranks of North Korea watchers in Asia and America a few days ago, speculating that the "Dear Leader" in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il, had been placed under house arrest by disgruntled military officers.

The rumor was quickly denied in Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington but not before it raised intriguing questions--how did the rumor originate and why did it make serious analysts of North Korea sit up and take notice?

As with many rumors, it was not clear where this one started. One account said a South Korean intelligence agency planted it in a Japanese news service. Another said the Tokyo news service picked it up carelessly from an advertisement for a novel about North Korea. Whatever the facts, it rippled out swiftly from there.

Even if only a rumor, it underscored how little the outside world knows about the secretive hermit kingdom in Pyongyang; North Korea watchers thus grasp at every tidbit that leaks out. More important, it raised the question of "regime change," meaning the overthrow of Kim Jong Il or otherwise seeing him pass from the scene.

Kim probably has more power centralized in his hands than any ruler in the world. So far as is known, however, he has fended off naming a successor even though he is reported to be in ill health as he approaches his 65th birthday on Feb. 16.

[Excerpt of Opinion page by Richard Halloran, Real Clear Politics]

Korea's son of Kim lives high life

China has secretly harboured the eldest son of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il in Macau for three years, despite the US-led crackdown on North Korea's finances in the former Portuguese colony, local reports say.

Kim Jong-nam, the North Korean leader's eldest son and former heir apparent, has been living with his family in Macau, dividing his time between five-star hotels and a family villa, the South China Morning Post reported citing a six-week investigation. The newspaper said the younger Kim had made Macau his home, and was not just a frequent visitor as previously thought.

In contrast to the deprived conditions, and in some cases starvation, suffered by most North Korean citizens, Mr Kim spends much of his time wining, dining and gambling in Macau's growing number of casinos and slot machine parlours, and travels frequently to the mainland and abroad using passports from the Dominican Republic and Portugal, the paper said.

The rotund younger Kim hit the headlines in 2001 when he was deported from Japan after trying to enter with his wife and then four-year-old son on a fake passport, apparently to visit Tokyo Disneyland. The humiliation led his father Kim Jong-il to cancel a planned visit to China.

If confirmed, the news that China has been harbouring Kim Jong-il's son is likely to embarrass Beijing, which has been under intense international pressure to use its much vaunted influence to pull North Korea back into line after it tested its first nuclear device last October.

[Excerpt of an article by Mary-Anne Toy, The Age]

Risking All For A New Life

Sky News Asia correspondent Peter Sharp reports from China's northern border where a savage winter is providing an impetus for an exodus of the weak and vulnerable:

Hunger is stalking the bleak, windswept hills of North Korea. And for some of the long-suffering residents of Kim Jong-il's hermit kingdom it has proved the final straw.

They cross the border at night. Winter has frozen the Tumen River that marks China's frontier with North Korea, allowing the refugees travelling in small groups to scuttle across the ice avoiding the border guards and Chinese police.

It is the start of a 2,500-mile journey to freedom. continued

[Sky News]

Risking All For A New Life, part 2

At a safe house at a secret location in Northern China we caught up with four refugees, a mother and her two girls, aged 14 and 12, and their neighbor, a woman in her forties. They had arrived in China a few days earlier.

The children's father disappeared several years ago and is believed to have been executed but what drove their mother to risk everything on this trip were the worsening conditions facing her daughters.

"Sometimes the girls are actually starving," she told us. "Sometimes they are lucky to have a little food for the day - but that is no guarantee there will be food for tomorrow."

The girls sit quietly beside her. They look no older than eight and 10, stunted by malnutrition.

On their journey they will be shepherded by South Korean activists who will help them get across China. They will teach them how to blend in with the local Chinese and buy them a new wardrobe to make them less noticeable.

The risks are great and the refugees were under no illusions about their fate if they were caught by the Chinese. "If you are arrested the Chinese will certainly send you back to North Korea," the other woman told us.

"There would be a prison van waiting for you and then almost certain death." continued

[Sky News]

Risking All For A New Life, part 3

The little group spent two days in Beijing before catching the train south. For those brought up in isolation in a Stalinist state, China's capital would have seemed overwhelming. The new high-rise office blocks, the shopping centres and the traffic all in stark contrast to the economic conditions in Kim Jong-il's bankrupt state.

At the main station we filmed secretly as the little group passed the final ticket check and boarded the express.

For the next 50 hours they stayed hidden in their bunks avoiding all contact with other passengers, terrified their North Korean origins would be detected and an informer would turn them in.

At a railway station near a south Asian country bordering China the four by-now exhausted refugees melted into the crowds on the streets outside the station without a backward glance - the children holding their mother's hands.

Our presence would only jeopardise the last border crossing that, if successful, would see them safe from the clutches of the Chinese police.

We still don't know if they made it.

But that won't stop hundreds of other refugees making that same perilous journey as Kim Jong-il's bankrupt socialist 'paradise' lurches towards free fall.

[Sky News]

Radio Station Makes Waves for North Korean Rights

Last year marked a turning point for Kim Seong-min, managing director of Free North Korea (FNK), a radio station for North Korean human rights based in Seoul. Kim, 45, made a trip to Washington to meet President George W. Bush at the White House with families of North Korean refugee Kim Han-mi and Japanese kidnapping victim Megumi Yokota.

The radio station, which is located in the basement of a crumbling building, was chosen as one of three North Korean human rights organizations to receive financial aid from the U.S. government. FNK airs a 60-minute program on short-wave radio every day at 7 p.m. Kim Seong-min first set up the radio station on April 20, 2004. He said he would define his staff members not as reporters, but as activists for North Korean human rights.

Kim Seong-min has become one of the busiest North Korean defectors in South Korea since he came to Seoul in February 1999 via China. His New Year’s Day started with greeting more than 200 guests, mostly North Korean defectors living in Seoul, in his 17-pyong (56-square-meter) apartment in Sinjong-dong, southwestern Seoul. For Kim Seong-min, who has led several North Korean defectors’ groups here in the past few years, not a day passed last month without a social gathering.

He called on the government to show more sympathy toward defectors. "I could have saved a 24-year-old boy last month. He was one of 12 North Korean defectors crossing the border between Vietnam and Cambodia, but he drowned in the water,’’ he said. "I couldn’t say a word when I got a phone call from his mom, who managed to call me from the North Korea-China border to ask about her boy.’’

He said 1 million won ($950) is enough to help two North Korean defectors find asylum in South Korea. "If it’s not possible at a government level, the Roh Moo-hyun administration should have helped nongovernmental organizations to help those refugees instead of cutting subsidies for defectors,’’ he said.

Like the defectors themselves, Kim and his radio station face many obstacles. A hatchet was delivered to the radio station on Dec. 23, with a bloody picture of Hwang Jang-yup, former secretary of North Korea’s ruling Workers Party. Hwang defected to the South in 1997.
Often called Hwang’s spokesman, Kim has supported Hwang’s denunciations of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his regime.

[Excerpt of an article by By Lee Jin-woo, The Korea Times]

Radios in North Korea

One might expect North Korea to be the target of outside Korean-language stations. After all, it is one of the few despotic regimes whose survival still largely depends on myths about the country's situation and its place in the world.

[Not so long ago] If North Korean citizens purchased a radio in one of the country's hard-currency shops, which accepted foreign cash and had a wider variety of items, or when overseas, it had to be submitted to police where technicians would "fix" (disable) it, making sure its owners could only listen to ideologically wholesome programs about the deeds of their Dear Leader - Kim Jong-il.

Things started to change in the mid-1990s when the border control collapsed and crowds of refugees and smugglers began to cross the North Korean-Chinese border. Among the many goods they brought back were small radios. Unlike the 1950s-style bulky radios produced in North Korea, these new transistor radios are small and easy to hide.

A survey of North Korean defectors found that 45% had listened to a foreign broadcast prior to fleeing the North. [Among the] stations to specifically target the North Korean audience ... is Radio Free Asia (RFA), a version of Radio Free Europe that once broadcast into East Europe - the segment that targeted the former USSR was known as the Radio Liberty.

[Excerpt of an article in the Asian Times by Dr Andrei Lankov, a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and Korea Center, Australian National University]

The Internet Black Hole That Is North Korea

The tragically backward, sometimes absurdist hallmarks of North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong-il, are well known. There is Mr. Kim's Elton John eyeglasses and strangely whipped, cotton-candy hairdo.

North Korea is an impoverished country where televisions and radios are hard-wired to receive only government-controlled frequencies. Cell phones were banned outright in 2004. In May, the Committee to Protect Journalists ranked North Korea No. 1—over also-rans like Burma, Syria and Uzbekistan—on its list of the "10 Most Censored Countries."

That would seem to leave the question of Internet access in North Korea moot. While other restrictive regimes have sought to find ways to limit the Internet—through filters and blocks and threats—North Korea has chosen to stay wholly off the grid.

Julien Pain, head of the Internet desk at Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group which tracks censorship around the world, put it more bluntly. "It is by far the worst Internet black hole," he said.

To the extent that students and researchers at universities and a few other lucky souls have access to computers, these are linked only to each other—that is, to a nationwide, closely-monitored Intranet—according to the OpenNet Initiative, a human rights project.

But how long can North Korea's leadership keep the country in the dark? Writing in The International Herald Tribune last year, Rebecca MacKinnon, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, suggested that North Korea's ban on cell phones was being breached on the black market along China's border. And as more and more cell phones there become Web-enabled, she suggested, that might mean that a growing number of North Koreans, in addition to talking to family in the South, would be quietly raising digital periscopes from the depths.

[Excerpt of an article by Tom Zeller Jr., NY Times News Service]

The Sunshine Policy and why Seoul is soft on North Korea

No country today is as misunderstood as North Korea. Journalists still refer to it as a Stalinist or communist state, when in fact it espouses a race-based nationalism such as the West last confronted during the Pacific War.

Pyongyang's propaganda touts the moral superiority of the Korean race, condemns South Korea for allowing miscegenation, and stresses the need to defend the Dear Leader with kyeolsa, or dare-to-die spirit--the Korean version of the Japanese kamikaze slogan kesshi.

North Korea espouses an awareness that Seoul will continue providing food and financial support no matter what happens. This support is not meant to expedite unification, which South Koreans are happy to put off indefinitely. Nor has it much to do with concern for starving children; by now everyone knows where the "humanitarian" aid really goes. No, the desire to help North Korea derives in large part from ideological common ground.

South Koreans may chuckle at the personality cult, but they generally agree with Pyongyang that Koreans are a pure-blooded race whose innate goodness has made them the perennial victims of rapacious foreign powers. They share the same tendency to regard Koreans as innocent children on the world stage--and to ascribe evil to foreigners alone. … Seoul pursues its sunshine policy with respect for Pyongyang.

The relationship between the Koreas can therefore be likened to the relationship between a moderate Muslim state such as Turkey and a fundamentalist one like Iran. The South Koreans have compromised their nationalist principles in a quest for wealth and modernity, and while they're glad they did, they feel a nagging sense of moral inferiority to their more orthodox brethren. They often disapprove of the North's actions, but never with indignation, and always with an effort to blame the outside world for having provoked them.

To be sure, there was public anger at Kim Jong Il when his nuclear test made stock prices drop in Seoul, but it dissipated the moment the U.S. began talking sanctions. Seoul has since made clear that the nuclear issue will have no significant effect on its sunshine policy. This earns it no goodwill from the North, mind; between soft-liners and hard-liners, sympathy can only go in one direction.

North Korea is not a communist country with ideological and sentimental reasons to listen to China and Russia; it is a virulently nationalist state that distrusts all the other parties at the six-party talks table. And though the rhetoric of a "concerted front" against North Korea has proved to be just that, it has sufficed to heighten South Korea's sense of solidarity with the North.

The U.S. has urged Beijing to bring more pressure to bear on the North. But if America can do nothing with its own ally, it can hardly expect the Chinese to do more with theirs.

[Excerpt of a Wall Street Journal editorial, by B.R. Myers, a North Korea researcher at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea]

Five points about North Korea from Davos

An engaging discussion took place at Davos on the military threat posed by North Korea. A team of policy makers - including the special adviser to the Japanese prime minister and a very impressive analyst from the Chinese army - spoke more frankly than perhaps they had intended to do. Five points that emerged:

One: Korea's nuclear aims frighten the west, but they are not the top concern of the country's neighbors. They are much more worried about the country's political collapse than they are about nuclear attack. That means stability, not confrontation, should be the aim of all policy. Treat North Korea like a rat in a trap, said one panelist, and it will bite.

Two: we know much less about North Korea than we would like - the parallel with Iraq before the invasion is striking. US intelligence gathering relies on satellite images and information from exiles. Both are misleading.

Three: the US needs a consistent regional policy, not an isolationist or unpredictable one. The US plan of sanctions on North Korea will cause chaos. But if the US pulls out of the region, Japan and South Korea will both develop nuclear weapons. Japan's is only a few weeks' work away.

Four: North Korea is really China's problem. Beijing props up Kim Jong Il, but can't control him. China does not want a reunified Korea extending US influence north (and South Korea could not cope with the costs of it). The country does not want a nuclear North Korea, nor a collapsing one.

Five: the next global military battle may be in space. China intends to match the US's development of space weapons step by step - and tested one last week. The country's leaders will not allow the US the exclusive power to destroy satellites, and so control all global electronic communication, just as the proliferation of nuclear weapons became inevitable once the US had developed and deployed one in 1945.

[Excerpt of an article by Julian Glover, The Guardian]

North Korea helping Iran with nuclear testing?

North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year. Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their test last October with Teheran's nuclear scientists.

A senior European defense official told The Daily Telegraph that North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October's underground test to assist Teheran's preparations to conduct its own — possibly by the end of this year.

There were unconfirmed reports at the time of the Korean firing that an Iranian team was present. Iranian military advisers regularly visit North Korea to participate in missile tests.
[Excerpt of an article by Con Coughlin, The Daily Telegraph]


North Korea [responded today by expressing] outrage at a British newspaper's report that Pyongyang was sharing its nuclear weapons technology with Iran, dismissing it as a "bid to mislead public opinion."

"Their assertion is nothing but a sheer lie and fabrication intended to tarnish the image of the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] by charging it with nuclear proliferation," a spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry, quoted by the state-run KCNA news agency, said Saturday.
[CNN]

UN Agency defers North Korea programs

U.N. Development Program agreed not to approve new projects in North Korea until an external audit addresses U.S. allegations that the agency has funneled millions of dollars to the communist regime in violation of United Nations rules.

U.S. deputy ambassador Mark Wallace alleged Friday that the UNDP's North Korea operation had been run "in blatant violation of U.N. rules" for years. He demanded an outside audit focusing on concerns that development funds had been used by Pyongyang for "its own illicit purposes."

The audit, announced Monday by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is expected to last three months.

UNDP assistant administrator Ad Melkert said the agency also agreed to end cash payments to the North Korean government and local suppliers and to stop hiring staff recruited by Pyongyang.

UNDP spokesman David Morrison said the agency has spent about $3 million annually in the last 10 years on programs in impoverished North Korea, in addition to about $600,000 in office costs, which include local salaries and supplies. The programs focus on food production, rural and environmental sector management, economic management and social sector management.

Morrison said UNDP international staff have visited nearly all their project sites in the past two years to ensure funds are being used appropriately.

[AP]

Watch for British documentary on US defector to North Korea

In the 1960s four US soldiers separately defected to North Korea, and were little heard from again. Now one - the last known former American GI left in the country - has spoken for the first time to British documentary-makers.

James Dresnok is something of a celebrity around the North Korean capital Pyongyang, his home for the last 44 years. Unmissable thanks to his 6ft 5in height and bulky frame, the 64-year-old has appeared in North Korean films, taught English at university and been a propaganda hero for the Communist nation.

"I have never regretted coming to [North Korea]. I feel at home," he says, in the documentary Crossing the Line, which premiered at the US Sundance Film Festival on Monday.

James Dresnok was a 21-year-old army private when he decided to leave his post in South Korea one August afternoon in 1962 to cross into the North. Three months earlier, Private Larry Abshier had become the first known US soldier to defect to the North, while patrolling the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas. In the three years that followed, Specialist Jerry Parrish and Sergeant Charles Jenkins would follow Abshier and Dresnok across the border.

A joint bid for asylum at the Soviet embassy in 1966 was rejected and the four were forced to undergo intense re-education, which included learning North Korea's official Juche ideology.
It was at that point, Mr Dresnok says, that he decided he would try to fit in. "Man is the master of his life, and little by little I came to understand the Korean people," he said.

UK documentary-maker Daniel Gordon and his Beijing-based co-producer Nick Bonner touch on the four defectors, but the focus is undoubtedly on James Dresnok who is filmed fishing, going to a restaurant, the opera and having a medical check-up.

"I found him a fascinating guy," Daniel Gordon says. "He has had such a unique experience of life. ... It is hard to understand from our perspective why an American soldier would choose to make his life in arguably the biggest US-hating nation on earth."

Mr Dresnok admits he lives a privileged life by North Korean standards, confessing that he got rice rations during the deadly famines of the late 1990s while others were starving. "The government is going to take care of me until my dying day," he tells the documentary team.

World view of US handling of North Korea

A new BBC poll released, which polled more than 26,000 people in 25 countries, found:
Only 30% of worldwide respondents approved of Washington's handling of North Korea's nuclear program (compared to 54 percent who said they disapproved).

50 % of U.S. respondents in this same poll said they approved of the government's handling of North Korea's nuclear program.


Worldwide:
49 % of worldwide respondents overall believe the U.S. is playing a "mainly negative" role in the world today.

Whereas with respondents from the States:
57 % of U.S. respondents in this poll said the country's overall influence on the rest of the world was "mainly positive."


[Source: Survey conducted by Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) which, along with Canada-based Globescan.]

North Korea’s "Idolization" absorbs large part of National Budget

The actual amount of money allocated for the idolization of the Great Leader is not clear. However, when we look at the number and size of these idolization figures springing up all over North Korea, the fact that these represent a large dedicated portion of the national budget can be easily ascertained.

The amount of money spent on statues and anniversary celebrations for Turkmenistan’s deceased leader Nayajopuna, or on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, are no match for the amount spent on Kim Father and Son. When Kim Jong Il made his appearance on the scene as successor in the 70’s, within 10 years the entire nation was covered with statues, and even today construction has not stopped.

Recently, historical monuments to Kim Jong Il’s great deeds have been constructed. at Jakangdo Weewon Electric Power Plant, North Pyongan Province Changsong County, Yupyong; South Hamkyong Province Yonpo; North Pyongan Province, Hyangsan County, Sangso-ri; and Yomju County Yongbok-ri, Bakchon County, Dansan-ri.

At recently constructed monuments, mosaics of Kim Chong Sok (Kim Jong Il’s birth mother) made of colored glass, tiles, and natural stone are prevalent.

North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is not spending money without cause in creating this idolization propaganda. The reason that the construction of these monuments has not stopped, even during a period of economic crisis, is because his intention is to use the vulnerabilities of citizens and young people to induce a spirit of sacrifice as they gaze on the Great Leader and the General (Kim Jong Il)

[The Daily NK]

North Koreans freezing to death

Lying among the simple wooden huts and burnt remnants of wooden furniture, they found the bodies of 46 North Korean villagers, including women and children, all of whom had frozen to death. Cut off from the outside world by one of the harshest winters in many years, the villagers had suffered a macabre fate that has exposed both the desperate poverty and callous misrule blighting the Stalinist state.

More than 300 people are thought to have perished from cold so far this winter in North Korea's mountainous north, victims of temperatures as low as -30C and of an arrogant ruling clique.
In a country notorious for its secretiveness, the regime of President Kim Jong-il has made no mention of the deaths. As the rest of the population struggle to stay warm, 50,000 members of his ruling elite continue to live in splendid isolation in a compound in central Pyongyang – enjoying the benefits of hot water, central heating and satellite television.

Elsewhere in the city, though, the scene could have been lifted from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. The air is thick with the smell of coal dust, as families light fires on the floors of their apartments to keep out the bitter, cold winds that blow south from Siberia.

Outside Pyongyang, the situation is yet more desperate. A six-mile drive from the city, poor farmers trudge through the snow with bundles of brushwood on their backs.A massive process of deforestation, begun in the 1990s by Kim Jong-il's father and predecessor, Kim il Sung, has resulted in huge swathes of forest being chopped down to clear land for farming. The disastrous policy led to large-scale soil erosion, believed by many to have been a leading cause of mass famine of the 1990s, when up to three million people starved to death.

[Excerpt of an article by Sergey Soukhorukov, The Sunday Telegraph]

UN chief modifies North Korea funding

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called for an urgent inquiry into all of the activities of UN funds and programmes around the world. It follows US claims that lax controls in the UN Development Programme (UNDP) may have led to millions of dollars being siphoned off by North Korea.

The UNDP is to stop payments to North Korea in dollars or euros, and only deal in the local currency, the won. The US fears money is being shifted into Pyongyang's nuclear programme.

The change in how North Korea receives UNDP payments will come into effect in March.

Critics of the UN within the US Congress and media have already been saying that the situation in North Korea amounts to yet another example of the abuses made possible by the lack of accountability within the UN system.

Ban Ki-Moon has pledged to restore the highest ethical standard to the UN.

[BBC]

North Korean activist Steve Kim

American Steve Kim, a furniture importer from Huntington, N.Y., has been in prison in China since September 2003.

Steve Kim was sentenced to five years for smuggling aliens. Mr. Kim, who is of Korean ancestry and is a Christian, became aware of the plight of the refugees during business trips to China. He funded two safe houses and paid for refugees' passage on the underground railroad.

Beijing refuses to grant him parole, saying foreigners are not eligible. His wife and three children have passed their fourth Christmas without him.

Indicator of North Korean Food Shortage

On New Year's Day this year, North Korea skipped giving extra food rations to its people, except the elite citizens of Pyongyang, a South Korean aid group [Good Friends] says a possible sign the country's food situation may be worsening.

New Year's Day is a major holiday in North Korea and the communist regime doles out special rations to its hunger-stricken population of 23 million.

Citizens in the capital of Pyongyang received three days of extra rations and more special rations were given to medium-level government officials living there, the group said.

Early this month, a North Korean Agriculture Ministry official claimed that the country's grain production last year was not bad and the country was not facing any impending food crisis, according to a pro-North Korea paper in Japan.

[Associated Press]

Christians Dream of 2nd Pyongyang Revival

The Korean Christian community is bustling with plans to celebrate the 100th year of what is known as the Pyongyang Revival of 1907.

It is not easy for the contemporary non-religious to imagine _ especially in times like this, when the name Pyongyang immediately evokes images of nuclear bombs and missiles _ but Western missionaries who were active in Northeast Asia in the early 20th century once called the North Korean capital the Jerusalem of the East.

It started with a Bible study that took place in Changdaehyun Church in Pyongyang. During the night of Jan. 14, 1907, pastors and ordinary Christians participating in a Bible study started to pour out their guilt in public, at the same time zealously repenting with tears. The wave of repentance lasted until the next day, and the religious fervor soon spread. The event touched off a massive conversion to Christianity and established organized Christian groups across the nation.

The growth in the number of pastors caused by the Pyongyang Revival led Christians to play a leading role in Korea’s independence movements, including the March First Movement in 1919.
For the Korean Christian community, the events currently taking place to mark the anniversary of the Pyongyang Revival are not only about remembering history. They are about facing challenges and making changes necessary for a second revival.

Park Young-shin, an expert on the sociology of religion and professor emeritus at Yonsei University, said “Korean Protestant churches have been losing ground because they lost holiness and are siding with materialism and the economy.”

“I don’t think we should be looking back so much to the past revival, but God wants us to regroup, fulfilling his future vision for Korea and for the rest of the world,’’ said Peter Wagner, president of Global Harvest Ministries and honorary co-chairman of Transformation 2007, in the conference’s opening session.

In the meantime, several South Korean churches are trying to reach out to the North, where the Pyongyang Revival is unlikely to be celebrated under the Stalinist Kim Jong-il regime.

[The Korea Times]

Kim Worship 2.0

Like a computer software firm updating program versions, the North is steadily updating its ideology to make it relevant. This practice of mass control by in-your-face ideology has been laughed off in much of the world, including China. But North Korea is increasing its ideological cult worship.

After the Oct. 9 nuclear test, for example, banners sprang up over North Korea stating "We are a country with a nuclear deterrent." Kim's test feeds a national pride that is part of the propaganda drilled into Koreans from birth: that Kim alone can fend off the US and Japanese enemies.

"The cult of personality campaign is more extensive today than in 1985," says former South Korean foreign minister Han Sung Joo, who visited Pyongyang this past October, and in 1985. "Unlike the Stalin and Mao personality cults, there is a deification and a religious emotional element in the North.

“The twinned photos of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are everywhere. Every speech says Kim Il Sung is still alive. I think if I stayed another two weeks, I might even see Kim Il Sung. The country worships someone who is deceased, as if he is alive."

[Excerpt of an article by Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor]

North Korea contributes to 'Doomsday Clock' moving forward

The world has nudged closer to a nuclear apocalypse and environmental disaster, a trans-Atlantic group of prominent scientists warned Wednesday, pushing the hand of its symbolic Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight.

It was the fourth time since the end of the Cold War that the clock has ticked forward, this time from 11:53 to 11:55, amid fears over what the scientists are describing as "a second nuclear age" prompted largely by atomic standoffs with Iran and North Korea.

But the organization added that the "dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons."

The Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945 as a newsletter distributed among nuclear physicists concerned by the possibility of nuclear war, has since grown into an organization focused more generally on manmade threats to the survival of human civilization. "As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth," said Stephen Hawking, the renowned cosmologist and mathematician.

"As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change."

The bulletin's clock, which for 60 years has followed the rise and fall of nuclear tensions, would now also measure climate change, the bulletin's editor Mark Strauss told The Associated Press.

It came closest to midnight -- just two minutes away -- in 1953, following the successful test of a hydrogen bomb by the United States. It has been as far away as 17 minutes, set there in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union.

[Associated Press]

More on Kim Worship 2.0

Kim Jong Il has upgraded his deification strategies to strengthen the family cult system. Western reports often detail Korea's unique "juche ideology" - a theology of Kim worship, repeated hourly and daily, reminding Koreans they are insolubly bound to the Kim family and must erase foreign influence from their minds.

Yet juche is a subcategory of a far more encompassing umbrella of deification known as woo sang hwa, or idol worship. In North Korea, woo sang hwa contains all the aspects of cult worship. [North Korean] socialism makes "family loyalty," with Kim at the head, the supreme good - a major deflection from communism.

Kim-worship in the North is a vivid - and inescapable - spectacle to behold, say visitors. Thousands of giant "towers of eternality" to Kim scatter the landscape. Special "Kimjongilia" crimson begonias are tended in family gardens. Kim's media calls him variously the "Guardian Deity of the Planet," and "Lodestar of the 21st Century."

In 2002, Korean mass dances known as Arirang, featured 100,000 flag wavers (and was described in state media as the "greatest event of humankind.") Many loyal Koreans bow twice daily to Kim pictures that sit alone on the most prominent wall of their homes.

Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of the Korean cult project is its recent veering toward race and ethnic solidarity, say Kim watchers. His main appeal to his people today, a push that rarely gets attention outside the North, is to the racial superiority of a people whose isolation and stubborn xenophobia supposedly makes their bloodlines purer. Since the 1990s Kim has more fervently claimed lineage to the first ancient rulers of Korea, a move intended to place him in a position of historical, if not divine, destiny as leader of the peninsula.

[By Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor]

Another North Korean Refugee’s Story

One young man, who asks that his name not be used for fear of retribution on family members still at home, spent time in the North Korean gulag, after being captured in China and repatriated. He was tortured, he says--rolling up his trousers at a recent press conference to display the scars on his legs.

One morning at roll call, he recounts, one of his cellmates, a man who had been badly beaten during the night, was too sick to get out of bed. The guards ordered the prisoners to carry the injured man into the woods and bury him. "I keep thinking, maybe he would still be alive if we hadn't buried him," the escapee says.

The name of the dead man was Kim Young Jin. The name of the prison is Chong Jin. Says the man who escaped: "I am very glad to be here, and tell the people how life in North Korea really is."

[Excerpt of an article by Melanie Kirkpatrick, The Wall Street Journal]

Monster bunnies to save North Korea from starving

Karl Szmolinsky from Eberswalde, in the east of Germany, has been given a contract by North Korea to supply giant rabbits to help to boost meat production in the reclusive Communist country, which is suffering severe food shortages. The only problem is that such huge rabbits consume vast quantities of food themselves as they grow.

Mr Szmolinsky was contacted by the North Korean Embassy in Berlin in October. He said that an attaché at the embassy came to his home and asked to see his rabbits. The diplomat was so impressed that he placed an order for eight females and four males, which were shipped to North Korea a few weeks later at a price of € 80 each.

“They want to boost meat production. They’ve arranged for me to go to Pyongyang in April to advise them on setting up a breeding farm,” Mr Szmolinsky, who is 68 next month, told The Times.

[The Times]

Short Facts about North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong Il

* Was born in Siberia in 1942 or 43.

* Is 5-foot, 3-inches tall and wears 12-centimeter (4.7 inch) high platform shoes.

* Has only been heard by North Koreans once, in 1992, in a national broadcast. He said: "Glory to the heroic soldiers of the People's Army."

* Has never appeared speaking live on TV in North Korea.

* Averages about 150 visits per year to schools, military bases, factories.

* Has the world's fifth-largest army.

* Gives his top generals loyalty tests.

[Excerpt of an article by Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor]

North Korean Education: from 7 years old, “Become the Dictator’s Soldier”

The Daily NK examined a North Korean 1st grade elementary school language textbook published in 2005. The 1st grade elementary school language textbook is similar to textbooks in South Korea, focusing on reading skills, writing and acquisition of basic vocabulary.

However, … 80% of the content in North Korean textbooks focus on idolizing Kim Il Sung. Excluding three classic tales such as ‘The ant and the grasshopper’, the book uses [idolization of] Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il to improve reading skills.

Irrespective of being a textbook for 1st graders, warlike expressions such as ‘Let’s become [Kim Jong Il’s] heroic army’ and ‘Strike the Americans with kid tanks’ frequently appear in the books.

Only 7 years old! The truth is North Korean children are taught to become the leader’s gun and bombs from their first day of school throughout life.

[The Daily NK]

North Korea escalates 'cult of Kim'

North Koreans are taught to worship Kim Jong Il as a god. In a manner unique among nations, the North exerts extraordinary control through deification - a cult ideology of complete subservience - that goes beyond the "Stalinist" label often used to describe the newly nuclear North.

In a time of famine and poverty, government spending on Kim-family deification - now nearly 40 percent of the visible budget - is the only category in the North's budget to increase, according to a new white paper by the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy in Seoul. The increase pays for ideology schools, some 30,000 Kim monuments, gymnastic festivals, films and books, billboards and murals, 40,000 "research institutes," historical sites, rock carvings, circus theaters, training programs, and other worship events.

In 1990, ideology was 19 percent of North Korea's budget; by 2004 it doubled to at least 38.5 percent of state spending, according to the white paper. This extra financing may come from recent budget offsets caused by the shutting down of older state funding categories, says Alexander Mansourov of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.

[Excerpt of an article by Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor]

How Kim Jong Il controls North Korea

Kim Jong Il has astutely nullified a dawning realization among his people that the world beyond North Korea's borders is a better place.

He's even created a new image for himself at home - not as a towering patriarch - but as a figure of sympathy, a beleaguered, America-taunted leader who eats soldier's gruel and deserves care by the masses. He's played a smart propaganda game in South Korea, where some elites admire him as a nationalist torchbearer for "true Korean-ness," and for outwitting the great powers.

Kim reportedly micromanages the entire country. North Korea has the world's fifth-largest army. His state is a hermetically sealed cult that allows no debate; even top generals and their extended families undergo loyalty tests. A half-dozen concentration camps hold 200,000 inmates, a dozen intelligence units spy on the people and each other.

One side of Kim only now emerging is how closely he stays in touch with the people. The Dear Leader is on the road, working the crowds, a great deal. Studies of Korean media show Kim averages about 150 local visits a year. He may not make live televised speeches, but he's at a school, a factory, a farm, a military base - every three days. (He shows up at a military unit once a week.) This suggests a populist streak.

"When someone you worship comes to your factory, it's a personal connection. We tend to overlook this simple fact," says Alexander Mansourov of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. who has tracked Kim's appearances. "Kim knows the local leaders, the opinion makers, the local cadres. He's not in a fishbowl. He may be a dictator, but he's also a populist."

Kim also appears today to be intensifying his ethnic nationalist message: Korea is different, special, unique, pure - and must remain so.

[Excerpt of an article by Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor]

The tactical skills of Kim Jong Il

As Kim Jong Il continues to elude efforts to constrain his nuclear program, a grudging regard for the North Korean leader's tactical skills is rising.

As a leader, Mr. Kim was once thought to be over his head. But 12 years after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung, the son is showing brilliance as a dictator. Some experts say that Kim, in his own way, may be shrewder than the father who built the nation.

"Kim was in many ways dealt a weaker hand than his father, but he has played it better," says Brian Myers, a North Korea specialist at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea.

Certainly, Kim has become a skillful player on the world stage. He retains firm hold of the most totalitarian state on earth. His nation has survived an epic famine.

"Why shouldn't Kim be seen as extraordinary?" asks Alexander Mansourov of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. "He's poked his finger in the eye of the US hegemon. He's tested missiles and nukes. At home he's more popular than ever."

"I used to think Kim was irrational and unrealistic," says Lee Jong Heon, who has just published a structural analysis of the North at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. "But when you study his moves, he has kept a grip on the people, and he now heads one of eight nuclear nations. He's been highly rational from his standpoint."

[Excerpt of an article by Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor]

North Korea says “No food crisis”

North Korea has no serious trouble feeding its people despite heavy floods and sanctions by "enemy states" Japan and the United States, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper said last week, quoting an agricultural official of the North. "It is not a satisfactory production level relative to our goal, but the problem of feeding the people is in no way at a serious level," Kim Kyong-il of the North's agricultural ministry was quoted in the Choson Sinbo newspaper as saying.

The paper is published by an association of North Korean residents in Japan with reports from Pyongyang, and is seen as carrying the official voice of the North.

Even in a good year North Korea does not produce enough grain to feed its people.

[Reuters]

North Korean starvation made worse by flooding

United Nations aid agencies warned of an impending food crisis in North Korea where summer flooding destroyed crops and worsened a chronic shortage of grain.

"The situation is indeed critical," Simon Pluess, spokesman of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), said. "About a third of the population never eats enough and half of the population goes for periods in the year when they have an insufficient food intake."

North Korea has still not recovered from famine in the 1990s that experts say killed about 2.5 million people, or 10 per cent of the population.

The reclusive country is estimated to be facing a cereal deficit of at least a million tonnes for 2007. The WFP is feeding only 700,000 of the 1.9 million North Koreans it has identified as needing aid.

"The situation is likely to translate into increased malnutrition rates," Mr Pluess said. Analysts believe North Korea cannot produce enough food for itself even in the best crop years, and much of the food is diverted to the military.

Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the UN Children's Fund, or UNICEF, said severe flooding in four provinces had "decimated" food production in North Korea.

[The Scotsman]

With countrymen like this, who needs enemies?!

A fisherman abducted by North Korea 31 years ago is finally on his way home to South Korea on Friday. But Koreans flew into an uproar Thursday as they learned of the manner in which the South Korean consulate in Shenyang responded to his initial desperate pleas for help after he fled the Stalinist country.

Hiding in a safe house in China, Choi Wook-il (67) and his wife from the South, Yang Jeong-ja (66), dialed the consulate to beg for help. "I am Choi Wook-il and I was a crew member of the trawler Cheonwangho abducted to the North from the East Sea in 1975. Since that time I have been living in the North but I resolved to return home and escaped. I am in China now. Can I talk to the consul?"

The response from a female employee: "We only deal with cases and accidents involving South Koreans in the three provinces in Northeast China, and we don't address any North Korean defector issues."

When the couple called again and asked for the person in charge of defector issues, the same woman got on the line. "You just called a moment ago," she scolded.

Only after Yang described their urgent situation did she gave them the mobile phone number of the proper official. But the official handling defectors proved equally unhelpful, demanding to know who gave them his phone number.

The Foreign Ministry posted an apology on its website late Thursday night after coming under fire thanks to the broadcast of a video clip of the consular employee's dealings with Choi. On Friday morning, a government official said Choi has been handed over to the South Korean side and is expected to arrive in Seoul soon.

[Chosun Ilbo]

15 North Korean refugees arrested in Thailand

Taipei Times reports that Thai police have arrested 15 North Koreans for illegally entering Thailand.

Police found the North Koreans in a bus in Chiang Rai, around 800km north of Bangkok, following a tip-off from someone on the bus, they said.The group had 10 women, three men and two young boys.

Serious food and energy shortages have made more and more North Koreans leave their country, and many of them have been going to northern Thailand after crossing through China and Laos.

The number of North Koreans arrested for illegal entry into Thailand last year jumped from 50 in 2005 to more than 400 in 2006.

[AFP]

North Korea's Foreign Minister Dies

Paek Nam Sun, North Korea's foreign minister and the country's top diplomat for nearly 10 years, has died at the age of 78, official media reported Wednesday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il expressed his condolences, the North's Korean Central News Agency reported. The one-sentence dispatch did not elaborate on when or how Paek died.

Paek has been the North's premier diplomat since 1998. News reports have said he was suffering from an unknown illness. It was unclear who would succeed him.

Paek's death was not expected to change North Korea's foreign policy because the North's Foreign Ministry usually implements policies that have been crafted by the ruling Korean Workers' Party. Power is heavily concentrated in Kim's hands, and state officers stray from the official line at their peril.

Paek's career is the story of an elite loyalist who rose steadily through the government layers over the decades. He was born in 1929 in North Hamgyong, a province on the Chinese and Russian borders that is home to a coal mine notorious for forced labor as well as a key missile base.

[Associated Press]

Gold is North Korean Loophole

North Korea plans to use the London gold market to get around financial sanctions imposed by the international community, it was reported.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has relisted North Korea's central bank with the London Bullion Market Association and plans to sell gold through London once the country gets a regular supply from its outdated mines, The Times of London reported.