300,000 North Koreans have fled to China risking their lives to flee the mass starvation and brutal oppression of the Stalinist North Korea Kim Jong regime.
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.
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.
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.”
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."
