DPRK watcher Mike Madden (who has made many contributions to this blog) has finally gotten around to launching his own DPRK blog: North Korean Leadership Watch. He has several good posts up already and I look forward to what else he is going to put together.
I made some historical satellite discoveries recently:
1. The birthplace of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church
Click image for larger version
Click here to see location in Wikimapia
Reference pictures: here and here
2. The (probable) birthplace of Kim Jong-il in Russia*
Click image for larger version
Click here to see location in Wikimapia
Click here for source material
* This is the location of the Soviet 88th Brigade camp, which housed of Chinese and Korean guerrillas. Kim Il-sung was stationed here as a battalion captain in the Soviet Red Army. Locals claim Kim Jong-il was born here on February 16, 1941 (Although the DPRK government claim Kim Jong-il was born on Baekdu Mountain in Japanese occupied Korea a year later, on February 16, 1942). Residents of the town claim that his brother “Shura” Kim fell into a well and died, and was buried there; however other sources claim that Kim Jong-il’s sibling drowned in a pool in Pyongyang in 1947.
When North Korea Uncovered (Google Earth) was featured in the Wall Street Journal last May, one aspect in particular generated some skepticism: the identification of thousands of burial mounds scattered across the DPRK’s mountains.
(Click on image for larger version)
IHS Jane’s Senior Image Analyst Allison Puccioni, in a blog post for CNN’s Anderson Cooper, confimrmed that this unusual looking landscape is composed of burial mounds.
“It’s sadly ironic that in a time where people can no longer sustain themselves the North Koreans still manage to bury their dead with the painstaking tradition of their culture. The burial mounds are unusually close together probably to save land for agriculture” (Allison Puccioni).
Also, here is a photo of these types of burial mounds in the DPRK from ground level:
(Click on image for larger verison)
The Korean tradition of burying the dead in burial mounds up on mountain tops and slopes goes back many years. Here is a brief history in wikipedia.
According to KBS Global (h/t ROK Drop):
Consumers can buy cigarettes produced by a North Korean firm starting next month.
A South Korean company announced Friday that it will start selling some 175-thousand packs of the “Baeksan” cigarettes from July sixth, with each pack costing two-thousand-300 won, or about one dollar and 80 cents.
It’s not the first time a South Korean company has imported a North Korean tobacco product. In 2000, the South’s Korea Tobacco and Ginseng Corporation imported North Korean cigarettes under a temporary contract.
Here are previous posts on North Korean cigarettes.
Here is a photo of the North Korean cigarattes I purchased on my trips.
(satire) A reader sends in this gem from the Onion‘s 2006 edition, when the DPRK tested their first nuclear device:
A press release issued by the state-run Korean Central News Agency Monday confirmed that the Oct. 9 underground nuclear test in North Korea’s Yanggang province successfully exploded the communist nation’s total gross domestic product for the past four decades.
“This is a grand day for the Democratic Peoples Republic Of Korea, whose citizens have sacrificed their wages, their food, and their lives so that our great nation could test a nuclear weapon thousands of feet beneath our own soil,” read an excerpt from the statement. “Now the rest of the world must stand up and take notice that the DPRK, too, is capable of decimating years of its wealth at any given moment.”
North Korea’s announcement would appear to support the CIA’s intelligence information on the blast. According to the CIA, over 500 tons of compressed purchasing power, the equivalent of 40 years of goods and services produced by the impoverished country, vaporized in 560 billionths of one second. The device consumed 15 years of peasant wages’ worth of uranium, two decades of agricultural- and fishery-export profits’ worth for its above-ground emplacement tower, and the lifetime earnings of the entire workforce of the Kilchu fish-canning factory for tungsten/carbide-steel bomb casings.
“A nuclear device that size explodes with the force of 10 to 15 tons of TNT, or a moderately sized economic boom,” said Ronald Shimokawa, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “The detonation most likely sent the burning, liquified remains of North Korea’s economy deep into the Earth’s core.”
Here are some previous posts from the Onion: The DPRK’s space program, Kim’s health.
Read the full story here:
N. Korea Detonates 40 Years Of GDP
The Onion
10/18/2006
From Slate (regarding the upcoming trial of Euna Lee and Laura Ling):
We do have some basic understanding about how the North Korean justice system is organized. The journalists will be tried by the Central Court, the nation’s highest judicial body. Usually, the Central Court only hears appeals cases from the lower, provincial courts, but for grievous cases against the state, it has initial jurisdiction. The Central Court is staffed by judges elected by the Supreme People’s Assembly, North Korea’s one-party parliament. The North Korean Constitution stipulates that each trial is to be conducted by one judge and two “people’s assessors”—i.e., lay judges—though special cases may be heard by a three-judge panel. (Appeals cases usually get the panel.) Legal education or experience is not an official prerequisite for becoming a judge, and rulings from the Central Court are not subject to appeal.
North Korean law does recognize the right of the accused to defend herself and to be represented by an attorney. According to the country’s penal code, either the defendant, her family, or her “organizational representatives” may select the defense attorney. As the two arrested journalists were not allowed access to any counsel during pretrial investigation, however, there are doubts that they will actually be allowed to select their own counsel. According to the U.S. State Department, there is “no indication that independent, nongovernmental defense lawyers [exist]” in North Korea in the first place.
The proceedings will be conducted in Korean, but the North Korean Constitution does grant foreign citizens the right to use their own languages during court proceedings. Trials are supposed to be open to the public, unless they might expose state secrets or otherwise have a negative effect on society. According to testimony from North Korean defectors, though, trials are often closed in practice. Announcements of the court’s findings and executions of sentences are often carried out in public as a means of educating the citizenry.
Thursday’s announcement from North Korea’s news agency did not specify what crime the two journalists are being charged with, though Pyongyang has previously accused them of “hostile acts” and illegal entry into the country. If they were prosecuted under a law regarding foreigners who “abuse” or “provoke national difficulty in order to antagonize” the North Korean people, they would face five to 10 years of “re-education” in a labor camp. Illegal entry carries a sentence of two to three years.
Previously, prisoners could be sentenced to death for a number of vague crimes, such as “ideological divergence” or “opposing socialism.” But subsequent to the enactment of a new penal code in 2004, the death penalty is reserved for four crimes: participating in a coup or a plot to overthrow the state, terrorism, treason, or “suppressing the people’s movement for national liberation.” In practice these four crimes seem to cover a wide range of activities, including, in one reported case from 2007, the making of international phone calls. Judicial proceedings are apparently not required for executions to be carried out.
As supplemental material, I have posted numerous DPRK statutes on this web page. To see the full list, scroll down the menu to “DPRK policies,” under which you can see them all. Of course, the DPRK is not a “rule of law” country, so the statutes themselves and even the constitution are not worth that much in terms of defining the “rules of the game” or defining/predicting the scope of “legitimate” government activity.
There have been several foreign law firms that have attempted to set up shop in the DPRK. Currently the only firms with legal offices or a periodic presence are: Hay, Kalb, and Associates, Kelvin Chia Partnership, and Chiomenti of Italy (formerly Birindelli e Associati ).
Read the full article below:
Objection, Dear Leader!
Slate.com
Nina Shen Rastogi
5/14/2009
…blogging will resume on the 13th.
This week, The South Korean government announced that if the North unilaterally files formal charges against a detained South Korean worker it will reevaluate regulations for its citizens to enter the zone which would require each border crosser to obtain a written guarantee of his safety from Pyongyang before leaving South Korea. Although the number of South Korean workers allowed to cross the DMZ was reduced after the North’s missile launch, this would effectively prevent South Korean managers from entering the Kaesong Zone and would likely bring an end to operations there. According to Yonhap:
South Koreans may be barred from visiting North Korea if the communist country takes legal action against a Hyundai Asan employee who has been unlawfully detained by Pyongyang, a government source said Sunday.
The Hyundai employee, who works at the Kaesong Industrial Complex and is identified only by his family name of Yu, has been held for 28 days for allegedly criticizing Pyongyang’s political system and trying to lure a North Korean female worker to defect to the South.
The worker in his 40s has yet to be interviewed by South Korean authorities to determine the exact nature of the detention.
“Under the special arrangement governing the Kaesong complex, the two Koreas must reach an understanding on how to deal with serious offenses involving South Koreans (that carry punishments) exceeding warnings, fines and expulsions,” the source, who declined to be identified, said.
“If Pyongyang takes unilateral action to indict the worker, it will be a violation of the fundamental rules related to cross-border interactions and will compel Seoul to rethink its stance on allowing South Korean to visit the North,” the source stressed.
The bilateral agreement makes clear that Pyongyang should respect the rights of South Korean workers, dwellings and property in Kaesong and the special tourist region in Mount Kumgang on the east coast. The latter has been closed since the shooting death of a female tourist by North Korean guards last July.
He said that if protection for South Koreans nationals cannot be ensured, Seoul will be compelled to review its policies on allowing visits from scratch.
“If this is the case, even employees working at Kaesong will have to get individual, written permission from North Korea that they will not be detained,” the official said.
Such a move could effectively make it hard for South Koreans to go to North Korea, crippling normal operations at the complex just north of the demilitarized zone that separates the two countries.
As of March, 101 South Korean factories operated in the complex, employing about 39,000 North Korean workers. The Kaesong park opened in 2005 and produces labor-intensive goods such as clothing, kitchen wares and watches. (Yonhap)
Given the trajectory of North-South relations this year, it is no surprise that inter-Korean trade dropped 30% in March. According to Yonhap:
Monthly trade between South and North Korea fell more than 30 percent on-year in March, as tensions ran high over South Korea-U.S. joint military exercise, government data showed Monday.
The two Koreas exchanged goods and services worth US$108.74 million over the last month, down 31.1 percent from $157.9 million in the same period in 2008, the data from the Unification Ministry said.
North Korea sealed the border three times in March, disrupting South Korean production in a joint industrial complex in the North’s border town of Kaesong. Pyongyang imposed the ban in retaliation against a joint military exercise South Korea staged with the United States from March 9 to 20 south of the border.
Pyongyang blasted the joint exercise as a rehearsal for a “second Korean War,” while the two allies say the annual drill is purely defensive.
More than 100 South Korean firms operate in the Kaesong industrial venture, just an hour’s drive from Seoul, joining their capital and technology with North Korea’s cheap but skilled labor.
North Korea demanded the South raise wages, pay fees for land use and revise existing contracts for the Kaesong venture during inter-Korean government talks last week, the first official dialogue in more than a year. Seoul is gathering opinion from South Korean firms and plans to respond to the North Korean demand as early as this week.
Hyundai Asan, which has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune in the last year, has launched a new tourism project to make up some of its lost revenue. Unable to offer trips to Kaesong and Kumgangsan, they are still trying to capitalize on the mystery of the DPRK:
Hyundai Asan said its new programme includes one-day tours costing 46,000 won (34 dollars) per person to border areas at Paju and Yeoncheon, north of Seoul.
Two-day tours to the border area at Yanggu, 175 kilometres northeast of Seoul, and to Mount Sorak on the east coast, will cost 118,000 won.
“Along with trips to front-line fences, tourists will be allowed to see wildlife and other places which remained untouched for decades,” a Hyundai Asan official told AFP.
Visitors will not be allowed inside the DMZ itself.
Hyundai Asan said the new programme would help ease its financial woes, which began when a South Korean woman tourist was shot dead when she strayed into a military zone at Kumgang last July.
The Seoul government halted tours to Kumgang after the shooting, while Pyongyang barred the one-day tours to Kaesong city as relations worsened.
The company’s other major joint project, the joint industrial complex near Kaesong city, is also facing problems due to sour cross-border ties.
The communist North has expelled hundreds of South Korean staff and restricted access to the Seoul-funded complex.
On March 30 it detained a Hyundai Asan employee for allegedly criticising the North’s regime and trying to persuade a local woman worker to defect.
Read the full stories below:
Gov’t warns it can bar S. Koreans from visiting N. Korea
Yonhap
4/26/2009
Inter-Korean trade drops 30 percent in March during political tension
Yonhap
4/27/2009
South Korean firm to start tours along North Korea border
Channel News Asia
4/27/2009
This week is “North Korea Freedom Week” in DC, and there will be many North Korea-related events around town. Though I have no relationship with this program, I plan on attending two of the events which I have listed below. If you are interested in attending also, please RSVP.
Wednesday, April 29 (10:00am-12:00)
Panel Session Focusing on Survey of North Korean Refugees
Featuring: Marcus Noland, Ambassador Jhe Seong So, and former DPRK Colonel Choi Joo Hwal
Summaries, presentations, audio, and visual materials here.
Thursday, April 30 (6:30-8:30pm)
Crossing Over: A Dialogue with North Korean Refugees
Featuring: Kim Young-il, Refugee & Executive Director of PSCORE (People for Successful Corean Reunification); Han Young-jin: Refugee & Reporter at Radio Free Asia; and
Laura Elizabeth Pohl: Freelance photojournalist and former foreign correspondent in Seoul.
Host: Ana Jang and the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, GPPI IPD Track, GU Korean Student Society, PSCORE
Location: Georgetown University,
Carbarn Building, 4th floor student lounge,
3520 Prospect Street, N.W.
Especially for Georgetown community, but open to the public.
Contact: hj57@georgetown.edu
Andrei Lankov writes in Newsweek:
North Korea will never follow the Chinese path because its circumstances are profoundly different. The biggest factor is the existence of a rich and free South Korea across the border. Southerners share the same language and culture as the dirt-poor North, but their per capita income is at least 20 times higher—and at the moment, average North Koreans are ignorant of the gap. The regime’s self-imposed isolation is so draconian that even owning a tunable radio set is a crime. If North Korea started reforming, it would be flooded with information about South Korea’s prosperity. This would make North Koreans less fearful of the authorities and more likely to push for unification with their far richer cousins, just as the East Germans pushed to rejoin the West.
Knowing all this, North Korea’s rulers will do whatever they can to maintain control. Given the weakness of its Stalinist economy, this means coming up with new ways to squeeze aid from the outside world. In order to keep the money flowing—with as few conditions as possible—Kim is likely to continue engaging in risky brinkmanship and blackmail. To survive, Pyongyang has to be, or appear to be, dangerous and unpredictable.
But such tactics could easily lead to disaster. The only way to avoid this is to replace the regime.
That’s easier said than done: Military options are unthinkable. And sanctions won’t work either, since China and Russia are unlikely to cooperate fully. Even if Moscow and Beijing did go along, the only likely result would be a lot of dead farmers. North Korea’s great famine of 1996–99 demonstrated that the locals do not rebel when oppressed, even under terrible circumstances. North Koreans are terrified, disorganized and still largely unaware of any alternative to their misery.
But there’s a way to change that equation. The past 15 years have seen the spontaneous growth of grassroots markets in the North and partial disintegration of state controls. Rumors of South Korean prosperity have begun to spread, assisted by popular smuggled DVDs of South Korean movies. The world’s most perfect Stalinist regime is starting to disintegrate from below.
The best way to speed things up is for Washington and its allies to push for active engagement with the North in the form of development aid, scholarships for North Korean students and support for all sorts of activities that bring the world to North Korea or take North Koreans outside their cocoon. Such exchanges are often condemned as a way of appeasing dictators, but the experience of East Europe showed that an influx of uncensored information from the outside is deadly for a communist dictatorship.
Pyongyang understands the danger of such exchanges, but it needs money and technology badly enough that it might allow them nonetheless—so long as they fill its coffers and don’t look too dangerous. This is even more the case when exchanges ostensibly benefit members of the elite. For example, a scholarship program to study overseas would go mostly to students from top families. Yet this wouldn’t limit its impact: experience of the outside world will change these young people and turn some of them into importers of dangerous information. A similarly small step helped to unravel the Soviet Union: the first group of students allowed to study in the U.S., in 1957, numbered just four and were carefully selected. Yet two grew up to become leading reformers, and one of them—Alexander Yakovlev—is often credited as having been the real mastermind behind perestroika.
Read the full article here:
Newsweek
Andrei Lankov
4/18/2009
