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."

CNSnews

Amid Berlin Wall commemorations, activists rally for liberation of North Korea

November 9^th 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.

CNSnews

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.

North Korea's "abysmal" human rights record

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".

[Excerpt of a Guardian article]

Stats on North Korea, Land of the Dear Leader

-- North Korea is about half the size of Britain.

-- The population is about 23.9 million

-- In 2008 per capita income was $1,800

-- Life expectancy is 63 years

-- 37 per cent of children under 7 have growth problems

-- The armed forces include 1.17 million military personnel, 3,700 tanks, 420 warships and 60 submarines

-- There are three newspapers, one television station and one radio station to which all radios are automatically set.

Kim Jong-Il backed into his own corner

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."

Reuters

Kim Jong-il the strategist

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.

Reuters

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."

Satisfaction of North Koreans living in Seoul compared to South Korean counterparts

North Koreans who have escaped from their Stalinist state and are now fortunate enough to be living in South Korea are indeed treated differently than their South Korean cousins. For one, the salary paid to a North Korean in Seoul will likely be one third less than what a South Korean earns. Far more North Korean transplants live in poverty in South Korea.

On the other hand, according to a 2007 study by the Korea Peace Institute, the average monthly salary for a North Korean who has lived in South Korea for more than seven years has increased steadily, from $374 (in 2001) to $710 (2004) to $1047 (2007).

When the North Koreans were asked to grade the level of satisfaction they felt with their lives, based on the categories of physical conditions, mental state and social and physical environment, North Koreans attached a considerable higher rating to their quality of life than did South Koreans living in the same environment.

Out of a perfect score of 5, North Korean defectors graded their lives in South Korea at 3.43out of 5, on average higher than what South Koreans gave.

North Korean Youth Look South for Entertainment

Myung Chul-jin, a recently defected North Korean living in Seoul, recalls there were some good times in Pyongyang: evenings with friends when they watched smuggled South Korean soap operas and American films like Superman Returns and Titanic. "North Koreans love foreign dramas," says Myung, using an alias to protect his family living in the North. "Many people watch them in secret, even when the police have tried to stop it."

In recent years, bootlegged South Korean dramas have been flooding into its northern neighbor — part of a recent explosion across Asia in popularity of South Korean TV shows and music known as the "Korea Wave." The nation's films and dramas have become so widespread in across the country that the regime launched a crackdown this fall on North Korean university students, the movies' biggest audience, and smugglers at the Chinese border, charging some with promoting the ideology of the enemy state. "The government is terrified of the ideas North Koreans are getting about the outside world," Myung says. "The people are starting to ask, 'Why are we poor?' And they point to South Korea."

The state-run media in the North has long derided South Korea's "decadent foreign culture and ideals," and has banned nearly all South Korean, American and Japanese films in favor of 1960s Soviet and Chinese films rife with revolutionary ideas. Yet foreign films have always been available to the country's élites, having been smuggled in before the 1990s though never at the rate that happens now. Even Kim Jong Il, the country's dictator, is said to own a library of more than 20,000 foreign and North Korean films.

"I used to believe strongly what the government told us — that foreign films are crazy and violent. We used to be terrified of watching South Korean dramas," said one North Korean university student in Seoul, who remains sympathetic to the regime. "But I've opened my mind."

"There are lots of stories on that from the defectors," says Lee Jong Ju, deputy spokesperson of Seoul's Ministry of Unification. "They said they can see [South] Korean soap operas in North Korea, and then that could be one of the reasons they decided to go to South Korea," says Lee.

[TIME]

Military on the hotseat over South Korean defector to North Korea

Chosun Ilbo reports that the South Korean military is under a hail of criticism over a man's flight to North Korea on Monday through a stretch of border guarded by the 22nd Division in Goseong, Gangwon Province. This is the same area where an unidentified man defected to North Korea in September 1996.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff on Wednesday dispatched a team to find out if their soldiers are guilty of negligence.

If the man, identified as Kang Tong-rim, defected to North Korea through the military demarcation line, this means that South Korean patrols failed to find the breach for a whole day. "It's unheard-of for a breach in the fence to remain undetected for more than a day, since the fences are patrolled 24 hours a day," said one military officer.

Kang strolled past a checkpoint that keeps civilians from reaching the border area some 10 km from the military demarcation line, cut through the fence and entered the demilitarized zone, which is strewn with land mines. The military completely failed to detect or deter Kang from moving through the area.

Here’s a switch --S Korean defects to North Korea

A South Korean pig farmer has defected to North Korea after crossing the heavily fortified land border, the communist state’s official media reports.

Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) identified the man as Kang Tong-Rim, 30, and said that on Monday he crossed the eastern section of the Demilitarized Zone which bisects the peninsula.

Seoul did not confirm the rare South-North defection but a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff said troops had found signs of wire cuts in the eastern section of the fence.

“We believe this is a sign of an alleged defection.”

AFP

Why it's sane for Kim Jong-il to be mad

For those who see North Korean leader Kim Jong-il as a dangerous lunatic prepared to risk the annihilation of his regime by launching a devastating attack on his neighbors, there is no shortage of supporting evidence.

But for analysts and policymakers trying to gauge the chance of a catastrophic war, game theory offers a crucial insight. In Kim's position, it is perfectly sane to seem mad. And it would be a disaster for him if the world believed he was rational.

"No fool stays in power for years ... when there are so many generals, sons and wives waiting in the wings to launch a coup," says Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who specializes in political forecasting based on game theory, and who advised the U.S. Defense Department on Korea in 2004.

For years, Kim has veered unpredictably between belligerence and conciliation. Viewed in terms of game theory, this behavior is entirely rational. In fact, it is Kim's only viable strategy.

Reuters

North Korean defectors fail to assimilate in S. Korean society

Four hundred seventy North Korean refugees who arrived in South Korea aboard two chartered flights from Vietnam in July, 2004, five years ago, still struggle to adapt to their new home.

A survey found that most defectors are still wandering around and struggling to survive in the South. Their noticeable linguistic accent, cultural differences, and a public reluctant to embrace them were the main reasons preventing their assimilation.

Compounding the problem for the defectors was their family members still in the North or hiding in China. Many defectors said they sent their resettlement subsidies from South Korea to their families in North Korea or China. Many were sending all of the money they earned in the South to their families in the North.

Dong-A met six North Korean defectors in London who were granted political asylum there. They said they receive unemployment and childrearing subsidies and medical care, and have a better life in England than in South Korea.

In conducting the survey, Dong-A Ilbo sent questionnaires to the 470 defectors for three months, and conducted face-to-face, phone and written interviews to find out their occupations, income, housing situation and life satisfaction.

Yeom Yoo-shik, a sociology professor at Yonsei University, commented, “This is the first time so many North Korean defectors were selected randomly and surveyed extensively. We can learn what factors are important for North Koreans to adapt to South Korea. As such, the study will be a great reference for Seoul in setting subsidy policy.”

The North Korean anachronism

North Korea attempts to present itself as a socialist workers' paradise where the conundrums of good governance have been solved by the supernatural brilliance of Kim Jong Il and his late father and founder of the country, the "Great Leader", Kim Il Sung.

The contradiction of North Korea includes both the nuclear armed military dictatorship of the extravagant monument-studded capital Pyongyang and the rest of the country, unbuttressed by modern agricultural techniques that, after floods in the late 1990s, between one and three million died of hunger.

North Korea is a place of tension and anticipation. Fed on propaganda and lies, North Koreans are usually the last to learn what is happening behind the scenes in their country.

It remains what it has been for 15 years--an anachronism, bankrupt economically, politically and intellectually that, according to conventional theories, should have collapsed years ago under the weight of its own contradictions.

Soon 20,000 former North Korean refugees will be living in South Korea

Hanawon, the government-run institution that trains and helps defectors settle in South Korea, celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. Up until 1998, a year before Hanawon opened, a grand total of 947 North Koreans had arrived to South Korea.

This year alone, more than 3,000 North Koreans are expected to arrive. By next year there will be 20,000 former North Korean refugees living in South Korea.

But 58.4 percent of defectors who have settled in the South still consider themselves North Koreans. Only 6.3 percent think of themselves as South Koreans. This is according to a recent survey of North Korean defectors completed by the Organization for One Korea.

Over 7 years, the number of unemployed defectors fell from 57.5 percent (2000) to 32.1 percent (2007), according to the Korea Peace Institute. But those with work do not have stable jobs, day labor accounting for 42.6 percent, as compared with only 9.2 percent of South Koreans eking out a living from day labor.

“Kimjongilia”, a new film about North Korea

Human rights organizations say tens of thousands of North Koreans live in forced labor camps for political reeducation, where torture, starvation, and illness are commonplace. North Korean defectors say entire families are sent to the camps for tiny crimes such as humming a South Korean pop song.

Now, a new film is bringing the stories of North Koreans who have escaped such camps to the screen.

“Kimjongilia” aims to introduce a global audience to the stories of real North Koreans who were brutally punished in labor camps before escaping their country. In the film, a man says, "I was hung upside down for 14 hours and beaten." "We never knew when we'd get beaten. There was constant fear."

Director Nancy Heikin says she has wanted to make the film for years, to express her outrage at what she calls North Korea's "concentration camps." All of the North Korean defectors featured in “Kimjongilia” now live in South Korea. Most made a dangerous and illegal journey into China first. Their personal stories of sex trafficking, torture, and the death of loved ones weave a dark backdrop for North Korea's utopian self-imagery.

Cash pledged by Seoul for resettlement of more North Korean defectors

Seoul plans to spend 9.3 billion won ($7.9 million) next year on building new readjustment and education facilities for defectors from North Korea.

According to the Unification Ministry’s 2010 budget proposal, the government aims to use more than half of that sum to build the country’s second resettlement education center for incoming North Korean refugees. The present resettlement education center, Hanawon, located in Anseong, south of Seoul, is capable of accommodating 750.

The government also plans to establish a nationwide network of regional support “Hana Centers,” designed to help improve the welfare of the North Koreans resettling in the South. The government plans to establish more centers in southern regions next year and up to 16 support centers nationwide by 2011.

[JoongAng Daily]

9 North Korean refugees in Hanoi leave for Seoul

After nearly a month at the Danish embassy in Hanoi, nine North Korean asylum-seekers flew out of Vietnam yesterday minutes before the South Korean president arrived for a state visit. They were to stop in Singapore before continuing to Seoul, said the source who declined to be named.

The group had spent almost four weeks living in a garage and an attached blue tent on the embassy compound. They included a doctor and his wife, a mother and her 13-year-old daughter, and a woman who had worked as a “virtual slave” in a Chinese karaoke club, said the activist group.

North Korean refugees flee the impoverished and isolated North on an “underground railroad” of illegal border crossings and safe houses that usually leads via China to Mongolia or Southeast Asia. The nine entered the Danish compound on September 24 hoping to reach South Korea, Kim Sang-Hun, an activist who said his group helped them reach the embassy, said earlier. They are the latest in a series of North Korean escapees who have sought asylum at various Hanoi embassies in recent years.

S.Korea considers humanitarian aid to North Korea via NGOs

South Korea is reportedly planning to provide North Korea with some US$1 million worth of aid through non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

According to government sources, the South Korean administration will make an official decision regarding the aid by the end of this week.

The sources emphasized that aid delivered through the inter-Korean cooperation fund should be viewed separately from direct humanitarian assistance that Pyongyang requested during inter-Korean Red Cross talks last week

U.S. official says Kim Jong-il invites Lee to summit

Chosun Ilbo reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has invited President Lee Myung-bak for a summit, citing a senior official with the U.S. Defense Department.

The official spoke to a press briefing for journalists accompanying U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on his way to Asian security talks and a NATO conference. He did not say when Kim invited Lee and what South Korea's reaction was, but publicly announcing a delicate matter between two third countries would still appear to be unusual in international protocol.

In a meeting with Lee after attending the funeral of former President Kim Dae-jung in late August, a North Korean delegation also expressed the North's intention to improve inter-Korean relations and delivered a message from Kim Jong-il citing a possible summit, the presidential official added.

Lee Dong-kwan, the senior presidential secretary for public relations, said, "President Lee has reiterated several times that he will meet chairman Kim any time for the sake of peace on the Korean Peninsula and for the future of the nation. But he has stressed that he opposes a meeting for meeting's sake and especially that any meeting would be meaningless if it is insincere and politically or tactically motivated."

S. Korean lawmaker highlights North Korean political prisoners

North Korea is estimated to be holding some 154,000 political prisoners in six large camps across the country, a South Korean lawmaker said Saturday.

Yoon Sang-hyun, a lawmaker with the ruling Grand National Party, stated that North Korean political prisoners are sent to the camps without trial and are condemned to life in prison in five of them, despite the North’s new constitution calling for respecting human rights.

Prisoners are forced to toil for more than 10 hours a day, are fed a poor diet and do not receive medical aid. They are also banned from communicating with their families while in prison, Yoon said in the statement.

Yoon’s aide said his office got the figures and other information on prison camps from the South Korean government as part of ongoing annual parliamentary inspections of the government ministries and agencies. He did not say how the South Korean government obtained the information.

In April, the North revised its constitution to say the state "respects and protects" human rights, according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles North Korean relations. Activists, however, say the North’s abuses on its citizens remain unchanged.

North Korea Official getsU.S. Visa to talk with scholars

The United States said on Friday it would allow a senior North Korean official to visit this month, a move analysts said could be a first step toward talks between the two on ending Pyongyang's nuclear programs.

The State Department said it had decided to grant a visa to Ri Gun, North Korea's No. 2 official at multilateral talks on its nuclear programs, to attend meetings in New York and San Diego with private scholars and experts who study North Korea.

There is a high probability U.S. diplomat Sung Kim would meet informally with Ri on his trip.

The United States hopes a bilateral dialogue may bring North Korea, which carried out its second nuclear test in May, back to wider talks on abandoning its nuclear programs.

North Korean refugees in Vietnam "could leave Danish mission in days"

A group of North Korean asylum seekers who have been living at the Danish embassy in Hanoi for three weeks could leave the compound within days, a Vietnamese diplomatic source said yesterday.

“If (there’s) no change, they could leave the embassy in one week,” said the source, who asked not to be named.

South Korea’s foreign ministry declined to comment when asked about such a scenario, which could coincide with an official visit to Vietnam by South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak, due from Tuesday to Thursday next week.

The nine North Korean refugees entered the embassy compound on September 24.

Franklin Graham in North Korea

The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, has arrived in North Korea bearing a gift for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Graham handed the present, which was not identified, to a high-ranking official Wednesday to give to Kim, the Korean Central News Agency reported.

"I believe it is important to make visits like this to help improve relations and to have a better understanding with each other," Graham said, according to his Samaritan's Purse Web site.

The group said Graham will visit a hospital and also will oversee the delivery of $190,000 in equipment to outfit a dental school that can train up to 70 dentists per year.

KCNA reported that Graham said he hoped he could act as a bridge for better relations between the United States and North Korea.

What inter-Korean family reunions mean for North Koreans

In North Korea, it is a great privilege to take part in reunions with family members in South Korea, and families are carefully vetted for ideological soundness before they can be considered.

One defector who worked for the North Korean intelligence apparatus said the family reunions are overseen by the Unification Bureau of the Workers' Party, which receives applications from families seeking to participate. The State Security Department and Ministry of Public Security then conduct background searches of individual members.

North Koreans who are successful or have no record of mistreatment by the regime are considered for their propaganda potential, as they are more likely to praise the leadership when they meet their family from the South. Once selected, North Koreans then go through between one and three months of ideological education at the Unification Bureau.

Chosun Ilbo

North Korean refugees suffer discrimination and illness

Ko Kyung-bin calls on South Koreans to view North Korean refugees not merely as victims but also consider their bravery in risking their lives to escape the Stalinist country.

Ko Kyung-bin is the director of Hanawon, the government-run institution for North Korean refugees in Seoul.

Typically, common ailments among North Koreans now living in the South are dental disease and tuberculosis. In fact, half of the organization's budget is spent on dental work. Ko says they require false teeth because they have no molars due to malnutrition.

And only 45 percent of North Korean refugees find jobs after leaving Hanawon, some 20 percent requiring psychological treatment after leaving the institution.

What does North Korea seek in all this?