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Re: N.Korea builds 'shrine' to leader's likely successor
Re: N.Korea builds 'shrine' to leader's likely successor
Yonhap News Agency February 14, 2014 3:45pm
Ex-U.S. envoy urges N. Korea to free detained American 'soon'
BEIJING, Feb. 14 (Yonhap) -- A former U.S. ambassador to South Korea said Friday he expressed "regret" to North Korea over its cancellation of a U.S. envoy's visit regarding jailed American Kenneth Bae and urged the North to release Bae "soon."
"When we heard that he was not going to be released, I expressed regret and said that I hope he would be released soon," Donald Gregg told reporters upon his arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport after wrapping up a five-day visit to North Korea.
Gregg, who heads a U.S. civic group and served as the U.S. ambassador to South Korea from 1989-1993, said the issue of Kenneth Bae was not part of his agenda during this week's trip to Pyongyang.
Gregg visited Pyongyang a day after the U.S. announced that North Korea had rescinded an invitation for Ambassador Robert King to visit Pyongyang to seek the release of the imprisoned U.S. citizen.
Bae, 45, has been detained in North Korea for more than a year after being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor on charges of attempting to overthrow the regime.
"That was not why we went. That was not part of our agenda," Gregg replied, when asked whether his visit was aimed at seeking the release of Bae.
However, Gregg said he held "very interesting" talks with North Korean officials.
"We had three good meetings," Gregg said, describing the mood as "friendly." He didn't elaborate further.
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Kim Jong-un 'Successfully Tightens Grip'
chosun.com Feb. 14, 2014 12:27 KST
U.S. intelligence services believe that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has succeeded in tightening his grip on power through a generational shift in the party and the military.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that two years after he took power Kim has further consolidated its position as sole leader and final decision maker.
He has tightened controls and ensured loyalty through personnel reshuffles and purges, Clapper said.
In this photo published by the official Rodong Sinmun daily on Wednesday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspects a gun factory and a firing range.
Defense Intelligence Agency Director Army Michael Flynn echoed the assessment. Flynn said the recent execution of Kim's uncle, Jang Song-taek was a strong message that he is "not willing to tolerate defiance in any form."
The regime is seeking to improve the economy and reduce external threats, Flynn added.
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U.N. report will conclude North Korea has committed crimes against humanity
Kns/AFP/Getty Images - This undated picture released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on Feb. 11, 2014 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un applauding during an agriculture conference in an undisclosed location in North Korea.
By Chico Harlan, Published: February 15
SEOUL — A yearlong United Nations investigation is set to conclude that North Korea has committed crimes against humanity, according to a leaked outline of the report, in the most authoritative indictment to date of abuses carried out by Pyongyang’s leaders.
The U.N. panel will also recommend that the North’s crimes be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, according to The Associated Press, which obtained an outline of the findings. The report of the three-member Commission of Inquiry will be released Monday.
By establishing that panel, the U.N. has sought to take aim at one of its most distressing challenges, a nation whose abuses are carried out by an entrenched family-run government that faces almost no threat of international intervention.
Activists and human rights lawyers say the report, at minimum, will bring broader global awareness about the North’s city-sized gulags and systematic abductions of foreigners. But they also say that traditional ally China, which has a permanent seat on the U.N. National Security Council, could block any referral of North Korea’s case to the ICC.
“It is exciting but also risky that the Commission appears to have requested the Security Council refer the situation in [North Korea] to the International Criminal Court,” Jared Genser, an international human rights lawyer and an expert on North Korean abuses, said in an e-mail. “There is no doubt that legally such a referral would be highly justified and appropriate. But it is also bound to infuriate China.”
The ICC describes crimes against humanity as any widespread or systematic attack — using extermination, torture or rape, for instance — carried out against civilians.
Within the last century, the North’s abuses stand apart not necessarily because of their viciousness, but because of their duration. Rwanda’s genocide lasted less than a year, Cambodia’s lasted about four, and Nazi Germany was toppled after more than a decade. But North Korean founder Kim Il Sung set up the camps in the 1950s, and they’ve since been used as a way to purge real and imagined political enemies, as well as their children and parents.
The North holds an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners in its camps, which are sealed off in mountainous areas of the countryside and have been documented primarily through satellite imagery and testimony from survivors.
“What you have in North Korea is a stable state system where they’ve had these terrible labor camps and they’re going on for 60 years,” said David Hawk, a researcher who has been at the forefront of documenting the gulags. “Even Stalin’s camps didn’t last that long.”
Last year Navi Pillay, the U.N. human rights chief, said that an investigation into North Korea was “long overdue,” in part because there had been no sign of improvement under third-generation leader Kim Jong Un. North Korea denies committing violations and has repeatedly failed to cooperate with the U.N.
The commission, headed by retired Australian judge Michael Kirby, conducted interviews with more than 80 victims and other witnesses in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington. The panel members were also aided by about a dozen staffers and researchers — a major personnel shift for the U.N., which previously had a single appointed volunteer dedicated to North Korean human rights.
In Seoul, the panel members heard from prison camp escapees, torture victims, and children whose parents had been abducted by North Korean agents. They also conducted closed interviews with victims, including Kim Hye-sook, who spent 28 years in Camp 18, which at the time was one of the North’s largest gulags.
Kim arrived there when she was 13, imprisoned because her grandfather had allegedly fled to South Korea. Kim, who has also told her story publicly, survived at the camp on wild herbs, grass and corn powder. While at the camp she went to school, married and worked in a mine. Her husband and brother died in mining accidents. Kim developed a pulmonary tumor from inhaling dust during her 16- or 18-hour work shifts. Once a week, prisoners were forced to memorize tropes about North Korean ideology.
When prisoners came to those ideology sessions, Kim said, security personnel would command the prisoners to get on their knees and open their mouths. Guards would then spit inside. If the prisoners didn’t swallow, they would be savagely beaten.
Reached Saturday, Kim called the commission’s conclusion “very natural.”
“I agree with their findings,” Kim said, “but I don’t expect changes to come any time soon.”
Yoonjung Seo contributed to this report.
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Boy Kim never wants to adopt the economics of the West or even China.
Pyongyang envoy in Mongolia gets into alcohol-related car accident
Published : 2014-02-16 19:43
Updated : 2014-02-16 19:43
By Philip Iglauer (ephilip2011@heraldcorp)
The North Korean Ambassador to Mongolia Ri Chol-gwang was involved in an alcohol-related car accident over the Lunar New Year holiday in Mongolia.
On Feb. 1 at approximately 3:00 a.m., the second day of Lunar New Year celebrations in Mongolia’s capital city of Ulan Bator, Ri and another unidentified North Korean diplomat were in a serious car accident that authorities suspect was alcohol-related, according to a report by a Mongolia-based news group.
The driver is suspected to have been inebriated at the time of the accident, but an investigation by traffic police is underway, according to a media report. It was not clear from the report whether another vehicle was also involved.
The injuries suffered by the North Korean diplomats were so serious that emergency medical personnel on the scene transported them to the National Center for Trauma in Ulan Bator.
Ri suffered serious injuries to his foot and chest and the unnamed diplomat broke his hip bone.
Mongolia established diplomatic ties with North Korea in October 1948, the second nation after the Soviet Union to recognize the communist North.
In October 2013, Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj visited North Korea, but did not meet leader Kim Jong-un.
not as bad as Kim's offspring partying in Singapore and Malaysia.
North Korea prison camp survivor Shin Dong-hyuk awaits UN report with scepticism
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 16 February, 2014, 8:57pm
UPDATED : Sunday, 16 February, 2014, 8:57pm
Reuters in Seoul
North Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk, who has given the UN panel harrowing accounts of his life and escape from a prison camp. Photo: Reuters
After a year of investigation, the United Nations is set to release a detailed report on human rights violations in North Korea that could pave the way for criminal prosecution in an international court.
But defectors from the country who have provided first-hand testimony of atrocities are deeply sceptical the report, to be issued on Monday, will have any effect on the regime in Pyongyang.
The UN Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea was set up last March to begin building a case for possible criminal prosecution.
Michael Kirby, who chairs the independent inquiry, said after preliminary findings last year that inmates in North Korea’s prison camps suffered “unspeakable atrocities”, comparable with Nazi abuses uncovered after the second world war
North Korean soldiers salute. The United Nations is set to release a detailed report on human rights violations in North Korea. Photo: AP
“The entire body of evidence gathered so far points to what appear to be large-scale patterns of systematic and gross human rights violations,” Kirby, a former justice of Australia’s top court, told the UN General Assembly’s human rights committee last October, adding that Pyongyang had refused to cooperate with the inquiry.
But any attempt to follow up the final report with prosecution will most likely be blocked by China. North Korea itself labels any attack on its human rights record as a US-led conspiracy.
The preliminary report did not say what kind of prosecution might be considered. North Korea is not a member of the International Criminal Court, but the UN Security Council can ask the Hague-based court to investigate alleged abuses by non-signatories.
China, the North’s major ally and main benefactor, stands ready to veto any attempt to mobilise the Security Council to open an investigation against Pyongyang.
“In some respects I have been disappointed with the United Nations, although the UN is trying to resolve the issue” said Shin Dong-hyuk, a North Korean defector who has given the UN panel harrowing accounts of his life and escape from a prison camp. As a 13-year-old, he informed a prison guard of a plot by his mother and brother to escape and both were executed, according to a book on his life called Escape from Camp 14.
“The Human Rights Council, the biggest organisation in the UN, has not solved any problems,” Shin said in an interview in Seoul ahead of the report’s release.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un shows no signs of changing the iron-fisted rule of his predecessors. Photo: Reuters
More than 200,000 people are believed to be held in North Korean prison camps, according to independent estimates.
The UN panel has worked to bring new attention to the allegations of horror at North Korea’s gulags with evidence and testimony from exiles, including camp survivors, in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington but has failed to gain access to North Korea.
Shin said China continues to use North Korea as a tool to keep US influence in the region under control.
“So far China has neglected North Korea’s human rights issue and supported its dictatorship,” he said.
WON’T BAT AN EYELID
After more than two years in power, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un shows no signs of changing the iron-fisted rule of his predecessors, forging ahead with a reign of terror and ordering the execution of his powerful uncle following a brutal public purge.
“North Korea won’t bat an eyelid,” said Hwang Jae-ok, vice president of the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul, who has extensively studied Pyongyang’s human rights record. “It has built up a strong tolerance to sanctions and pressure.”
The North has been under gradually tougher international and US sanctions since its first nuclear test in 2006.
The sanctions have not stopped Kim, believed to be in his early 30s, from stepping up the nuclear and missile programmes launched by his father and accomplishing what experts have said were notable successes that have turned the clock back on years of disarmament efforts led by Washington.
Human rights activists hope the panel’s report work and the global attention it generates will seep back across North Korea.
But Baek Kyung-yoon, a North Korean female army captain who fled to the South in 2000, said her former compatriots are unlikely to have the luxury of pondering about human rights or anticipating improvement.
“Loyalty (to the regime) is everything and it’s nonsense to discuss human rights there,” Baek said on Wednesday, ahead of the premiere of The Apostle: He Was Anointed By God. The Korean-language film is based on her experience of ordering the torture of a man who possessed a few pages from the Bible.
A US Christian missionary, Kenneth Bae, was sentenced last year to 15 years of hard labour after being convicted of state subversion. Pyongyang has abruptly rescinded a visit by a US special envoy to seek Bae’s release for a second time.
Religious persecution is one of 11 areas of inquiry by the UN panel, which also include food deprivation, torture, executions and abductions.
Despite his frustration with the lack of visible progress, Shin, who had a finger chopped off with a butcher knife by prison guards as a punishment, still hopes the United Nations can bring change in North Korea.
“Personally the COI (Commission of Inquiry) is my last remaining hope. Even if there is little chance for change, I am betting everything I have.”
Re: Kim Jong-il: the life and times of the leader of North Korea
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