Mobile Phones in the North?

Apparently so. From Daily NK:

Changchun, China -- The number of mobile phone users within Pyongyang has been increasing rapidly since the service was launched last December, with affluent citizens and even some students using them.

A source from Pyongyang said in an interview with Daily NK on the 17th, “Demand for mobile phones has been increasing. Almost 30 percent of Pyongyang citizens seem to be using them. Only cadres in the Central Committee of the Party and foreigners cannot.”

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People may only use phones in their own name, and any impropriety is investigated by the National Security Agency. Additionally, one cannot use two phones simultaneously.

“The authorities seem to be listening in to the mobile phones as well,” the source said. “There was a case last month where a trader dealing with antiques using his mobile phone was uncovered by the NSA,” the source said.

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The price of a mobile phone is around 120 dollars, but just 90 dollars when bought by a group. The charge for a phone is fixed at 3,000 North Korean won a month for eight hours of talk time. If that time is exceeded, 15 Euros is levied in extra charges.

“The usage of mobile phones is only currently for Pyongyang citizens, and although they can call Sariwon in North Hwanghae Province the call quality is not so good. Therefore, people use them only within Pyongyang.”

Full story here.

DPRK to Reopen Border with South

Looks like the North will allow some reunions of families separated by the border. They will also allow tour groups to visit certain parts of the DRPK. From NYT:

The conciliatory move, coming just after the high-profile releases of two American journalists and a South Korean worker detained by the North, seemed likely to ease the growing anxiety on the Korean peninsula.

...

But the North, in the announcement Monday by its official news agency, also warned the United States and South Korea about their joint military exercises, which the North said were “obviously maneuvers for a war of aggression.” It said an “annihilating” retaliation could be one consequence. Still, that kind of bellicose language is almost standard from the North and was eclipsed by its outreach about the border and tourism.

Analysts have said North Korea is eager to re-establish contacts with Washington and Seoul in hopes of undermining the United Nations’ sanctions over its nuclear program.

The North said it would allow reunions of Korean families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War, with visits taking place at Mount Kumgang, or Diamond Mountain, during the three-day Harvest Moon Festival, when Koreans traditionally visit their hometowns. This year the festival begins Oct. 3.

Regular visits to Mount Kumgang on North Korea’s eastern coast will start “as soon as possible,” the official North Korean news agency reported, as well as visits to the ancient border town of Kaesong.

Programs allowing tour groups — predominantly South Koreans — to visit the North were expanded in October 2007 but were stopped last year when a South Korean tourist at Kumgang who apparently entered a restricted zone was fatally shot by a North Korean guard.

Full story here.

DPRK Frees Auto Worker

The North has released a South Korean prisoner held since March. Friom the AP:

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea freed a South Korean worker Thursday it had detained for months for allegedly denouncing its political system — an apparent goodwill gesture toward Seoul and Washington amid the standoff over the regime's nuclear weapons program.

Last week, the North released jailed American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, helping ease months of tensions stoked by the country's recent atomic and long-range rocket tests.

On Thursday, Pyongyang deported Yoo Seong-jin, a 44-year-old technician who worked at a joint industrial park in the North, where about 110 South Korean-run factories employ about 40,000 North Korean workers.

Yoo has been held for allegedly denouncing the North's government and attempting to persuade a North Korean worker to defect.

"I'm happy that I returned safely," Yoo told reporters in a brief comment after arriving at a South Korean immigration control center near the border.

Hyundai Group Chairwoman Hyun Jung-eun has been in the North for the past few days, and she may have negotiated the release of Yoo, who is an employee for Hyundai's North Korean business arm, Hyundai Asan.

Full story here.

Kang Chol-Hwan Weighs In...

Kang Chol-Hwan is a North Korean refugee who has become a South Korean journalist. His chilling memoir of growing up in the Yodok prison camp, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, is one of the best books I've read on North Korea thus far.

Everything he writes is worth reading, including his new column in The Chosun Ilbo, in which he responds to Clinton's visit to Pyongyang to free Ling and Lee.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's surprise visit to North Korea to win the release of two American journalists went according to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's script. The North used the capture of the two reporters to its utmost advantage, the hostages providing it with an ideal opportunity to lure an eminent American onto its soil just when it became subject to tighter sanctions over its nuclear tests and missile launches from the international community and the U.S. in particular. It was a lucky break of the first order.

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In the past half century, the North has essentially consolidated itself by the sole expedient of anti-Americanism, defining the U.S. as a longstanding enemy. According to North Korean propaganda, America is the great imperial power, desperate to destroy the last bastion of socialism. North Korea alone holds out against it now that the Soviet Union has fallen and China has deserted the cause.



Few North Koreans believe the propaganda any longer. Many among the North Korean privileged classes are beginning to think it is not China but North Korea which has deserted socialism, and some of them question the wisdom of dealing with the U.S. alone over the nuclear issue when they feel it could better be resolved with China. Hwang Jang-yeop, a former Secretary of the North Korean Workers' Party who defected to the South, recalls, "I often heard Kim Jong-il slander the Chinese leadership, but never heard him criticize the United States."



...

A sort of farce is being played out whereby the Kim regime, whose survival depends on China, is desperate to win recognition from the U.S. Why does North Korea insist on direct negotiations with Washington while distancing itself from its ally China, which holds all the economic and military keys? The answer lies in the threat called reform and opening.


The essence of all North Korean problems including nuclear, missile and human rights issues, is the fixation on maintaining the current dictatorship. Expanding trade between South Korea and China as well as China's rapid economic development represent the biggest threats to Kim Jong-il, who, accordingly, believes that nuclear armament is the only way to defend himself. North Korea's groveling reception of Bill Clinton and the release of detained journalists even as a South Korean remains locked up incommunicado at the joint Kaesong Industrial Complex, can be seen not as a diplomatic victory but as the last desperate effort to maintain the regime through hostage taking.

Full story here.

Kissinger on North Korea

Henry Kissinger offers his thoughts on Clinton's visit and its ramifications. From Sunday's NYT (emphasis added):

Context matters. It is less than six months since Pyongyang conducted a nuclear test and resumed the production of weapons-grade plutonium in violation of an agreement signed at the six-power conference in Beijing in February 2007. North Korea refused a visit by the new U.S. envoy charged with discussing its proliferation efforts. Pyongyang has rejected various U.N. Security Council resolutions to desist from these activities and to return to the six-party talks. A visit by a former president, who is married to the secretary of state, will enable Kim Jong-il to convey to North Korea, and perhaps to other countries, that his country is being accepted into the international community — the precise opposite of what the U.S. secretary of state has defined as the goal of U.S. policy until Pyongyang abandons its nuclear weapons program.

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The root cause of our decade-old controversy with Pyongyang is that there is no middle ground between North Korea being a nuclear weapons state and a non-nuclear weapons state. At the end of a negotiation, North Korea will either destroy its nuclear arsenal, or it will become a de facto nuclear state. So far, it has used the negotiating forums available to it in a skillful campaign of procrastination, alternating leaps in technological progress with negotiating phases to consolidate it.

We seem to be approaching such a consolidating phase now. North Korea may return to its well-established tactic of diverting us with the prospect of imminent breakthroughs. This is exactly what happened after the last Korean nuclear weapons test in 2006. Pyongyang undoubtedly will continue to seek to achieve de facto acceptance as a nuclear weapons state by endlessly protracted diplomacy. The benign atmosphere by which it culminated its latest blackmail must not tempt us or our partners into bypaths that confuse atmosphere with substance. Any outcome other than the elimination of the North Korean nuclear military capability in a fixed time period is a blow to non-proliferation prospects worldwide and to peace and stability globally.

Full story here.

Refugees and Human Trafficking

A good article from VOA via Han Voice. Key graphs:

Bang Mi Sun left North Korea and crossed illegally into China in 2002. Countless other North Korean women have done the same since the mid 1990s. Hunger and severe shortages of necessities such as medicine and heating fuel have driven them from home.

She says after she and her two children crossed the Tumen River, a Chinese family welcomed them. The son said Bang should earn money to feed her children. She says she thought he was offering her a job.

But instead of a job, the Chinese family arranged for human traffickers to separate Bang from her children and sell her into marriage to a Chinese farmer.

She says her Chinese husband was 15 years older, and had a crippled leg. From that point on, she says, she was his slave. If she did not obey his orders, he beat her, and often locked her in a storage shed for the full day.

Eventually, she made it to South Korea, but human rights activists say Bang's story is typical of tens of thousands of other North Korean women who flee poverty and repression at home.

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Lee says most of the men who buy the women are either physically or mentally disabled, and incapable of earning a living.

"The rural family or rural husband actually falls into debt because they had to pay a lot of money to buy this woman. So they are again in the poverty trap, which they really wanted to get out of with North Korea," noted Lee.

Some of the women flee - but most of them, says Lee, make do with their new lives - knowing at least that they will not starve.

"But the thing is, these women are young - in their 20's, 30's - and they become pregnant pretty soon. And they kind of give up the idea of running away. Things change - and they try to accept their fate," said Lee.

There are, by some estimates, as many as 50,000 North Korean women in China. Those women are believed to have had up to 20,000 children.

Full story here.

North Koreans Not So Fond of Kim Jong-Un?

Some anecdotal evidence provided by Jiro Ishimaru via The Daily NK:

In mid-June, I visited Jilin in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, where I met with two North Korean men and seven women who had crossed the border and were staying in China on a temporary basis.

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In the beginning, just after it leaked out, the interviewees did not know about the succession, but later they heard the story from military acquaintances. It is just a matter of time before rumors spread beyond the military like this.

Once the rumor started circulating, there were some aggressive reactions from among the people. Some said, “The small one (a derogatory way of saying Kim Jong Il) is trying to make a novice in his 20s his successor,” while others say, “The General (Kim Jong Il) is almost dying, and if his son is the next general, we won’t be able to follow orders anymore.”

This is, the people respect Kim Jong Il because of his father’s achievements, but there is no reason to respect Jong Woon.

An interviewee from North Hamkyung Province was sure, “If a war begins, there is no one who would fight for Jong Woon.”

These North Korean people agreed with the idea that the fifteen years since Kim Il Sung’s death have been years of failure. This is because after going through the great famine of the 1990s, still the situation has not been reformed at all.

North Korean people generally believe that Kim Jong Woon’s succession means the period of failure will continue.

Full story here.

Kristof: North Korean Policy Needs Less Carrot, More Stick

In his column in today's NYT, Nicholas Kristof changes course. Key graphs:

There are new indications that North Korea may be transferring nuclear weapons technology to Myanmar, the dictatorship also known as Burma, and that it earlier supplied a reactor to Syria. For many years, based on five visits to North Korea and its border areas, I’ve argued for an “engagement” approach toward Pyongyang, but now I’ve reluctantly concluded that we need more sticks.

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There are no good options here, and a grass-roots revolution is almost impossible. North Koreans, even those in China who despise the regime, overwhelmingly agree that most ordinary North Koreans swallow the propaganda. Indeed, Kim Jong-il’s approval rating in his country may well be higher than President Obama’s is in the United States.

Our best bet will be to continue to support negotiations, including a back channel that can focus on substance instead of protocol, as well as economic and cultural exchanges — but backed up by sticks. The Obama administration is now working with allies to reimpose economic and financial sanctions that a few years ago were very successful in squeezing the North Korean regime. China is surprisingly cooperative, even quietly intercepting several shipments of supplies useful for W.M.D. programs.

Where we have intelligence that North Korean ships are transferring nuclear materials or technology to a country like Myanmar or Iran, we should go further and board those vessels. That’s an extreme step, but the nightmare would be if Iran simply decided to save time and buy a nuclear weapon or two from North Korea. We can’t allow that to happen.

Full story here.

Bubba Got 'Em Out

Lee and Ling left North Korea with President Clinton. Full story here, and pretty much anywhere else you look for it.

Bill Clinton and Kim Jong-Il in North Korea Tuesday

(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

DPRK rolls out Kim Jong-Un (Jong Woon) Propaganda

Looks like it's official: Kim Jong Un (Woon) will succeed Kim Jong-Il.

From The Daily NK:

Shenyang, China -- A source from North Korea reported on Monday that the authorities gave a public propaganda lecture on July 20 to passengers preparing to board the international train from Pyongyang to Beijing. The short lecture extolled the virtues of Kim Jong Woon and announced him as the successor to Kim Jong Il.

The source said, “Around 9:20 A.M. in the waiting room at Pyongyang Station, a female member of a propaganda unit came and announced that, in essence, Captain Kim Jong Woon is a youthful captain who will be able to lead the strong and prosperous state. He was given credit for the successful nuclear test, and it was emphasized that no imperial state can look down on Captain Kim Jong Woon.”

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According to the source, the propaganda slogan was “Let’s bring glory to the fatherland, which the Great Leader Kim Il Sung recovered, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il developed, and Youthful Captain Kim Jong Woon will lead to a bright future.”

The lecturer continued, “We will be under the guidance of Kim Jong Woon as we construct the strong and prosperous state,” indicating the strong likelihood that the succession may take place in advance of 2012, when the strong and prosperous state is due to come to fruition.

Full story here.

CNN: Clinton (Bill) to travel to DPRK

Former President Bill Clinton will travel to North Korea to negotiate the release of American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. CNN has the tip from "a source with detailed knowledge of the former president's movements."

I'll have more on this as it plays out. Full story here.

UPDATE: Look's like he's already on his way. Here's the top of the NYT story.

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton was headed to North Korea to negotiate the release of two American television journalists who were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korean territory, a news agency reported early Tuesday morning in South Korea.

Mr. Clinton was on his way to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, according to the Yonhap news agency, citing an unidentified source familiar with the situation. The White House declined to comment on Monday night.