The week that was: Five North Korea articles you don't want to miss
To ensure you never miss out on the best NK News content, we highlight the top five most-read features and interviews of the week |
Is Kim Jong Un’s plan working? - Expert Survey
By Ha-young Choi As has been said many, many times, Kim Jong Un is young, with little political experience prior to his father’s death. His actions, whether raising tensions after South Korea inaugurated President Park Geun-hye in early 2013, to purging his uncle later that year, are consistently portrayed as meant to solidify his rule. It’s not asked often enough, however, whether his gambit is working.
NK News surveyed a number of South Korean observers to ask that question. Most of those surveyed suggested that Kim’s domestic solidification process is not over, and he will not show much of an interest in inter-Korean ties until that process is over. Though South Korea’s president regularly comes in for criticism for failing to break the impasse, the experts suggested until the process is over, Kim’s priorities will remain on economic growth and domestic security – both from domestic challenges, and through nuclear deterrence.
In part 23 of a major new NK News expert interview series, established and rising Pyongyang watchers from the Republic of Korea outlined their thoughts on the state of inter-Korean relations in 2015.
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Can we expect an anti-unification political fringe to emerge in S. Korea?
By Ha-young Choi
As young South Koreans grow skeptical of unification’s promises, is there the chance of such a movement coming to power?
A panel of experts told NK News that, as the quest for unification has been an overarching part of Korean identity for so long – it’s even enshrined in South Korea’s constitution – an anti-unification party is not all that likely. And if were to come to power, and the desire to unify no longer underpinned inter-Korean relations, North Korea’s reaction would also change – and not for the better.
In part 22 of a major new NK News expert interview series, established and rising Pyongyang watchers from the Republic of Korea outlined their thoughts on the prospects anti-unification sentiment emerging in the South.
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North Korea: Stuck in the past or poised for the future?
By Felix Abt 2015 has been a record year for the publication of books about North Korea. Many of these deal with the horrific crisis years of the ’90s, characterized by mass famine, poverty and oppression. North Korea is portrayed as a country stuck in the past; laboring under brutal repression, poverty and hunger.
North Korean political activists also claim that North Korea’s government still rigidly and violently suppresses all foreign ideas and information, saying citizens found watching foreign films are summarily executed and their close family members shamed and demoted in the social hierarchy. Vociferous defectors like Jang Jin-Sung categorically state that North Korea cannot be reformed and assert that change can only emerge bottom up, but never top down.
Yeonmi Park, another famous defector and author, talked about an ongoing “gulag with dead bodies floating in North Korea’s rivers and piling up in the streets.” If these horrific depictions are accepted as truly representative of contemporary North Korea, it would seem there is no possible alternative to systematically isolating it and imposing strangulating sanctions until it collapses.
Click here for the full article at NK News |
Who really speaks for North Korea’s abduction victims?
By Ji-young Song Among the issues raised by the 2014 report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry (UN COI) on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was the kidnapping of foreign nationals by North Korean spies under the direct order of Kim Jong Il, father of current leader Kim Jong Un.
The 2014 COI report found that since 1950, the DPRK government has systematically kidnapped nationals from South Korea, Japan, China, Thailand, Europe and the Middle East. Pyongyang forces them to stay in North Korea, where the commission found that gross human rights violations had taken place – including public executions, enslavement, torture, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence. After the release of the UN COI report, North Korea agreed in May 2014 to launch a new probe into the abductions.
In exchange, Japan agreed to ease some unilateral sanctions on North Korea, though it continues to enforce sanctions backed by the UN over North Korea’s nuclear and long-range missile programs. The Japanese delegation, led by Junichi Ihara, head of the Asia and Oceania affairs bureau at Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, met with his North Korean counterpart, Song Il Ho in October 2014 as progress in the DPRK investigation had been very slow.
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For Chinese students learning North Korean, Pyongyang is far away
By Our Investigative Reporter Chinese students of Korean at Yanbian University are enrolled on a major called ‘North Korean language’ and receive extensive instruction in socialism. But few have chosen degrees in Korean out of any interest in the subject, which they in fact learn from Chinese Korean teachers and textbooks preferring the Southern variety of the language.
As a result the DPRK, only 20 miles away, could not be further from their minds. “Wait a minute everyone,” shouted newly-appointed banzhang, or class monitor, Jianye as the Korean grammar lesson ended and Group 14 stood up to leave with a bone-jarring scraping of chairs.
“There’s an essay from that class when the teacher didn’t show up,” he says, fumbling through a dog-eared bundle of papers. “The title is: How do we account for the last 500 years of the history of socialism?” There was a collective groan. “Five-hundred years?” Hongyao who was sitting behind him exclaimed in dismay. “Has socialism even existed that long?”
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