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 |
Kim Jong Un may be easing reign of terror over elites
By John G. Grisafi In recent months, there have been numerous cases of North Korean elites reemerging after months of absence from public view. For several of these officials, there is evidence to suggest they were undergoing reeducation and even punishment due to some infraction or shortcoming. These examples may be evidence of a shift in Kim Jong Un’s method of disciplining senior officials and exerting his supreme authority over regime elites.
This trend itself may be a sign that Kim and the rest of the core leadership now feel more secure and stable as the rulers of North Korea. Throughout much of Kim Jong Un’s reign thus far, he has become known for a “reign of terror” in which many senior elites and even his own uncle, Jang Song Thaek, have been executed in violent purges intended to remove potentially disloyal or rival elements from the regime. As of July, Kim reportedly has had around 70 senior officials executed since coming to power in December 2011 (not including deaths, by execution or otherwise, of average North Korean citizens).
But lately Kim appears to have largely shifted from conducting purges by execution to using punishment by labor and reeducation over the course of several months to discipline senior officials (again, this is separate from the regime’s handling of average citizens).
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North Korean victims of North Korean kidnappings
By Dr. Andrei Lankov
On November 24, 1959 the Muscovites who were walking in the center of the Soviet capital, near the world famous Moscow Conservatory, bore witness to a rather unusual scene. Around 2 p.m. a group of menacing-looking Asian men attacked an Asian youngster. A short but violent fight followed, with exchanges in a language nobody understood, but sometimes the young man was loudly asking for help in Russian. Soon, though, he was overwhelmed by the attackers, who unceremoniously pushed him into a car with diplomatic plates, which promptly sped away.
The KGB learned about the event in no time (it was 1959 Moscow, after all), and soon a KGB officer, Colonel Lebedev, made a phone call to the Foreign Ministry to notify the diplomats that a major complication had just happened. North Korean agents had managed to locate and forcefully kidnap Yi Sang Gu, a post-graduate student at the Moscow School of Music, who had applied for asylum in the Soviet Union and sent a letter very critical of Kim’s regime to the Korean Supreme People’s Assembly.
By the time of his abduction Yi Sang Gu’s application was being considered, so the violent attack was a major violation of international law.
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Would a destabilized Korean Peninsula mean a China-U.S war? - Expert Survey
By Rob York Observers of the Korean Peninsula broadly agree that China guards its interests there very closely, opposing North Korean moves that raise tensions but avoiding moves that might cause regime collapse. If it did collapse, though, and the northern half of the peninsula needed to be secured, how would China react? More importantly, how would China and the U.S. – whose South Korean allies would look to unite the peninsula under their control – react to one another in such a scenario? Would it be the Yalu River in 1950 all over again?
Chinese experts say no. For them, the conflict between the U.S. and China is, perhaps ironically, restricted to times of peace, as the U.S. prods Beijing to be more proactive in addressing the North and Beijing resists, focused as it is on its economy. However, the North’s continuing proliferation in the face of U.S. sanctions and Chinese discouraging is gradually leading to a condition the Chinese have been dreading: South Korea’s deployment of U.S. THAAD missile defenses in defiance of Beijing’s wishes.
In NK News latest expert survey, such a deployment was identified as increasingly likely.
Click here for the full article at NK News |
High-level inter-Korean talks? Low expectations
By Aidan Foster-Carter As NK News readers will know, North and South Korea have finally agreed to hold their long-promised high-level talks on December 11 in the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC). Excited? Me neither. Ever the optimist, I wish I could hope. But in all honesty, there is a whole raft of reasons not to expect much from this event. In no particular order, here are eight of them:
1. Poor precedent. First up, can we be sure the meeting will even take place? Probably it will, but you never know. Twice in recent years, planned inter-Korean meetings have either been called off, as in 2013 (see point #5, below), or never been held despite an agreement to do so. As last year, when talks which the two sides had agreed would follow the North’s troika visit to the Incheon Asian Games’ closing ceremony in October 2014 simply never materialized.
2. Time taken. What took them so long? Three months have now passed since August 25’s six-point inter-Korean accord. That defused a fortnight of worrying tensions, even if (as I wrote here at the time) opinions varied as to who won and what the whole spat really proved.
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Without more flights, North Korea tourism industry will stagnate
By Gareth Johnson Spring Airlines, a budget flight operator based out of Shanghai Pudong airport, is believed to be in the process of opening a new route from Shanghai to Pyongyang. From February 2016 it could offer as many as four flights per week – which would make it the third player in the North Korean aviation market (the others being state monolith Air Koryo, which runs scheduled flights from Beijing, Shenyang and Vladivostok, and Air China which runs two per week from Beijing).
Now, those of us in the travel industry have learned take such grand announcements with a large pinch of salt. All too often, after the fanfare has died down, the plans amount to nothing. But in this case, we really have to hope this comes to pass – North Korea has pretty much reached capacity for tourism. Without new routes into the country, tourism in the DPRK is likely to stagnate.
This year, two genuinely momentous occasions for the aviation industry in North Korea occurred: First, the Pyongyang Sunan International Airport was transformed into a modern international airport and, second, North Korea opened its second international airport at Wonsan.
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