Kim Jong Un’s aunt, her husband sue defectors for defamation

Kim Jong Un’s aunt, her husband sue defectors for defamation

Rumors prompting suit dealt with Kim Jong Nam ouster, use of ruling family funds for plastic surgery

JH Ahn 

December 2nd, 2015

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South Korean lawyer Kang Yong-suk, on behalf of Ko Yong Suk and her husband Lee Kang, said that they have filed suit against three North Korean defectors for spreading false information about Ko and her family.

Ko Yong Suk is the younger sister of Ko Yong Hui, the mother to Kim Jong Un and third wife of late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

In 1998, Ko and her husband chose to relocate from Switzerland to the U.S., according to a 2013JoongAng Ilbo report.

The report noted that an anonymous South Korean intelligence source, who claimed that he had worked during former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung’s administration, told the paper that both Ko and her husband had gone through cosmetic surgery to change their identities and were living under the Central Intelligence Agency’s protection.

“The reason behind Ko’s defection to U.S. is still mainly unknown,” said Cheong Sung-chang, researcher at the Sejong Institute in Seoul.

“To my knowledge, Lee Kang was working as a North Korean diplomat and got into some trouble that was seen as problematic in the North Korean leader’s eyes.”

Cheong has also noted that Lee used to be called Park Kun prior to his defection to the U.S.

Lee visited the attorney on Monday to file suit against the three South Korean individuals, including a former officer from North Korea’s State Security Department, a former North Korean diplomat and the son-in-law of the former North Korean prime minister.

Their attorney stated that these three appeared on South Korean television programs from 2013 to 2014 and made false claims, including about Ko’s involvement in the ouster of Kim Jong Nam, older brother to Kim Jong Un, and the rumor that Ko paid for plastic surgery with Kim Jong Il’s secret funds.

“There is no way that these defendants would have known about the recent situation in North Korea as they defected back in the 1990s,” their attorney told Yonhap.

“Lee Kang asked why these defendants would claim such false information as if it were true.”

Yonhap said Lee showed his American passport to prove his identity to the attorney and has left Korea already.

Their attorney declined to provide NK News with additional details on the ongoing case.

Featured Image: Ko Yong Hui and a younger Kim Jong Un, from the North Korean movie 위대한 선군 조선의 어머님

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JH Ahn

Ahn is a NK News contributor based in Seoul. He previously worked as an Interpreter for U.S. Forces Korea.

Upon hearing Malcolm Turnbull's call for innovation in Australia, I've decided to be far more entrepreneurial and innovative in forcing higher penalty rates for myself and my excellent colleagues in all the human service industries. I'm sure that's what he meant. I'm sure he was talking to all of us.

'Australians all let us rejoice for we are blonde and free, all nature's gifts bestowed on us, a nuclear dump girt by sea...''

A Nuclear Dump Girt by Sea

I note our Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull saying that Australians are living in the most exciting time, ever, and that all we need to do is to be more innovative, and also get rid of Penalty Rates for Nurses, Shop Assistants, and all those folk who don't matter a fuck..//...and, damn it, I agree with him. As an Australian born free thinking man I can do without Penalty Rates, and I can do without my own toilet for that matter, too. I'm happy to defecate and piss anywhere, as has been the lucky fortune and life story of our Prime Minister...leading by example...and what an example this shallow, primitive, rich cunt is.
Yes, of course, my country, and Malcolm's country would be a good place to store the world's nuclear waste...after all, it's just a shit-country anyway..and it would make a buck for a few years...and that's all that matters.
Makes me wonder why other advanced nations aren't doing the same right now...makes me wonder why they need us for them to be safe, unpolluted and respected in the long haul of the years. A Nuclear Dump? can we fit that into the National Anthem...a Nuclear Dump Girt By Sea perhaps.

This week in North Korea

The week ahead in North Korea

President’s Commission on Unification Preparation at UCSD​

• Stephan Haggard will be hosting three members of President Park Geun Hye’s Presidential Commission on Unification at a public panel discussion at 4:30 on Monday (December 7) at the Robinson Auditorium at the Graduate School of Global Policy and Strategy.
• Dr. Chong-wook Chung, Dr. Chung-in Moon, Dr. Byung-yeon Kim, and Prof. Susan Shirk will be speaking.
• For more information, click here.

North Korean Human Rights Seminar at King's College​

• As a part of the 3rd North Korea Freedom Week in Europe, a seminar will be held in order to address the ​current situation of North Korean ​human rights. As ​a ​part of the event, four North Korean defector representatives will give public lectures at ​the Strand Campus of ​King's College London on the topic of North Korean human rights. 
• The event will be taking place from 18:00 to 20:00 on Monday 7th December.
• For more information click here.

UN council to meet on North Korea rights violations

• The UN Security Council will hold a meeting on December 10 to discuss human rights violations in North Korea, only the second time that such a session will been held.
• This year's request for a meeting was made by Britain, Chile, France, Jordan, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Spain and the United States, which holds the council presidency this month.

Planning for Korean Unification: What Is Seoul Doing?​

• South Korean President Park Geun-hye has made Korean unification a central tenet of her foreign policy strategy. Chung Chong-wook, Moon Chung-in and Kim Byung-yeon will be holding a discussion on reunification policy chaired by Bruce Klingner.
• The event will be taking place form 12 to 1:30 pm on December 10th at the Heritage Foundation.
• For more information and to RSVP, click here.

Realizing Freedom of Information in North Korea ​

• Choi Jeong Hoon. Oh Joong Seok, Ishimaru Jiro, Kim Seung Chul and Nat Kretchun will be discussing the problems of getting information into and out of North Korea at the Kim Koo Museum and Library in Seoul.
• The event will be taking place from 2 to 5pm on 10th December.
• For more information contact 02-889-7470 or Kakao id yaheung0503.

North Korean Human Rights Film Screening at Korean Cultural Centre​

• ​As a part of the 3rd North Korea Freedom Week in Europe, a film screening will be held to feature the ​dire situation ​of​North Korean human rights. The film screening session will screen a documentary 'On the Border' ​at the Korean Cultural Centre. 
• The event will be taking place from 17:00 to 19:00 on Friday 11th December at the Korean Cultural Center in London.
• For more information click here.

Inter-Korean Relations in Historical Context​

• Jongdae Shin, Professor of political science at the University of North Korean Studies, Seukryule Hong, Professor of history at Sungshin Women’s University, and James Person, historian and Coordinator of the Wilson Center’s Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy will be discussing current and forthcoming inter-Korean negotiations.
• The event will be taking place from 3:30 to 5:00 pm on Friday 11th December at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

China promises road for every village

English.news.cn   2015-12-04 22:45:40

LANZHOU, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China will try to connect every village with an asphalt or concrete road by 2019, as part of a campaign to reduce rural poverty, Minister of Transport Yang Chuantang said on Friday.

China still has 28,000 poverty-stricken villages that lack access to asphalt or concrete roads. They are mostly located in mountainous areas where road construction remains difficult, Yang said at a conference in northwest China's Gansu Province on poverty reduction.

He said transportation would be a "vanguard commander" and lay foundations for the poverty reduction campaign.

China has 70 million rural residents officially classified as poor. It has pledged to lift them out of of poverty by 2020.

China has invested heavily to improve transportation in underdeveloped areas, making access easier to 42,000 villages by opening bus services, renovating ports and building bridges over the past five years, according to Yang.

Would a destabilized Korean Peninsula mean a China-U.S war? - Expert Survey By Rob York

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).  Click here to read the full article at NK News

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.  Click here for the full article at NK News

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. Click here for the full article at NK News

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.