Uh Oh... N. Korea troubles

As an aside, I read somewhere recently that on average, South Koreans are 3" taller than North Koreans (malnutrition being the obvious culprit in stunting growth).

Wonder if those statistics had to be smuggled out as well.

South Korean anthropologists who measured North Korean refugees here in Yanji, a city 15 miles from the North Korean border, found that most of the teenage boys stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. In contrast, the average 17-year-old South Korean boy is 5-foot-8, slightly shorter than an American boy of the same age.

The height disparities are stunning because Koreans were more or less the same size ?- if anything, people in the North were slightly taller ?- until the abrupt partitioning of the country after World War II. South Koreans, feasting on an increasingly Western-influenced diet, have been growing taller as their estranged countrymen have been shrinking through successive famines.

Notebook
Notes from Underground
A smuggled video appears to show dissent alive and kicking in North Korea

BY DONALD MACINTYRE | SEOUL


Monday, Jan. 24, 2005

U.S. President George W. Bush was likely including North Koreans when, in last Thursday's inaugural address, he vowed: "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." Some residents of the authoritarian state may not need much encouragement: earlier in the week, a Seoul-based human-rights group released an anti-regime video that it says was produced by dissidents in the North. Following some jerky shots of a market, a high school and a factory, the camera pans across a poster that declares: "Down with Kim Jong Il!" in Korean characters scrawled in red ink. "People, let's all rise up and drive out the dictatorship!" The video ends with a shot of anti-Kim graffiti scrawled over an official portrait of North Korea's Dear Leader. A voice off-camera urges the U.S. and other countries to "help our movement to overthrow Kim Jong Il's authoritarian regime."


AHN YOUNG-JOON?-AP
Activist Do Hee Yun says dissidents in the North produced the anti-Kim film

Reports of discontent have filtered out of the North for years, but this is the first time such sentiments have been filmed, according to Do Hee Yun, whose group, the Citizen's Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, released the footage. Do says a contact in China had smuggled the video out of the North; defectors from the area have said that the factory and other buildings shown in the footage are in Hoiryong, a small town near the border with China. The filmmakers, who call themselves the Youth Freedom League, have cells in other North Korean cities, including Pyongyang, says Do, and they want the world to pay attention: "They have put their lives at stake to tell the outside world about the prison-like conditions inside North Korea."

Any underground movement faces enormous difficulties getting traction in a country where police surveillance is pervasive, and the video has yet to be definitively authenticated.

Still, the samizdat film fits the picture painted by recent defectors of an increasingly angry and desperate populace. "I really think it reflects the popular mood," says Jasper Becker, author of a forthcoming book titled Rogue State: The Continuing Threat of North Korea. "There is a persistent pattern of people trying to voice their hatred of Kim Jong Il and blame him for the disasters that have overtaken the country." Those voices may be getting louder, but it's not clear that Bush?-already entangled in Iraq?-will be inclined to listen.

?-With reporting by Kim Yooseung/Seoul


From the Jan. 31, 2005 issue of TIME Asia Magazine

[...]
There was speculation that the move may have been prompted by the economic reforms in North Korea, which have led to the introduction of farmers' markets. It could be that the government wants to encourage the privatisation measures, which have led to farmers holding back some of their produce that would otherwise go into the public distribution system. But the 16 million Koreans who depend on the government rations are likely to go hungry as a result.

James Morris, the executive director of the World Food Programme, said he did not know why the North Korean government had cut the rations, but there was much concern about the long-term impact on children. The WFP distributes aid to 6.5 million of the most vulnerable people in North Korea, including nursing mothers and children.

He said: "You look at the average seven-year-old North Korean boy and compare him to the average seven-year-old South Korean boy, he's 20cm shorter and 10kg lighter.

"The future of the Korean peninsula is tied to the development of these children who are showing signs not only of the famine years in the 1990s but also from inadequate nutrition in general. A child who's compromised early in life will never recover, in terms of intellectual and physical development."

Mr Morris stressed that the WFP food supplements, distributed through orphanages, hospitals and schools, would not be affected by the government decision which concerns the public distribution system. "There's no reason for our ration to be cut," he said.

Gerald Bourke, the World Food Programme's public affairs officer for Asia, said the cut was likely to be in effect at least until the middle of the year. "That it is this early in the year is of concern," Mr Bourke said.
[...]

Jan.28,2005

N. Korea No Longer 'Main Enemy' in Defense White Paper


The Ministry of Defense said Friday it ill scrap the term "main enemy" in reference to North Korea in a defense white paper for 2004. Instead, it will refer to Pyongyang as a "direct military threat" in the paper due on Feb. 4. This would be the first time in 10 years that the North has not been designated Seoul¡¯s "main enemy" in a defense white paper.

The ministry took the measure in order to smooth ruffled feathers in Pyongyang as well as parts of South Korean society, allowing it to resume publication of the white paper, which had stalled since 2000 due to disputes over the designation. In intra-Korean meetings since the June 2000 summit, North Korea has persistently asked for the "main enemy" terminology to be scrapped.

In a press release, the Defense Ministry said it decided to make the change since no other nation in the world designated anyone ¡°the enemy¡± and because Pyongyang was also restraining itself from using a directly hostile term for the South.


But the ministry added that even if the terminology changed, the concept remained the same. Textbooks for soldiers and other internal Defense Ministry documents would continue to use the term "enemy."
Current military textbooks say, "The North Korean regime and North Korean military that obeys it are the core enemies that have been continuously threatening our existence and prosperity... The North Korean military, North Korea's reserve fighting strength, the Korean Workers Party and North Korean government institutions are the enemy of the military of the ROK."

One Army field officer said, "Because of the atmosphere of intra-Korean reconciliation and cooperation, it has become difficult to give our soldiers psychological training, and it will get even tougher in the future."
The term "main enemy" was first used in the 1995 defense white paper after the deepening North Korean nuclear crisis and a March 1994 threat to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire" made by a North Korean negotiator during intra-Korean contacts in Panmunjeom. The term stayed in continuous use until 2000.

The Hermit Nuclear Kingdom
By Nicholas D. Kristof
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
by Bradley K. Martin
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 868 pp., $29.95

Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies
by Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang
Columbia University Press, 265 pp., $24.50

1.
North Korea is the most secretive country in the world today, with its main railway lined with walls so high that its foreign passengers can't see the countryside. It is also, as Brad-ley Martin's book makes clear, the most repressive and brutal country in the world, with entire families sometimes executed if one member gets drunk and slights the Dear Leader. It is at the same time by far the most totalitarian, with nearly every home equipped with a speaker that issues propaganda from morning to night. It is the country most defiant of the West, whose leaders not only counterfeit US $100 bills but also are building nuclear warheads. North Korea is also, along with Iraq, the country where President Bush has most seriously bungled US foreign policy, and has made the world more dangerous and unstable. Finally, North Korea is perhaps the least understood place on earth. There is no firm agreement on such basic facts as whether Kim Jong Il is a playboy or a savvy leader who constantly monitors the Internet and CNN...

Monday January 31

U.S. has proposal for N.Korea

TOKYO (Reuters) - The United States has a serious proposal for North Korea and is ready to discuss it at six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programmes, a senior U.S. official has been quoted as saying.
"We are ready to go. We have a serious proposal. And we are ready to discuss it without preconditions," Kyodo news agency on Monday quoted Michael Green, senior director for Asia on the National Security Council, as telling reporters in Tokyo.

He gave no details of the proposal.

Green made the remarks after visiting officials at the Prime Minister's Office, Kyodo said.

North Korea has joined the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia for three rounds of nuclear talks since August 2003. China has played host to the negotiations.

Pyongyang boycotted a fourth round, originally set for last September, and has said it would watch how U.S. policy towards it shapes up before deciding whether to return to the talks.

Green urged Pyongyang to show up at a fresh round of six-party talks, Kyodo said.

Later, in a report from Beijing, Kyodo quoted diplomatic sources as saying Green would arrive in the Chinese capital late on Monday for talks expected to cover the resumption of the six-way talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Kyodo quoted Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi as saying Tokyo was considering specific steps to put pressure on North Korea to reach solutions on various issues, while keeping talks going.

"We are considering how to resolve the abduction, nuclear and other issues comprehensively and what measures are effective to that end both in terms of dialogue and pressure," Koizumi was quoted as telling reporters.

A feud between Japan and North Korea has intensified since November, when bones handed over to Japanese diplomats were found after DNA tests not to be those of Japanese citizens abducted by North Koreaa in the 1970s and 1980s to teach its spies about Japan.

Pyongyang accused Tokyo last Wednesday of fabricating the DNA test results, and Japanese officials said they would consider stiff measures including economic sanctions against the North.

Last week, Japanese diplomatic sources said China had proposed holding working level talks to pave the way for a fourth round of six-party talks.

The proposal was made as the international community is trying to persuade the reclusive communist state to abandon its nuclear weapons programmes.

U.S. officials say communist North Korea may have more than eight nuclear weapons and Bush once branded the North as part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

In return for scrapping its nuclear weapons programme, Pyongyang demands security assurances from the United States as well as energy and other economic aid.

The standoff began in October 2002 when the United States said North Korea had said it had a secret programme based on highly enriched uranium as well as a plutonium scheme that it had put on hold. Pyongyang later denied having a uranium project.