Free Republic

Born in the Gulag: Why a North Korean Boy Sent His Own Mother to Her Death By Blaine Harden Mar 28 2012, 7:01 AM ET84 Life inside North Korea's Camp 14 so twisted 13-year-old Shin In Geun that he betrayed his mother and only brother. Nine years after watching his mother's hanging, Shin In Geun squirmed through the electric fence that surrounds Camp 14 and ran off through the snow into the North Korean wilderness. It was January 2, 2005. Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be...

N.Korea Steps Up Air Force Training Flights North Korea has stepped up the number of training flights since last month to as many as 650 sorties a day. The North Korean air force is conducting training flights even on weekends, several times flying so far down south near the border with South Korea that the South had to scramble fighter planes to form defensive formations. A government source here said Wednesday, "We're analyzing the reasons for the marked increase in North Korean sorties compared to its usual winter training flights, focusing on the fact that they have increased after North...

China-N.Korea Communication Breaks Down High-level communication channels between China and North Korea have apparently been shut down since the death of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Pyongyang is failing to inform its sole ally of important developments like the upcoming missile launch. The only high-ranking Chinese official to visit North Korea since Kim's death was Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying, who was in Pyongyang between Feb. 20 and 25 to discuss aid to the North. Fu met his North Korean counterpart Kim Sung-gi but did not speak with higher ranking officials. China was stunned by the announcement on Feb....

North Korea has begun fuelling a rocket for a launch that the West considers a missile test, a Japanese newspaper reported on Thursday, citing a source "close to the government" in Pyongyang. "The launch is coming closer. The possibility is high that the launch date will be set for April 12 or 13," the source said according to the Tokyo Shimbun in a report from Seoul. It cited the source as saying that North Korea had begun injecting liquid fuel into the rocket. The paper also said a diplomatic source had confirmed that North Korea has moved the rocket to...

2012/03/29 (LEAD) N. Korea honing capability to attack Seoul: USFK commander By Lee Chi-dong WASHINGTON, March 28 (Yonhap) -- The commander of U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula expressed concern Wednesday that North Korea's new leadership will trigger a military conflict based on a "miscalculation." Before the House Armed Services Committee, Gen. James Thurman said the North continues improving its ability to attack the South Korean capital of Seoul. "The first thing I worry about every day is a miscalculation on somebody's part that causes a conflict that he hadn't planned for," he said at a hearing on the security...

US: Debris from NKorea rocket risks casualties WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior U.S. military official says debris from a planned North Korean rocket launch could cause casualties. Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Lavoy told a congressional hearing Wednesday that North Korea has indicated the rocket will be launched southward, but the U.S. lacks confidence about the rocket's stability and where the impact will be.

South Korea is preparing to shoot down a North Korean rocket if it strays into the South's territory during a launch planned for next month, the defence ministry said Monday. The South Korean and US military are closely monitoring activity at the Tongchang-ri base, a ministry spokesman said, a day after Seoul confirmed the main body of a rocket had been moved to the site in the North's northwest. Seoul is concerned that the first stage of the rocket, scheduled to drop into the Yellow Sea between South Korea and China, may fall onto the South's territory, the spokesman said....

After squinting through binoculars into a nation frozen in time, US President Barack Obama reeled off a contempt-laden and startlingly frank indictment of North Korea. The Stalinist remnant of the Cold War was, in Obama's eyes, nothing but a nation which cannot make "anything of any use", "doesn't work", and even its vaunted weapons exports were hardly state of the art. "It is like you are in a time warp," Obama said Sunday, after he toured a rocky border post in the demilitarised buffer zone that has split the Korean peninsular for longer than he has been alive. "It is...

DPRK ready to launch a "satellite" 08:27 25 MAR 2012 (AGI) Tokyo - Satellite images show that a long-range DPRK missile part, housing a satellite, has been moved to the country's NW. According to the Japanese agency Kyodo, which quotes Seoul diplomatic sources, the component has been moved by train to the launching base in Tongchang-ri, in the northern section of the Phyongan province. On 16 March, the North Koreans announced their intention to launch the Earth observation satellite Kwangmyongsong-3, triggering the alarm and the protests of countries such as South Korea, the US and Japan. It is widely feared...

Can Kim Jong-un Subdue the N.Korean Military? As soon as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un became vice chairman of the Workers Party's powerful Central Military Commission there emerged signs of a sweeping purge. Around a dozen high-ranking officers, including an assistant chief of the Ministry of the People's Armed Forces, an assistant chief of the General Staff Department as well as frontline commanders were brutally executed, ostensibly for being drunk or for sexual harassment during the mourning period for dead leader Kim Jong-il. But what does the purge mean, and what is exactly is going on in the North Korean...

Kremlinology in Beijing and Pyongyang By Michael Auslin March 22, 2012 /snip Washington Asia watchers are tantalized, and some are quite worried, over recent events in both Beijing and Pyongyang that may indicate hitherto unrecognized levels of dissension and possibly tension within the secretive ruling circles of both nations. In China, as I talk about on the homepage, one of the more colorful and controversial leaders, Bo Xilai, was fired from his job as party boss of massive Chongqing city. This almost certainly derailed his chances of becoming one of China’s “Supremes,” the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee. Was the populist...

‘S. Korea, U.S. to agree to extend missile range’ South Korea and the U.S. are expected to reach a compromise soon to allow Seoul to develop longer-range ballistic missiles, President Lee Myung-bak was quoted Thursday as saying. The allies’ talks over revising the bilateral missile pact apparently gained momentum after North Korea unveiled its plan last week to launch a satellite on a long-range rocket around April 15 to mark the centennial birthday of its national founder Kim Il-sung. Under a 2001 revision to the initial agreement, signed in 1979, Seoul is banned from developing ballistic missiles with a range...

N.Korean Rocket Launch 'Long and Carefully Planned' South Korean and U.S. officials now believe that North Korea has set its sights since last year on test firing a long-range missile on the centenary of nation founder Kim Il-sung on April 15, and that its pledge of a moratorium on missile launches in an agreement with Washington in February was a cynical ploy to extract aid. The officials at first thought the announcement of what the North claims is a satellite launch was the result of pressure by hardliners in North Korea's military, who were opposed to the agreement with the...

/begin my excerpts On the Kim Jong-eun's Order "Not even a hair should be left" ... Mortar Used Lee Yong-soo Kim Jong-eun Ordered, "Not even a hair should be left" More than ten generals purged this year, "Another day, another one disappears." Since Kim Jong-il's sudden death last year, Kim Jong-eun took over and N. Korean military has been in the vortex of unprecedented 'purge drive' and the means of execution is (very) cruel, such as using mortar fire, a knowledgeable government source on N. Korea revealed on Mar. 21. He said, “Since Dec. 30 last year when Kim Jong-eun...

Obama to visit DMZ, raise pressure on North Korea By Alister Bull and Matt Spetalnick WASHINGTON | Wed Mar 21, 2012 1:28am EDT (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, seeking to increase pressure on North Korea to abandon its atomic weapons, will visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on South Korea's tense border on Sunday before a nuclear security summit in Seoul. Obama's visit to the border will be a strong show of support for South Korea, the White House said on Tuesday, sending a message to the North as Washington builds an international effort to get stalled nuclear disarmament talks back...

/begin my excerpts Exclusive: Drinking during Kim’s Mourning Period... Vice Defense Minister Shot in Public A Deputy Chief of Staff also shot for a sexual misconduct Kim Jong-eun, Vice Chairman of Party’s Central Defense Commission, purged senior military figures in an attempt to establish discipline in military after Kim Jong-il’s death, according to sources on Mar. 20. They said, “Last January, Kim Jong-eun gave an order to ‘eliminate anybody who did outrageous things during General’s (Kim Jong-il’s) mourning period.’ We have intelligence that a Deputy Chief of General Staffs was arrested for committing a sexual misconduct during Kim’s mourning period...

Rush-- w/out translation. Japan is threatening North Korea with deploying and activating its own Missile Defense (MD) system, and shooting down the North Korean ICBM test launched scheduled from between 12 April and 16 April, a move stunningly announced by Pyongyang news sources yesterday and creating considerable tension in Northeast Asia suddenly.No time to do an English translation now but am linking the breaking Japan story in Japanese. Will synopsize later, but wanted to get the thread and linked article up ASAP.

North Korea announced plans Friday to blast a satellite into space on the back of a long-range rocket, a provocative move that could jeopardize a weeks-old agreement with the U.S. exchanging food aid for nuclear concessions. The North agreed to a moratorium on long-range launches as part of the deal with Washington, but it argues that its satellite launches are part of a peaceful space program that is exempt from any international disarmament agreements. The U.S., South Korea and other critics say the rocket technology overlaps with belligerent uses and condemn the satellite program as a disguised way of testing...

North Korea may have secretly detonated two nuclear devices made with highly enriched uranium in 2010, with one or both of the test blasts possibly being undertaken on behalf of Iran, according to a report highlighted in a daily security briefing I received from Congressional Quarterly. The original source for the CQ briefing is Austrian newspaper Wiener Zietung, which appears to be elaborating on a story that appeared Sunday in German paper Die Welt that it claims was based on “Western intelligence sources.” The Die Welt piece, meanwhile, noted evidence of the alleged 2010 nuclear tests was published last month...