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Lead story: We continue to follow the disturbing report that the North Korean security apparatus has developed a more systematic policy for squeezing the 20,000 plus refugees in the South by using their families as hostages. Threats—needless to say, highly credible ones—are being used for a variety of purposes:
- To extort money from the refugees;
- To extract information from refugees in the South on what is going on within the refugee community;
- To “turn” refugees to provide information on the ROK itself.
But the most disturbing part of the story is that a large number of families—up to 30,000 people—have been relocated to three make-shift tent camps near the Chinese border area. This relocation policy not only isolates the refugees’ families but allows the government to control any communication. Meetings with the refugees in China can now be effectively controlled. But most importantly, the lack of rations to the camps can be used as the ultimate bargaining chip to extort resources.
In Witness to Transformation, we document the way in which incarceration is used to extort bribes; thus this story strikes us as a highly plausible extension of that strategy. We look forward to hearing what the journalistic community can produce on this, but if true it deserves a response from the highest levels of the US government, including to Beijing.
Ongoing story: As careful readers may have gathered, Professor Haggard is slightly obsessed by foot and mouth disease, hoof and mouth to some. By coincidence, both South and North Korea have reported new outbreaks disease over the last month. The outbreak in the South was reported at a pig farm in Yeongcheon less than a week after the government had downgraded the level of alert. Despite widespread vaccination, there is always risk that some animals will develop the disease because of weak resistance. The story in the North is a little more troubling. An update to the World Organization for Animal Health reports on four new outbreaks of the disease in North Hwanghae and Kangwon, concentrated mostly in pigs and with a mortality rate of about 50 percent over an affected population of 300. The report notes that “no vaccination has been done.” We reported earlier on the joint FAO/World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) mission, which recommended a US$1 million program including vaccines and other equipment for controlling the disease.
Better late than never: In an earlier post we remarked on the tangled history of North Korean relations with Zimbabwe. Earlier this week we came across a report from the fall about another odd incident involving North Korea and Zimbabwe. It appears that the regime of Robert Mugabe, which has had close relations with North Korea, commissioned North Korean sculptors to create two statues of deceased Zimbabwean patriot (and Mugabe rival) Joshua Nkomo for erection in Nkomo’s home town of Bulawayo. It is not clear whether the ensuing uproar was more connected with the North Korean role in massacres that occurred in the Matabeleland region, or whether Nkomo’s friends, family, and supporters just didn’t like the art. But either way, the statues have been removed. This is not the first time that North Korean statue-building as run into problems in Africa: last year a statue in Senegal caused another uproar, though our impression is that this was due more aesthetics and to local dissatisfaction with the President Wade than the nationality of the sculptors. If anyone knows where the Nkomo statues ended up, drop us a line.
