Who’ll stop the pain?

Under the 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act, the United States offered fast-track processing for North Korean asylum-seekers. So far, 53 North Koreans have been granted refugee status here. Some tell stories that remind an old Asia hand of the worst Khmer Rouge atrocities. Others just remind us that evil is mostly banal—and sometimes the evils that kill us aren’t stunning or dramatic but simply the result of systemic neglect and an utter disregard for the individual, her health, her sanity.

Lee Jeong-Ae’s story is one of the saddest I have heard in 18 years as a journalist, covering some of the roughest regimes on the Earth. She died of lung cancer just three weeks after arriving with her family in Virginia, at age 35. She enjoyed exactly 21 days of U.S. political asylum. Her journey, I think, serves as a cogent reminder of the shadowy no-man’s-land inhabited by all illicit asylum-seekers, and none more so than the North Koreans who flee to every corner of the earth without access to even the most basic health care or legal protection.

Newsdesk: Pyongyang slams ‘unsavory’ Tibetan elements

This just in from the South Korean news agency Yonhap, though it’s hardly a surprise: North Korea is throwing its support behind the Chinese authorities in their quest to suppress spreading anti-Chinese riots. “The DPRK government supports the Chinese government in its efforts to ensure social stability and the rule of law in Tibet and defend the fundamental interests of the Tibetan people,” a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as telling the country’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

North Korea: Change to Official View of the Disabled

Wonhee Lee, February 18, 2008, translation by Greg Scarlatoiu:

The North Korean authorities are undergoing a change in perception regarding the people living with disabilities. North Korea is now no longer reluctant to request assistance for the disabled.

For a long time now, it has been known that it’s impossible to see or meet disabled people on the streets of Pyongyang. Los Angeles-based Shalom Disability Ministries has been distributing wheelchairs to the disabled of North Korea. For a while now, this organization has been telling the world that North Korea is embarrassed to even admit the existence of its disabled, but Shalom representatives have recently told RFA that views on the disabled appear to be changing in the reclusive communist state.

A harmonic convergence in North Korea?

The musical puns are almost too good to resist, but I’ll do my best. The New York Philharmonic, America’s oldest symphony orchestra, played a concert today. They do that a lot, being an orchestra and all. But this concert was extraordinary, because it occurred in Pyongyang—possibly the most repressive country on Earth, and not known as a world music capital.

North Korean executed for making calls abroad

RFA-Korean reports that North Korea last year executed the director of one of its state-run companies last year for having made phone calls abroad without permission, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Paris-based RSF said in its annual survey of press freedom worldwide that North Korea “is the world’s most isolated country and the security forces are responsible for keeping it that way at all costs. Pyongyang’s executions for the offense of communicating with people outside the country have shot up.

North Korea: China ‘wants N. Korean army to be fed’

From RFA’s Korean service (in Korean)- Feb. 14, 2008 Sungwon Yang interview with Prof. Hazel Smith of Warwick University, at a Korea Society event in New York City:

China and South Korea actually want the North Korean military to be fed. The last thing they want is to have to deal with is hungry and desperate North Korean soldiers roaming the border areas, looking for food.

– Hazel Smith

According to the North Korea scholar and former WFP official, the rice aid sent to North Korea by South Korea or China is first distributed to the North Korean military.

Between 2000 and 2002, Prof. Hazel Smith of the UK’s Warwick University acted as a WFP official, administering rice aid for North Korea and also designing rice distribution monitoring plans. RFA had an exclusive interview with Prof. Smith

‘Investing in the Fatherland’: Corruption in North Korea

Greg Scarlatoiu has provided a thoughtful and in-depth file of translated broadcasts and background information on the problem of corruption in North Korea. The Web story will be posted later today on RFA’s main Web site, but there is a lot of very valuable material here that you won’t find elsewhere.

“The entire system in North Korea is fraudulent, and abuses are so systematic that corruption has become an incurable disease.”

— Andrei Nikolaevich Lankov, Kookmin University professor

“When it comes to corruption and abuses by government officials, North Korea probably ranks first in the world. Money can buy anything in North Korea.”

— Ms. Choo Myung-hee, North Korean defector

Traffickers use drugs on North Korean ‘brides’ in China

We’ve reported extensively on the trafficking of North Korean women into China, where men abound, women are scarce, and the black-market trade in wives often takes a grim and grisly turn. But here’s a new angle, unearthed by RFA’s Korean service: The traffickers, taking a page from pimps in the West, are using addictive drugs to keep their women pliable. “Brokers force North Korean women defectors to take illegal drugs,” said a North Korean woman who defected to China in search of a better life, only to be passed from human smugglers to bride traffickers.

North Korea probes corruption among its own

RFA-Korean recently reported that the Dandong bureau chief of the DPRK National Economic Cooperation Federation had been summoned to the capital, Pyongyang, after authorities launched a high-profile investigation of the Federation. The National Economic Cooperation Federation (NECF) manages the disbursement of humanitarian aid to North Korea as well as South Korean investment in the North, and has offices in Dandong and Yanji, China, and Vladivostok, Russia.

North Korean Fighting for His Love in Russia

Ten years ago, Jeong Kum Cheol was working in Siberia, as a dispatched North Korean construction worker. One day, he managed to escape from the tightly controlled North Korean construction site, married a Russian woman, had a son, and then moved to Moscow. The Russian authorities rejected his application for adjustment of status. He was apprehended for living in Russia as an illegal alien and was subsequently almost deported to North Korea. While the deportation procedures were under way, he managed to escape from the custody of the Russian police,