“As a member of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Indonesia must fulfill its international obligations in promoting human rights by utilizing Kim’s visit to initiate a progressive dialogue on overcoming the prolonged human rights problems in North Korea,” Marzuki Darusman, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation concerning human rights in North Korea, told The Jakarta Post.

“There are about six million North Koreans who are so close to death because of famine. There have also been accusations that 150,000 to 200,000 people have been detained without trial for political reasons. This can only be changed through an international movement. If Indonesia fails to do this, we can be accused of negligence,” the former attorney general said.

I’d love to know how much of a role China played in facilitating that visit. They seem to be the root of all evil in that region.

Four South Korean activists have been detained in China since March on suspicion of spying after they interviewed North Korean refugees living in hiding there, according to an anti-Pyongyang group. [....]

One of the four is Kim Young-Hwan, a former leader of an underground leftist party who became an activist opposing Pyongyang’s regime. Names of the three others were not given. [AFP]

Kim isn’t the only ex-leftist to see the error of his ways after getting a closer look at North Korea. I remember driving Ha Tae-Keung from Washington, D.C. to where he was staying in the Virginia suburbs, as he told me about how he was imprisoned by South Korea’s former right-wing dictatorship for possession of pro-North Korean literature. Since then, Ha founded Open Radio for North Korea and got himself elected to the National Assembly

When South Korea suspended its participation in the Kumgang tourism project after a North Korean soldier shot and killed housewife Park Wang-Ja for strolling into a restricted zone, the North’s response was to make a public show of the flirtations of other suitors to invest in Kumgang. Nothing came of this, of course. It was a transparent pressure tactic; no one could have really believed that there was a great untapped demand to visit Kumgang by anyone but South Koreans. (After all, how many of us will see Ha Long Bay, Santorini, Old Town Prague, and the ceiling of the Blue Mosque before we die?)

Similarly, you wouldn’t think there would be much pent-up demand for North Korean propaganda, but the North is showing off a new Indonesian suitor for its journalistic business model:

Under the agreement, Indonesia and North Korea will exchange television shows, photos and news, Priatna said. In the near future, the two nations will also swap journalists.

North Korea was ranked as the second most censored country in the world by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in 2012. According to CPJ reports, news in North Korea is controlled by the government’s Korean Central News Agency and is saturated with anti-United States propaganda and glowing reports of life in one of the most isolated nations on earth.  [Jakarta Globe]

It says plenty that North Korea’s totalitarianism still attracts revulsion from journalists in authoritarian Indonesia. The arrangement may be a money-maker for the Indonesian news service — there’s a lucrative market for reselling North Korean “news,” according to an insider I’ve corresponded with — but an Indonesian edit of KCNA propaganda hardly has the pernicious potential that an AP edit would.

THE WORLD’S LEAST REASSURING THEME PARK: “It’s a shame that North Koreans are treated by their rulers as basically an expendable race of people. Before we were allowed on the ride, the guys in charge sent a few terrified farmers on test runs like a shipment of human flour sacks.” Read the whole thing.

CAT-AND-MOUSE JOURNALISM IN CHINA: For all the kvetching I’ve done lately about junk reporting from Pyongyang, it’s easy to forget that some dedicated and intrepid journalists are working hard and taking risks to enlighten us about our world.

On our trip to Hunan Province, the nearest town center to the village we were trying to reach was about 40 minutes away, and we judged it would be too close to the area to spend the night without getting a knock on the door by police.

A good strategy is to check in to a hotel hours away from our final destination, so police officers don’t necessarily make a connection between our arrival and that area’s news story. That also gives us the opportunity to set out before dawn and hopefully get to our interview by mid-morning before most people would spot a TV crew in the neighborhood.

Depending on whether the family or person we’re visiting has nosy neighbors, our team can get quickly reported to local officials who then dispatch a team to investigate. [Al Jazeera, Melissa Chan]

Chan’s report is enlightening on multiple levels — first, in that Al-Jazeera itself is maturing into an instrument for greater openness, and second, for what it tells us about the mechanics of repression in rural China. Don’t miss this one.

The price for a North Korean woman named Kim Eun-sun, her mother, and sister, to escape to China was 2,000 Chinese yuan, slightly more than $300. Like thousands of North Korean women before them, they crossed the Tumen River into China and met a woman who said she would help them escape –only to discover that they’d been sold to a Chinese farmer who wanted a wife. [CSM, Don Kirk]

I have to think plenty of these women know what awaits them, yet choose it over starvation. If it were me, I would.

North Korea has held public executions of at least three people on charges of cannibalism in recent years, a South Korean state-run institute said Thursday, the latest development that could support what has long been rumored in the isolated country.

There have been accounts among North Korean defectors in the South that some North Koreans ate and sold human flesh during the massive famine in the late 1990s that was estimated to have killed 2 million people.

A North Korean man in the northeastern city of Hyesan was executed in December 2009 for killing a preteen girl and eating her flesh, the Korea Institute for National Unification said in a white paper on human rights in North Korea, which is set to be released next week.

The man committed the crime because of a lack of food following Pyongyang’s botched currency reform in late 2009 that caused massive inflation and worsened food shortages, the white paper said, citing an interview with an unidentified defector in June last year.  [Yonhap]

More here. Apparently, not everyone in North Korea gets invited to the supermarkets and picnics that the AP has been photographing in Pyongyang.

This was Mauthausen. I want you to remember the word… I want you to know, I want you to never forget or let our disbelieving friends forget, that your flesh and blood saw this. This was no movie. No printed page. Your son saw this with his own eyes and in doing this aged 10 years. – Fred Friendly, May 14, 1945

I’ve been reading witness testimonies about the horrors of North Korea’s concentration camps for years now, but after re-reading Chico Harlan’s story in The Washington Post last week, I was roused from my desensitization again:

At Yodok, perpetually famished prisoners sometimes participated in Olympic-style games, ordered as amusement for agents from the “integrity department.” Those agents, according to Jeong’s testimony, sent prisoners on 2.5-mile downhill races to retrieve corn cakes at the bottom.

Tell me how, aside from geography, Yodok is not Mauthausen:

The SS guards would often force prisoners — exhausted from hours of hard labour without sufficient food and water — to race up the stairs carrying blocks of stone. Those who survived the ordeal would often be placed in a line-up at the edge of a cliff known as “The Parachutists Wall.” At gun-point each prisoner would have the option of being shot or pushing the prisoner in front of him off the cliff.

I’ve learned to hate the words “never again” the way I’ve learned to hate other lies.

Those who died from infectious disease, starvation or labor were often not immediately buried, according to Kim. Rats devoured the corpses’ eyes, ears and genitals, “making them impossible to recognize.”

Eventually, the bodies were dumped into a “large steel furnace in a place inside the camp called ‘Bulmangsan’ and burned … with logs.”

If Human Rights Watch had existed in the 1930s, a member of their Board of Directors would have hosted a Leni Riefenstahl film festival. I don’t know what else to infer from the fact that a member of its Board recently hosted a Kim Jong Il propaganda exhibition.

North Korea’s jamming of GPS used by airliners, of course, is more than just words — it has caused “four close calls where passenger jets approaching Incheon and Gimpo airports abruptly shifted course when their GPS malfunctioned and landed only after circling the airports.” I can see why South Koreans would call that terrorism, too.

North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008.

North Korea will participate in the Paralympic Games for the first time ever in London this summer. A Yonhap News report cites Tokyo-based pro-North Korean media as saying that its athletes have been gearing up for the 2012 London Paralympics, which will run from late August to early September.

It adds that North Korea was granted provisional membership in the International Paralympic Committee in March, and that its athletes are now training in China.

Have any of that event’s organizers asked North Korea to explain the report by U.N. Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn that this regime “rounds up disabled people and sends them . . . to special camps, where they are sorted by handicap and subjected to ‘subhuman conditions?’” Or that it takes handicapped children from their families and sends them to camps where they become subjects for the kind of experiments Josef Mengele would have admired? Are the organizers of the Paralympics merely uninformed, or are they like the organizers of the World Cup — lacking in any consistent standards?

I have no way of knowing how many of those reports are true, of course, but I do know that in the case of North Korea alone, we fail to demand the right to investigate them.  I can’t top Stephan Haggard’s phase for this:  North Korean exceptionalism.

This isn’t the first example of defections we’ve seen at the North’s northern or southern borders, and I have to wonder how many more incidents like this we don’t hear about because they happen in North Korea’s interior, where the news can’t get out.

The latest Sunshine experiment is the AP’s establishment of a bureau in Pyongyang, which the AP hailed as a “new window” into North Korea, but which has been controlled strictly on North Korea’s terms.  So far, this experiment has produced plenty of propaganda and at least some outright fakery, but no new insights into reports of, say, widespread famine deaths and human rights atrocities a short drive from the AP’s bureau.

This is not to deny that engagement on the right terms can change the character of North Korea, both profoundly and irreversibly.  It has — when the engagement is directly with the people of North Korea, not with its regime, but in spite of the regime.  We saw the first hard evidence of this in Witness to Transformation, by Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard.  More recently, outside observers were surprised when North Korea admitted that its launch of an Unha-3 rocket had failed, causing most to speculate that the regime knew it couldn’t keep the failure secret.  Today, a new report finds that the North Korean regime shows no signs of easing its controls on information intentionally, but is losing control over what its subjects can read and hear, and the subversive impact could be profound:

More and more North Koreans are defying strict government controls on access to outside information that starkly contrasts with official propaganda, said a U.S. study released Wednesday.

Avid consumption of South Korean movies and pop music as well as foreign radio and television broadcasts is changing North Korean views of its southern neighbor and even of the United States, a report by the InterMedia consultancy showed.

“In 2012, North Koreans can get more outside information, through more types of media, from more sources, than ever before ? and they are less fearful of sharing that information than ever before,” said InterMedia.

The U.S. State Department-commissioned study, “A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment,” captures 10 years of research on refugees, travelers and defectors from North Korea, including face-to-face interviews with more than 650 adults in 2010 and 2011.  [Reuters, Paul Eckert]

The information leakage includes “mobile phones, computers, MP3 players and USB drives . . . in substantial numbers, particularly among the elites.”

You can read the full report and see a webcast on InterMedia’s site.

Access to information by itself will disillusion the North Korean people, but by itself, it will not change the regime.  The regime is willing to use any degree of force necessary to preserve its power, and the people know that.  The problem of communication in North Korea is not only the problem of establishing communication between North Koreans and the outside world, but also of communication between North Koreans and other North Koreans.  Without the means to organize, North Koreans can never pose a significant challenge to the state.  That’s why multiple incidents of anti-regime resistance were quickly contained and quelled.  Organization will begin in small ways, like social and trade networks, and then evolve toward more political applications, like churches, alternative media, and labor organizations.  It will be the ability to organize the North Korean people on a wider scale that will enable the people to challenge the state, whether by popular mobilization or by force of arms.  This report is several steps from that inevitable consequence, but it shows us that North Korea has made strides toward it.

Update:  Radio Free Asia reports that smuggled South Korean DVDs are widely available in the North now.  No surprise there.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un lashed out at officials of an amusement park for neglecting to take proper care of the facility’s grounds and rides, the North’s state media said Wednesday in an apparent move to highlight the leader’s concern for his people.

North Korean media, including the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), said Kim inspected the Mangyongdae Funfair in Pyongyang and scolded officials there after discovering flaws throughout the park.  [....]

According to the news reports, Kim Jong-un noticed a damaged path in front of a Viking ride and called it “pathetic,” while also pointing out flaws in the park’s gardens and a roller coaster, the condition of paint on rides and the safety of a water park.

The Associated Press has exclusive video:

From the episode summary for “Cartmanland,” season 5, episode 6:

Cartman’s grandmother dies (which Cartman treats as nothing more than an inconvenience to his weekend plans) and he inherits her life savings of one million dollars because the rest of the family would likely have spent the money on crack. Cartman decides to buy an amusement park, fulfilling his dreams not only of having a park all to himself without having to wait in lines, but also for the pleasure of telling other people that they can’t come to it, presenting it as a reference to How the Grinch Stole Christmas! [....]

Cartman decides to hire a security guard to keep trespassers out, especially Stan and Kyle. Cartman believes the guard will accept a few free rides a day as payment, but the guard insists on a cash salary. Cartman is unable to pay after spending all his inheritance to buy the park, so the guard advises him to let a couple of people in a day, for a fee, which should pay for the salary. Cartman also believes from the guard’s advice that he should not be inconvenienced by a few customers in the large park, so he sets off the rest of the day to enjoy the rides. Much to his dismay, the customers form a line to one of the rides that he wants to ride. More expenses begin to pile up for maintenance, refreshments, utilities and such to keep the park intact.

This site is unpacking — from a big move last weekend, when I finally overcame my fears and upgraded from (don’t laugh, I’m very sensitive) Word Press 2.0.4 to 3.2.2, which also made this sa-weet new template possible.  Unfortunately, some of my Google Earth screen grabs didn’t survive the migration, so if I can’t work some FTP magic, I’ll have to reload them this weekend.

If any reader in Korea can get his hands on a translation of the NHRC report and send it my way, I’ll be eternally grateful.  The substance of Harlan’s description, like the other excepts I’ve written about here, is horrific.  For years, our foreign policy establishment, including presidents of both parties, have tried to isolate any discussion of these atrocities from our diplomacy with North Korea, believing that it would blow up negotiations over “higher” priorities.  It didn’t work that way when we raised human rights with, say, Burma, of course, or in our years of disarmament talks with the U.S.S.R.  In those cases, we understood that atrocity and mendacity spring from a common pathology, and that advocating for the people of those countries helped build friendships that endured (or will endure) longer than their oppressors.  Until we persuade this regime that its present pathology equates to its own extinction — not by war, but by economic constriction and political subversion — negotiations will continue to achieve nothing.

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism October 11, 2008.

Discuss among yourselves.