Segacs's World I Know

Archive for the ‘North Korea’ Category

…with Tina Fey. Okay, maybe not. But here are some of the tidbits from the weekend.

It looks like there might not be an election after all, as the Conservatives’ polling numbers slip and Harper looks increasingly like a vengeful opportunist each day. The Conservatives are going to have to come up with a better argument than “we’re not the Liberals” if they want a turn in power. In the meantime, Martin’s gamble seems to be paying off, and his shaky government might get its life support extended a little longer.

More idiocy on parade as the annual workers’ event of May Day results in “clashes with police”. That’s the media’s non-judgmental way of saying that a bunch of idiots smashed things and then reacted violently to police who tried to get them under control. Oh yeah, and they really really don’t like Jean Charest. Just in case we didn’t know that already.

North Korea’s getting bolder as the Dear Leader of Death Camps slowly realizes that the rest of the world can’t or won’t do anything to stop them. Canada won’t sign onto the US’s missile defense plan, but Japan certainly sees the value in it.

Violence is on the rise again in Egypt, as suicide attacks on tourists by Islamist terrorists sent a chill through the region. This pretty much rules out any hope that last month’s attacks at Taba were isolated incidents. One thing we can pretty much count on: if Egypt’s tourism industry suffers, they’ll find a way to blame Israel somehow.

And last but certainly not least, Passover is over and I’m back to eating real food again. It’s great to have a meal that doesn’t taste like cardboard!

Check out the opening paragraph of this news story on North Korea’s nuclear announcement:

North Korea is to strengthen its “atomic potential” in response to Washington’s hostile policies, Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency quoted the president of its parliament as saying Thursday.

The article then continues to expand on the quotes from the Dear Leader of Death Camps for – count them – ten paragraphs, before bothering to mention that “Washington’s hostile policies” don’t really exist except in Kim Jong-Il’s mind:

On Feb. 10, North Korea said it possessed nuclear weapons and was dropping out of six-party talks aimed at ending its atomic ambitions. It blamed U.S. hostility for the decision to pull out.

About six weeks later, the North said it was forced to increase its nuclear arsenal because it saw the U.S. military as a serious threat.

U.S. officials have repeatedly said Washington has no plans to invade the North.

Frankly, I’ve given up expecting fair media coverage from Reuters.

Hmmm… you think there may be more obstacles to unification of North and South Korea than financial costs alone?

North Korea has the world’s worst human rights record, according to British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell. He urged the UN Human Rights Commission to pass a resolution condemning the country:

Kim Tae Jin, a North Korean who was imprisoned by the government before defecting in 1997, told the commission that “there is absolutely no freedom in North Korea.”

“In a political prison camp in North Korea, one must forget that he or she is a human being,” said Kim, who spent five years in a camp and endured eight months of torture and interrogation.

“There were numerous people who spent 20 to 30 years in the prison camp simply because of some ludicrous crime their grandfather allegedly committed,” said Kim.

Mr Rammell said that the European Union will sponsor a resolution at the commission to condemn North Korea’s record of abuses, adding that he expects it to be passed by a large majority.

I’m absolutely shocked… not that North Korea’s human rights record is unimaginably bad, but that the UN Human Rights Commission would consider taking a 5-minute break from its full-time Israel-bashing activities to actually comment.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

The People’s Democratic Republic of Death Camps has admitted its nuclear program and refused to return to talks on nuclear disarmament, claiming it needs the weapons for “defence against the United States”:

“We … have manufactured nukes to cope with the Bush administration’s evermore undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the DPRK,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

Sadly, the international media is playing right into the horrifying regime’s hands, painting this as more of a political issue for Bush than a legitimate threat to the security of the world:

The statement also poses a challenge to Bush, who has long backed a diplomatic solution to the crisis but now faces two nations he once named as part of an “axis of evil” being openly defiant about their nuclear programs — North Korea and Iran. He went to war with the third axis nation, Iraq.

While most people have known for years that North Korea was building up its nukes, this official announcement signals that the “Dear Leader” has been emboldened by the world’s refusal to do anything about Iran or really anything about much of anything lately. Even if North Korea has had the nukes for a while, the announcement is a signal that they might be willing to use them.

This is not good news, to put it mildly.

If we can go so far as to attribute logic to a madman, we might suggest that Kim Jong-Il knows full well that the United States is the only country who might even try to do something and that the rest of the world hates the U.S.’s guts. He’s probably banking on the fact that most people will assume that America is more dangerous than a regime that sends children to prison camps that have gas chambers reminiscent of Auschwitz, that starves its own population en masse, and that ranked dead last in the Index of Economic Freedom for the umpteenth year in a row.

But never mind all that, of course the world would be safer if we just got rid of Bush. Suuuuuuuure.

FreeNorthKorea.net has plenty of reading material about the kind of things that are going on in North Korea even as we speak. I challenge anyone to read it and not be legitimately terrified at the idea that this country could launch nuclear warheads.

One of the reasons we know so little about the horrors that go on in North Korea is that hardly anyone escapes to tell the tales.

Today, a group from North Korea made it to the Canadian embassy in Beijing:

Forty-four North Korean men, women and children scaled the walls of the Canadian embassy in Beijing in a likely bid for political asylum, an embassy spokesman said.

It was one of the largest groups ever to burst into a diplomatic compound in the Chinese capital in a desperate attempt to escape poverty and oppression in their Stalinist home country.

Officials are still sorting out exactly who is in that group. Until then, it is unclear what their fate will be, as China has not been sympathetic to refugees from the People’s Democratic Republic of Death Camps:

China treats North Koreans as illegal immigrants and has an agreement with Pyongyang to deport those it catches. But it has allowed Koreans who succeed in getting into foreign missions to leave for South Korea via a third country.

Those returned can face harsh punishment by the Stalinist government.

If it is determined that these people are legitimate political asylum-seekers, one hopes that they will be granted asylum someplace safe… and allowed to speak whatever tales they may have to tell, to provide even a tiny insight into the vast darkness that is North Korea.

The U.N. has continued its uselessness this week by calling for nuclear disarmament and inspections in North Korea.

The predicted North Korean response is: “Oh yeah? And if we don’t agree, what are you gonna do about it?” The predicted U.N. response is, well, silence.

In the meantime, the U.N. couldn’t be seen slouching on its regularly scheduled programming, so it resumed calls for a “nuclear weapons-free zone” in the Middle East – a call clearly aimed at Israel:

Israel has always said that it does not oppose signing the NPT, though only after there is stable peace in the Middle East.

It is an annual ritual at the IAEA annual conference that Arab and Muslim states try to get a resolution on the table that calls on Israel to give up its alleged nuclear weapons arsenal.

The last time they succeeded in getting such a resolution adopted by the IAEA General Conference was in 1991. Since 1987, the IAEA conference and U.N. General Assembly have passed 13 such resolutions. Israel has ignored them all.

Israel, by any normal standards, cannot be considered a threat to world security, and its neither-confirm-nor-deny policy is a necessity in a world that won’t let it defend itself from destruction by any means. Of course, since when are U.N. standards normal standards?

No, U.N. standards are more like these:

“Israel’s unsafeguarded facilities is a real threat to international peace and security,” Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna, Pirooz Hosseini, told the conference.

Excuse me for laughing. Iran, which has openly threatened to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons, claims that Israel, who would never dream of using the nuclear weapons they allegedly posses, is the threat to world security? But Iran knows that the best way to divert attention from itself is to attack Israel, the eternal scapegoat.

Mah nishtana?

I have a feeling that most of the world expects and secretly hopes that Israel will deal with Iran’s nuclear program the same way it dealt with Iraq’s ambitions in 1981. Of course, everyone will condemn Israel for it and bluster and threaten. But none of them want to see a nuclear Iran either, and they know that Israel’s the only country that will actually do something about it.

Hypocrites.

Terrorists publicize a video of the beheading of another hostage in Iraq. The nuclear threat from Iran continues to grow, because the Iranian government believes – probably rightly – that the US is tied up elsewhere and nobody else in the world will do anything about it. And North Korea flaunts its nuclear status. Meanwhile, thousands more are killed in Darfur while the world points fingers and stands idly by.

Just another typical day.

Witnesses saw a mushroom cloud. Little else is known so far.

Update: Both the US and South Korea are saying it’s unlikely to be nuclear. Which, of course, begs the question of what it was.

Update #2: North Korea says it was for a hydroelectric project. But this is North Korea we’re talking about, so the credibility of that statement is somewhat suspect. Just look at their statement:

Paek, who was providing the first North Korean word on the explosion, said it was part of a construction project to build a hydro-electric dam in the remote mountainous region of Ryanggang on the Chinese border.

The BBC said that when Paek was asked why North Korea had not explained earlier about the blasts he told Rammell Pyongyang had not done so because all foreign journalists were liars.

I suppose that’s a good reason… if you subscribe to the North Korean version of logic.

This headline seems better suited to The Onion than to real news: North Korea likens Bush to Hitler:

North Korea has described US President George W Bush as an “imbecile” and a “tyrant that puts Hitler in the shade”.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman was responding to comments President Bush made last week in which he described the North’s Kim Jong-il as a “tyrant”.

This pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Kim Jong-Il, the “Dear Leader” of gas chambers and concentration camps, who has killed and tortured countless members of his population and prompted comparisons to Auschwitz and outrage by Yad Vashem. The “Dear Leader” of child prisoners and sex slaves. The “Dear Leader” who prefers to starve his entire population rather than accept outside aid. The “Dear Leader” of nuclear weapons factories who refuses to even talk about disarming.

But no. In this upside-down world, Bush is clearly the person who merits comparison to Hitler. The “Dear Leader” must be just misunderstood. Or something.