Kim Jong-un Is Not a Freakish Buffoon

[tao]

BEIJING — North Korea is not a problem that can be solved. As much as the West may engage in wishful thinking about a revolution, the Kim family regime has survived far longer than almost anyone predicted. Even today, it shows no signs of collapsing, and the North Koreans show no signs of rebelling en masse.

 

Does anyone actually think that with another round of sanctions the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, will suddenly give up power and North Koreans will all become liberal democrats? Or that somehow Washington could brandish enough aircraft carriers that the North Korean military and political establishment will surrender?

 

The widespread mocking of Kim Jong-un as a freakish buffoon is a sign of our misguided approach. Viewing him as a joke is a mistake not because it’s rude, but because it contributes to a dangerous underestimation of his power. Mr. Kim has managed to rule for almost six years as a brutal totalitarian dictator. He may be many things, but he is not a lightweight. Leaders do not survive under such circumstances without being superb politicians.

 

Sanctions and threats haven’t worked in the past, and more of the same most certainly will not work in the future. As his father and grandfather did, Mr. Kim meets pressure with pressure. It is no surprise that a surge in missile tests came as the Trump administration has made threats about sending aircraft carriers and potential pre-emptive strikes. North Korea isn’t unpredictable; rather, it is the most predictable country on earth.

 

The North Koreans are also very calculating. By aiming test missiles at Japan, Pyongyang is sending a clear signal: Take a preventive shot at our missile sites, and we will take a shot at Japan, most likely at the roughly 50,000 American military personnel stationed at United States bases there. It would not be the start of a second Korean War, but rather a poke for a poke. Would the United States really want to up the ante a second time? Would Japan, China and South Korea want to?

 

Nuclear weapons are almost useless for coercion, but they are great for deterrence. They are designed to ensure the survival of the country and the regime. The more pressure the United States puts on the North Koreans, the more likely they are to continue perfecting their missiles and nuclear weapons. In short, deterrence works, and neither North Korea nor the rest of the world is in danger of forgetting that.

 

Twenty years ago, there might have been an opportunity for the two sides to reach a deal. But both Washington and Pyongyang have had years of evidence to back their claims that the other side will never live up to its word. This is a classic paradox: Actions one side takes to make itself safer prompt a response by its adversary, making both sides less safe.

 

Given this pessimistic perspective, what is the way forward?

 

The good news is that deterrence is effective both ways. North Korea poses almost no threat to South Korea as long as the United States-South Korea alliance remains ironclad. Kim Jong-un may be many things, but he is not suicidal. Deterrence will continue to work.

 

But the North Korean problem is far bigger than its nuclear program. The country is experiencing a humanitarian disaster. The number of people trying to flee the country could soar in a crisis. It’s also an economic and environmental black hole that limits trade and travel throughout Northeast Asia. While the political challenges that come with the nuclear weapons program are unavoidable, the West should continue putting effort into solving these other problems.

 

Politicians in the United States and South Korea may not want to admit that the North Korean nuclear arsenal is a reality, but Washington has a history of coming around. The United States spent more than a decade ignoring the situation in South Asia before finally acknowledging that India and Pakistan had nuclear weapons.

 

North Korea is in a class of its own. But we ignore that it is a real country with a functioning government at our peril. For the United States, making steady progress in alleviating the humanitarian and economic problems, while maintaining strong deterrence against the nuclear program, is the only way forward.

 

< Here >

 

[straycat19]

Quote

Kim Jong-un Is Not a Freakish Buffoon

 

No, he's the modern version of Porky the Pig.  The resemblance between the two is amazing, so we just print pictures of Porky with Kim's face on them.  Make excellent targets for darts or at the range.  If he really wants nuclear weapons I think we should give him some, one or two nicely positioned over his palace should do the trick.  He wants to be a super power but is only a supper power and will never be nothing more.  How many more North Koreans have to starve before he sees the light and starts playing nice with the rest of the world?  I really feel sorry for the common people of North Korea who have to endure so much for a psycho's ego.

[virge]

Kim thinks he can bully the rest of the world, what he doesn't realize is Russia, China, and the US have the ability to wipe North Korea off the face of the earth forever. He looks like one of those Teletubbies. He can parade his tanks and missiles all day long, but in the end, all his insanity is just his lips flapping and a major reality wake up call is coming to his door very soon.

[SnakeMasteR]

How can you be a superb politician without doing actual politics? Handholding taking place from a handful of countries (if it's that much) can't be compared to China, USA, England, France, Russia, Germany and all the other countries that require a leader with political skills due to many different leaders being approached throughout daily business, there is simply a big amount of political involvement. There isn't really much daily business going on with North Korea from a political perspective due to it being heavily isolated from global political playfields, that's the whole reason why threats are the only sign of life you can expect from that country and there is no reason why that should change with North Korean's "system" in place.

[rudrax]

Kim Jong-un is a kind of those rare specimens who are born through the backdoor instead of the regular front door. This backdoor phenomenon causes the mental development in such a way that one becomes like Kim Jong one day.

[pc71520]

Paranoid or not, Kim Jong-un

is not a Globalization and New World Order Puppet

like most of the Western-world Politicians.

[dMog]

On July 8, 2017 at 7:39 AM, pc71520 said:

Paranoid or not, Kim Jong-un

is not a Globalization and New World Order Puppet

like most of the Western-world Politicians.

No he is not a new world puppet.... But certainly he is a puppet of  government or what it is ruling and in power in China

[dufus]

The Russian Foreign Ministry has now published the complete text of the Russian-Chinese joint statement on the Korean conflict.

http://theduran.com/russian-chinese-joint-statement-korea/

 

[pc71520]

4 hours ago, dMog said:

But certainly he is a puppet of  government or what it is ruling and in power in China

IF Kim Jong-un had been a puppet of China, Beijing would have cancelled the N. Korean Missile program.

I have not seen Kim Jong-un being stopped by China, Russia etc.

He has done whatever he wants,  and he has been Free to do so.

[steven36]

 

Quote

 

North Korea threat: Alaska mayor says he's 'worried about moose, not missiles

 

While lawmakers in Alaska have doubled down on calls for improved U.S. defense in the wake of a North Korea ICBM test, some have appeared to shrug off the threat seemingly posed by the rogue regime.

“I’m worried about moose, not missiles,” Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz told The Washington Post  in a story published Saturday. “Bears, not bombs.”

Todd Sherwood, an attorney who served more than a decade in the U.S. Air Force, told the newspaper that if North Korea would to attack, the U.S. military reaction would probably be severe. He downplayed the threats cast by Dictator Kim Jong Un.

 

“I’m more worried about whether I’m going to fall off my paddleboard on an Alaska glacier lake this summer,” he said. “And I’m not all that worried about that.”

According to The Washington Post, Alaska’s past may have something to do with its mellow response to the possibility of an attack from North Korea. An Alaskan town was bombed in 1942 during World War II and in the same week Japan occupied two Aleutian Islands. Alaska was also on alert during the Cold War with its incredibly close proximity to Russia. Some Alaskan homes still have fallout shelters.

 

Though some may shrug off the threat, lawmakers are still taking steps to bolster defenses.

 

“Today, Alaskans awoke to disturbing news that North Korea tested a missile that some experts say may be able to reach Alaska in the near future,” Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said last week. “Now more than ever, it’s imperative for Alaskans and the rest of the nation that we be prepared.”

 

A bill introduced in May by Sullivan and Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, would incorporate 28 ground-based inceptors across the U.S., 14 of which would be located in Alaska. An interceptor moves towards its target based on tracking data, and is assumed to destroy the target by force of impact to neutralize its nuclear explosive power; it could be launched if given notice of a missile headed towards the U.S.

 

The Pentagon has a total of 36 missile interceptors in underground silos on military bases in Alaska and California, and is expected to increase that to 44 by the end of the year.

 

According to Professor Bruce Bechtol of Angelo State University in Texas, the missile North Korea launched could hit the U.S. if positioned at a “standard launch angle.”

 

“I’ve been saying for months that it’s no longer ‘if’ but ‘when’ Kim Jong-Un will get the ability to strike U.S. cities with a nuclear missile,” Sullivan said prior to the ICBM launch.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/07/10/north-korea-threat-alaska-mayor-says-hes-worried-about-moose-not-missiles.html

 

[dMog]

6 hours ago, pc71520 said:

IF Kim Jong-un had been a puppet of China, Beijing would have cancelled the N. Korean Missile program.

I have not seen Kim Jong-un being stopped by China, Russia etc.

He has done whatever he wants,  and he has been Free to do so.

Whywould they stop him.... in fact. If anything they encourage. Chinaand russia both support and finance his military.  Why.... to show America that by doing so they have huge iinfluence inthe region through Nkorea.... can't say iblame themfor doing so either. The game of international politics and each super power trying to keep the other from getting too hig and powerful is very complex.    Many little players look and act independant but are mere cogs in three countries plans..... USA,CHINA AND RUSSIA..... really the USA has no option but to make a lot of noise. ...rattle a few sabers.... but the end result Nkorea will icbms with nukes on them,because CHINA and RUSSIA. Wants it so..... if those two powers were not in play here kim's daddy. Would not have been leader into his old age

 

[steven36]

 

Quote

 

Time for a North Korea ultimatum: Choose peace or obliteration

 

 

North Korea’s Fourth of July missile test launched some diplomatic fireworks in the United Nations Security Council, including threats of force. As Kim Jong Un grows increasingly belligerent and irrational, the international community should deliver a calm but stern message: It is no concern of ours how you run your own country — but if you threaten to extend your violence, North Korea will be reduced to a burned-out cinder.

 

This line is paraphrased from the 1951 anti-nuclear science fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the contemporary context, the North Koreans are the Earthlings, and we are the aliens.

The Day the Earth Stood Still was a message film from the dawn of the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. In it, the wise, hyperrational alien Klaatu lands in Washington, D.C., as an emissary from beyond, accompanied by a planet-busting robot named Gort. Klaatu notes that humanity (like North Korea) has “discovered a rudimentary kind of atomic energy” and is “experimenting with rockets.” He observes that “in the hands of a mature civilization, these would not be considered weapons of aggression.”

 

 

This is also true of seasoned superpowers that accept the nuclear deterrence paradigm. But, Klaatu continues, “we don't trust you with such power. … We know the potentiality of these developments, and we are disturbed to find them in the hands of children.” Or in the contemporary case, in the hands of an unstable young dictator with delusions of grandeur.

 

The aliens Klaatu represented had their own crushing experience with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After the alien Armageddon, they rebuilt their civilization and established an army of Gort-style galactic policemen to identify and snuff out aggression, kind of like the original vision for the United Nations. They could thus engage in peaceful interplanetary trade (think globalization) without fear of experiencing another apocalypse. “We do not pretend to have achieved perfection,” Klaatu declares, “but we do have a system — and it works.”

 

Unlike some other peace-themed films, The Day the Earth Stood Still did not preach an unconditional form of love thy neighbor. Klaatu makes clear that the Earthlings have “no alternative” to the alien proposal to end Earth’s weapons research and join the team. Should the offer be refused, “the planet Earth would have to be — eliminated.”

 

Washington has taken a hard rhetorical line against Pyongyang in the past. For many years, it was U.S. policy that it would be “unacceptable” for North Korea to possess nuclear capability. However, once Pyongyang began testing nuclear weapons, we accepted it. Yes, there have been sanctions and statements and bluster, but North Korea’s weapons program has continued, even accelerated. The 21st century lesson learned by the Kim dynasty is, if you don’t want to wind up like deposed and deceased WMD-seekers Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gadhafi, keep building nukes.

 

We are now in the analogous position of the aliens represented in the film 66 years ago. We are saying, or should be, that the risk is too great for rogue states and other proliferators to possess the awesome power of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them worldwide. We have a superior civilization, and countries like North Korea are welcome to participate. 

 

Past U.S. policymakers may have comforted themselves with the notion that it didn’t matter if they bowed to Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions because North Korea lacked delivery systems that could threaten the United States and the globe. Yet now the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is accelerating the pace of its missile program and has tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, which Kim called “a gift for the American bastards.” Simply proclaiming this unacceptable lacks credibility; Pyongyang has heard that one before.

 

But if they continue to put the world at risk, they will have to answer to our version of Gort. President Trump and the international community could deliver to Pyongyang Klaatu’s final words before leaving Earth: “Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace. Or pursue your present course — and face obliteration. We will be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you.”

 

James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University and served as a special assistant to the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. Follow him on Twitter: @James_Robbins

 

http://www.pnj.com/story/news/2017/07/09/time-north-korea-ultimatum-choose-peace-obliteration/458975001/?from=global&sessionKey=&autologin=

 

[pc71520]

@dMog

 

I guess, China and Russia are No different from N. Korea, aren't they?

What follows next? Iran?

[luisam]

12 hours ago, dMog said:

he is a puppet of  government or what it is ruling and in power in China

Maybe North Korea was years ago a  puppet government of China but now it's a real life "Chucky" and I'm not sure that Russia and China can (or even want?) really control them. Probably the main issue is that both Russia and China have some important commercial interests with Pionyang and they are reluctant to take any really harsh procedure against them.

 

16 minutes ago, pc71520 said:

I guess, China and Russia are No different from N. Korea, aren't they?

 

It should take long pages to analise the structure of Russian and Chinese systems and I don't believe that NSANE is the most appropiate forum to do so but I don't really need to guess. China and Russia are completely different from North Korea.

[VIKTOR PAVEL]

Magnifico!!! Fantastico!!!

 

super powers has have enough nukes to destroy earth! but to be sure :

 

[steven36]

 

Quote

 

Russia submits North Korea missile data to U.N.

 

 

July 10 (UPI) -- Russia has submitted documents proving the North Korea projectile launched last week was an intermediate-range missile.

 

Russia's state-run Tass news agency reported the proof was submitted to the United Nations secretariat and contradicts U.S. and South Korea findings that show the Hwasong-14 rocket is an intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.

 

According to Tass, the Russian documents submitted to the United Nations on Saturday stated the Voronezh radar base in Irkutsk, Russia, tracked the launched of a North Korea midrange ballistic missile on July 4.

 

Missile flight time was 14 minutes, the maximum altitude reached was 332 miles and flight distance was 317 miles, Russia stated.

 

Based on the data, the Hwasong-14 is a midrange missile that can hit targets within a 1,240-mile range.

 

Russia's proof includes a map of the missile flight path.

 

The move comes after Russia's deputy U.N. Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov said at the U.N. Security Council Moscow's data indicate North Korea launched a midrange projectile, and not an ICBM.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley challenged the claim.

 

"Not only has the secretary-general said this was an ICBM and the United States has said this is an ICBM. North Korea has said this is an ICBM. So if you need any sort of intelligence to let you know that the rest of the world sees this as an ICBM, I'm happy to provide it," Haley said.

 

Russia blocked a U.N. statement urging North Korea sanctions.

 

The report also calls into question North Korea claims. Pyongyang stated last week the Hwasong-14 flew 580 miles at a maximum altitude of 1,740 miles, and claimed the launch was a "successful" demonstration of ICBM capability.

 

The claim, if true, means the Hwasong-14's range exceeds 4,900 miles if fired from a normal angle.

 

ICBMs must have a minimum range of 3,400 miles.

 

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/07/10/Russia-submits-North-Korea-missile-data-to-UN/8811499691892/

 

[Sylence]

Canada is the puppet of U.S, not North Korea. and they call NK rouge nation because they are not dog like other nations to bow down to U.S.

 

North Korea Best Korea!

[knowledge-Spammer]

North Korea  is on are border  so russia have to talk about things and try and make peace

we not want fight but things may have to be changed to make less problems for all people

 

 

[steven36]

 

Quote

 

China and US step up co-operation over North Korean nuclear crisis

 

President Xi reiterates Chinese view that dialogue is needed to resolve standoff

 

 

China’s president Xi Jinping and US president Donald Trump vowed to step up security co-operation between their two countries to tackle the North Korean nuclear crisis, and Mr Xi has ordered China’s navy to take part in US-led military exercises in the Pacific Rim next year.

Mr Xi held a 1½-hour meeting with Mr Trump on the fringes of the G20 in Hamburg, and news of military and security co-operation comes as a surprise after the relationship between the world’s two biggest economies appeared strained by a series of aggressive remarks by the US leader. Just days before the G20, Mr Trump tweeted that China was not doing enough to restrain North Korea.

While ordering the navy to take part in the “Rimpac” manoeuvres and proposing military co-operation with the US, Mr Xi restated the North Korean nuclear standoff could be resolved only through dialogue.

“The international community should increase efforts in promoting dialogue and controlling the situation when responding to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s [North Korea’s] violations of UN Security Council resolutions,” Mr Xi said, quoted by the Xinhua news agency.
Anti-missile system

The Chinese president reiterated his opposition to the deployment of the US Thaad anti-missile system in South Korea, and said he continued to oppose joint naval drills by the US and South Korea, which the North Koreans see as preparation for invasion.


The two countries’ defence ministers should exchange visits as soon as possible, and there should be joint chiefs of staff meetings, said Mr Xi, before ordering “the Chinese navy’s participation in the United States-led 2018 Pacific Rim military drill.”

China first took part in the US Pacific Rim drill, known as Rimpac, in 2014, when it sent 47 ships, six submarines, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel.

Always mercurial, the Sino-US relationship has become extremely difficult to predict of late, certainly from the American side.

“It’s an honour to have you as a friend,” Mr Trump told his Chinese counterpart at the weekend, before telling him he appreciated actions he had already taken on North Korea, a direct contradiction of his tweet of a few days earlier.

Mr Trump campaigned on a message of getting tough with China on trade issues, but when the two leaders first met in April at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort, the US leader hailed their friendship, which apparently had survived news over chocolate cake that the US was planning an air strike on Syria.

In recent weeks Mr Trump has criticised China for not doing enough to rein in its ally and neighbour North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, which appears to have reached a stage that it can fire an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The Chinese have been angered by US arms sales to Taiwan, rumblings of trade embargoes over steel exports, the sanctioning of a Chinese bank for allegedly dealing with North Korea and also US naval vessels have sailed close to islets in the South China Sea which Beijing claims as Chinese territory.

“As far as North Korea is concerned, we will have, eventually, success. It may take longer than I’d like. It may take longer than you’d like. But there will be success in the end one way or the other,” Mr Trump said. – (Additional reporting: Reuters)

 

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/china-and-us-step-up-co-operation-over-north-korean-nuclear-crisis-1.3149931

 

[dufus]

15 hours ago, knowledge said:

North Korea  is on are border  so russia

could be plan destable nk flood russia china with millions of innocent civilians causing mayhem

[tao]

17 hours ago, knowledge said:

North Korea  is on are border  so russia have to talk about things and try and make peace

we not want fight but things may have to be changed to make less problems for all people

An interesting article in today's The New York Times:  "North Koreans in Russia Work ‘Basically in the Situation of Slaves’"

 

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia — Across Western Europe and the United States, immigrants from poorer countries, whether plumbers from Poland or farmhands from Mexico, have become a lightning rod for economic anxieties over cheap labor.

 

The Russian city of Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, however, has eagerly embraced a new icon of border-crushing globalization: the North Korean painter.

 

Unlike migrant workers in much of the West, destitute decorators from North Korea are so welcome that they have helped make Russia at least the equal of China — Pyongyang’s main backer — as the world’s biggest user of labor from the impoverished yet nuclear-armed country.

 

Human rights groups say this state-controlled traffic amounts to a slave trade, but so desperate are conditions in North Korea that laborers often pay bribes to get sent to Russia, where construction companies and Russians who need work on their homes are delighted to have them.

 

“They are fast, cheap and very reliable, much better than Russian workers,” Yulia Kravchenko, a 32-year-old Vladivostok housewife said of the painters. “They do nothing but work from morning until late at night.”

 

The work habits that delight Vladivostok homeowners are also generating sorely needed cash for the world’s most isolated regime, a hereditary dictatorship in Pyongyang now intent on building nuclear bombs and missiles to carry them as far as the United States.

 

Squeezed by international sanctions and unable to produce goods that anyone outside North Korea wants to buy — other than missile parts, coal and mushrooms — the government has sent tens of thousands of its impoverished citizens to cities and towns across the former Soviet Union to earn money for the state.

 

North Korean laborers helped build a new soccer stadium in St. Petersburg to be used in next year’s World Cup, a project on which at least one of them died. They are working on a luxury apartment complex in central Moscow, where two North Koreans were found dead last month in a squalid hostel near the construction site. They also cut down trees in remote logging encampments in the Russian Far East that resemble Stalin-era prison camps.

 

But they have left their biggest and most visible mark in Vladivostok, providing labor to home repair companies that boast to customers how North Koreans are cheaper, more disciplined and more sober than native Russians.

 

“Surprisingly, these people are hard-working and orderly. They will not take long rests from work, go on frequent cigarette breaks or shirk their duties,” promised the website of a Vladivostok company.

 

The home repair industry stands at the more benign end of North Korea’s labor export program. Painters and plasterers are not generally subjected to the brutal mistreatment endured by North Koreans working in Russian logging camps or on construction sites.

 

Though rigidly controlled by minders from the Workers’ Party of Korea, the ruling party in Pyongyang, they do not, on the whole, live in what the State Department in its recently released annual report on human trafficking called “credible reports of slave-like conditions of North Koreans working in Russia.”

 

All the same, they still suffer from what human rights groups say is a particularly egregious feature of Pyongyang’s labor export program: Most of their earnings are confiscated by the state.

 

A lengthy report on North Korean workers in Russia issued last year by the Data Base Center for North Korean Human Rights, an organization in Seoul, said the Workers’ Party of Korea seizes 80 percent of the wages earned by forestry workers and at least 30 percent of the salaries paid to laborers working in construction. Further money is taken to cover living expenses, mandatory contributions to a so-called loyalty fund and other “donations.”

 

This “exploitative structure,” the report said, constitutes “one of the fundamental causes of the North Korean workers’ inhumanly hard labor in Russia.”

 

The human rights group estimated that the North Korean authorities earn at least $120 million a year from laborers sent to Russia, a vital source of income for a family dynasty founded, with Moscow’s backing, by Kim Il-sung in 1948 and now headed by his 33-year-old grandson, Kim Jong-un. It put the number of North Koreans working in Russia at nearly 50,000, though other studies say the number is 30,000 to 40,000, which is still more than in China or the Middle East, the other principal destinations.

 

The Russian boss of a Vladivostok decorating company that employs scores of North Koreans said the amount of money seized from salaries had increased substantially over the past decade, rising to a current monthly rate of 50,000 rubles, or $841, from 17,000 rubles a month in 2006. He said his highest-paid workers now lose half or more of their monthly salary through confiscation, while the leader of each construction squad of around 20 to 30 laborers takes an additional cut of about 20 percent in return for finding painting jobs for his men.

 

The Russian asked that he not be named because he feared that Workers’ Party supervisors would punish his laborers or prevent them from working with him.

 

The increased rate of confiscation followed a sharp fall in the value of the ruble against the dollar, a troubling development for a regime that wants dollars, not rubles.

 

But the jacking up of the amount of rubles seized more than compensated for the ruble’s fall, reflecting Pyongyang’s desperate hunt for more cash since Kim Jong-un took power in December 2011 and ramped up North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.

 

International sanctions and a Chinese ban on imports of North Korean coal in February after a series of missile tests have steadily squeezed Pyongyang’s other sources of foreign revenue. That has left the export of labor, along with a string of state-run restaurants and other small businesses in Vladivostok and elsewhere, as one of the regime’s shrinking list of ways to generate hard currency.

 

To prevent them from running away and seeking refuge in South Korea, North Korean laborers are forced to live together in cramped dormitories scattered around the outskirts of Vladivostok and prohibited from contacting Russians and other foreigners outside work.

 

The boom in North Korean labor exports to Russia coincides with an expansion of other links between the two countries, including a recent surge in Russian coal exports and the start in May of a new ferry service twice a week between Vladivostok and Rason, a special economic zone on the east coast of North Korea.

 

In April last year, just months after North Korea announced that it had tested a “miniaturized hydrogen bomb,” Russian and North Korean officials gathered south of Vladivostok to celebrate the reopening of Kim Il-sung House, a wooden building dedicated to the memory of the dictator. It had been rebuilt, at Russia’s expense, after a fire.

 

The links with Russia are still far less extensive than those North Korea has with China, its principal foreign backer, and do not appear to violate sanctions imposed — with the Russian government’s support — by the United Nations. But they have nonetheless raised eyebrows in the United States and Japan, which want to tighten the economic and diplomatic vise on Pyongyang.

 

Russian coal exports to North Korea more than tripled to $28.4 million in the first quarter of this year from $7.5 million in the same period in 2014, indicating that Moscow would most likely object to any efforts by Washington to widen United Nations economic sanctions.

 

Why North Korea would sharply increase coal imports is a mystery, as it has plenty of coal. A bigger mystery is the business rationale behind the new ferry service to North Korea, started last month by a private Russian company, InvestStroyTrest, at a time when few Russians want to travel to North Korea and even fewer North Koreans, aside from laborers, visit Russia.

 

When the ferry, the Mangyongbong, docked in Vladivostok last week from North Korea it had just six paying passengers. It has berths for 193.

 

Mikhail Khmel, the deputy director general of InvestStroyTrest, said that “all the noise around North Korea that makes people afraid” was to blame for the slow business.

 

North Koreans, he added, “are not angels” but don’t deserve all the pressure put on them by the United States. “America is very far away, but we live next door,” he said. “We want to deal with them normally.”

 

The ferry service only expands existing transport links between North Korea and Vladivostok, the only foreign destination other than Beijing and the northern Chinese city of Shenyang for Pyongyang’s national airline, Air Koryo.

 

Each Friday, skinny North Korean laborers in ragged clothes, watched over by supervisors in suits with Kim Il-sung badges, gather at Vladivostok airport with piles of luggage before a weekly flight to and from Pyongyang.

 

While presenting a miserable tableau of deprivation at the airport, North Koreans who have worked as laborers in Russia often are eager to come back. Indeed, the Russian decorating company boss said, they often pay bribes to officials from the Workers’ Party to gain an assignment to work abroad.

 

One of these is a 52-year-old painter now on his second five-year assignment to Russia. Speaking broken Russian as he painted Ms. Kravchenko’s bedroom wall, he said that he liked the work and the opportunity to earn foreign money for himself and his country. While in Russia, he goes by the name Dima, short for Dimitri.

 

He said his Russia work permit expires next year and he will have to go home. “I hope I can come back,” he said.

 

The Russian boss said North Koreans work “crazily long hours” without complaint and call him at 6 a.m., even on weekends, if he has not yet shown up to tell them what to paint or plaster. “They don’t take holidays. They eat, work and sleep and nothing else. And they don’t sleep much,” he said. “They are basically in the situation of slaves.”

 

All the same, he added, North Koreans still want to work in Russia, where, despite the hardships and confiscation of a big chunk of their wages, they can live better and freer than they do at home.

 

“It is not slave labor but hard labor. And it is much better here than in North Korea,” Georgy Toloraya, a former Russian diplomat in Pyongyang, said.

 

< Here >

 

[dufus]

russia again up to no good l