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Post by Admin on Jun 24, 2020 19:57:11 GMT
North Korea has decided to suspend military action plans against South Korea, the official KCNA news agency reported on Wednesday, as a report suggested North Korean troops were taking down loudspeakers recently reinstalled at the fortified border.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un presided over a video conference meeting of the ruling party’s Central Military Commission on Tuesday, where members “took stock of the prevailing situation” before deciding to suspend the military plans, the report said, without elaborating.
The committee also discussed documents outlining measures for “further bolstering the war deterrent of the country,” KCNA reported.
Political tensions between the rival Koreas have been rising over Pyongyang’s objections to plans by defector-led groups in the South to send propaganda leaflets into the North.
North Korea claims the moves violate an agreement between the two aimed at preventing military confrontation, and accused the defectors of insulting the dignity of North Korea’s supreme leadership.
North Korea’s military was seen removing about 10 loudspeakers near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on Wednesday, just days after they were seen reinstalling around 20 of the devices, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing unnamed military sources. About 40 such systems were taken down after the two Koreas signed an accord in 2018 to cease “all hostile acts”.
A spokesman for South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North, said it is monitoring the situation and had no change in its stance that inter-Korean agreements should be kept.
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Post by Admin on Jun 27, 2020 19:17:03 GMT
Japan has scrapped plans to buy a multibillion-dollar missile defence system from the US that was intended to boost its ability to counter the “serious and imminent” threat posed by North Korea. Japan’s defence minister, Taro Kono, conceded the land-based Aegis Ashore system would prove too costly and time consuming because it would require a hardware upgrade to ensure booster rockets did not fall on populated areas near host sites. Japan’s National Security Council on Friday endorsed the cancellation, raising the prospect that Japan could develop a first-strike capability – a move that critics say violates its constitution, which has restricted its military to a strictly defensive role since the end of the second world war. Kono said Japan would have to scale up its entire defence posture in the face of continuing regional threats to its security. “We couldn’t move forward with this project, but still there are threats from North Korea,” he said in Tokyo this week, adding that the government had been unable to find alternative sites for the missile systems. Donald Trump has not commented on the cancellation, but he has encouraged Japan to buy more military hardware from the US and take more responsibility for its own defence. The state department said in a statement the US would “continue to work closely with Japan to find a solution to their concerns that enhances our shared security in the face of growing regional threats”. The government approved in 2017 plans to buy two Aegis Ashore systems to add to its SM-3 guided missiles launched by Aegis-equipped destroyers and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles. The two units, with an estimated cost of $4.2bn over three decades, were to have covered all of Japan from a station at Yamaguchi in the south and another at Akita in the north.
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Post by Admin on Jun 28, 2020 6:20:26 GMT
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un vanishes, then pops up. Now, the portly despot is out of sight again, and that raises the question: Who’s minding the store — the one that keeps him in booze and fancy wheels? His little sister has stepped into his role as saber-rattler, even threatening a nuclear attack on the US. But those caught up in the palace intrigue really want to know if she’s also the one overseeing the money machine that keeps the mean machine running. That would be the shadowy, notorious Office 39 in Pyongyang, the headquarters of an allegedly illicit global smuggling network designed to generate millions in hard currency that fatten the coffers of Kim and his family. Without it, Pyongyang’s elite, hamstrung by UN and US sanctions that prevent them from doing above-board trading with the world, would have to do without any luxuries — not to mention nuclear weapons. “Where do you think Kim gets his cognacs, Mercedes and Rolex watches?” David Maxwell, a retired US Army Special Forces colonel and North Korea expert, asked the Post. “All the money to buy that stuff comes from Office 39.” Drug manufacturing and trafficking, counterfeiting, gold smuggling, arms dealing and slave labor are just a handful of the ultra-illegal activities that Office 39 has sponsored since Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-Il, launched it in 1974. Kim, reportedly holed up in his coastal resort in Wonsan, is the nominal head of Office 39, which is housed in a faceless government building in the capital. Some speculate his sister, who is married to a top official in Office 39, could be starting to take control as well. Others insist the operation remains firmly in the hands of the septuagenarian executives that do much of the heavy lifting in Pyongyang. “It’s like a bank for Kim Jong Un,” North Korean defector Jason Lee, 35, told the Post. Both Lee and his father worked as executives in Office 39, running shipping companies, before they fled Pyongyang for Seoul and then the US. “But he’s gotten a little more careful in recent years about the illegal activity, Lee said. “It was getting too much attention and looking bad for the Party.” Up until the early 2000s, North Korean diplomats working on behalf of Office 39 were the shameless bag men for the regime — and often still are, according to Sean King, an Asia specialist at Park Strategies in New York. “The Kims are like an organized crime family masquerading as the leaders of a country,” King told the Post. “The diplomats were sent overseas with quotas of hard currency they’d have to send back, by any means necessary. North Korea’s embassies were organized like a multinational criminal enterprise.”
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Post by Admin on Nov 16, 2020 5:29:26 GMT
What comes next Biden knows the challenges likely posed by North Korea. Pyongyang conducted both a nuclear and a long-range missile test in the opening months of Obama's presidency, under which Biden served as vice president.
However, he is not necessarily expected to revert back to the Obama-era policy of "strategic patience" of waiting for Pyongyang to come to the negotiating table while keeping sanctions in place.
That policy failed to achieve its main objectives. during that time, North Korea significantly expanded its nuclear and missile capability and carried out four of its six nuclear tests.
Ambassador Yun said that Biden has shown he "wants a diplomatic solution, he wants an engagement."
"Sure, he has emphasized denuclearization, but at the same time he has emphasized what he called principled diplomacy so I would hope that the engagement door would be more open now," he said.
However, a provocation from Pyongyang -- especially a missile test -- could dramatically change the calculus for a Biden administration.
Evans Revere, senior director with the Albright Stonebridge Group, has extensive experience negotiating with North Korea during his time at the State Department. He believes Biden would react strongly to any provocation from North Korea.
A response will most likely include the immediate resumption of large-scale US-South Korea military exercises, new military deployments to Korea and the surrounding area and a major effort to impose new sanctions and strengthen existing measures, said Revere. "As well as to take new steps designed to isolate, weaken and pressure the North Korean regime," he added.
It is not clear at this time what pressure China, North Korea's main trading partner and ally, would exert to prevent a resumption of testing. It's also not clear how a US-China relationship, currently at its lowest point in years, would progress.
Trump's personal style may have led to three history-making summits, but nuclear talks between the two countries have been stuck in neutral for months.
Diplomacy with North Korea will likely be much more process oriented, said Delury of Yonsei University.
"Under Trump what we've seen is a personalistic style which is almost unprecedented," he said. "A Biden administration is going to be an administration, there's going to be a coherence to it."
Pyongyang has doled out its fair share of insults to Biden over recent months, calling him a "fool of low IQ" and a "rabid dog" who "must be beaten to death with a stick."
But former US officials who have dealt with Pyongyang acknowledge name-calling is par for the course. Trump himself has shown us threats and insults do not rule out diplomacy.
President Obama warned an incoming President Trump that North Korea would be one of the most pressing national security concerns. Revere believes Biden does not need any such warning.
"He understands the problem and knows that, after four years of the Trump administration, the North Korean nuclear threat is greater than ever," Revere said.
"Biden is not about to ignore North Korea, and Pyongyang can be counted on to ensure that he doesn't."
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Post by Admin on Nov 27, 2020 23:23:54 GMT
North Korea is taking increasingly harsh measures to stop the coronavirus from entering the country, including executing an official in August who violated anti-virus rules, South Korean intelligence officials told lawmakers on Friday. In a closed-door briefing to a parliamentary intelligence committee on Friday, the officials told lawmakers that the executed North Korean had brought goods through customs in the city of Sinuiju on North Korea's border with China, in violation of coronavirus-related quarantine measures. North Korea also has locked down the capital, Pyongyang, and prohibited fishing and salt production in the ocean as part of its restrictions to block COVID-19, lawmakers cited the intelligence officials as saying. Lawmaker Ha Tae-keung, who is on the intelligence committee, told reporters after the briefing that North Korea has refused to take delivery of 110,000 tons of rice promised by China. The rice is sitting in northeastern China's port of Dalian, he said, because North Korea fears the coronavirus could enter the country with the shipment. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "has been expressing emotional excess, anger and signs of stress, and increasingly giving unreasonable orders," Ha told reporters. Most of North Korea's trade — both legal commerce and extensive smuggling — goes through China, and the border closure after the coronavirus broke out has sent food and commodities prices surging in sanctions-hit North Korea, according to news reports. Trade with China plummeted 73% from January to September, year-on-year, according to a report by the Korea International Trade Association. By contrast, trade dropped 57% following the latest batch of international sanctions, imposed in 2017. North Korea claims to have been successful in keeping the coronavirus out of the country. Despite testing thousands of suspected cases, it claims not to have a single confirmed case, although health experts say smugglers could have brought the virus in from China. Lawmaker Ha added that South Korea's intelligence service foiled an attempt by the North to hack into a South Korean drugmaker working on a coronavirus vaccine.
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