Latest news with #NorthKoreans
Daily Maverick
13 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Rights abuses continue in North Korea a decade after probe, says UN investigator
A decade after a landmark U.N. report concluded North Korea committed crimes against humanity, a U.N. official investigating rights in the isolated state told Reuters many abuses continue, exacerbated by COVID-era controls that have yet to be lifted. James Heenan, who represents the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, said he is still surprised by the continued prevalence of executions, forced labour and reports of starvation in the authoritarian country. Later this year Heenan's team will release a follow-up report to the 2014 findings by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which said the government had committed 'systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations' that constituted crimes against humanity. DPRK is North Korea's official name. While the conclusions of this year's report are still being finalised, Heenan told Reuters in an interview that the last 10 years have seen mixed results, with North Korea's government engaging more with some international institutions, but doubling down on control at home. 'The post-COVID period for DPRK means a period of much greater government control over people's lives and restrictions on their freedoms,' he said in the interview. North Korea's embassy in London did not answer phone calls seeking comment. The government has in the past denied abuses and accused the U.N. and foreign countries of trying to use human rights as a political weapon to attack North Korea. A Reuters investigation in 2023 found leader Kim Jong Un had spent much of the COVID pandemic building a massive string of walls and fences along the previously porous border with China, and later built fences around the capital of Pyongyang. A report this week by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said the COVID pandemic raged in North Korea for more than two years before the regime admitted in May 2022 that the virus had permeated its borders, and that the regime bungled the response in a way that violated freedoms and left most citizens to fend for themselves. On Wednesday SI Analytics, a Seoul-based satellite imagery firm, released a report noting North Korea is renovating a key prison camp near the border with China, possibly in response to international criticism, while simultaneously strengthening physical control over prisoners under the pretence of facility improvement. Heenan said his team has talked to more than 300 North Koreans who fled their country in recent years, and many expressed despair. 'Sometimes we hear people saying they sort of hope a war breaks out, because that might change things,' he said. A number of those interviewees will speak publicly for the first time next week as part of an effort to put a human face on the U.N. findings. 'It's a rare opportunity to hear from people publicly what they want to say about what's happening in the DPRK,' Heenan said. He expressed concern about funding cuts for international aid and U.N. programmes around the world, which is pressuring human rights work and threatening support for North Korean refugees. While human rights has traditionally been a politically volatile subject not only for Pyongyang but for foreign governments trying to engage with the nuclear-armed North, Heenan said the issues like prison camps need to be part of any engagement on a political settlement. 'There's no point self-censoring on human rights, because… no one's fooled,' he said.
Otago Daily Times
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
Rights abuses continue in North Korea: investigator
A decade after a landmark U.N. report concluded North Korea committed crimes against humanity, a U.N. official investigating rights in the isolated state says many abuses continue, exacerbated by COVID-era controls that have yet to be lifted. James Heenan, who represents the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, said he is still surprised by the continued prevalence of executions, forced labour and reports of starvation in the authoritarian country. Later this year Heenan's team will release a follow-up report to the 2014 findings by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which said the government had committed "systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations" that constituted crimes against humanity. DPRK is North Korea's official name. While the conclusions of this year's report are still being finalised, Heenan told Reuters in an interview that the last 10 years have seen mixed results, with North Korea's government engaging more with some international institutions, but doubling down on control at home. "The post-COVID period for DPRK means a period of much greater government control over people's lives and restrictions on their freedoms," he said in the interview. North Korea's embassy in London did not answer phone calls seeking comment. The government has in the past denied abuses and accused the U.N. and foreign countries of trying to use human rights as a political weapon to attack North Korea. A Reuters investigation in 2023 found leader Kim Jong Un had spent much of the COVID pandemic building a massive string of walls and fences along the previously porous border with China, and later built fences around the capital of Pyongyang. A report this week by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said the COVID pandemic raged in North Korea for more than two years before the regime admitted in May 2022 that the virus had permeated its borders, and that the regime bungled the response in a way that violated freedoms and left most citizens to fend for themselves. On Wednesday SI Analytics, a Seoul-based satellite imagery firm, released a report noting North Korea is renovating a key prison camp near the border with China, possibly in response to international criticism, while simultaneously strengthening physical control over prisoners under the pretence of facility improvement. Heenan said his team has talked to more than 300 North Koreans who fled their country in recent years, and many expressed despair. "Sometimes we hear people saying they sort of hope a war breaks out, because that might change things," he said. A number of those interviewees will speak publicly for the first time next week as part of an effort to put a human face on the U.N. findings. "It's a rare opportunity to hear from people publicly what they want to say about what's happening in the DPRK," Heenan said. He expressed concern about funding cuts for international aid and U.N. programmes around the world, which is pressuring human rights work and threatening support for North Korean refugees. While human rights has traditionally been a politically volatile subject not only for Pyongyang but for foreign governments trying to engage with the nuclear-armed North, Heenan said the issues like prison camps need to be part of any engagement on a political settlement. "There's no point self-censoring on human rights, because... no one's fooled," he said.
Time Magazine
a day ago
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Why Trump May Ignore 80 Years of U.S. Regime Change Mistakes
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Donald Trump expected his first face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama would be all of '10 or 15 minutes.' After all, the pair had spent years circling each other, trading barbs from afar and using the other's political movement as a blend of punching bag and strawman. The mutual enmity was hardly a secret; Obama's trolling of Trump at a White House correspondents' dinner set in motion the New Yorker's serious contemplation of Redemption By White House Win. [time-brightcove not-tgx='true'] The 2016 summit between the President-elect and the incumbent ended up going 90 minutes, during which North Korea was, to Trump's mind, the big takeaway. (Obama's team recalled the conversation differently.) The message was pretty clear: that rogue nation was one of the biggest problems Trump was inheriting as he rose to power after the 2016 election. The election clearly did not go as Obama had hoped so he had this one set piece to convey to his successor just how fraught the situation on the Korean Peninsula was, and how any misstep could be fatal to millions. The outgoing President's concern was that Trump, or some of his top advisers, might want to try to swap regimes. But history is lined with examples why these trades have never gone as planned. And Obama wanted to convey the risks of both a nuclear-armed free agent and a country decapitated without a clear next step. Obama hated the threat of a nuclear North Korea but also understood how things might escalate in some pretty terrible ways if unchecked emotions and amateur gut sense took over. Maybe—despite his own instincts—Trump understood that regime change was not compatible with this worldview. Instead, he courted the North Koreans and broke a half century of protocol in visiting with the reclusive regime's chief. In fact, as a candidate, and even well before that, Trump resisted any suggestion of intervention. That positioning helped Trump remake the Republican Party by elevating its isolationist wing. It's why the current moment is such a challenge for Trump: Israel's strikes on Iran lure dreams of a time after an Ayatollah runs the Islamic Republic. But dreams can easily turn into nightmares, and this particular lullaby is more than a little discordant. 'Regime change' has become shorthand in national-security circles the same way 'nation building' and 'mission accomplished' have devolved from well-considered policy goals into collapsed folly. U.S. intervention into foreign nations' governance in pursuit of friendlier—if not less-lethal—regimes has proven a loser. In recent years, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya have all provided proof of the model's overly optimistic lens on the map. Going back in the post-World War II era, history has shown the United States very capable at both toppling governments and then promptly getting the sequel disastrously wrong. For every regime change at the hands of Americans that went well—think Adolf Hitler's exit from Germany and Benito Mussolini from Italy—there are multitudes that went off the rails: six overt attempts during the Cold War and another 64 in covert operations. And just about no one on the political stage this century has been more clear-eyed on that reality than Trump. Dating to his days as a celebrity host of a reality show, Trump hated foreign adventurism, although he did tell Howard Stern he supported the Iraq war a month before Congress voted on it. After launching his presidential bid in 2015, he campaigned endlessly against so-called 'forever wars' and creeping American meddling. He blasted decisions to engage beyond U.S. borders as simply stupid. He called regime change a dangerous precedent that violated sovereignty and wasted cache. For Trump, the ability to topple rivals was enough of a threat without taking it out of the safe. 'Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?' Trump said in a February 2016 debate. Months later, after he won election but before he took office, Trump seemed to redouble his skepticism of the military's reach into other governments. 'We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with,' the President-elect said in December of 2016. There's a reason why regime change has been a non-starter. Democrats hated it when George W. Bush tried it, particularly with Iraq. Republicans hated the blowback they faced for Bush's errors. Independents loathed the fallout. Swing-state voters hated that their kids were sent onto battlefields they didn't understand. Fiscal conservatives hated the costs. Fiscal liberals hated the opportunity costs. In Iraq alone, 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives. Trump gets that. He may not have a grasp on the nuances of the foreign policy but he certainly gets the zeitgeist. And, as has been the case for two decades, the patience for a thrust beyond U.S. borders is limited. Want proof? Look at the post-WW2 landscape. South Korea, Greece, and Syria all fell to U.S. meddling before 1950 even got here. Burma, Egypt, Iraq, Guatemala, Indonesia, Syria (again), Cambodia, and Cuba all followed. Far-flung efforts in the Dominican Republic, Laos, Brazil, Chile, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Afghanistan, and even Poland followed. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti left U.S. administrations in the political muck. Vietnam was the biggest catastrophe to most Americans' memories. Put in the crudest terms, the United States is really good at ignoring what Washington has coined the Pottery Barn Rule: you break it, you own it. Yes, we can break a whole lot, and have. But the United States does not exactly have total control over what it knocks off the shelf. Which brings us back to Iran, which sits dangerously close to the ledge's edge. In public comments, Trump is being very cagey about what he does next. 'I may do it, I may not do it, nobody knows what I'm going to do,' Trump said Wednesday about the prospect of launching an air strike on an Iranian nuclear facility. Read more: A New Middle East Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes Yet undermining that cautiousness is Trump's apparent acceptance of Israel's view that Iran is racing toward building a nuclear weapon. That assessment is at odds with the U.S. intelligence community's view, which remains consistent that that's not the case. 'I don't care what she said,' Trump said on Tuesday, referring to recent testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that Iran isn't actively trying to build a bomb. Trump may have been brutal about Bush getting the intel wrong on Iraq, but it seems he may not have learned the risks of rushing into the mix with incomplete or manipulated facts. Trump is, at his core, a gut-driven figure who has proven adept at finding voices that confirm his instinct—and banishing those who challenge it. Trump might despise the existing regime in Tehran, but he also does not want to be left with another shattered nation in that region with little more than epoxy as a plan. Yet even members of his own base fear he may be about to do just that, dragging the country into the very kind of boondoggle he won office by denouncing and abandoning the isolationism that he inserted into the GOP's new DNA. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Kim Jong Un is sending another 6,000 people to Kursk, after an estimated 6,000 of his troops were killed or wounded there
Russia says Kim Jong Un is sending another 6,000 people to Kursk. UK intelligence estimates 6,000 North Koreans have already been killed or wounded in Kursk. Sergei Shoigu said Kim is now sending 1,000 sappers and 5,000 workers to rebuild the oblast. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is set to send another 6,000 of his people to aid Russia in the Kursk region. Russian state media on Tuesday cited Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Moscow's security council, saying that Pyongyang had agreed to provide 1,000 sappers — combat engineers who deal with explosives and fortifications — and 5,000 construction workers to rebuild the oblast. Shoigu gave no timeline on the deployment. He said the sappers would help to demine Kursk, where Ukrainian troops held pockets of territory for about eight months after a surprise incursion in the summer of 2024. The North Korean workers, meanwhile, would "restore infrastructure facilities destroyed by the occupiers," Shoigu told state media. Shoigu's announcement comes after he visited North Korea for the second time in two weeks. According to Russian state media, he's visited Pyongyang three times in the last three months. The new arrangement underscores a deepening relationship between Russia and North Korea that's opened up a vital source of arms and troops for the Kremlin to maintain its offensive pace against Ukraine. Pyongyang, meanwhile, has benefited from economic support, cash payouts, and military tech expertise from Russia. In November, Ukrainian officials had estimated that North Korea would receive up to $2,000 from Russia for each soldier it deployed to fight Ukraine. "Sending North Koreans to support Russia is a quick and reliable way for Kim Jong Un to make money," Soo Kim, a North Korea researcher and former CIA analyst, told Business Insider about Tuesday's announcement. "So in the short run, Kim gets money in exchange for providing manpower to Russia," she added. "Long run, the access to critical military know-how will only strengthen his threat base." North Korean state media wrote on Tuesday that Kim had met with Shoigu. While it did not report on any details of fresh troops being sent to Kursk, it wrote that Kim had "confirmed the contents" and "accepted the relevant plans" of North Korea's cooperation. Kim initially sent some 12,000 troops in the fall of 2024 to Kursk, the oblast where Ukraine entered in August of that year and seized up to 500 square miles of Russian soil. Aided by Pyongyang's soldiers, the Kremlin's forces recaptured almost all of those gains by March 2025, effectively ousting Ukrainian forces from the region by late spring. In the process, Pyongyang reportedly suffered heavy casualties. Ukraine said in early 2025 that about 3,800 to 4,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded. On June 15, the UK Defense Ministry said in an intelligence update that it estimated that more than 6,000 North Korean troops had been killed or wounded in Kursk. Shoigu, who oversaw the first two years of Russia's war in Ukraine as defense minister, said Moscow and Pyongyang are planning memorials for the North Korean troops lost. "The heads of our states have decided to perpetuate the feat of the soldiers of the Korean People's Army who took part in the military operations," he told state media, referring to North Korea's military. The top Russian official didn't say if Kim's new tranche of personnel to Kursk would come from North Korea's military. Pyongyang has typically been known to use its massive army to build large infrastructure projects. In response to the announcement, South Korea's foreign ministry said in a statement that it was "closely monitoring developments" between North Korea and Russia. Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Kim Jong Un is sending another 6,000 people to Kursk, after an estimated 6,000 of his troops were killed or wounded there
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is set to send another 6,000 of his people to aid Russia in the Kursk region. Russian state media on Tuesday cited Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Moscow's security council, saying that Pyongyang had agreed to provide 1,000 sappers — combat engineers who deal with explosives and fortifications — and 5,000 construction workers to rebuild the oblast. Shoigu gave no timeline on the deployment. He said the sappers would help to demine Kursk, where Ukrainian troops held pockets of territory for about eight months after a surprise incursion in the summer of 2024. The North Korean workers, meanwhile, would "restore infrastructure facilities destroyed by the occupiers," Shoigu told state media. Shoigu's announcement comes after he visited North Korea for the second time in two weeks. According to Russian state media, he's visited Pyongyang three times in the last three months. The new arrangement underscores a deepening relationship between Russia and North Korea that's opened up a vital source of arms and troops for the Kremlin to maintain its offensive pace against Ukraine. Pyongyang, meanwhile, has benefited from economic support, cash payouts, and military tech expertise from Russia. In November, Ukrainian officials had estimated that North Korea would receive up to $2,000 from Russia for each soldier it deployed to fight Ukraine. "Sending North Koreans to support Russia is a quick and reliable way for Kim Jong Un to make money," Soo Kim, a North Korea researcher and former CIA analyst, told Business Insider about Tuesday's announcement. "So in the short run, Kim gets money in exchange for providing manpower to Russia," she added. "Long run, the access to critical military know-how will only strengthen his threat base." North Korean state media wrote on Tuesday that Kim had met with Shoigu. While it did not report on any details of fresh troops being sent to Kursk, it wrote that Kim had "confirmed the contents" and "accepted the relevant plans" of North Korea's cooperation. Kim initially sent some 12,000 troops in the fall of 2024 to Kursk, the oblast where Ukraine entered in August of that year and seized up to 500 square miles of Russian soil. Aided by Pyongyang's soldiers, the Kremlin's forces recaptured almost all of those gains by March 2025, effectively ousting Ukrainian forces from the region by late spring. In the process, Pyongyang reportedly suffered heavy casualties. Ukraine said in early 2025 that about 3,800 to 4,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded. On June 15, the UK Defense Ministry said in an intelligence update that it estimated that more than 6,000 North Korean troops had been killed or wounded in Kursk. Shoigu, who oversaw the first two years of Russia's war in Ukraine as defense minister, said Moscow and Pyongyang are planning memorials for the North Korean troops lost. "The heads of our states have decided to perpetuate the feat of the soldiers of the Korean People's Army who took part in the military operations," he told state media, referring to North Korea's military. The top Russian official didn't say if Kim's new tranche of personnel to Kursk would come from North Korea's military. Pyongyang has typically been known to use its massive army to build large infrastructure projects. In response to the announcement, South Korea's foreign ministry said in a statement that it was "closely monitoring developments" between North Korea and Russia.
