Warning to North Korea over Missiles

Warning to N Korea over missiles
The US has urged North Korea to honour an agreement not to conduct missile tests, after it apparently fired two short-range missiles.
The US said North Korea should abide by a moratorium on missile tests which had been agreed during talks last year.

The firings on Wednesday came at a time of stalemate in negotiations aimed at resolving North Korea's nuclear crisis.

The six-nation talks on the North's nuclear ambitions began in 2003, but have yet to achieve much progress.

The short-range tests were originally reported in Asian media but later confirmed by the US State Department.

Some reports suggested the missiles were fired off accidentally during a military drill, while others say they were test-fired toward the Sea of Japan.

"We have consistently pointed out that North Korea's missile programme is a concern that poses a threat to the region and the larger international community," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

No progress

Correspondents say that while much of the world's attention has been focused on Iran's nuclear activities, progress over containing North Korea's nuclear ambitions has stalled.

Last September, North Korea agreed to give up its nuclear goals and return to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

But demands that it be given a civilian nuclear reactor - and a row over financial sanctions imposed by Washington due to alleged money-laundering and counterfeiting - have brought talks to a standstill with no date set for the next round of negotiations.

(Note: this counterfeiting allegation is based on North Korea's relation with Macao's Banco Delta, which made counterfeit U.S. dollars. The international community got wind of this and imposed sanctions. Kim Jong Il, caught red-handed, stalled the Six-Party talks and pushed for creating the civilian nuclear reactor.)

Musical Casts Light on N. Korean Prisons

By Bo-Mi Lim, Associated Press March 6 2006

SEOUL, South Korea - Soldiers dance across the stage calling for death to traitors in a South Korean musical that brings an unlikely subject under the theatrical spotlight: prison camps in Communist North Korea.

"Yoduk Story" has drawn attention — as well as alleged threats demanding the show's cancellation — even before this month's scheduled premiere. The show's theme is especially sensitive here because South Korea's government, seeking to reconcile with its longtime foe, has lately avoided talking about the horrors of the North Korean regime.

The musical tells the tragic love story of a female inmate and a prison guard and is set in Yodok, the more common spelling of the musical's "Yoduk" and site of an actual camp about 70 miles northeast of Pyongyang.

The story may sound implausible, but its author and director, 38-year-old Jung Sung San, is himself a defector from North Korea who says his father was killed in a prison camp.

"Yoduk Story" offers a glimpse into a gulag which the U.S. State Department estimates holds up to 200,000 political prisoners.

According to a group run by a prominent defector, many North Korean prisoners are forced to toil for over 15 hours a day, survive on just 12-17 ounces of corn and salt, and die from malnutrition, pneumonia or tuberculosis.

The author-director told The Associated Press in an interview that he wanted to highlight human rights in North Korea "through the lives of people who die miserably for crimes that are not really crimes."

"There are still so many people dying in North Korea's prison camps," said Jung, who defected to the South in 1995 after escaping from a camp where he had been sent for secretly listening to South Korean broadcasts.

Getting his message out was harder than he expected.

Some investors pulled out of the project, and a theater where the musical was to be staged canceled at the last minute. To finance the play, Jung says, he even had to offer his left kidney as collateral for a 20 million won ($20,600) black-market loan — an illegal and highly unusual action. He says he will have to give up the organ if he can't pay up by next month.

He said the biggest obstacle came from South Korean government officials, who he claims threatened to cancel the show and demanded changes in its depiction of North Korean life.

The government denies it.

"We have called all related government offices, but confirmed no official made contacts" with Jung, said Cho Yong-sik, an official at the Unification Ministry, which deals with North Korean affairs. "A performance is an expression of art and we have no reason to interfere."

Still, the criticism of Kim Jong Il's regime hits a nerve for the South Korean government, which is regularly accused by activists of keeping silent for the sake of detente. Seoul has in recent years abstained in U.N. resolutions criticizing the North's human rights record.

Jung said he began writing the musical when he heard his father was beaten to death in public at a prison camp in 2001 for his son's work in South Korea on movie scripts and plays critical of North Korea's leadership.

He says he first tried repeatedly to cut his wrists, and still has the scars, but came to realize that his father's death represented something beyond his personal mourning.

"It wasn't simply my sorrow, but the sorrow of the Korean people," he said. "I felt a sense of duty that I should help eradicate this pain, this sorrow."

Jung said he was sentenced in 1994 to 13 years in prison for listening to South Korean radio broadcasts, but the truck moving him to a prison overturned and he managed to escape, making his way to South Korea via China.

"Yoduk Story" features genuine North Korean songs and choreography by another defector who was a professional dancer in North Korea.

Through the life of the female character Kang Ryon Hwa — a renowned dancer jailed after her father is accused of spying — the story also illustrates the stark contrast between the extravagant lives of the North's elite class and the harsh conditions faced by prisoners.

In a basement in southern Seoul, the cast rehearse a scene in which Kang and her father are taken to prison. "Never leak a word of complaint. Whisper, whisper, always watch your mouth," they sing.

Later, they call for death to the traitors: "Don't even waste stones on them! Beat them to death with a stick!"

The curtain falls on "Yoduk Story" with the spotlight on a child born to the guard and prisoner, symbolizing forgiveness, according to Jung.

"To Kim Jong Il, I want to say it's about time he forgive all his prisoners," Jung said. "I think I can now forgive Kim Jong Il."

Two Koreas Resume Military talks

BBC News

Military talks between North and South Korea have resumed after a break of nearly two years and the meeting is at the highest level since the Korean War.

The talks in the truce village of Panmunjom inside the demilitarised zone are aimed at easing military tension and boosting trade.

North Korea effectively upgraded the talks last week by asking for two-star generals to attend instead of one-star.

The South is expected to put naval security high on the agenda.

Opening the talks, Northern chief negotiator Lt Gen Kim Young Chul called for unity and cooperation to fight "foreign powers" - a reference commonly used by Pyongyang to refer to the United States, the South's chief ally.

Maj Gen Han Min-koo, the South's chief delegate, said he expected "a lot of things" would be "solved well" at the talks.

Deadly clashes

South Korea is anxious to prevent clashes at sea and to establish a joint fishing area in the disputed Yellow Sea.

Deadly naval clashes between the two sides have occurred in the area and navy ships from both sides have found it increasingly difficult to patrol.

Chinese boats have been aggressively fishing in the buffer zone dividing the sea border.

The South Korean delegation is also requesting discussions on safe passage guarantees for those using cross-border roads and railways.

Although tracks have been laid connecting the two countries, trains have not passed through the military border due to the absence of this guarantee.

Former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung has expressed interest in travelling to the North by train in June to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Two Koreas learn to work as one

Two Koreas Learn to Work as One
New Industrial Park Matches South's Capital and Know-How With North's Low-Cost Labor

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 28, 2006; Page A10

KAESONG, North Korea, Feb. 27 -- Inside a modern new industrial park two-thirds the size of Manhattan, hundreds of North Korean textile workers kept heads down and eyes focused Monday as South Korean managers patrolled the assembly lines.

But Kim Eue Hye, an effusive young woman wearing generous makeup, proudly looked up at a visitor to pronounce her verdict on an experiment that is bringing back together two societies separated for half a century.

"I have learned that it is possible to work with the South Koreans," said Kim, briefly putting down the blue pinstriped blouse she was finishing for dispatch to a department store in Seoul, the South's capital. "It has brought Korea closer to reunification. Together, nothing can stop us."

That, at least, is the official hope of the two Koreas, which view the vast Kaesong Industrial Complex just north of their shared border as the seeds of the peninsula's economic future: South Korean capital, technology and management matched with the North's low-cost labor.

Moving the project ahead has brought extreme challenges from the start. After the first busloads of North Korean workers arrived at the gates 16 months ago, weeks passed before people from the two societies could even understand each other's dialect, said Lim Dong Ryul, a section manager for Taesun Hata Corp., a cosmetics company that came north to set up in Kaesong last year.

He had to explain virtually every aspect of modern life to his fresh-faced communist charges -- down to how to use the factory's Western-style toilets.

Today, Taesun Hata is exporting compact casings for Clinique and eye shadow holders for Bobbi Brown from its multimillion-dollar plant, located just five miles north of the barbed wire and minefields of the world's most heavily fortified border."

By standing with the North Koreans side by side and not giving up, we were able to make things work," Lim said. "Just look at what we've built."

Southern companies making shoes, textiles, auto parts and kitchen implements employ more than 6,000 North Koreans here. The workers put in long hours at often grueling tasks, but life here nonetheless seems a cut above the poverty that is common in most of North Korea.

This year, officials in Seoul project that an additional 15,000 North Koreans will start work as more than 20 South Korean companies move in. By 2012, plans call for as many as 700,000 employees -- 4.5 percent of North Korea's entire workforce.

The 1950-53 Korean War left both North and South in ruins. They never signed a peace treaty. Now, with detente softening the tensions, the Kaesong industrial zone is the largest effort at economic cooperation to date.

It is also key to South Korea's strategy for lessening what is bound to be a massive economic jolt if it reunites with the North. With North Korea's per-capita income at roughly $1,800 a year, 10 times less than the South's, South Korea faces a far greater wealth imbalance than West Germany did when it took in the communist East. So Seoul is hanging much of its hopes on gradually bridging the gap by offering its neighbor something it needs more than anything else -- jobs.The idea is to "keep the North Koreans up there and avoid heavy migration south by bringing in stable investment," said Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for International Economics. "So they are turning to projects like Kaesong, which presumably will only be the first of a series of such economic enclaves" funded by South Korea.

Officials say Kaesong is also meant to keep on course a program of market-oriented restructuring that the North is undertaking in its domestic economy.

The industrial park remains a work in progress, with only a fraction of its real estate developed. Officials here say factors such as an unresolved dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons program could derail large-scale expansion.

But on Monday, earthmovers stood at the ready in cleared patches of land between the 13 factories already operating. A South Korean telephone company has installed the first 300 of thousands of planned phone lines; a branch of a major South Korean bank is open for business, as is a Family Mart convenience store staffed by two North Korean women.

Thousands of workers live in on-site dorms, while others arrive by bus from the nearby city of Kaesong. South Koreans are not permitted beyond a bright green perimeter fence that is guarded by armed soldiers and separates the complex from a decaying North Korean village rife with communist slogans, including one telling all residents to "celebrate the greatness" of North Korea.

While conceding they are here to promote North-South ties, South Korean executives also say the project makes economic sense. The companies, which have received low-interest loans and security guarantees from the South Korean government, are paying most North Korean workers a fixed salary of $57.50 a month. That is about 20 times less than the pay of a South Korean worker of the same skill level, but it is a welcome sum in North Korea.

It is unclear how much of that money actually goes to the North Korean workers. The dollar-denominated checks issued by the South Korean companies are paid to a North Korean government agency. Na Un Suk, director general of North Korea's Central Special Economic Zone Control Agency, said the government makes deductions for room and board provided to the employees before paying them varying amounts in North Korean currency.

"But it is clear that our workers are not doing this to make money," Na said. "They are doing it because it is their duty for the greater good of the nation."

Although South Korean managers have some say in promoting workers, they have little role in choosing who arrives on their doorstep. Many employees are from Kaesong city -- the ancient capital of the Goryeo kingdom that first united much of the Korean Peninsula. But all are picked by officials from the North Korean government.

Because of the communist state's chronic shortages of electricity, the South Koreans have had to run power lines across the border to serve their factories. And some company representatives concede that the North Koreans are not always ideal business partners.