Email received today - with a link to this BBC report Eyewitness: US tourist in North Korea - from a friend with this message:
"Unfortunately, humans are great 'followers' by temperament and preference."
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
North Korea tells aid agencies to leave
Right now here in England it is 7.30 Tuesday evening and I am watching channel 4 TV news. Commentator Jon Snow says North Korea is telling aid agencies to leave, even though thousands are starving and in need in aid.
According to the report, North Korea is a country where millions are starving or malnourished:
6.5 million people receive aid. It's leadership is throwing out western aid agencies by the end of the year.
North Korea Manager of the UN's World Food Programme was interviewed. They have been asked to stop humanitarian aid. The UN agency has been asked to stay to do development work but is unclear as to what that is.
Foreign NGOs have been told to get out. North Korea's leaders insist the country can feed itself.
The reality is an impoverished land still struggling to feed itself. It's the monitoring of aid North Korea does not like. They feel there are too many foreigners around. Grain including rice has been banned from being sold commerically.
Also, the reporter said if North Korea finds western aid workers too instrusive, it does not bode well for nuclear inspections.
According to the report, North Korea is a country where millions are starving or malnourished:
6.5 million people receive aid. It's leadership is throwing out western aid agencies by the end of the year.
North Korea Manager of the UN's World Food Programme was interviewed. They have been asked to stop humanitarian aid. The UN agency has been asked to stay to do development work but is unclear as to what that is.
Foreign NGOs have been told to get out. North Korea's leaders insist the country can feed itself.
The reality is an impoverished land still struggling to feed itself. It's the monitoring of aid North Korea does not like. They feel there are too many foreigners around. Grain including rice has been banned from being sold commerically.
Also, the reporter said if North Korea finds western aid workers too instrusive, it does not bode well for nuclear inspections.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
MEDIA FAST FOR MOJTABA
Excerpt from a post at Committee to Protect Bloggers May 19, 2005:
The CPB is asking bloggers and other concerned people to observe next Thursday, May 26 as a Media Fast for Mojtaba.
Mojtaba Saminejad, a blogger from Iran, has declared a hunger strike. He is being held at Tehran's Gohar Dashat prison, which has a reputation for mistreatment of detainees. He is being held in the general population, the overwhelming majority of which are common criminals.
Mojtaba was arrested for reporting the earlier arrest of three of his fellow Iranian bloggers. (Iran has arrested over 20 bloggers over the last year.) Iranian bloggers who have been released have reported being the victims of torture.
Read full story at Committee to Protect Bloggers: MEDIA FAST FOR MOJTABA.
[via Curt with thanks] Tags: Tehran Iran Mojtaba Blog Bloggers Committee+to+Protect+Bloggers
The CPB is asking bloggers and other concerned people to observe next Thursday, May 26 as a Media Fast for Mojtaba.
Mojtaba Saminejad, a blogger from Iran, has declared a hunger strike. He is being held at Tehran's Gohar Dashat prison, which has a reputation for mistreatment of detainees. He is being held in the general population, the overwhelming majority of which are common criminals.
Mojtaba was arrested for reporting the earlier arrest of three of his fellow Iranian bloggers. (Iran has arrested over 20 bloggers over the last year.) Iranian bloggers who have been released have reported being the victims of torture.
Read full story at Committee to Protect Bloggers: MEDIA FAST FOR MOJTABA.
[via Curt with thanks] Tags: Tehran Iran Mojtaba Blog Bloggers Committee+to+Protect+Bloggers
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC RADIO IN THE AGE OF PODCASTING: Anybody can create their own public radio online
Note Rebecca MacKinnon's post linking to a live webcast from Harvard's Berkman Center today, May 17, 2005.
Jake Shapiro of the Public Radio Exchange will talk about the future of public radio in the age of podcasting, which enables anybody to create their own public radio online.
This is history in the making. Keep it for your archives.
- - -
Open Source. It'll be a radio show. May 30, 2005
Here is a don't miss, must-do: listen to Open Source's pilot on podcasting and bloggers without borders. Hear phone interviews and discussions with Rebecca and Ethan of Global Voices, and several other bloggers, hosted by smooth (and thankfully not-so-fast) talking American Christopher Lydon at Harvad's Berkman.
See Ethan's follow-up post "On hold with Chris Lydon".
Note also GlobalCoordinate.com Geo-Community. Click on the map to zoom in. You can add your own comments, stories, or photos at any location.
Tags: Tehran Iran Podcast Blog Podcasting Radio Audioblogging Zuckermann LydonMacKinnon Shapiro Berkman Harvard
Jake Shapiro of the Public Radio Exchange will talk about the future of public radio in the age of podcasting, which enables anybody to create their own public radio online.
This is history in the making. Keep it for your archives.
- - -
Open Source. It'll be a radio show. May 30, 2005
Here is a don't miss, must-do: listen to Open Source's pilot on podcasting and bloggers without borders. Hear phone interviews and discussions with Rebecca and Ethan of Global Voices, and several other bloggers, hosted by smooth (and thankfully not-so-fast) talking American Christopher Lydon at Harvad's Berkman.
See Ethan's follow-up post "On hold with Chris Lydon".
Note also GlobalCoordinate.com Geo-Community. Click on the map to zoom in. You can add your own comments, stories, or photos at any location.
Tags: Tehran Iran Podcast Blog Podcasting Radio Audioblogging Zuckermann LydonMacKinnon Shapiro Berkman Harvard
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Make Poverty History - Tony Blair chairs G8 summit July 6, 2005
Email just received from Patrick Kielty (pictured below):
Hello,
Over the past few months more than a quarter of a million people have sent a message to Tony Blair and asked him to make poverty history.
It's an achievable aim that has risen up the political and news agendas like never before - thanks to the actions of people like you.
But we are rapidly approaching the critical moment of this campaign - and it really is time to turn up the heat.
After last week's election result we now know for sure that it will be Mr. Blair who sits at that all-important G8 summit table in Scotland on July 6th. Last month, he said he would work "night and day" on this issue until the summit. Now he has the chance to prove it, and the responsibility to deliver.
30,000 children will continue to die needlessly every day unless he succeeds.
So please, if you are in the UK click here [outside the UK click here] and urge Tony Blair to make this his number one post-election priority.
Even if you have emailed him before, now is the time to do so again.
The countdown has begun to the biggest day ever in the fight to end poverty and we need to make sure that our message is getting through loud and clear.
Thank you,
Patrick Kielty
Hello,
Over the past few months more than a quarter of a million people have sent a message to Tony Blair and asked him to make poverty history.
It's an achievable aim that has risen up the political and news agendas like never before - thanks to the actions of people like you.
But we are rapidly approaching the critical moment of this campaign - and it really is time to turn up the heat.
After last week's election result we now know for sure that it will be Mr. Blair who sits at that all-important G8 summit table in Scotland on July 6th. Last month, he said he would work "night and day" on this issue until the summit. Now he has the chance to prove it, and the responsibility to deliver.
30,000 children will continue to die needlessly every day unless he succeeds.
So please, if you are in the UK click here [outside the UK click here] and urge Tony Blair to make this his number one post-election priority.
Even if you have emailed him before, now is the time to do so again.
The countdown has begun to the biggest day ever in the fight to end poverty and we need to make sure that our message is getting through loud and clear.
Thank you,
Patrick Kielty
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Worse Than 1984 - North Korea, slave state.
Copy of a report by Christopher Hitchens, May 2, 2005:
How extraordinary it is, when you give it a moment's thought, that it was only last week that an American president officially spoke the obvious truth about North Korea. In point of fact, Mr. Bush rather understated matters when he said that Kim Jong-il's government runs "concentration camps." It would be truer to say that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp. It would be even more accurate to say, in American idiom, that North Korea is a slave state.
This way of phrasing it would not have the legal implication that the use of the word "genocide" has. To call a set of actions "genocidal," as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.'s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.
It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the "slavery" of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves "captive." The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.
In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")
Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.
Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place—North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave—my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.
In consequence of this, and for the first time since the founding of Kim Il Sung's state, large numbers of people have begun to take the appalling risk of running away. If they make it, they make it across the river into China, where there is a Korean-speaking area in the remote adjoining province. There they live under the constant threat of being forcibly repatriated. The fate of the fugitive slave is not pretty: North Korea does indeed operate a system of camps, most memorably described in a book—The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan—that ought to be much more famous than it is. Given what everyday life in North Korea is like, I don't have sufficient imagination to guess what life in its prison system must be, but this book gives one a hint.
It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation. The Chinese obviously cannot be expected to take millions of North Koreans all at once, which is why they engage in their otherwise criminal policy of propping up Kim Jong-il, but if international guarantees for runaway slaves could be established, this problem could be anticipated.
Kim Jong-il and his fellow slave masters are trying to dictate the pace of events by setting a timetable of nuclearization, based on a crash program wrung from their human property. But why should it be assumed that their failed state and society are permanent? Another timeline, oriented to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more. Bravo to President Bush, anyway, for his bluntness.
[via Slate Magazine via Disinformation with thanks]
Related in Slate
Fred Kaplan questioned whether President Bush understands the situation in North Korea in this "War Stories"; Kaplan's other Slate articles on North Korea can be found here. In March, Soyoung Ho filed a "Foreigners" detailing her conversation with a North Korean defector living in Seoul. Brendan Koerner explained why the North Koreans kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s in 2003. This 2002 "Assessment" of Kim Jong-il said that, "It would be easy to dismiss Kim as a madman, but his behavior is too consistent for that."
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays, in which a longer account of North Korea can be found.
How extraordinary it is, when you give it a moment's thought, that it was only last week that an American president officially spoke the obvious truth about North Korea. In point of fact, Mr. Bush rather understated matters when he said that Kim Jong-il's government runs "concentration camps." It would be truer to say that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp. It would be even more accurate to say, in American idiom, that North Korea is a slave state.
This way of phrasing it would not have the legal implication that the use of the word "genocide" has. To call a set of actions "genocidal," as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.'s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.
It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the "slavery" of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves "captive." The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.
In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")
Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.
Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place—North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave—my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.
In consequence of this, and for the first time since the founding of Kim Il Sung's state, large numbers of people have begun to take the appalling risk of running away. If they make it, they make it across the river into China, where there is a Korean-speaking area in the remote adjoining province. There they live under the constant threat of being forcibly repatriated. The fate of the fugitive slave is not pretty: North Korea does indeed operate a system of camps, most memorably described in a book—The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan—that ought to be much more famous than it is. Given what everyday life in North Korea is like, I don't have sufficient imagination to guess what life in its prison system must be, but this book gives one a hint.
It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation. The Chinese obviously cannot be expected to take millions of North Koreans all at once, which is why they engage in their otherwise criminal policy of propping up Kim Jong-il, but if international guarantees for runaway slaves could be established, this problem could be anticipated.
Kim Jong-il and his fellow slave masters are trying to dictate the pace of events by setting a timetable of nuclearization, based on a crash program wrung from their human property. But why should it be assumed that their failed state and society are permanent? Another timeline, oriented to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more. Bravo to President Bush, anyway, for his bluntness.
[via Slate Magazine via Disinformation with thanks]
Related in Slate
Fred Kaplan questioned whether President Bush understands the situation in North Korea in this "War Stories"; Kaplan's other Slate articles on North Korea can be found here. In March, Soyoung Ho filed a "Foreigners" detailing her conversation with a North Korean defector living in Seoul. Brendan Koerner explained why the North Koreans kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s in 2003. This 2002 "Assessment" of Kim Jong-il said that, "It would be easy to dismiss Kim as a madman, but his behavior is too consistent for that."
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays, in which a longer account of North Korea can be found.
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