Day: April 1, 2023

North Korea has long sought to convince its own people that the U.S. and South Korea are its mortal enemies, leaving the nation no choice but to develop advanced weapons for self-protection. Analysts are questioning whether that closed society is giving leader Kim Jong Un’s daughter a similarly constricted view of the outside world.

Kim Ju Ae, believed to be about 10, has been spotted at military events with her father about 10 times since he introduced her to the public on November 18, a little girl standing in front of a gigantic Hwasong-17 ICBM at a launch site.

Most recently, she accompanied Kim as he was overseeing simulated nuclear counterattack drills on March 18-19, the test of a Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile on March 16, and artillery firing drills on March 9, according to North Korea’s state media KCNA.

The father-daughter visits to missile sites and military events are “an indoctrinating moment for her,” said Michael Madden, an expert on North Korean leadership at the Stimson Center. He said she is probably told that “the missiles guarantee … the continuity of the Kim family regime.”

The Kim regime spans three generations, with power passing from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il and then to the father of the girl who represents the fourth generation.

Madden added that rather than being raised to see the world in shades of gray, Ju Ae is absorbing “a black-and-white way of viewing things, and that South Korea and the United States are our enemies and have been our enemies for 70-plus years.”

‘Very cutthroat’

Kim is presenting her with this worldview to raise her as an elite member of Pyongyang’s top ranks, if not as his successor who would continue the regime’s authoritarian rule, suggested Ken Gause, a North Korean leadership expert and director of International Affairs Group, a part of the Strategic Studies division of the U.S.-based CNA Corporation.

“There is a part of running North Korea that is very cutthroat,” Gause said. “The less you know about how democracies run” and “to a certain extent, the less you know about the outside world, probably the better.”

Almost all the events Ju Ae attended have involved the military, a sign that she is “being placed in the context of the Korean People’s Army,” said Madden. “This could be read as a continuation of the partisan, guerrilla legacy of her great-grandfather Kim Il Sung,” who founded the regime.

A soccer match she attended with her father in February set the Defense Ministry team against a team composed of Cabinet members.

Even a groundbreaking ceremony for a new street in an apartment complex in Pyongyang that she attended with Kim in February had a military twist. Members of the Youth League, which is tied to the KPA, were assigned to construct the buildings, according to Madden.

For Ju Ae to be presented with the regime’s narrative suggests she is not completely exempt from being brainwashed like the rest of the North Korean people, experts said.

North Korea is considered one of the most repressive countries in the world, denying its people freedom of information, expression and thought or opinion, according to a 2022 report by Human Rights Watch.

The regime strictly “controls virtually all information within the country” and prohibits “ordinary citizens from listening to foreign media broadcasts,” according to the State Department’s 2022 report on human rights practices in North Korea.

Death penalty

A law adopted in December 2020, designed to preserve North Korea’s socialist ideology, authorizes up to a death sentence for those caught distributing media from South Korea and the U.S.

On Thursday, South Korea’s Unification Ministry released a report detailing North Korean defectors’ accounts of human rights situations in the country from 2017 to 2022, including crackdowns on distributing and watching foreign media contents.

The regime indoctrinates its people with one-sided narratives via propaganda messages at schools and workplaces, and through state-owned media tightly controlled by the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the ruling Workers’ Party, according to a report by the U.S. State Department.

Former high-ranking officials in Pyongyang who defected to South Korea say ordinary North Koreans lack the information needed to form their own opinions of Ju Ae’s outings in high-end outerwear.

A black velvet coat with quilted stitching she wore to the ICBM launch on March 16 appeared to come from the French luxury brand Christian Dior and cost $2,800, according to a report by The Washington Post.

“Ordinary North Koreans [seeing the pictures of Ju Ae] will not know she is wearing Dior,” said Ryu Hyun Woo, a former North Korean acting ambassador to Kuwait since 2017 who defected to South Korea with his family in 2019.

No frame of reference

“They don’t know what Dior is or it costs over $2,000 unless they are told,” he continued in an interview with VOA’s Korean Service earlier this week. “They might think it could cost a lot, but they don’t have any reference to compare it with, even to become angry” at the regime.

Another high-profile North Korean defector, who prefers to remain anonymous to avoid attracting the regime’s attention, told the Korean Service, “North Korean residents can’t fathom how expensive the coat is because they are going hungry and don’t have enough food to eat.”

Chronic food shortages have plagued North Korea since a famine killed an estimated hundreds of thousands of people in the mid-1990s. Although it is difficult to accurately assess current conditions, many experts believe the COVID-19 pandemic worsened food insecurity.

Source: Voice of America

The EU has forsaken its goal of ensuring peace and prosperity for its members, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban declared on Friday. Warning that the bloc is considering sending troops into Ukraine, Orban insisted that Hungary will continue pushing for a ceasefire.

“Those who are pro-war have put the whole European Union in danger,” Orban told Radio Kossuth, referring to the ongoing efforts by EU member states to arm Kiev’s forces. To date, Brussels has supplied Kiev with just under $4 billion worth of arms, while individual member states have donated tanks, artillery, and in the case of Poland and Slovakia, fighter jets to Ukraine.

“We expect two things from the European Union; the first is to have lasting peace,” Orban continued. “The second thing we expect of the EU is that it should preserve the prosperity it has achieved, but in comparison war and sanctions are destroying the European economy.”

Energy costs and inflation have soared across the EU since Brussels embargoed Russian fossil fuels following the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine last February. This embargo and other sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy, as their proponents predicted. Instead, Russia’s economy is set to grow faster this year than that of Germany, according to IMF figures.

The prospect of global war is more urgent than the economic threat, Orban said. The Hungarian prime minister claimed in Friday’s interview that EU leaders were considering deploying a “peacekeeping” force to Ukraine. This, he argued, would be a catastrophic escalation.

“When European and American leaders say that if this continues, we could end up in a third world war, it seems incredibly exaggerated at first, but where I work and where I see the events, this is a real danger at this moment,” he said.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday that such a force would be Russia’s “direct enemies” and would be “ruthlessly destroyed” on the battlefield.

“Peace talks are not what we should be talking about now, but a ceasefire,” Orban said, explaining that hostilities must be suspended before a settlement can be worked out. Whatever happens in Ukraine, the prime minister stressed that Hungary would not get involved. “They want to squeeze us into this war,” he claimed, referring to EU leaders, but the question of “whether Hungary should take part in the war… or whether it should stay out can only be decided in one place, the Hungarian parliament.”

Source: Russia Today

European NATO members may face difficulties in supporting Kiev in its conflict with Russia after the 2024 US election, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has warned. Washington’s aid to Ukraine is likely to be reduced regardless of the results, he told Welt am Sonntag in an interview published on Saturday.

The US will have to pay more attention to the Indo-Pacific region after 2024, even if a “pro-European” president wins the election, Pistorius said, while a worst case scenario could spell doom for the West’s support for Kiev, he warned.

“Should the worst case [scenario] come to life and an American president, who has distanced himself from Europe and NATO, move into the White House, we will have challenges that are currently unimaginable,” Pistorius said. Europe will then have to “compensate” for reduced American commitment to the defense of the military bloc “on top of what we are already doing today,” he added.

Pistorius also said that Germany’s own defense issues will not be resolved by that time. The supply and funding problems that the German Army has faced for years are unlikely to be resolved before 2030, the minister noted. He also said that the army’s stocks are limited, and declined to pledge more German-made tanks to Ukraine.

The minister did not say which presidential candidate he had in mind regarding the worst-case scenario. Several prominent potential Republican candidates, including former President Donald Trump, have cast doubt on the idea of continuing American support for Ukraine, sparking concerns in Kiev.

In March, Trump said that if he is re-elected, Kiev should expect that “there will be little more money coming from us.” Another potential candidate, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, described the conflict as a “territorial dispute” in which the US has no interests in being more actively involved.

US President Joe Biden, whose administration secured $112 billion in Ukraine-related funding from Congress last year, has been criticized by some Republicans for what they call his “blank check” for Kiev.

In late March, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky told AP that he was worried about the potentially dwindling US support, saying, “if they stop helping us, we will not win.”

Source: Russia Today