I haven’t yet had time to read Nat Kretchun’s new report on the circulation of samizdat inside North Korea, but Reuters, The Washington Post, and Sokeel Park helpfully summarize its bleak ...
This blog has closely followed reports of indiscipline within the North Korean military, resistance against the state, strategies for political subversion, and the breakdown of border control. La...
With all the news out of North Korea recently, I’ve been saving up links to news reports about the floods in the northeastern provinces until I had a moment to put some thoughts together. Accor...
https://freekorea.us/2016/09/in-north-korea-no-disaster-is-ever-entirely-natural/
When the U.S. Army wants to breach a minefield, it deploys a Mine-Clearing Line Charge to blast a path through it with 1,750 pounds of C-4. The procedure looks like this: Obviously, the North Kor...
https://freekorea.us/2016/08/to-prevent-war-talk-to-north-koreas-soldiers-about-rice-peace-freedom/
Via the Daily NK and Yonhap, we have yet another report of fratricidal violence, corruption, and indiscipline among North Korea’s border guards, except this time, the fratricidal intent wa...
https://freekorea.us/2016/08/n-korean-nco-kills-wife-daughter-of-his-company-commander/
It has been three months since 12 young women and a man defected from that North Korean restaurant in Ningpo, China, and since 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait staged a mass protest against the...
In Wednesday’s post, I wrote about Beyond Parallel’s imagery analysis pointing to a decline in cross-border trade between China and North Korea, along with the limitations of that analysis an...
https://freekorea.us/2016/07/a-blanket-trade-embargo-wont-help-us-disarm-or-reform-north-korea/
I’ve been a fan of the show for years, so it was an honor to be asked to come on to talk about North Korea on Wednesday night. By all means, listen to the entire program if you can, but my segm...
https://freekorea.us/2016/06/ofk-on-the-john-batchelor-show/
Until 2011, the erosion of North Korea’s border control and the infiltration of foreign ideas may have been the only hopeful trends in a country where just about all of the news is bad. When K...
https://freekorea.us/2016/06/despite-a-crackdown-n-koreans-find-cracks-in-the-information-blockade/
A month after the President signed the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act and two weeks after the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 2270, enough information has emerged fro...
Twenty years of state-to-state engagement between North and South Korea have not lived up to Kim Dae-Jung’s promises. Pyongyang has taken Seoul’s money, nuked up, and periodically attacked So...
https://freekorea.us/2015/12/inter-korean-phone-calls-can-keep-the-promises-of-the-sunshine-policy/
Our endlessly unrequited vigil for North Korean reform continues: Hyeonseo Lee is also increasingly worried about her personal security since the July publication of the best-selling memoir about...
https://freekorea.us/2015/11/seoul-pyongyang-join-forces-to-fund-n-koreas-rich-starve-its-poor/
Yesterday, I questioned the premises of economic engagement with Pyongyang — that Pyongyang is socialist, that trade is capitalism, that capitalism inexorably erodes socialism, and that capita...
https://freekorea.us/2015/10/the-more-north-korea-trades-the-more-it-reforms-right-wrong/
Admittedly, Baek’s explanation of the North Korea’s guerrilla banking system isn’t the first I’ve read, it’s only the best: The next time Kevin talks to his mother, she asks him for $1,...
https://freekorea.us/2015/07/must-read-jieun-baek-on-how-north-koreans/
Last week, a 19 year-old North Korean army private fled “repeated physical abuse at the hands of his superiors” and “the realities of his impoverished country,” walked and rode for a wee...
https://freekorea.us/2015/06/is-the-north-korean-military-falling-apart/
New Focus International has published an “exclusive” report that “North Korea’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Ministry of People’s Security (MPS)” have begun what amounts to an...
https://freekorea.us/2015/04/n-korea-perestroika-watch-gunfire-must-be-made-to-resound/
In the eleven years I’ve been writing OFK, I’ve observed a cycle in North Korea’s border security. – In Phase One, the lure of capitalism coopts and corrupts the men (and they are mostly ...
Did you hear the one about how Amerikkka’s prisons are filled with small-time drug offenders? Well, the workers’ paradise has solved that problem: In mid-November 2014 in Sinuiju, North Pyong...