Whoops!

An article in a Chinese state publication defined the Korean War as an invasion by North Korea. It is an incredible statement for a state news publication to have made.

In its feature on the 60th anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, the International Herald Leader, a newsweekly of the Xinhua News Agency, said the North Korean army launched the war by crossing the 38th parallel and seizing South Korean capital Seoul in three days.

The article immediately drew attention, with some placing significance on China’s first admission of military aggression by North Korea at the start of the war.

However, the article was soon removed from the weekly’s Web site as well as the sites of Xinhua and other portals. It is suspected that the Beijing government had a hand in removing the pieces, fearing the repercussions from North Korea.

JoongAng Daily

H/T One Free Korea

DPRK Propaganda

Kim Jong-il in his role as comforting parent of the entire Korean people mourning the loss of Kim Il-sung

(more pictures here)

B. R Myers, whose book The Cleanest Race sits unread on my bookshelf, believes that the key to understanding North Korea is in its propaganda and that while it is sometimes almost impossible not to laugh at its po-faced naiivete, the themes that emerge are genuinely believed in. He also thinks that some of the assumptions made about North Korea are shown to be incorrect when the propaganda is carefully studied. In particular Myers points out that Communism, or even the official Juche philosophy, is only given lip-service by the Kim regime and that the real driving ideology is an extreme nationalism that has elements of racial superiority. According to him the DPRK sees Koreans as a unique race that can only be protected from a hostile outside world by the Kim family, whereas the decadent lackeys of Western imperialism in the south are allowing this unique blood to be sullied by outsiders. In an FP article in which he sketches out his theory he writes:

"Our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance," a North Korean general told his South Korean counterpart during a 2006 meeting to discuss realignment of the maritime border between the two states. "Since ancient times our lands have been one of abundant natural beauty," he said. "Not even one drop of ink must be allowed."

Kim Canute

The belief in a specifically Korean natural beauty that must be defended against a hostile outside world is sometimes depicted as in the pitcure above of Kim Jong-il on a wave-swept beach staring defiantly at the storm. Myers sharply observes in his book that Kim Jong-il took advantage of such imagery when Bill Clinton went to the DPRK to negotiate the release of the reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling as the group photograph of Kim sitting (again with a somewhat defiant or stroke-addled expression) in front of more paintings of waves behind them shows.

This propaganda can only work, however, if foreigners - particularly the Americans and the Japanese (from whom Myers says a lot of North Korean propaganda slogans were adopted) along with support from their south Korean lackeys  are depicted as incorrigibly dangerous and anti-Korean. Along the streets billboards showing the Yankee soldiers succumbing to massive Korean fists are common while children are given any and every opportunity to learn about their hated enemy.

Here's a picture I took of a children's game at the funfair in Pyongyang. I think it may be called, "Kill the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors", although Myers gives some rather more alarming examples of indocrination in his article.

Even the English-language propaganda isn't shy about using racial epithets that are completely unacceptable in the West these days. So, for example, the programme I bought for a revolutionary opera called Sea of Blood has a couple of eyecatching captions:

Myers sees something distinctly ominous about this racially-driven propaganda in the likely impossibility of an agreement being reached on the Korean peninsula.

What is especially significant and perhaps unique about North Korean nationalism is its emphasis on the vulnerability of the race. Whereas World War II-era Japan's racialized worldview equated virtue with strength, the North Koreans are taught that their virtue has rendered them as vulnerable as children in an evil world -- unless they are protected by a great leader who keeps a watchful eye on military readiness.

Unfortunately for the United States, there is no place in this for any improvement in relations between the two countries. Were Kim Jong Il to abandon his ideology of paranoid, race-based nationalism and normalize relations with Washington, his personality cult would lose all justification, while his impoverished country would lose all reason to exist as a separate Korean state.

Quote of the Day

"angrysoba was never banned, but he is a pain in the ass. I really wouldn't mind if he dropped dead. Feel free to go over to his blog and denounce North Korea with him."
FGFM

Kim Hyun Hee on the Cheonan

Kim Hyun Hee, believes that Kim Jong-il ordered the Cheonan sinking.

Story here.

North Korea in the World Cup

Uh-oh! North Korea caught illegally broadcasting World Cup Games!

But North Korea's first game was a pretty impressive performance against Brazil in which they lost 2-1.

c/o One Free Korea

Update: Portugal 7 - North Korea 0 LOL!

Update 2: In light of the DPRK's highly embarrassing defeat at the hands of Portugal, some people are worried about the fate of the players.

A good article here:

When the US soccer team is getting slaughtered, Americans tend to turn their TVs off before the game's over. When Portugal slaughtered North Korea's soccer team Monday night, it was the government who turned the TVs off.




After Portugal delivered a humiliating 7-0 defeat to North Korea, the game's broadcast there immediately shut off. The team hasn't played at the World Cup in 44 years, and the authoritarian state's Korean Central TV Broadcasting Station aired Monday's game live, purportedly North Korea's first-ever live Cup broadcast. With the communist country's history of human rights violations that include public executions, many are worrying for the safety of the North Korean soccer team. Are those fears well-founded?

Please read on to find out.

Update 3: Well, that wraps that up: North Korea 0 - Ivory Coast 3

North Korean Art

Excellent collection of North Korean art here.

And here's one I took in Pyongyang:

North Korea Kills Chinese Citizens

In further attempts to shrug off its image as a country run by deranged and psychopathic leaders and to appear normal, North Korea has shot dead three Chinese citizens across the DPRK-China border at Dandong.

This has even tested the patience of the Beijing government which tries hard not to get excitable about such things.

BBC

The ever-excellent Barbara Demick has a report on this story in the LA Times:

The irony of China's protest over last week's shooting was not lost on South Korea.

"This time it is their citizens who are killed, and they show they are not so naive after all about North Korea," said Kim Tae Jin, a North Korean defector and human rights activist in Seoul. However, he applauded China's protest of the shooting. China needs to show North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "that he can't get away with whatever he wants," Kim said.

Resistance is Useless!

Ahmadinejad Stresses Need for New World Order

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday called for cooperation among world states to forge a new world order.

FARS

HT: Screw Loose Change

I wonder if he'll be at Bilderberg this year.

"no, AS"

Wikipedia

On page 65 of Christopher Hitchens' memoir "Hitch 22", during a chapter in which he recounts his experiences at a school for posh nobs in Cambridge, he writes:

More intriguing to me and my young contemporaries, restlessly modern as we aspired to be in the early 1960s, was the chance to walk past the Cavendish Laboratories and see where the atom had been first split, or to pass by the Rose and Crown pub, into which Crick and Watson had strolled with exaggerated nonchalance one lunchtime to announce that with the double helix they had uncovered "the secret of existence."

In the same way Hitchens crossed out the quote from conspiraloon Gore Vidal on the back of his book and scrawled, "no, CH" I had to do something similar over the twee-sounding "Rose and Crown" in the above quote as it was The Eagle in which the eminent scientists Crick and Watson toasted their discovery.

This picture is of the plaque on the wall of The Eagle and was, apparently, taken by someone going by the name of Richard Carter. So, thanks for the picture.

Andrei Lankov Predicts Russia's Verdict on the Cheonan Sinking...

Speculation is high as a team of Russian experts, sent to South Korea to review the findings of the multinational investigation into the [sinking of the Cheonan] incident, returned home Monday to report to Moscow, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

But regardless of what its experts determine, a prominent North Korea expert here expects Russia to avoid taking a firm stance on the findings, as it has too much to lose by supporting either side...


..."It might have indeed been North Korea," [Lankov] said, taking the voice of the Russian government. "But the evidence is not sufficient and so it is better not to jump to conclusions and drive tensions higher. Let's forget about this unfortunate incident as soon as possible."



Korea Times

Essentially, Andrei Lankov believes Russia has nothing to gain by concluding too firmly whether or not they agree with the international investigation's conclusion into the sinking of the Cheonan.

B R Myers on the sinking of the Cheonan

NRO

Crazy, Irresponsible Yankees Rule Out Nukes!

In not-particularly surprising news the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors "United States" has ruled out blasting the ocean floor with a nuclear bomb to cap an oil-well which it abetted its neo-imperialist greed monkeys, BP, Transocean and Halliburton into bursting. As mentioned before there had been some speculation that a nuclear bomb would be the only thing to stop the oil leak not just from spewing more of its poison into the ocean but from killing off all worthwhile life on Earth!!!1! (i.e not including cockroaches and other stuff like that).

The New York Times has a story about how such "crazy" talk is just crazy talk and that there is no way the US is going to resort to nukes to stop the relentlessly oozing spill:

The chatter began weeks ago as armchair engineers brainstormed for ways to stop the torrent of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico: What about nuking the well?

Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow. Why not try it here?

But...

Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said that neither Energy Secretary Steven Chu nor anyone else was thinking about a nuclear blast under the gulf. The nuclear option was not — and never had been — on the table, federal officials said.

“It’s crazy,” one senior official said.

Government and private nuclear experts agreed that using a nuclear bomb would be not only risky technically, with unknown and possibly disastrous consequences from radiation, but also unwise geopolitically — it would violate arms treaties that the United States has signed and championed over the decades and do so at a time when President Obama is pushing for global nuclear disarmament.

So, it's all just crazy talk, eh? And yet, even the article itself points out that this is just the kind of crazy talk that the New York Times engaged in too...

But if it really is crazy talk this does, of course, raise the uncomfortable question: "Got any better ideas?"

The atomic option is perhaps the wildest among a flood of ideas proposed by bloggers, scientists and other creative types who have deluged government agencies and BP, the company that drilled the well, with phone calls and e-mail messages. The Unified Command overseeing the Deepwater Horizon disaster features a “suggestions” button on its official Web site and more than 7,800 people have already responded, according to the site.
Among the suggestions: lowering giant plastic pillows to the seafloor and filling them with oil, dropping a huge block of concrete to squeeze off the flow and using magnetic clamps to attach pipes that would siphon off the leaking oil.

Well, that's reassuring! This, on the other hand, is not:

Not everyone on the Internet is calling for nuking the well. Some are making jokes.

Friendly Fire?

A no-doubt spontaneous rally in Pyongyang against the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors

Sunday, May 30th saw a big demonstration against the findings of the international investigation that blamed North Korea for the sinking of the Cheonan.

South of the border, there is also a high degree of skepticism that North Korea were responsible for the Cheonan's sinking. According to Bloomberg:

Prime Minister Chung Un Chan ordered the government to find a way to stop groundless rumors spreading on the Cheonan’s sinking, the JoongAng Daily said yesterday. Prosecutors questioned a former member of the panel that probed the incident over his critical comments, the paper said. The Joint Chiefs of Staff sued a lawmaker for defamation after she said video footage of the ship splitting apart existed, a claim the military denies, Yonhap News reported.

Almost one in four South Koreans say they don’t trust the findings of the multinational panel, according to a poll commissioned by Hankook Ilbo on May 24. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency yesterday accused the South’s “puppet military of trying to cover up the truth about the sinking” by seeking to silence opposition lawmakers with the lawsuit.

Indeed, North Korea's Defence Commission held a press conference in which they brought up what they see as inconsistencies in the report...

The Press Conference is reported, in typically temperate North Korean rhetoric, here.

But while North Korea are furiously denouncing those who blame them for the sinking of the Cheonan and it is reported that many in South Korea don't believe the official report, B R Myers points out that anger towards North Korea is quite limited in South Korea. He points out that anti-American protests in the past have far surpassed the anger levelled at North Korea right now:

This urge to give the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt is in marked contrast to the public fury that erupted after the killings of two South Korean schoolgirls by an American military vehicle in 2002; it was widely claimed that the Yankees murdered them callously. During the street protests against American beef imports in the wake of a mad cow disease scare in 2008, posters of a child-poisoning Uncle Sam were all the rage. It is illuminating to compare those two anti-American frenzies with the small and geriatric protests against Pyongyang that have taken place in Seoul in recent weeks.

Now, this is something that could lead a conspiracy theorist to wondering whether or not the sinking of the Cheonan by the North Koreans is a cover for the possibility of a "friendly fire" incident by the United States. It is quite clear that should the United States have sank the Cheonan instead of the North Koreans then the outrage would indeed be spontaneous and stronger than that of the anti-North Korean protests right now.

One of the proponents of this view is Kim Myong Chol, who is an "unofficial" spokesperson for North Korea who lives in Japan.

Kim Myong-Chol has argued that it is impossible for the Cheonan to have been attacked unawares by a torpedo from a North Korean submarine given that the Cheonan was on naval maneouvres at the time and one of its main jobs was to detect submarines and other enemy vessels. This is a repeat of what he had asserted before, here.

Of course, what he has to say on the incident should be taken with a pinch of salt given that he then goes on to threaten:

The Korean People's Army has been put on combat readiness. Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il is one click away from turning Seoul, Tokyo and New York into a sea of fire with a fleet of nuclear-tipped North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles.


But, I'd be interested to know what anyone has to say about his accusations...

No One To Blame But Themselves...

"History" North Korean-style

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has a history of rewriting history as the title of the book above suggests. Although not always going as far as DPRK propaganda, some Western academics have also been keen to exonerate the Hermit Kingdom for its behaviour, sometimes with embarrassing results.

Given the fact that the causes of the Korean War are still being disputed sixty years after the DPRK initiated it, it isn't too surprising to see that the latest round in that conflict also can't be agreed upon. Despite the findings of the international investigation , China is still publicly saying that it hasn't been convinced of North Korea's guilt. This probably won't surprise Andrei Lankov who believed after the report was issued, that China would still declare themselves unconvinced even if showed a video of a North Korean submarine attacking the Cheonan:



However, China has now said it will not protect those responsible which presumably includes - in fact, can only refer to - North Korea, if it can be persuaded the North was responsible. It may begin to look isolated if a Russian team who have gone to South Korea to investigate end up agreeing with the earlier investigation.

In the meantime, while tensions have always been high on the Western maritime border between North and South Korea - also known as the Northern Limit Line - they look set to become more dangerous as North Korea cuts its hotline to South Korea that was originally set up to prevent naval clashes such as those detailed in this Global Security report.

Perhaps it is likely this will all "fizzle out" soon enough as Lankov says in the video and as B.R Myers suggests is wanted in South Korea.

The Russians Are Coming!

North Korean Puppets Assail South Korean Puppets!

When South Korea announced it was set to resume propaganda broadcasts into North Korea including the old Cold War tactic of literally blaring broadcasts from speakers from the border across the "demilitarized zone", North Korea similarly resumed its tough talk against the "puppet government" of South Korea:

Pyongyang, May 26 (KCNA) -- As already reported, the south Korean puppet military gangsters have carved slogans for anti-DPRK psychological warfare on walls of MP posts in the Demilitarized Zone along the Military Demarcation Line and are busy resuming the loudspeaker propaganda as part of the said warfare...

...If the south side sets up even loudspeakers in the frontline area to resume the broadcasting, in particular, the KPA will take military steps to blow up one by one the moment they appear by firing sighting shots because such action will be tantamount to a blatant abrogation of the north-south military agreement and a military provocation against the DPRK.
Moreover, measures will be taken to totally ban the passage of personnel and vehicles of the south side in the zone under the north-south control in the western coastal area.
The south Korean puppet war-like forces would be well advised to act with discretion, bearing deep in mind that such measures of the KPA will not end in an empty talk.


KCNA

Kim Hyun Hee: Tears of My Soul Part 1

The recent sinking of the Cheonan seems to have perplexed a few people who question why North Korea would commit such a brazenly provocative act, while some analysts suggest Kim Jong-il himself ordered the mission. But it isn’t by any means the first time North Korea has acted this way. So here is Part One of a review of a book that describes another fairly recent occasion.

I first heard about Kim Hyun-Hee from a student who told me two things about the North Korean spy that didn’t quite gel. First, that she had placed a deadly bomb aboard a South Korean airliner and second that she now lived in Seoul. “But why was she not in prison?” I asked incredulously. My student said he didn’t know but ventured it may have been because she was very beautiful.

The official story of how Kim Hyun-Hee became transformed from a mass murdering terrorist who stowed a liquid bomb aboard KAL858 killing 115 people to a victim evoking sympathy brainwashed by the evil North Korean state is partly told in her memoir The Tears of My Soul. The book is apparently intended as an act of contrition with the proceeds going to the families of the bombing victims.

Kim’s story is an insight into the rise of the daughter of a North Korean diplomat which tells of her early life first living in Cuba and then in Pyongyang – making her one of the privileged elite – also shedding light onto her school and university years and her induction into Foreign Intelligence. She explains that her and other school children would be told to redact the names of those who had become “unpeople” in purges from the textbooks and of certain chores such as having to collect maggots from the excrement of public outhouses and then the excrement itself which was to be used as fertilizer in the countryside (this practice still apparently continues in North Korea but due to food shortages, it has diminishing returns).

In the Youth Corps she is made a leader with the responsibility of reprimanding others who don’t show enough zeal:

“You claim to have not met your quotas because you didn’t have enough time. And yet yesterday I myself saw you playing with other children. I find it hard to believe that you had time to play but not to work. Such an excuse shows you have violated the lesson of Our Great Leader [Kim Il-sung], who teaches us to be faithful to a group life.”
She says that others would often eagerly make stronger denunciations:

“Comrade student, you don’t deserve to study in the bosom of Father President. You should be expelled from school at once.”
She does well at school and gets herself accepted to the Pyongyang Foreign Language Center in which she majors in Japanese. Her language abilities and dedication fatefully attract the eye of Party Agents and she is inducted in to a military college to be trained as a spy with the codename Kim Ok Hwa. Her Japanese teacher there is named Eun Hae.

Kim Hyun-Hee explains that Eun Hae was a Japanese citizen from Tokyo who was abducted by North Korean agents while playing with her children at the beach and forced to become a Japanese tutor for North Korea’s spies. Although Eun Hae’s life is miserable, in which she spends a lot of time drinking and pining for her children in Japan, Kim rationalizes Eun Hae’s abduction by saying that Japan’s crimes in World War Two were far worse. There’s a remarkable account of both of them sneaking out of the military college to arrive at a nearby village in which the people live in far worse poverty than is seen in Pyongyang.

Eun Hae insisted, on Sunday evening, that we visit the village, because she had never seen ordinary North Koreans before. We found a decrepit cluster of houses and filthy children running around the streets, some naked. I was ashamed at this and tried to pull Eun Hae away. But she stared at the children with tears in her eyes…
“So this is your brave new world, Ok Hwa,” she said with unmitigated scorn. “I pity you”.

Eun Hae is, in fact, Yaeko Taguchi who the North Korean government insist is now dead.
The chapters involving some of her ninja-style training are actually quite grippingly told. She has to infiltrate a mock-embassy, break a safe and memorize a message. In order to add to the realism of the exercise she is allowed to beat the guards unconscious. She is also trained in the three Korean martial arts, taekwondo, tangsoodo and hapkido, which she later puts to good effect when she is accosted by a madman in the lingerie section of a Belgrade department store (!)

Finally, she is summoned to meet the Director of Foreign Intelligence and learns of a top secret and important mission that she is to fulfill:

“Comrades,” he said “I will start with the conclusion first. Your mission will be to destroy a South Korean airplane.” He paused, allowing the words to sink in. I felt butterflies in my stomach and stared at him.
“The order, you may be interested to know, was written by Our Dear Leader himself, Kim Jung Il [sic]. Handwritten, that is…This whole mission is in fact Our Dear Leader’s own idea…Our entire national destiny will depend on it.”
The Director goes on to explain that the destruction of the plane would prevent South Korea from being able to hold the Olympic Games as other countries will stay away in fear and that the change in the constitution of South Korea from a dictatorship to a democracy will be sent into turmoil with the country eventually falling apart and having to unify with North Korea under the leadership of the Kim family.

Well, if that doesn’t sound quixotic enough of a plan Foreign Intelligence went even further in compromising the mission by partnering Kim - who would go by the Japanese name Mayumi Hachiro - with an almost infirm and aging chain-smoker Kim Seung-il who would pose as her father, Shinichi, and having them fly from Belgrade to Baghdad and then to Abu Dhabi (where they would alight) allowing them to escape as the plane continued on to Seoul with a bomb in the overhead luggage compartment. Fortunately, if anything went wrong they each had a packet of Marlboro cigarettes to console themselves with. Each contained one with a slight ink smudge on it indicating it was laced with cyanide.

Kim Seung-il has some reservations about this strangely incompetent plan which increases his anxiety and illness. Future Axis-of Evil North Korea's agents were to fly in to Saddam International Airport to pick up this bomb while the two other future Axis-of-Evil nations Iraq and Iran were locked in a war. Unsurprisingly security is very tight and yet the two men who deliver them the bomb arrive at the airport disguised as…well secret agents…dressed in identical suits with identical sunglasses and both named Choi!

To be continued...

How Inconvenient!

This picture, which appears at the Foreign Policy blog purports to show a piece of the torpedo which sank the Cheonan diplaying the Hangul script. I'm dismissive of conspiracy theories that claim the evidence is fabricated or of those who react to the discovery of Korean script on the torpedo with, "How convenient!" simply because it is in no way convenient to South Korea or any of the other countries that sent its experts to be part of the international investigation such as the US, UK, Australia and Sweden.

The DPRK has offered to send its own investigators:

The Democratic People's Republic Korea (DPRK) on Saturday urged South Korea to receive an inspection group to be dispatched by the National Defense Commission (NDC) of the DPRK to verify evidence related to the sinking of a South Korean warship in March, the official KCNA news agency reported.


But they have been refused:

According to the KCNA, Seoul's rejection of the DPRK inspectors "can not be construed otherwise than a move to prevent the true nature of its conspiratorial farce and charade from being brought to light."


The South Korean side has already given its reasons for rejecting this delegation no doubt seeing the murder of 46 of its seamen to be humiliation enough:

But South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-Young on Friday rejected the North's demand as "outrageous", saying it would be "like a robber or a murderer insisting he must inspect the crime scene".

South Korea said Friday the North should instead attend military talks with the US-led United Nations Command (UNC) after the command wraps up its investigation to review the findings of the investigation and determine the scope of armistice violation that occurred in the sinking.


It seems that it could also be inconvenient for North Korea in this final straw will be the end of the "Sunshine policy" of engagement with North Korea.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial insists that Kim Jong-il's regime no longer be seen as legitimate:

The larger strategic insight is to recognize that North Korea won't change until Kim dies or his regime falls. The goal of the West should be to increase pressure on the North toward the latter goal, especially given signs of increasing discontent in the North...

...The [US] Administration could also announce that its "future vision" is for a united and democratic Korea, similar to the united and democratic Germany that Mr. Obama celebrated in his famous Berlin speech. Supporters of engagement will decry this as provocative, but it will put the North on notice that the U.S. no longer accepts its legitimacy as a given.

Peace-Loving DPRK Misunderstood Again

The Peace-loving DPRK

North Korea's official news agency, KCNA, reports that the kum-ba-yah-esque Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea has issued a "What? Me?" response to the South Korean investigation that concluded the Cheonan had been destroyed by a North Korean torpedo:

I will publish it in its entirety here:

Pyongyang, May 21 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK) issued a statement on Friday assailing the south Korean puppet forces for releasing extremely provocative "results of the investigation" into the sinking of a warship of the south Korean puppet navy in a bid to hurl mud at the north.

The statement noted that the publication of the above-said "results of the investigation" is another extremely ridiculous charade staged by the puppet group in a bid to hurt the dignity of the DPRK, steadily tighten the "sanctions" against it, harm and suffocate it in conspiracy with its U.S. and Japanese masters, much upset by the might of the Republic advancing by leaps and bounds toward a thriving nation.


The Lee Myung Bak group, while working with bloodshot eyes to escalate confrontation with fellow countrymen, drew the conclusion from the day the case occurred that the warship was "sunken by the north" and has since conducted intensive investigation on its basis to hatch a plot, the statement said, and went on:


In the course of nearly two month-long investigation the puppet group fabricated what it called "circumstantial evidence" with conjecture, supposition and random guess. It just produced fragments and pieces of aluminum whose origin remains unknown as "evidence," becoming the target of derision.


Greatly irony is that it deliberately linked the case with the north, talking about the results of the analysis of composition of the unidentified "evidence" without any marking and its size and type.


This is nothing but a shameful deed of those keen on escalating the confrontation with the north.


The Lee group's assertion that the above-said case is linked with the north is the last-ditch effort of those who face destruction as it is a premeditated and deliberate plot to tide over a serious crisis created due to the total failure of its domestic and foreign policies and smoothly stage the "elections to the local self-governing bodies" in a bid to maintain the fascist rule and bring the inter-Korean relations to a collapse.


The puppet forces are now kicking up such fuss as creating atmosphere reminiscent of a wartime situation in south Korea, blustering they would not "rule out a war" and crying out for "counter-measures", urgently evacuating the personnel, equipment and materials of the south side from the areas of the north side and issuing top secret order for taking steps for personal safety and making preparations for withdrawal.


This racket reminding one of an eve of a war goes to prove that the group's recent publication of the "results of investigation" was not a mere clarification of the sinking of the warship but a carefully calculated provocation to seek a pretext for igniting a war of aggression against the north together with outside forces.


The puppet group has created such grave situation on the Korean Peninsula that a war may break out right now.


Pursuant to the statement issued by a spokesman for the National Defence Commission, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea solemnly declares as follows, speaking for the DPRK government authorities:


Firstly, from now on the DPRK will regard the present situation as the phase of a war and decisively handle all matters arising in the inter-Korean relations to cope with it.


Secondly, in case the puppet group opts for "counter-action" and "retaliation" under the pretext of the sinking of the warship, the DPRK will strongly react to them with such merciless punishment as the total freeze of the inter-Korean relations, the complete abrogation of the north-south agreement on non-aggression and a total halt to the inter-Korean cooperation undertakings.


The DPRK will never pardon anyone hurting its supreme dignity and doing harm to it, warned the statement.


Source: KCNA

North Korea Blamed For the Cheonan Sinking!

North Korea has officially been blamed for the sinking of South Korea's Cheonan naval vessel after an international investigation. I had said before that it sounded a little like the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898. However, this one now seems to be the reverse as the USS Maine was initially believed to have been deliberately sunk and later found to be an accident whereas the Cheonan was initially believed to have been an accident and later declared deliberate.

One of the pieces of evidence was the fact that a serial number from a torpedo was discovered on some of the shrapnel from the blast as the Korean Times says here:

Korea has found a serial number marked on fragments of torpedo propeller collected from the scene where the petrol ship Chonan of the navy sank in March, Yonhap News reported Wednesday.

The number was written in a font used in North Korea, and investigators have concluded that the 1,200-ton corvette came under a North Korean torpedo attack near the West Sea border on March 26 before breaking in half and sinking, Yonhap quoted officials in Seoul said.

Foreign experts from the United States, Britain and Australia working as part of an international team have also agreed to the assessment that a torpedo attack sank the Cheonan, officials said.

One blog that appears to have been correct from the start is One Free Korea which originally featured this post very shortly after the first part of the wreck was salvaged.

But also, while I was being tongue-in-cheek in a previous post on Kim Jong-il's trip to China about the meaning of "frank exchange of views" between China and North Korea, I can't help wondering whether or not Kim Jong-il actually was given a dressing down by Hu Jintao or at least made to explain whether North Korea were behind the sinking of the Cheonan.

Of course, naval border skirmishes between the navies of the two Koreas are not rare, but if this is the modern version of the USS Maine then it doesn't bode well for the future.