Saturday September 6
 
19:13
 
N Korea’s Kim Died In 2003; Replaced By Lookalike, Says Waseda Professor

So who did I have tea with then when I visited North Korea?!

The second Kim-Koizumi summit, in 2004, lasted all of 90 minutes. Scheduled meetings with other foreign dignitaries were abruptly canceled. Kim’s retreat from the public eye was almost total. State television in October 2003 showed him touring a collective farm, but mention of the date of the visit was conspicuously absent.

Kim’s family, meanwhile, was in a state of upheaval. His wife died—of breast cancer, said official reports; assassinated, according to persistent rumors. His favorite sister, a high-ranking Communist Party official, suddenly moved to Paris. Her husband lost his post. Clearly something was afoot.

In the spring of 2006, says Shigemura, American spy satellites succeeded in photographing Kim. An analysis of the photographs led to an astonishing conclusion: Kim had grown 2.5 cm!

“Recently,” Shigemura proceeds, “someone who was in contact with a Kim family member told me he heard the family member say, ‘There’s been a promise not to decide on Kim’s successor so long as the current shogun is alive.’”

“‘Shogun’ was Kim’s nickname,” Shigemura explains “If Kim were alive, the family member would simply have said, ‘the shogun’—not ‘the current shogun.’ The stress on ‘current’ seems to suggest that the person in question is someone other than Kim Jong Il.”

Full story.

Friday July 18
 
10:53
 
Propaganda

When writing reports about North Korea, The Economist chooses its words well - to inflict bias:

Just half an hour before his assembly speech, news came through that a South Korean tourist had been shot dead by a North Korean soldier. The 53-year-old woman, who was taking an early-morning stroll on the beach near North Korea’s Mount Kumgang resort..

The “early morning stroll on the beach” tone of this article almost romanticizes the idea of what the woman was doing - an innocent early morning stroll - and how cruel and unreasonable the North Koreans were for shooting her.

The BBC writes:

..the woman had strayed into a restricted area in the early hours of Friday morning, failed to heed a warning, and was shot dead.

Restricted. Warned. A “stroll on the beach”?

I have been to North Korea, to exactly the same place as the woman was shot. We were warned: Do not be outside the hotel after midnight. Stay inside the hotel until breakfast. Do not go into fenced areas.

The security was unbelievably intense. I was prohibited from taking my laptop and my mobile phone into North Korean - I even had to leave my spare mobile phone battery (though it was pointless without the phone, right?). Long zoom lenses were banned. Photography out of the bus was banned. When travelling outside the resort areas, the buses were not allowed to stop even if someone was about to wet themselves. There were soldiers stationed along the road every 100 meters.

Of course I do not agree with the woman being shot - but there is no way she could not have known the rules. When you are in Kumgang, it is very clear you are in a military controlled compound. Korean Ajuma’s might be able to get their own way and do whatever they hell they want in South Korea, but in North Korea they have to obey the rules.

North Korea is often accused of propaganda. From wikipedia:

Propaganda is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people

For The Economist to deliberately distort the facts and use biased language, and to do that consistently so that it always looks like North Korea is “the enemy”, they are doing exactly the same thing that they accuse North Korea of: spreading propaganda.

My heart goes out to the family of the shot woman, of course - it shouldn’t have happened. Why shoot her dead instead of just wounding her?

But she went to a resort policed heavily by the military, to a country intensely paranoid about spies, and she was warned. The least The Economist can do is report the facts correctly.