Northerners Flee Into the Hills

North Korea still not playing nice

North Korea missed its end-of-year deadline to shut down its nuclear weapons reactor. A new deadline, for the end of February, has been set. South Korea doesn’t care, believing that North Korean military forces are declining in capability, and will be incapable of trashing South Korea within two or three years. But is this really the case? Not according to StrategyPage.com:

• The south believes it will be able to bribe the north into giving up all their nuclear weapons.
• North Korea opened the year by promising to improve living conditions and strengthen the military in the new year. That won't happen.
• The corruption is a mess. Actually, there are several separate economies in North Korea. At the top there is leader Kim Jong Il, who has his own banks and representatives in government departments that handle money.
• This crew, often referred to as the "royal bankers", can take whatever they want. This is increasingly leaving the other "banks" broke.
• The Communist Party has its own pot of goodies (companies and money making capabilities, some of them criminal), as does the military. So does each province.
• The central government is cracking down on some of the provinces that have been too successful, too greedy and too criminal about how they raise money. It's become popular for North Koreans to compare their situation to past medieval ones, when poor peasants were pushed around by feuding nobles.
• South Korea is buying anti-missile missiles for its Aegis radar equipped warships. These missiles can shoot down North Korean ballistic missiles.
• The Aegis anti-missile system has undergone several successful tests over the last few years. Japanese and American Aegis warships also patrol off the Korean coast.
• North Korea calls this missile defense activity "aggression."
• Conditions in North Korea are becoming chaotic.
• The secret police are becoming more brutal in their attempt to bring local (corrupt) officials back under the control of the central government.
• Public executions of such officials have been reported, as well as citizens fleeing into the hills to escape the chaos and random violence.
• Most provinces, factories and collective farms remain stable, but the corruption and decline of discipline continues to spread. It's worst along the Chinese border, where there are more economic opportunities (most of them illegal) just across the frontier.
• No one can predict when, or if, the entire country will collapse into chaos, but the lack of order is being seen in more and more parts of North Korea.

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Northerners Flee Into The Hills
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Our Take

We must trade the pipe dream of appeasement for the cold hard reality that what we are dealing with in North Korea is a brutal, communist, dictatorship that could strike out and wreak havoc if not kept in check. This article is yet another grim reminder of that unpleasant fact.