Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...American journalists who were each handed 12 years in prison yesterday by a North Korean court for committing "hostile acts" by allegedly overstepping the border in March, have received a harsh sentence by Western standards of justice. The news is grim, to be sure. But former prisoners in Pyongyang's horrific penal system speculate that the pair may not have to endure the grimmest conditions, which very few have emerged to talk about...
...Though Americans will wake up this morning shocked by the harshness of the verdict, they shouldn't be. This is, sadly, business as usual for the North. The regime in Pyongyang is nothing if not a Mafia state - a family-run dynasty that funds itself in part through a variety of illicit businesses, such as illegal arms sales and counterfeiting U.S. currency. For decades, international kidnapping has been in its playbook. (See pictures of North Korea's secrets and lies at LIFE.com...
...Pyongyang admitted what many in Japan had been saying for years - that it had systematically kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and '80s, using them to train its spies, who were then filtered back into Japan. Kim Jong Il said at a 2002 summit meeting with then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that the North had seized 12 Japanese citizens (though he also said to Koizumi that he himself was unaware of the program), including, most infamously, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota, who was abducted on the way home from school in Niigata, on the northwestern Japanese coast. Kim had hoped...
...Gaesong Industrial District, a site just across the border, where scores of South Korean companies set up light manufacturing operations. The project was arguably the most visible success of the so-called Sunshine Policy run by Roh Moo Hyun, the former South Korean President who committed suicide in May. Pyongyang revoked all the contracts at Gaesong last month and has continued to hold the businessman, apparently as a way to express its anger at current South Korean President Lee Myung Bak's harder line toward the North...
...always some twisted policy goal that drives Pyongyang to kidnapping; Kim has also resorted to abduction to satisfy his personal whims. The North Korean dictator has long had a passion for movies, but he evidently believed North Korea's cinema wasn't up to his standards. In the late '70s, when his father Kim Il Sung was running the country, Kim apparently ordered the abduction of Shin Sang-ok, then perhaps the most famous film producer in the South, and his wife, Choi Eun-hee, a famous actress. Shin was imprisoned for four years, then forced to make a socialist...