Sarah Wang’s Four Days in North Korea
August 10, 2009
North Korea left no traces in my passport, not even a visa. It showed that I left China in July and returned four days later. There was no indication of where I had been, except that I passed through customs in Dandong, a city in northeastern China that borders the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Thus begins Sarah Wang’s fascinating SLATE dispatch from North Korea, an account of a mildly surreptitious visit to the Hermit Kingdom of Kim Jong-il Ms. Wang made last month while American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were still in custody there for illegal border crossing and crimes against the Korean state. Wang’s piece is a fascinating and objective window into the DPRK that we rarely get from the mainstream media.
From our first moments in the country, it was obvious that some North Koreans receive special treatment. The train for Pyongyang had 15 cars, but only the three “international compartments” had fans to fight the sweltering heat. Well-dressed North Koreans took up the majority of seats in the compartment. The women wore silk blouses, nice skirts, and high heels, and the men were decked out in good T-shirts, which sometimes showed off their big bellies. They were the only fat North Koreans that I saw on the trip.
A keyword in Wang’s dispatch is hunger:
I brought 150 Kit-Kat bars into the country, and I always took several out of my bag when I was alone with a North Korean. They would hesitate for a few seconds, look around to make sure that no one else was watching, and then stuff the Kit-Kats into their pockets.
The resolve of the people—Juche— is apparent among the socialist true believers just as regime change is to American neocons:
“We Koreans have long had a hatred for the United States. Those people bombed our land and killed our people in the war, and they reactivated the use of nuclear weapons in 1994. At that time we had natural disasters, and they imposed sanctions on us. So we had the Arduous March between 1995 and 1998. We were all hungry,” one guide told us. “Now we don’t have natural disasters, but the Americans are imposing stricter sanctions. If we don’t strengthen our national defense forces, we cannot safeguard our motherland. If we don’t make military construction our priority, we cannot safeguard socialism,” she said.
Read Sarah Jang’s important dispatch in its entirety in SALON.
Obama Taps Three Asian Americans for Federal Bench
August 10, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C.—President Barack Obama Friday named U.S. Magistrate Judges Edward M. Chen to the Northern District bench and chose Dolly Gee, managing partner of the Los Angeles law firm Schwartz, Steinsapir, Dohrmann & Sommers LLP, to the Central District bench. A week earlier, he named Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Jacquelyn H. Nguyen to the District Court in Los Angeles.
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Only Gee, 50, a labor and employment litigator and past president of the Southern California Chinese Lawyers Assn., lacks prior experience as a judge, although she was a clerk for an Eastern District judge after graduating from UCLA law school in 1984.
Nguyen, 44 and also a UCLA law graduate, spent several months at a Camp Pendleton refugee camp when she was a child after her family was airlifted out of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. If confirmed, she would be the nation’s first Vietnamese district judge.
Chen, 56, worked as a staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union before his judicial appointment. If confirmed, he would be the only Asian American on the Northern District bench, which also lacks Latino representation among its 14 judges.
The trio of Asian American nominees, and Obama’s fourth pick U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard G. Seeborg, will be brought before the Senate for confirmation after its summer recess.
Even after the four appointments to California districts, five seats remain vacant in the state — two each in the Central and Northern districts and one in the Eastern District, which includes most of the state’s prisons.
Human Rights Activists Say Current TV Reporters Jeopardized Efforts to Help No. Korean Refugees
August 10, 2009
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With their families and supporters basking in the afterglow of their release last week by Pyongyang, the judgment and professionalism of the Current TV reporters captured on North Korean soil March 17 is being criticized on both sides of the Pacific.
Now that Americans Laura Ling and Euna Lee are free and in seclusion in their Los Angeles-area homes, South Korean human rights activists are speaking out for the first time, saying that the actions of the two Current TV reporters may have jeopardized their efforts to help refugees trying to leave North Korea.
Meanwhile, a veteran, award-winning American journalist says Current’s decision to cross into North Korea was “foolish.”
