FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The sudden death of Kim Jong-il has triggered a deluge of early commentary and analysis on what this may mean for North Korea and the region. The North Koreans themselves are of course the people who will be affected most by this development, but the voice of the North Korean people has been severely lacking. While the regime has always been comprised of much more than one man, the death of the leader does usher in a new period of increased uncertainty for the North Korean people.

It is impossible to go inside North Korea to interview the people regarding their true feelings on the situation. However LiNK has spoken with refugees who have recently left the country. It should be noted that North Korean refugees cannot be considered to be necessarily representative of the general population, as the majority have come from border regions and therefore their views may be different from those living in Pyongyang or elsewhere.

LiNK works on the ground helping North Korean refugees who have escaped into China, bringing them out through a ‘modern-day underground railroad’ to its shelter in Southeast Asia where refugees can then seek safe resettlement in third nations. Prior to Kim Jong-il’s death, we had interviewed refugees who came through our shelter on their attitudes towards the succession. Some of the refugees had left North Korea as recently as November 2011. Over the past few hours we have contacted further refugees for their comments and thoughts upon hearing about Kim Jong-il’s death.

North Korean Refugees on the Succession:

“Some North Korean people believe that if Kim Jong-un takes over North Korean politics, he will be even worse than his father.”

“Kim Jong-un has been presented to us by the state media as a military figure.”

“Of course, people think badly of the succession. How could you think it is a good thing? The Government is not providing the people with any kind of standard of living.”

“The North Korean people just hope to live in freedom and to live well.”

North Korean refugees’ reaction to the death of Kim Jong-il:

“The North Korean people will currently be putting on feigned shows of sadness. This is very different to the death of Kim Il-sung. Kim Il-sung founded the country and the people think that he did a lot for them. Times have been hard during Kim Jong-il’s reign. People have woken up and are much more aware of the reality of the country and the leadership now. People will outwardly be showing sadness but inwardly they will feel very differently. The people fear that anything but the required show of sadness could get them killed… The most likely outcome of the succession is that Kim Jong-un will continue in the same mold as his father.”
- Shin Jong-wook, M, 20.

“This is not a happy or a sad event for me. But it is a big moment. This will be a shocking moment for the North Korean people. But there will not be as much grief as when Kim Il-sung died. Of course, people will have to pretend to be sad, and people may get caught up in the atmosphere, but it is not true sadness.”
- Kim Moon-soo, M, 21.

“I worry about what this will mean for my relatives back inside and for the North Korean people. I fear that the relatives of defectors will be persecuted more. They are closing the markets and there are bound to be a lot of staged political events, so for the people that are already struggling things are going to get even harder.”
- Park Yun-joo, F, 31.

“I didn’t feel anything in particular when I heard the news. But I am worried that my family in North Korea will suffer because of the change in leadership.”

- Lee Sunghee, F, 39.

“It was a big surprise. I don’t know what the next leadership will be like, so its a big worry. Some people will be sad because the leader of the country has died. That is normal. But some people will probably be glad that he has died.”
- Park Il-hyung, M, 37.

“I don’t care that Kim Jong-il is dead. In North Korea now, the norm dictates that everyone has to cry. But people don’t have any positive feelings towards Kim Jong-il. The majority of people will be faking their tears.”

- Nam Gum-sook, F, 19.

“If you don’t cry in North Korea after the leader dies, then you could come under suspicion as being against the Government. Then you have to live with that label and suspicion for the rest of your life.”

- Kang Bohee, F, 21.

Notes for Editors:
LiNK (Liberty in North Korea) works to redefine the North Korea crisis, while providing emergency relief to North Korean refugees and pursuing an end to this crisis. LiNK is the only grassroots organization in North America dedicated full-time to the North Korea issue.
The names of refugees have been changed to protect their identities and ensure the security of relatives still inside North Korea.
LiNK cannot provide contact details for North Korean refugees to outside agencie

Many of us work in corporations and I thought that you could actually help me by sending a small request to any type of internal forum you might have at your company! I will very much appreciate if you can forward the text below to your company’s forum. It’s as simple as copy-paste and click on “send”. Unless your company’s forum is rubbish, which I sure hope it’s not!

Hello,

Best regards,
Tom Zacharski
(t.zacharski@gmail.com)

And so, I stumbled upon this website some time ago, where they were raising funds for refugees from North Korea. I remember the feeling of wanting to help the country so much after leaving it that I decided to take part in their fundraising challenge. The organization is called “LiNK” and my personal fundraising website can be found here.

The funds go to helping North Korean refugees. Not much can be done to help the country as the money typically disappears in the corrupt government officials’ pockets. There are however thousands of people who escape the regime every year – unfortunately, escape itself is not enough to ensure a peaceful life. Once out of the country (typically in China) a refugee needs to avoid Chinese officials who are more than willing to send them back to North Korean, sex and human traffickers and all other challenges. Once they reach South Korea it’s like a dream come true – they become South Korean citizen and receive a government stipend to start a new life. The funds being raised by LiNK will help all those refugees. I like to think that this can actually become more scalable. Once North Koreans learn that there are organizations like LiNK more of them might start leaving the country. A process like this can lead to a revolution and freedom for Koreans. And I don’t think that after my photo story I have to remind anyone that would be most desirable for the wonderful small country on the Korean peninsula.

I originally had a goal of raising $200. After one person (thank you Tim) donated exactly $200 and my overall sum of funds raised hit $251 I decided to up the goal to $500. But you know what? That’s nothing. THINK BIG. So I’m upgrading my new goal to $10,000 by the end of the year. Now that’s a challenge! I will be writing more in the upcoming days about my fundraising efforts. I will appreciate all your help – financial (you can raise money through the website) and organizational (more about this soon).

LET’S DO IT. TOGETHER!

Click on the first photo to start running through the photo story.

Click here to help North Korean refugees.

1. Amusement Park (“Fun Fare” as it was called by our guide)
In the very middle of Pyongyang, surrounded by communist posters / billboards / portraits / slogans (and whatever else you can imagine as long as it features Kim Il-Sung’s face), is nothing else but an amusement park. Not too big, but fairly modern, featuring a few rides – the equipment is Italian and has been personally tested by the leader-in-waiting Kim Jong-Un (Kim Jong-Il’s son). It was somewhat hilarious, because at every ride we were told where Kim Jong-Un sat when he took the ride.

Our guide was really happy to be there, we could actually see her face beaming with excitement – she kept asking us whether we were afraid as to encourage us to take the rides (or to pay more money for all of this at the end). She got the park’s manager to walk with us and show us to the rides, which was a nice experience as were able to cut the queue before the Korean People’s Army soldiers – there were a whole lot of them in the park! By far it was one of the biggest absurdities – on the one hand you’re surrounded with communist posters, the apartment buildings around you are falling apart, yet the government decided to build an amusement park in the middle of its capital.

2. Kumsusan Memorial Palace
Whenever a “great” communist leader dies there’s really only one way you can show respect to him – and that’s by mummifying his body and showing it on public display in a building so grandiose that the leader himself would probably think twice before building it. Anyway, North Korea is no different in this respect from Russia, China, Vietnam (and other countries with mausoleums, I’m actually not sure about the whole list). They have what’s called the Kumsusan Memorial Palace and it’s the biggest of all mausoleums (duh). The experience inside is quite unique… Before you get to see the body it takes about 20-30 minutes to go through all “purification” procedures – your shoes are being cleaned, you go into a wind chamber and also through the halls of sorrow and something else that’s supposed to make you cry and bring back to life the emotions you had when the leader died. You could probably cry out of laughter in there if it wasn’t for the fact that there are soldiers all over the place and I wouldn’t be surprised if you were deported for a desecration of any type.

3. McDonald’s
During the trip we stopped for lunch at some sort of a waterfall. The waterfall was quite nice and that helped balance the mood as the lunch was quite terrible – the food we had in North Korea was not of the best sort, yet somehow are guide always managed to ask us whether we though whatever we were eating was “delicious”. It happened once that we actually went to a really, really good restaurant in Pyongyang.

Anyway, after having lunch the guide once again asked me whether I thought the food was delicious. Once again I lied and told her that I quite very much enjoyed it, however I am missing some of our typical western restaurants. Being a fast food connoisseur I mentioned that in particular I am missing a Cheeseburger from McDonald’s. The guide smiled and said that there is a McDonald’s in Pyongyang. As my heart started pumping faster I decided to push this subject and ask her to take us there. I had a feeling I wouldn’t really get my hands on a Cheeseburger, but I sure wanted to see a McDonald’s in North Korea…

We went there the next day. As predicted it was something of an imitation of McDonald’s or a fast food bar – you can see it in the photos.

4. Wonsan
During a trip to Wonsan we went to the beach and had a swim in the sea. Our guide was ecstatic about this since she had about 20 groups of tourists come over to Wonsan, but no one wanted to swim (well, the water wasn’t all that warm). Anyway, the mere fact of actually going to the beach in North Korea was somewhat absurd to us, but the funniest joke was cracked by my friend Bernard – he found a can of Coca Cola in the sea and told our guide that he found an imperialist spy ship floating in North Korean waters. The guide actually smiled for a moment, but quickly regained her composure. What was going through head? What was she actually thinking? These are the questions to which we never received any answer and we might only receive it when North Korea is an open country.

5. Stories about the leaders

• We were heading to another tourist location and at one point stopped in a field, where some sort of fruit was growing. Our guide proudly told us that many years ago there was nothing growing here, but when Kim Il-Sung was driving pass this field he asked to stop his car and personally inspected the soil. After doing that he determined that it would be good to seed pears in that place and then he ordered the farmers to do it. “And now we have the best pears in Korea growing here” – as the guide told us with a proud face.



• We drove to a very nice location somewhere on the east of North Korea and saw a lake with a nice little island with a hut on it. “Nice”, we thought, “finally some nature, without all the Kim Il-Sunginess of the place”. Oh boy, we didn’t know what was coming. The guide told us that the hut and the whole place commemorates the great mother Kim Jong-Suk and the fact that she shot a bird on the little island. Yes, they did build a hut an island to commemorate her shooting skills. At this point a very funny conversation was started by my friend. It went more or less like this:

  - John: Oh, so Mother Kim Jong-Suk killed a bird here. What bird was it?
  - Guide: I’m not sure.
  - John: Hmm… Was the bird white?
  - Guide: Maybe.
  - John: Was it a swan?
  - Guide: Yes, I think it was a swan.
  - Jonh: Oh. Well, killing swans is illegal in Britain. If Mother Kim Jong-Suk killed one in the UK she would go to prison.
  - Guide: Then it probably wasn’t a swan.

]]> http://www.tomzacharski.com/?feed=rss2&p=249 0 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=245 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=245#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 15:39:24 +0000 Tom Zacharski http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=245 North Koreans don’t like journalists. That’s the simplest and fastest explanation as to why the website was down for a couple of months.

Last year I went on a trip to Chernobyl with two good friends of mine. The idea for the trip was initiated on a random night a couple of months earlier when we started wondering what would be a “weird” place to go for a trip. Obviously after Chernobyl it was just a matter of time before someone posed the question: “What’s next?”

North Korea was an obvious choice. My friend, Bernard, is a veteran of Far East travels and wanted to combine that with a trip to other parts of Asia. I wanted to see China. And so, in March, we started planning the trip.

At the moment of this writing I’m already back from North Korea and I’m somewhere in China, travelling alone as my friend has headed south to Singapore. Before I start writing about the craziness of what we have seen and experienced in North Korea I would like to share some information about our travel planning and also list a few mythbusters. In the next days I’ll try to write more.

• North Koreans do not allow journalists on guided tours – due to this I decided it would be best to bring my site down. I’m no journalist, but in today’s world pretty much anyone with a computer can be considered a journalist.
• North Koreans don’t like two social groups in particular – Americans and people who speak Korean. For this trip I decided to leave the American passport home and I travelled only on my Polish passport. My travel guides in North Korea never learned of my dual nationality.
• Getting a visa to North Korea and organising the whole trip was very easy. I can highly recommend Ms Sabrina Wong from “Explore North Korea” (www.explorenorthkorea.com), who was our travel agent on this trip and was extremely helpful along all the steps of the trip. The benefit of travelling with “Explore North Korea” is that we had a Chinese group and it seems like the rules were less strict for us than for other foreign groups.
• Talking of rules. At no point during the trip were we told that we can’t take pictures except for the first day when we learned that we’re not allowed to take pictures of soldiers. At the border everyone had to put their cameras into a plastic bag and a North Korean official went through the pictures. The whole operation lasted for about an hour. I managed to hide one of my cameras, which I now consider to be a move more stupid than brave since none of my friends’ photos were deleted.
• I was told by a friend who did this trip some time ago (thank you Joao!) to take a flashlight (due to frequent power outages) and towels (as there are none in hotels). I’m happy to report that the Korean electric industry has made some massive improvements and during our six days in North Korea we experienced only one two-minute outage! Towels were also there. I’m fairly certain that someone in North Korea is monitoring the Internet and reading the feedback from foreign travellers…
• Talking of Internet. It’s non-existent in North Korea. One of our guides said that she thought they did not really need it because of the libraries they had. Yeah, right. Trying to explain to them what I currently do in life (online advertising) was a challenge to say the least. Anyway, I was very surprised to see cell phones in North Korea – unfortunately, they can only make local calls and calling them from abroad is impossible.
• There are way more cars in Pyongyang than I expected. At times we could even speak of traffic – a lot of the cars are high end. Our thought is that they must belong to party officials and the government.
• Although we have not noticed malnutrition, there was a whole lot of poverty and rural towns are just falling apart. Halted construction, no machines in the fields.
• North Koreans are actually very nice people, they smile a lot and were often more than happy to take pictures with us. At one point I became a celebrity, probably due to my white hair, and went through five rounds of North Korean photo sessions. Oh, that’s another surprise. A whole lot of people in North Korea own digital cameras!
• Yes, they’re brainwashed. Big time. It’s probably the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life to see all the people revere someone so deeply and unquestionably. At least on the outside, who known what’s going through all those people’s heads. You could see communist billboards and “advertising” in every town and city, with either a portrait of Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il or a communist slogan. Every single person wears a lapel pin with Kim Il-Sung’s portrait on it. It’s disgusting.

I’ll leave more for later, these are just some of the highlights and mythbusters. Overall, the trip was an unforgettable experience, although a very sad one. Our guide in North Korea asked us what was the best part of the trip and I answered that it was her and her friend – no kidding, the interaction we had with our guides made this trip an amazing experience. They are two great girls and I wish them all the best from the bottom of my heart – I hope that something changes in their country for the better or they somehow manage to change their situation. Due to this fact when describing them I’ll be using fake names and I won’t show their faces in the pictures.

Many thanks to my friends, Bernard and John, who made this trip even more exciting!

]]> http://www.tomzacharski.com/?feed=rss2&p=245 0 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=243 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=243#comments Sun, 03 Apr 2011 19:26:52 +0000 Tom Zacharski http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=243 A great article by Thomas L. Friedman, you can read it at NY Times or below:

There is an old saying in the Middle East that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. That thought came to my mind as I listened to President Obama trying to explain the intervention of America and its allies in Libya — and I don’t say that as criticism. I say it with empathy. This is really hard stuff, and it’s just the beginning.

When an entire region that has been living outside the biggest global trends of free politics and free markets for half a century suddenly, from the bottom up, decides to join history — and each one of these states has a different ethnic, tribal, sectarian and political orientation and a loose coalition of Western and Arab states with mixed motives trying to figure out how to help them — well, folks, you’re going to end up with some very strange-looking policy animals. And Libya is just the first of many hard choices we’re going to face in the “new” Middle East.

How could it not be? In Libya, we have to figure out whether to help rebels we do not know topple a terrible dictator we do not like, while at the same time we turn a blind eye to a monarch whom we do like in Bahrain, who has violently suppressed people we also like — Bahraini democrats — because these people we like have in their ranks people we don’t like: pro-Iranian Shiite hard-liners. All the while in Saudi Arabia, leaders we like are telling us we never should have let go of the leader who was so disliked by his own people — Hosni Mubarak — and, while we would like to tell the Saudi leaders to take a hike on this subject, we can’t because they have so much oil and money that we like. And this is a lot like our dilemma in Syria where a regime we don’t like — and which probably killed the prime minister of Lebanon whom it disliked — could be toppled by people who say what we like, but we’re not sure they all really believe what we like because among them could be Sunni fundamentalists, who, if they seize power, could suppress all those minorities in Syria whom they don’t like.

The last time the Sunni fundamentalists in Syria tried to take over in 1982, then-President Hafez al-Assad, one of those minorities, definitely did not like it, and he had 20,000 of those Sunnis killed in one city called Hama, which they certainly didn’t like, so there is a lot of bad blood between all of them that could very likely come to the surface again, although some experts say this time it’s not like that because this time, and they could be right, the Syrian people want freedom for all. But, for now, we are being cautious. We’re not trying nearly as hard to get rid of the Syrian dictator as we are the Libyan one because the situation in Syria is just not as clear as we’d like and because Syria is a real game-changer. Libya implodes. Syria explodes.

Welcome to the Middle East of 2011! You want the truth about it? You can’t handle the truth. The truth is that it’s a dangerous, violent, hope-filled and potentially hugely positive or explosive mess — fraught with moral and political ambiguities. We have to build democracy in the Middle East we’ve got, not the one we want — and this is the one we’ve got.

That’s why I am proud of my president, really worried about him, and just praying that he’s lucky.

Unlike all of us in the armchairs, the president had to choose, and I found the way he spelled out his core argument on Monday sincere: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And, as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

I am glad we have a president who sees America that way. That argument cannot just be shrugged off, especially when confronting a dictator like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. But, at the same time, I believe that it is naïve to think that we can be humanitarians only from the air — and now we just hand the situation off to NATO, as if it were Asean and we were not the backbone of the NATO military alliance, and we’re done.

I don’t know Libya, but my gut tells me that any kind of decent outcome there will require boots on the ground — either as military help for the rebels to oust Qaddafi as we want, or as post-Qaddafi peacekeepers and referees between tribes and factions to help with any transition to democracy. Those boots cannot be ours. We absolutely cannot afford it — whether in terms of money, manpower, energy or attention. But I am deeply dubious that our allies can or will handle it without us, either. And if the fight there turns ugly, or stalemates, people will be calling for our humanitarian help again. You bomb it, you own it.

Which is why, most of all, I hope President Obama is lucky. I hope Qaddafi’s regime collapses like a sand castle, that the Libyan opposition turns out to be decent and united and that they require just a bare minimum of international help to get on their feet. Then U.S. prestige will be enhanced and this humanitarian mission will have both saved lives and helped to lock another Arab state into the democratic camp.

Dear Lord, please make President Obama lucky.

]]> http://www.tomzacharski.com/?feed=rss2&p=243 0 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=216 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=216#comments Tue, 29 Mar 2011 18:12:04 +0000 Tom Zacharski http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=216 I recently found a few interesting tools to show some global economic / social statistics. You might find them useful or interesting or inspirational in terms of how data is being shown.


Fed Ex – Happiness Index
http://experience.fedex.com/us/en/#/data/default/topic/money_and_happiness

The Economist – Comparing Chinese provinces to Countries
http://www.economist.com/content/all_parities_china

The Economist – Comparing U.S. States to Countries
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_us_states_countries

]]> http://www.tomzacharski.com/?feed=rss2&p=216 0 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=226 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=226#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2011 06:50:16 +0000 Tom Zacharski http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=226 For all of you wondering why I was posting random decreasing numbers over the last few days on Facebook, here’s an answer – I was counting down the number of views for Justin Bieber’s “Baby” Youtube video to achieve *the remarkable*. The video has became the first video ever to hit a staggering HALF A BILLION views. Although not my favorite singer I will let Justin also invade my website – you can watch the video below. You might also be interested in this – an all-time Youtube videos chart (be sure to change your location to “Worldwide”, otherwise it might show the most popular videos in your country).

Justin Bieber’s video was quoted for a long time as the number one watched Youtube video of all times, but it was also notable for a different statistic – the number of dislikes. Although it has been the most disliked video at Youtube, it seems that Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, which went viral only about a week ago, will quickly top “Baby’s” number of dislikes. Now, having your art or work disliked is ok, not everyone has to like it. But cyber-bullying and hatred shown to Rebecca over the last week was horrible… The comments, directed at this 13 year old, are often awful, cruel and show the dark side of the Internet. In one of the interviews Rebecca said that she actually cried after reading those, however got used to them fairly quickly – good for her, she’s only 13! She also mentioned that she would love to do a duet with Justin Bieber… I guess that would be a solid candidate for the first billion views on Youtube.

Now, although I wasn’t enticed by “Friday’s” lyrics (even though the melody was stuck in my head for all of Saturday morning) as a tribute to the quickest one million dislikes on Youtube, you can watch the video below.

]]> http://www.tomzacharski.com/?feed=rss2&p=226 0 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=194 http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=194#comments Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:15:06 +0000 Tom Zacharski http://www.tomzacharski.com/?p=194 Well maybe not whatever you want, but check out this website: www.fiverr.com. It is (quote): “The place for people to share things they’re willing to do for $5″.

I guess it’s a great opportunity for young artists, but also for consumers to get services like caricature drawing over the web. I’m wondering myself what would be worth doing for $5 and posting on fiverr. Here are some of the more interesting things I found:

• Caricature of your face for $5
• “I will call anyone in the US and sing them a Happy Birthday for $5″
• Custom hand-written signature for $5
]]> http://www.tomzacharski.com/?feed=rss2&p=194 0