look inside North Korea

OpinionJournal - Extra :: Behind the Iron Curtain

Where to go to get a look inside North Korea. BY BRENDAN MINITER

The "North Korean Zone" offers a round up of the latest news including links to news articles, as well as analysis and radio and TV broadcasts that are beamed into North Korea. The site also welcomes photos and comments from anyone who has visited the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and information on key events in North Korea in recent years, including the massive explosion in Ryongchon two years ago that destroyed a train station not long after Kim Jong Il passed through it.


Alexander V. Vorontsov, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Northeast Asia Policy Studies finds that a nation with a dominant military leader isn't necessarily destined to be an impoverished, belligerent backwater. Park Chung-hee, a colonel in the South Korea's army, seized power in 1961 in a "bloodless coup"


Aidan Foster-Carter, a senior research fellow at Leeds University in Britain who has studied North Korea for more than 35 years, disagrees. He concludes that "North Korea long ago chose to be Sparta" and is now incapable of anything other than threatening its neighbors.


Ms. Kirkpatrick's article, available here, offers a glimpse of life on the run for North Koreans.


Liberty in North Korea or LiNK is a small organization based in Washington and dedicated to spotlighting human rights abuses and helping North Koreans. Over the past year LiNK has opened more than two dozen secret refugee shelters in China for those who escape Kim Jong Il's regime and on its Web site reports what a team it sent to China recently found


Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who spent several months in North Korea providing medical care for the poor, managed to travel extensively in the country. An interview with him is available online here.