From Cambodia, Condolences for a Dear Friend

This 1975 photo shows Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s head of state in exile, meeting with then-North Korean President Kim Il Sung. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

December 20, 2011
By Jacob M. Schlesinger
The Wall Street Journal

As Cambodia manages to transition from its communist past to a more capitalist future, the government here was one of the few to issue heartfelt condolences on the passing of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

Cambodian information minister Khieu Kanharith called the death “a great loss,” the Phnom Penh Post reported in its Tuesday editions. A separate government spokesman was quoted saying “the friendship and bilateral cooperation between North Korea and Cambodia will never die.”

As the report noted, the ties had less to do with ideology, or even the regional realpolitik, than with the eclectic past of Cambodia’s own longtime great leader, King Father Norodom Sihanouk.

Mr. Sihanouk met Kim Il Sung at the Bandung Conference, an anti-colonialist, non-aligned movement banquet in Jakarta hosted by then-Indonesia leader Sukarno in 1965. Mr. Sihanouk wrote musical scores in 1970 celebrating “friendship and fraternity” between the two countries, the Post reported. And Mr. Sihanouk stayed in a 60-room palace outside Pyongyang during his period of exile; even after his return to power, he regularly vacationed there.

All aboard North Korea's refugee railroad

Aug 3, 2011
By Sebastian Strangio
Asia Times Online

In the cable, however, Om Yentieng "did register some concern over the PM's safety due to the proximity of the North Korean Embassy [which is next door] to the PM's residence" should Cambodian cooperation on the refugee issue become public.

PHNOM PENH - In late November 2006, after a long, perilous journey from northeast China, a North Korean national crossed the Vietnamese frontier into Cambodia's northeast Mondulkiri province. The man, identified only as Ly Hai Long in local media reports, was promptly arrested by Cambodian police, who told a reporter from the Cambodia Daily that they had deported him to Vietnam.

Recently leaked cables from the US Embassy in Phnom Penh, part of a cache of 777 dispatches released last month by anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, tell a different story. According to one cable (06PHNOMPENH2072) from the same month, Ly Hai Long was secretly allowed to remain in Cambodia. The South Korean ambassador to Cambodia confirmed to United States officials "that his government would be working quietly with the RGC [Royal Government of Cambodia] to ensure that the North Korean is moved to South Korea".

Thamrongsak Meechubot, then head of the office of the United Nations refugee agency in Phnom Penh, told US officials he was "not surprised" that Cambodian police had leaked information about the man's deportation. The implication was that the rumor was used to provide a cover of secrecy to his transfer to the South. Thamrongsak said it was a tactic that had been used by the Cambodians before.

Cambodia-North Korea: Phnom Penh and Pyongyang seek "a solid trade relationship"

Kim Il Sung (L) and Sihanouk (R)

The objective is to strengthen cooperation in agriculture. For years, the North has suffered from chronic food crises, caused by the disastrous economic policies of the regime of Kim Jong-il. Ties between Pyongyang and Phnom Penh since the days of King Sihanouk and Kim Il-sung. Conflicting opinions ...

Thursday, July 28, 2011

By Asia News

Phnom Penh (AsiaNews / Agencies) – The establishment of a "solid business relationship" with particular attention in the "agricultural sector" is the objective of the delegation of senior North Korean officials visiting Phnom Penh this week. The group, led by Deputy Trade Minister Ri Myong San, met Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong, to discuss "new possibilities of cooperation" for the development of both countries. The attention to the agricultural sector - Cambodia is one of the major rice producers - seems to be related to chronic food shortages that affect citizens of North Korea, because of the disastrous socio-economic policies promoted by the regime of Kim Jong-il.

Re-proposing an initial agreement between the two countries signed in 1993, the parties aim to develop long-dormant trade ties, reports The Phnom Penh Post. Cambodian officials point out that "there are zero economic and trade exchanges between Cambodia and North Korea at the moment". However, the two nations have a long history of friendship and cooperation, so that the former Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk - a beloved and controversial figure, who dominated second half of the 1900 - maintained close personal relationships with the "Eternal President "Kim Il-sung, father of the" Dear Leader "now in power.

Speaking against 'Dear Father'

"People died trying to eat live snakes," Kim Young-soon says yesterday about life in North Korea's gulag. (Aaron Lynett, National Post)

Saturday, Jun. 12, 2010
Peter Goodspeed
National Post

"He was our Dear Father, our Great Leader and people used the titles of father and mother to refer to the government. But really, they were war criminals."

In her youth, Kim Youngsoon was a dancer and a member of the North Korean elite who lived a life of calculated caution, surrounded by privilege and propaganda in Pyongyang. Then a high-school and college friend, the actress Sung Hye-rim, who lived in an apartment just above hers, became Kim Jong-il's mistress and gave birth to his son.

Desperate to keep the affair secret from his disapproving father, North Korea's Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, the younger Kim had the security police arrest everyone who knew of his liaison.

Mrs. Kim, her husband, three children and her elderly parents were whisked away to the North Korean gulag. They wound up in the notorious Yodok concentration camp in the mountainous northeast, condemned without charge or trial to a life of hunger and hard labour.

Her parents died of starvation; she was separated from her husband and never saw him again; one of her sons died, aged nine, trying to cross a river outside the prison camp; and after she was released from prison, another boy was killed by North Korean border guards as he tried to escape into China.

In 2000, after 31 years of suspicion and punishment, famine and fear, Mrs. Kim fled to China with her remaining son. She bribed a border guard to look the other way as they walked across a frozen river.

Her goal was South Korea. It took her 2½ years, working illegally as a waitress, to save US$600 to pay a "broker" to smuggle herself and her son out of China. Then they spent more than five months travelling, mostly at night and on foot, through the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

Now, a Seoul resident and one of nearly 16,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, Mrs. Kim is a political activist who calls for the destruction of North Korea's dictatorship and wants to see Kim Jong-il stand trial at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

"Every day you cry in your soul and live with anxiety and fear," she said yesterday, as she prepared to be the guest speaker tonight at a fund-raising gala for Toronto's Korean human rights group, HanVoice.

"People around the world don't realize how scary the dictatorship is. Those who haven't experienced it can't believe it. But the whole world needs to know."

Small, slim, carefully coiffed and wearing a brown blouse decorated with flowers, Mrs. Kim looks like a friendly grandmother.

Sitting in the back of a University Avenue coffee shop, she displays little emotion at first as she describes the nine hellish years she spent in Yodok. The work camp, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, houses up to 30,000 political prisoners in the mountains of South Hamgyong province.

"Yodok was filled with fear and hunger," she says. "People lost their teeth and their gums turned black. Their bones grew weak and they died in rags. I remember there used to be bodies of people lying all over the streets, too weak to walk."

People ate mostly corn and salt, but, two decades before the rest of North Korea endured a devastating famine, they never had enough.

"One of the few things we could eat was corn and, when we did eat it, it would just run right through us," she says.

"People died from diarrhea regularly. People died trying to eat live snakes or they would eat wild mushrooms and die. Anything that was green, they would eat it."

"People used to sort through pig dung, just looking for undigested corn and other seeds," she added. "This is the reality of the camps. Whatever flew or crawled, whatever they could catch, they ate ... They were dying slowly. This is the reality of the camps."

In the summer, prisoners worked from before dawn to after dark in the cornfields. In the winters, they harvested timber in the forests.

Some were sent to Yodok for eavesdropping on South Korean radio broadcasts. Others had been turned in by neighbours for complaining about the government. One man was jailed for accidentally dropping a bust of Kim Il-sung.

Mrs. Kim didn't know why she was imprisoned and her family destroyed until 10 years after she was released.

In 1989, while working as a seamstress in the North Korean city of Hamhung, she was hauled in for an interview by security officials. They insisted her old friend, Ms. Sung, was not Kim Jong-il's wife and she should forget anything she might have heard about them having a child.

At the time, Kim Il-sung was making preparations to establish the world's first communist dynasty and was getting ready to designate Kim Jong-il as his successor.

"We used to see Kim Il-sung as our saviour," Mrs. Kim says.

"He was our Dear Father, our Great Leader and people used the titles of father and mother to refer to the government. But really, they were war criminals."

pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com

Great King of Cambodia profusely praised Great Leader of North Korea: he will revere the latter “until the end of his life and in the afterlife”

Great Leader Kim Il Sung with Great King Norodom Sihanouk in April 1994

Norodom Sihanouk salutes the “immortal Great Leader” of North Korea

14 Oct 2008
By A.L.G.
Cambodge Soir Hebdo
Translation from French by Tola Ek
Click here to read the article in French

King-Father expressed his admiration for Kim Il Sung, his “benefactor,” by assuring his “infinite love, admiration, gratefulness, respect.”

Norodom Sihanouk reminisced about his friendship with Kim Il Sung, the former North Korean State leader and founder of the communist regime in Pyongyang who died in 1994, in a letter sent to the editor of the “Rodong Sin Moun” newspaper, which King-Father called “the great newspaper of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

In his message posted on his website, the former monarch recalled “the kindness, goodwill, love, generosity, hospitality, encouragements, solace, support, justice, which are unique in the world” shown to him by the “very illustrious, revered, beloved, so admired Marshall President Kim Il Sung” for several “decades long” when he (King-Father) was met with the “worst misfortune, misery, suffering and humiliations.”

Calling the former head of state the “immortal Great Leader of the glorious Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” King-Father assured that he will revere the latter “until the end of his life and in the afterlife.”

The two men met each other in 1961 in Belgrade, during a meeting of non-aligned heads of state.

In 1970, Norodom Sihanouk found refuge in Pyongyang where Kim Il Sung put a palace for his disposition. In his message, King-Father recalled “the immense contribution” made by Kim Il Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong Il to “the success of our second struggle for national liberation between 1970 and 1975.”

Norodom Sihanouk’s birth home is now used as the North Korean embassy in Phnom Penh.

King Sihamoni instructs Kong Sam Ol to prepare the celebration of the tyrannical North Korean regime and leaders in Cambodia

Anniversary of DPRK to Be Marked in Cambodia

Pyongyang, August 9 (KCNA) -- A preparatory committee was inaugurated in Cambodia on August 4 to celebrate the 60th birthday of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Kong Sam Ol, deputy prime minister in charge of Royal Palace, was selected chairman of the preparatory committee at the instruction of King Norodom Sihamoni.

The preparatory committee set the celebration period from August 9 to September 10 and decided to widely introduce through media the immortal feats performed by President Kim Il Sung and General Secretary Kim Jong Il for the country and the revolution and hold colorful events in the period.

Great Leader's history published in Great King Sihanouk's Kingdom

Great Leader Kim Il Sung with Great King Norodom Sihanouk

Kim Il Sung's Reminiscences Published in Cambodia

Pyongyang, June 29 (KCNA) -- Vol. 3 of Part 1 the Anti-Japanese Revolution of President Kim Il Sung's reminiscences "With the Century" was published by the Antri Miek Publishing House in Cambodia.

The book deals with the facts that in the period from February Juche 22 (1933) to February Juche 24 (1935) guerrilla bases were built in different parts of east Manchuria, China and a united front with the Chinese nationalist anti-Japanese units established. It also tells about the course of the first expedition to north Manchuria and other stories.

A ceremony of releasing the book was held on June 23 at the publishing house.

Great King of Cambodia sent large floral basket to Great Leader's embassy in Phnom Penh

Great Leader Kim Jong-Il

Large Floral Basket to DPRK Embassy from Great King of Cambodia

Pyongyang, April 13 (KCNA) -- Norodom Sihanouk, Great king of Cambodia, sent a large floral basket to the DPRK embassy in Phnom Penh on the occasion of the Day of the Sun.

Upon the authorization of the great king of Cambodia, a delegation of the Ministry of Royal Palace of the Cambodian government headed by Kong Sam Ol, deputy prime minister in charge of Affairs of the Royal Palace, visited the DPRK embassy on April 10 to lay the floral basket before the portraits of President Kim Il Sung and General Secretary Kim Jong Il.

Cambodia to boost shipping links with North Korea

10.25.07

PHNOM PENH (Thomson Financial) - Cambodia is expected to sign a deal with North Korea to boost trade between the two countries' sea ports, Foreign Minister Hor Namhong said Thursday.

The agreement is part of a trade package to be finalised early next month during a visit to Cambodia by North Korea's Prime Minister Kim Yong-Il as the nations move to increase economic ties.

Political relations between Cambodia and North Korea 'have been excellent ... but with the economic sector, so far there has not been much,' Hor Namhong told reporters after meeting with North Korean Ambassador Ri In-Sok.

Last week Cambodian Commerce Minister said isolated North Korea was seeking access to world markets through investing in Cambodia.

'Through investment, North Korea may see Cambodia as a bridge by which to produce goods and export to bigger countries,' he said at the time, adding though that investment between the two impoverished countries was 'zero.'

Cambodia has always maintained close diplomatic ties with isolated North Korea, and it has been tapped in the past to ferry messages between South Korea and the north aimed at improving relations.

During his four-day official visit beginning November 1, Kim is expected to meet with Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior government leaders.

The communist leader will also call on former king Norodom Sihanouk, a long-time friend of North Korea who frequently stays in a palace in Pyongyang provided to him by the North's first leader, Kim Il-Sung.