The story on how North Korea exports arms is worth a longer post than I have time to write today.
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Kim Jong Il’s banker Ambassador to Switzerland is retiring. Hmmm.
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A U.S. District Court has issued a summons for the Foreign Minister of North Korea. I’ll have much more to say about this another day, but the interesting point here is that the widow of Rev. Kim Dong Shik has indeed sued the North Korean government for the abduction and murder of her husband, something I’ve long been asking people who know her to urge her to do.
Remember him? Robert King says something: “We will continue to press human right issues as we’ve done in the past.” You know, it’s that “in the past” part that sucks all the credibility out of the entire promise.
Reuters, citing a study by the Korea Development Institute (KDI), reports that “North Korea’s international trade dropped last year for the first time in more than a decade.” The report suggests that this was mostly the consequence of sanctions, but a closer look at the evidence it was The Great Confiscation that really brought trade across the Chinese border to a standstill by paralyzing the economy, markets, and trade, and banning the use of foreign currency in the final months of 2009. As trade with South Korea, Japan, and other nations has declined in recent years, the great majority of North Korea’s international trade has shifted to China. The KDI report notes that “the largest impact came from a sharp decline in trade with China.” But if trade with China has declined, there’s little evidence that this is because China has tried in good faith to comply with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874. Reports from last year suggests that the new resolution had little if any impact on China-North Korea trade, and China has largely turned a blind eye to North Korean arms trafficking.
Instead, the decline in trade is more likely due to the regime’s own increasingly desperate efforts to destroy a rising underground market economy in North Korea, efforts that began with the state banning and confiscating Chinese imports in July, continued with the closure of its largest unofficial market in September, and culminated in The Great Confiscation — a series of draconian diktats that destroyed the working capital of millions of traders and the saving of millions of desperate citizens, banned the use of foreign currency, and destroyed confidence in the domestic currency. Despite some reports that that the crackdown on foreign currency has been eased out of necessity, according to this report, the regime is still cracking down on the use of the Chinese Yuan, and that this has caused food prices to soar.
A Daily NK source explained, “Lately, cadres have been claiming that the Chosun (North Korea) economy could be occupied by China, so dealing in Yuan is banned.” He added that he does not know whether this is just a pretext, or whether the North’s officials really are worried. Additionally, of course, the amount of foreign currency in the country cannot meet the overall demand. This is stoking inflation.
There are three measures the authorities are employing to block the inflow of Yuan. First and most obviously, they are blocking the channels of direct Yuan inflow. Since the redenomination, North Korean border guards have been cracking down on smuggling and drug dealing. One unintended result of the crackdown is that currency smuggling and drug dealing are now being led by border guards, but supplies of Yuan are still dropping as a result of the measure.
Secondly, due to regulations against the use of cell phones for reasons, nominally, of national security, dealings between North Korean traders and Chinese wholesalers have been seriously circumscribed. Now, less than half the previous amount of cross-border trading is being initiated via mobile phone.
Lastly, in the market, a ban on the circulation of foreign currency is still in force. As foreign currency dealing is more risky now, the costs associated with that risk are being added into the exchange rate while, simultaneously, the value of the North Korean won is deteriorating for a number of reasons.[Daily NK]
Another important factor in the decline of trade must certainly be the regime’s politically motivated interference with access to the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which we can assume is now in a state of slow but steady decline due to the vastly increased political risk of investing there.
The KDI report also notes that the decline in imports “indicates a foreign exchange shortage in the North.” Yet U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874 exempts humanitarian aid and “lawful economic activities,” and as a practical matter, hasn’t affected most Chinese exports to North Korea. Thus, to the extent the decline in North Korea’s imports reflects the effect of sanctions, it likely means a decline in North Korean imports of things we don’t want it to import anyway — yachts and fancy cars, to name two — and the increased difficulty of generating foreign exchange by selling weapons.
(One complicating factor in this picture is China’s tendency to block all food exports when domestic food prices rise. This can cause food prices to rise in North Korea, which imports much of its food supply from China.)
Today, the South Korean government is worried about the sudden deterioration of North Korea’s food situation, citing declining food production and something South Korea’s leftist governments never mentioned: “disproportionate food distribution among different classes or regions.” But between the summer of 2008 and the beginning of The Great Confiscation in November 2009, there were no strong indications that North Korea’s food situation was much worse than usual. Although the 2009 harvest was a poor one, the statistics also show that it wasn’t significantly worse than in previous years. North Korea’s food situation did not change significantly after May 2009, when North Korea tested its second nuke and the U.N. responded with UNSCR 1874. Instead, reports of a rapidly deteriorating food situation and resulting public discontent are a very recent development that is largely attributable to The Great Confiscation.
U.N. sanctions certainly seem to have damaged to the Palace Economy, and to have scared away investors who don’t know or don’t care how their money will be used. That will make the world a safer place. But any damage to the Peoples’ Economy is largely the result of the regime’s own brutality and stupidity. For years, those two economies have largely performed as separate entities as the regime used the hard currency it generated for its own priorities and depended on international aid to feed the expendables. To the extent the hard times for the Palace Economy and the Peoples’ Economy are related, it’s likely because the former attacked the latter with confiscatory intent.
Korean-American Richard Cho has been hailed as a hero for helping subdue a terrorist and putting out a fire aboard a U.S. airliner heading for Detroit last Christmas. Cho, 40, immigrated with his family to the U.S. at age seven, and went to high school in Chicago. He majored in political science and sociology at Iowa State University, and since graduation has been working as a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines.
On Dec. 25, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian with ties to al Qaeda, attempted to detonate a bomb aboard Northwest Flight 253, which was traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit with 290 passengers.
Jasper Schuringa, a director from Amsterdam, was the first to subdue Abdulmutallab after hearing a bang and seeing smoke. Cho rushed to help Schuringa. When the blanket that was covering the bomb caught fire, Cho quickly put it out with a fire extinguisher and prevented a major disaster aboard the flight.
U.S. President Barack Obama sent Cho a handwritten letter thanking him for his heroic act. Obama said in the letter that Americans will “forever remember” his heroism in saving the lives of passengers and protecting the U.S., and he offered his gratitude for Cho’s “dedication and courage.” [Chosun Ilbo]
I wonder if Cho had self-defense training. I will say this: passengers and crew certainly seem to been more effective than Federal Air Marshals at stopping things like this. Maybe instead of taking pointy things away from passengers, we should issue them.
Kang Chol Hwan thinks that Kim Jong Il’s address to a mass rally in Hamhung — that is, if you’re convinced he really did address that rally –means that His Withering Majesty is determined to resist any reform of the system. That part of what Kang says is obvious enough and therefore less interesting than his description of Hamhung, which sounds post-apocalyptic:
Hooligans clustering at the railroad station glared at the goods carried by pedestrians and provoked quarrels if they thought you were looking at them. At construction sites in Pyongyang, the word was that Hamhung people were wild. Often there were gang fights at project sites where tens of thousands of youths from different regions had been mobilized, and Hamhung youngsters were always the most violent. The city was home to the greatest number of organized gangs, and even police officers couldn’t handle them. Hamhung also has more access to outside world as it is an intermediary place through which all things coming in through the northern border with China pass. [Chosun Ilbo]
Hamhung also appears to have the worst drug problem of any city in North Korea, and is believed to have suffered disproportionately during the Great Famine.
The defection of those two loggers at the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok inspires further thought from Claudia Rosett:
I’ve seen those North Korean lumberjacks–or at least their predecessors. In 1994 I was working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Moscow when a story turned up in the Russian press, saying that North Korea was running lumber camps in remote areas of Russia.
In Moscow, Russian officials confirmed to me that they had two big logging operations manned and policed by North Koreans. Both were in the Russian Far East, in areas once part of Stalin’s old gulag. One was based in a place called Tynda. The other was headquartered in a town called Chegdomyn, straddling a rail spur that ran a few hundred miles north from the major city of Khabarovsk, one of the main stops on the Trans-Siberian railroad.
These camps were the legacy of a 1967 Brezhnev-era deal between the Soviet Union and the North Korean regime of Kim Il Sung. The Soviets supplied the equipment and the forests, in rough terrain where during the long winters the temperature dives far below zero. North Korea supplied–and supervised–the lumberjacks. The two governments sold the lumber abroad and divvied up the profits.
In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Surrounded by a freer Russia, these logging sites carried on as de facto slave labor camps, totalitarian outposts of North Korea. For the Russian foreign ministry at the time, this was a human-rights embarrassment. One Russian official told me there was “harsh treatment” in the camps, including “torture, beatings” and even “controversial” deaths. But the Russian Ministry of Agriculture, which was raking in money from the lumber sales, saw it as an excellent deal worth continuing. One of their spokesmen explained that Russians would not be willing to log such hostile turf for the pittance the North Koreans were paid.
Having heard this tale, I recruited the help of a young intern and interpreter in our bureau.
Latest word is that the loggers will actually demand to be sent to the United States. Under Article 2 and 3 of the South Korean Constitution, however, the men are South Korean citizens, and pursuant to long-standing principles of international and immigration law, an applicant for asylum must generally apply for asylum at the first country of refuge where asylum is sought. The natural place of refuge is the place where these men are already citizens, and let’s face it, Chung Dong Young isn’t the President of the Republic of Korea. It’s reasonable to assume that these men can live safely in South Korea.
Still, isn’t it interesting that after a lifetime of indoctrination that Americans are big-nosed, baby-bayoneting rapists, these men would still prefer to live in the United States, notwithstanding all of the linguistic and cultural barriers living here would mean for them?
Something tells me the Putinjugend Nashi web site isn’t going to feature, by popular demand, this newly released 1945 report by a Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who drove through Hwanghae and North and South Pyongyan provinces just after the war’s end. The officer’s detailed, 13-page report on the behavior of Russian soldiers in North Korea makes drunk G.I.’s in Itaewon look like Mormon missionaries by comparison:
The handwritten document in Russian was discovered by the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a U.S. think tank devoted to national security, and translated into English.
“The immoral behavior of our servicemen is horrible. Regardless of rank, they indulge in looting, violence and misconduct every day here and there. They continue to do so since few have been punished,” the document said. The lieutenant colonel described the atrocities of the Red Army, which described itself as “liberators” at the time. “The sound of gunfire never stops at night in areas where our troops are stationed,” he said.
“Drunk and disorderly soldiers commit immoral behavior and rape is prevalent.”
It added, “Drunk soldiers are often spotted on the streets in broad daylight and drinking parties in more than 70 inns and public buildings take place every night.” [Donga Ilbo]
Given the behavior of German soldiers on Russian soil, it’s possible to put the atrocious behavior of the Russians who invaded Germany in 1945 into some perspective, though it still doesn’t excuse the widespread mass rape of German women. It’s much harder to understand why the Russians could justify behaving like this toward Koreans, whom they themselves recognized as victims of fascism and colonialism:
A North Korean who tried to bring a drunk Soviet lieutenant to justice said, “I cannot forgive the Soviet soldier who raped my wife.” Many such perpetrators went unpunished. Though another lieutenant colonel urged the Soviet military police to punish the perpetrators to maintain military discipline several times, his words went unheeded, the report said.
The 25th Primorsky Krai unit commander of the Soviet Far East Army arrived at Pyongyang Airport on Aug. 26, 1945, and described the Soviet army as liberators. “Remember fellow Koreans! Your happiness is up to you. You have achieved freedom and independence. Everything is up to you now,” he said. The report, however, quoted the commander as threatening to “hang half of the Koreans” if they rise up against the Soviet army in protest of their abuses.
The commander held a party with his subordinates for 22 hours in a row in downtown Haeju on Nov. 16, 1945. A fire broke out and burned houses, but he said the fire was an act of arson committed by dissidents and received 300,000 yen as compensation.
The report quoted another Soviet colonel as saying privately, “The Korean people were enslaved for the past 35 years. It’s okay for them be enslaved a little longer.”
We all eagerly await the calls for an inquiry by some Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In fact, let me just put it out there that Charles J. Hanley, having recycled the No Gun Ri story at least three times now, might actually find some fresh material here.
This week’s papers have several disturbing indicators suggesting that a sudden deterioration of the food situation is in the works. First was this report that even shops and hotels for foreigners in Pyongyang had run out of food; then, Robert linked to a report that kids can now seen begging even in Pyongyang.
Depending on what you choose to believe, however, this may not be an entirely new development. Our friend Christine Ahn, no less, reports seeing kids begging during a 2004 “solidarity” visit to Pyongyang.
“I went to North Korea as a peace activist. North Koreans were living in very difficult conditions. Eight-year-old children were loitering around the hotel, shaking because of hunger. Even soldiers were extremely thin.
From which she concludes:
One thing that surprised me was the mental strength of the North Koreans. I strongly felt their pride and urge to preserve their system.
So, Christine, you could feel the urge of starving eight-year-olds to preserve the system? Do tell! Still, I tend to think that a person who prefers to speak of North Korea’s “collective spirit” and complete absence of sexist billboards would not have mentioned the hungry kids unless she’d actually seen them. Ahn says the kids were “loitering.” To ask her to concede that they were most likely begging may be asking too much.
In other dreary news, at least one “leading” expert projects that North Korea’s grain production will continue to decline. Meanwhile, a regime crackdown on illegal border crossing has caused food prices to rise in North Korea.
The regime, for its part, thinks the answer to low food production is more state intervention, not less. It is offering financial incentives to party officials and their wives in Pyongyang to move to the countryside, something that would be tantamount to suicide for city folk unaccustomed to the hardships and privations of rural life.
Civic group North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said the party held seminars at party chapters on Feb. 23 promising W10,000 in cash and 120 kg of food for households if they voluntarily move to farms.
The Workers’ Party recently distributed copies of a training manual for senior officials on fortifying rural bases. “To increase grain production the most important thing is to make up for a shortage in the rural workforce. This is why blue-collar workers and office workers in urban areas, senior officials in particular, should lead the vanguard in the campaign.” The regime is urging the wives of senior officials in the party and security agencies to set an example for others.
The regime is afraid of the possibility of mounting public discontent if it forces people to relocate at a time when they are seething in the wake of a disastrous currency reform. The regime is giving indoctrination classes to senior officials to move to rural areas and urging them to set an example, news media speculated.
But the group said such efforts would not be effective in persuading ordinary North Koreans to move to rural areas because living conditions there are very bad. “It’s very likely that the regime will end up forcibly relocating them,” it added.
The report goes on to predict that the regime won’t find many volunteers and will end up relocating people forcibly. But moving people from the top of the food chain to the bottom is a potential source of instability when it creates anxiety within the ruling class. This is a story worth watching.
Thirty American victims of Hezbollah terror attacks have filed civil action in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., against the government of North Korea. The plaintiffs, injured by Hezbollah rockets fired into northern Israel during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, allege that North Korea aided the militant group by training senior Hezbollah leaders and by providing networks of underground storage bunkers meant to house Katyusha rocket launchers. [Ha’aretz]
This would be the third recent civil suit against North Korea in a U.S. court of which I’m aware. The first, by surviving crew members of the U.S.S. Pueblo and the widow of its captain, won $65 million in damages over North Korea’s horrific torture of those men. The second suit, which is pending now, seeks damages for North Korea’s role in a 1972 terrorist attack at Lod Airport that killed 26 people, most of them religious pilgrims from Puerto Rico. Both suits took advantage of an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act for acts by states that were then listed as state sponsors of terrorism (meaning that Esther Kim should call her lawyer, but Robert Park need not bother).
Having observed, no doubt, that North Korea never defends these suits and inevitably ends up on the wrong side of a default judgment, the plaintiffs have asked for $100 million in compensatory damages, plus an unspecified amount in punitive damages. The suit cites this 2007 memorandum by the Congressional Research Service to support its allegations.
This is not to say that North Korea is completely beyond litigating its claims in foreign courts. In 2008, North Korea reached a 39 million Euro settlement with several insurers that it sued for refusing to pay on claims that the insurers suspected of being fraudulent. Those suspicions were later supported by the detailed account of former North Korean insider (and my friend) Kim Kwang Jin.
Here’s the plaintiffs’ lawyer, speaking about the newest lawsuit:
“Hezbollah’s underground facilities significantly improved their ability to fight the Israelis during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war,” the memorandum added.
Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said: “North Korea has become a major player in providing support and material resources to Middle East terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah.” It was North Korea which trained Hezbollah’s leadership and built the underground bunkers that permitted the terrorists to evade Israeli jets during the Second Lebanese War and to continue their rocket attacks targeting civilians,” she added.
Darshan-Leitner added that, “As a facilitator of the Hezbollah rockets, North Korea is financially liable to all those Americans injured by the terrorists. The lawsuit aims to secure a measure of justice for the terror victims and teach North Korea that it cannot continue to support Hezbollah with impunity.”
President Obama decided not to restore North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism on February 3, 2010. President Bush removed North Korea from the list on October 11, 2008 as a reward for its “progress” toward nuclear disarmament. Discuss among yourselves.
Hat tip to a friend.
On a distantly related note, the plaintiffs will have one less source of North Korean assets to attach to satisfy their judgment. Pyongyang Soju has withdrawn from the U.S. market after discriminating drunks said “bleccccch.”
Not for the first time, China has announced that it has leased part of the North Korean port at Rajin, a move that would give China’s rust belt access to the Pacific. I’m just not going to find the time to write about this in detail, but you can read more about this here. Given recent reports that North Korea had canceled the last lease, you have to wonder how much this really means.
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Two North Korean loggers have sought asylum at the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok. Kushibo has more here.
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North Korea inaugurates a new military unit to handle a newly developed medium-range missile:
The North’s People’s Army recently launched a division supervising operational deployment of missiles with a range of more than 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) that it had developed in recent years, Yonhap news agency reported citing an unidentified South Korean government source.
The missiles could pose a threat to U.S. forces in Japan, Guam and other Pacific areas that are to be redeployed in time of emergency on the Korean peninsula, Yonhap said. [AP]
I’m going to add just one small bit to the fracas between the Korean Finance Ministry and two reporters with whose work I’m familiar — Don Kirk and Evan Ramstad. As to the questions themselves, sometimes, the function of a good reporter is to challenge official groupthink and corruption, especially in a place where groupthink is as prevalent as it is in Korea. I do not think that a country that aspires to be a hub of international business can nonetheless exempt itself, for cultural reasons, from ethical standards that have gained international acceptance. One of these is that governments ought not to ply interest groups or investors with prostitutes (which seems to be a reasonably good guess as to where the questions might be headed). If a reporter has a basis to believe that this has occurred, it seems fair to ask about it. The questions Kirk and Ramstad were at least as appropriate as the question that brought us this infamous episode of presidential mendacity. As for the context in which the questions were asked or the other issues between Ramstad and the Foreign Ministry, I have no particular knowledge and therefore nothing useful to add.
I will confess, however, that I am biased toward Kirk and Ramstad, am a fan of their work, and wish them both well. Long before this episode, I’d noted their role in a trend toward much-improved reporting about Korea lately. Some full disclosure would be appropriate: I consider Kirk a personal friend, and he arranged for his publisher to send me a free review copy of his excellent book about Kim Dae Jung. I don’t think this was enough to buy me off, but I put that out there for your consideration. Kirk’s book, like his original exposure of the 2000 summit scandal, are prime examples of questions that some Koreans no doubt considered pushy and inappropriate at the time, not just in spite of the fact that they contradicted Korean groupthink about DJ and North Korea, but because they contradicted it. Those who lived in Korea in those years know the extent to which those issues had become intertwined with Korea’s national pride and nationalism. For a time, it was blasphemy to challenge it.
Ramstad has featured my work, and Curtis’s, in the Journal. In addition to our lengthy conversation during which which he interviewed for that article, we’ve had a number of e-mail exchanges. These, in addition to my observation of his work, have been sufficient for me to get a sense of his subject matter knowledge, which is first-rate. His reporting has added a much-needed correction to past reporting of North Korea by reporting on conditions inside North Korea itself. Both Kirk and Ramstad are correspondents of the first caliber. To the extent that their questions drew attention to elephants that went unmentioned in a room filled with reporters, so much the better.
Surely even the most determined opponent of the Iraq War would agree that this is a far better way for a war to end than this, or this. It’s not quite over, of course, but there’s no reason for it to go on. No one in Iraq wants it to go on, and most importantly, no one is afraid:
One of trite bumper sticker slogans that became vogue in the last five years is that you can’t export democracy at gunpoint. From where I sit, it looks like we just have. Mind you, Iraq is one of those extraordinary cases — the only case I can envision today — in which direct foreign military intervention was an appropriate way to accomplish that. I submit that the intense unpopularity of the war in the terrible years of 2004-2008 was not so much that the casualties exceeded what our politicians expected before they voted to send the troops in. It was unpopular because the people could not see the outcome we see here. How else could this result have been achieved? Not without violence, certainly, and had it not been achieved, Iraq would be in a state of unrestrainable genocide, proliferation, and aggression.
To all of those who served and to their families, there are not enough occasions when the rest of us thank you for what you have done. Let this be one of those occasions. Thank you.
The fact that Japan has its own Roh Moo Hyun now is both more and less troubling than Roh’s own presidency. On the one hand, Hatoyama wasn’t elected on a wave of anti-Americanism, but because voters were understandably tired of one-party rule. If Hatoyama doesn’t improve conditions in Japan, he may not hold power for long. On the other hand, we have much more air and naval power in Japan than in Korea, and whereas Korea is strategically expendable to America, Japan really isn’t.
I hold Barack Obama responsible for the fact that somewhere in Futenma, someone hates us.
If you believe in peace, it might be worth a minute of your time to condemn the utter senselessness of the terrorists who murder Iraqis for defying them and voting in the Arab world’s only truly free elections. The terrorists may even be losing the support of the BBC:
The campaign of sectarian killing is beginning to seem like mindless nihilism, rather some sort of clear-cut political strategy. Having completely failed to derail the democratic process here, it is hard to see what the extremists can do now. Other than raise the level of violence even more, of course. [BBC, John Simpson]
Who would have thought this could happen four years ago? Thank goodness President Obama had the spine and the will to stand up to all those calls to pull the troops out.
I’m not sure of what the story is, or why Pepsi’s site used to say, “Voting ends on February 28th,” and now says, “Voting ends on March 31st,” but LiNK confirms they’re still in the running for $250K. I suppose that means I’ll have to fix that button and put it back in my sidebar. For now, vote here. They’ve dropped to number 7, so they definitely need your vote.
And if anyone from LiNK can explain why the deadline was extended, please e-mail me or drop a comment. Thanks.
Update: So I guess the way this works is that Pepsi starts the contest all over again every month. LiNK’s position hasn’t dropped; this is a whole new beginning.
So Operations Key Resolve and Foal Eagle have started again. I boldly predict that this year, as has been the case for each year for the many decades we’ve had troops stationed in South Korea, the exercise will not end with an American invasion of North Korea. Just as predictably, North Korea is threatening the United States and/or South Korea. The challenge for North Korean propagandists is always how to make each year’s threat stand out from such previous-year classics as “sea of fire.” After all, you can only say “brigandish,” “imperialist,” and “merciless” so many times before people start to suspect you’re writing your missives with pre-printed refrigerator magnets.
The North’s military warned Sunday that it would bolster its nuclear capability and break off dialogue with the U.S. in response to the drills. It also said it would use unspecified “merciless physical force” to cope with them, saying it is no longer bound by the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War. [AP]
“The revolutionary armed forces of (North Korea) will be left with no option but to exercise merciless physical force as the rival is set to do harm to the (North),” the military’s mission at the truce village of Panmunjom said in a statement carried by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency.
North Korea has escalated its threats against South Korea and the U.S. over the planned drills. Last week, the North vowed to strengthen its nuclear deterrent and its means of delivery — an apparent reference to missiles. Last month, the North also threatened a “powerful” — even nuclear — attack if the drills go ahead. [AP]
Also, because any excuse will do, North Korea is telling us yet again that it’s not going to disarm:
North Korea said Sunday it would no longer move forward with nuclear disarmament in response to a planned U.S.-South Korean joint military exercise. The announcement was made by the official Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA.
“The maneuvers clearly indicate once again that the U.S. and the South Korean authorities are the harassers of peace and warmongers keen to bring a war to this land,” the statement said. [CNN]
President Obama decided not to restore North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism on February 3, 2010. President Bush removed North Korea from the list on October 11, 2008 as a reward for its “progress” toward nuclear disarmament. Discuss among yourselves.
“The process for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula will naturally come to a standstill,” the North’s official KCNA news agency quoted a senior military official as saying.
“It is illogical to sit face to face with the dialogue partner, who brings dark clouds of a nuclear war while leveling its gun at the other party, and discuss ‘peace’ and ‘cooperation’ with him,” the official was quoted as saying. [Reuters]
And they had been doing so well until now! If only we could all just get along. If only we had another Agreed Framework:
The North has been demanding a peace treaty with the U.S. and even made it a major condition for its returning to the six-party nuclear disarmament talks. [….] On the face of it, it’s a very easy decision to make,” John Feffer, the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus, a Washington-based think tank, told The Korea Times. The proposition also appears commonsense because the U.S. and North Korea have not exchanged any significant gunfire since 1953.
Some observers correctly say that it’s because U.S. negotiators see granting a peace treaty to the ill-behaving North as a “reward.” But a deeper and even ultimate diagnosis may be that it’s because the U.S. actually cannot afford to give it to North Korea. And the problem lies with its domestic political situation, according to Feffer.
“U.S. law stipulates that a peace treaty must obtain two-thirds of the votes in the Senate. The problem is that there are a number of Senators, mostly Republican, who are not willing to sign a peace treaty with North Korea. This domestic consideration has to be taken into account,” said Feffer, adding that this is the “real reason” the U.S. administration is unwilling to offer a peace pact. [Korea Times, Sunny Lee]
And here I was, prepared to hold Barack Obama responsible for the fact that the people in Pyongyang who tell the KCNA guys what to write who hate us, only to see John Feffer elucidate why the stuff that KCNA says is actually all the Republicans’ fault. But then, Feffer’s unique talent is the capacity to construct an argument that everything that happens in Korea — Kim Jong Il starving North Koreans, Kim Jong Il testing nukes, Kim Jong Il breaking promises, Kim Jong Il threatening the neighbors — is somehow America’s fault. In some circles, this unique gift is confused with intelligence.
Note to Sunny Lee: couldn’t you find anyone to go on record and express a view that isn’t the exclusive dominion of the lunatic fringe? Now fasten your seat belts, because we’re about to cross over to an alternative universe:
In a survey last year by Rasmussen, a U.S. polling organization, North Korea topped the list of countries that American voters see as the biggest national security threat. A Gallup poll in February showed that the view hasn’t changed. The North again topped the list of countries, together with Iran, in “critical threats to the U.S. vital interests.”
The results show the predominantly negative perceptions the American public have toward North Korea. And given that their view on the North, not the U.S. administration, may be the ultimate decider on whether a peace treaty should be signed, Pyongyang is at a critical disadvantage.
In its peace treaty demand, North Korea may have neglected this factor. It’s important for the secretive state to have “winning negotiations” with U.S. nuclear envoys, but behind them are lawmakers, and behind them the general public, who ultimately influences U.S. negotiations.
“There is a tendency in the U.S. that sees a peace treaty with North Korea as somehow a concession,” said Feffer. “That’s why it has been so difficult to push the issue forward domestically.”
Perhaps, it’s time for North Korea to engage in a charm offensive of public diplomacy to earn the hearts and minds of Americans first to see progress on its demand.
I suppose it violates the Feffer Principle to imply that Kim Jong Il modify his behavior — or even that he has the free will to do so — but I would humbly suggest that a minimally effective “charm offensive” might begin with Kim Jong Il announcing a moratorium on declarations of war, nuke and missile tests, public executions, threats against the neighbors, illegal arms shipments and technology transfers to shadowy regimes, and the refusal of international food aid for starving people. Maybe he could even show some sincerity by closing down his death camps. Any one of those things would go a lot further to dispel our hegemonic misconceptions than any of Feffer’s intricate constructs of brittle logic.
The AP is reporting that Pakistani security forces have captured Scummy Hippie Traitor Number One, Adam Gadahn, in Karachi.
Grain of salt: this, from Pakistani sources, which don’t have a terribly good record for reliability.
And in related news, there’s some sweet red-on-red fighting reported in eastern Afghanistan, with the forces of ex-Marxist, ex-mujahid and thorough scumbag Gulbuddin Hekmatyar fighting against the Taliban. Some of Gulbuddin’s people are said to be getting the worst end of the fight and defecting to government forces. While I don’t doubt that Gulbuddin himself could bring over plenty of valuable intel, he is after all the man primarily responsible for destroying Kabul, and who got his start throwing acid into the unveiled faces of women at Kabul U.
During the Soviet war, mujaheddin groups fought each other frequently, the but Soviets’ arrogance and brutality prevented them from exploiting those divisions successfully.
And they had been doing so well until now! If only we could all just get along. If only we had another Agreed Framework: 