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No More Digital Divide: Someone has invented a durable rubber-coated laptop with an estimated cost of under $100.
Archive for September, 2005
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France’s position on the Iraq war wasn’t enough to remove it from the terrorists’ target list.
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More on the growing unrest in rural China. There’s a large enough data pool to see an emerging trend.
‘Peace In Our Time!’ Update
Chris Hill, fresh from caving in to the North Koreans and then watching them publicly repudiate the agreement anyway, may be trying to shore up his right flank:
The next thing North Korea needs to do is to tell the international community where its nuclear arms facilities are, the U.S. chief negotiator in six-party denuclearization talks Christopher Hill said Wednesday. Hill also told reporters there could be trouble ahead if North Korea in the next round of talks refuses to admit to a uranium enrichment program Washington alleges it operates.
Hill told the Chosun Ilbo the U.S. was seeking not just a confirmation that materials needed for the enrichment program went into the country but clarification what exactly became of them. Hill said he had yet to finalize plans to visit Pyongyang ahead of the next round of talks in November. He said he could make no concrete statements about a visit because there first need to be discussions with U.S. leaders including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
I’ll believe that when I see it. It can’t make anyone in Foggy Bottom happy that suddenly, we’re searching the couch cushions for South Korea’s missing uranium. Oops.
Lying on the SOFA
This is another story that I’ve meant to discuss in more detail, but simply could not because of time constraints:
U.S. troops stationed in Korea were reportedly involved in 780 criminal acts, three of them homicides, between 2000 and August 2005, yet not a single one of them has been brought to book here, Seoul Metropolitan Police data show. Statistics announced on Monday by Democratic Labor Party lawmaker Lee Young-soon
during an audit of the police show U.S. Forces Korea personnel implicated in three murders, 19 robberies, 149 thefts and other illegal activities, but none were in police custody.
First, the quick version. Ms. Lee’s “statistics” are lies, and I speak from first-hand knowledge. Starting in 1999, I was a JAG Defense Counsel in Korea, and between June 2001 and June 2002, I was the Army’s Senior Defense Counsel in Seoul. I personally represented clients who had been detained, prosecuted, and sentenced under the Korean judicial system. I have a particular case at the very front of my mind, a serious case in which my client was indicted in July of 2000 and subsequently convicted and sentenced, but will not risk my law license by disclosing my client’s confidences. I’m also reasonably certain that the other attorneys I worked with represented clients who had been prosecuted in the Korean system. This story is false, and I’d swear to this under oath without hesitation. I probably even have a copy of at least one Korean conviction somewhere in my basement.
Confirmation? You could do a FOIA request to the Army on its Trial Observer reports, asking to redact the names so that you wouldn’t get tangled up in the Privacy Act. That could take months, unfortunately. Maybe I can get my friend the former Trial Observer to add some off-the-record comments. Or, someone could actually check the records Ms. Lee claims to have checked. Like, say, the person who wrote this story . . . .
A note on those homicides–none were my cases, and what I’m revealing here is mostly a matter of public record. I’m aware of three murders that took place in Seoul between 1998 and 2002. One was a U.S. Navy sailor who killed his Korean wife and their son. A long and agonizing court-martial trial followed, which ended in the sailor getting a life term. Since it took place just a few rooms from my office, I observed some of the motion hearings. The other is the infamous McCarthy case, where a young soldier broke the windpipe of a prostitute on Hooker Hill in Itaewon, causing her death several hours later. I won’t tell you the whole story of the ajjashi who told McCarthy to run away, the ajjumma who let this poor woman choke to death over the next several hours, the hospital that was non-operational because of a strike that night, or exactly who wasn’t looking when McCarthy briefly escaped custody. The real point is that the Korean system sentenced McCarthy to an outrageously light term of eight years–an outrage even to me, a defense attorney at the time. The other Seoul “American” homicide of which I’m aware is the Jamie Penich murder, which remains unsolved, in part because the CID agents at the scene report told me that the Korean police completely screwed up the crime scene (had a soldier been charged, I was told by my superiors that the assigned defense attorney would have been your correspondent).
Other nuances that the Chosun Ilbo leaves out:
- The fact that the Korean system does not prosecute a soldier doesn’t mean that the soldier got away with the crime. It could mean there was no evidence, or that the U.S. military prosecuted the soldier. As suggested above, the U.S. military system generally imposes much harsher punishments than the Korean system.
- Nor does it mean that the Korean system was deprived jurisdiction. As any JAG in Korea can tell you, the Korean authories are fond of waiving it.
- The fact that an offense occurred in Korea does not mean the Korean system had jurisdiction in the first place. For example, the US has primary jurisdiction over offenses against other SOFA personnel and on-post offenses. It has exclusive jurisdiction over strictly military offenses.
Another Lee lie:
“Police do not even start questioning suspects before they are officially handed over to the U.S. because they claim there are no interpreters, while U.S. representatives are only concerned with taking custody of the suspect rather than to cooperating with the investigation,” Lee said.
This is bullshit. For every client of mine ultimately prosecuted in the Korean system, five went through Korean interrogations without being charged. Commanders routinely paraded soldiers past my office (I couldn’t do a thing for them) before having the platoon sergeants frog-march them to the local Korean police stations for questioning, where Korean-English translators were waiting. Korean cops–I realize that I’m about to say something really astonishing here–often speak excellent English. In fact, the Seoul Metropolitan Police has a special International Division.
Here’s another fact I don’t much mind revealing: the Seoul cops love to use English-speaking Pakistanis as undercover informants to try to do dope buys. Then they use them to do interrogations. One who interrogated a client of mine was a ferocious anti-American who loved to get aggressive with soldiers once they were safely handcuffed, a fact that probably doesn’t surprise anyone since we learned the name Daniel Pearl. And that right to have a SOFA observer present? The Korean police see that as subject to interpretation, meaning soldiers are sometimes questioned for hours before one arrives.
I just grow weary of repeating this. Hate-peddlers lie and newspapers accept it uncritically–in this case, apparently without even bothering to get a comment from the USFK. Deliberate lies walk hand-in-hand with journalistic laziness and malpractice. The demand this feeds is more trials of U.S. soldiers in courts where they have even less chance than ordinary Koreans of receiving fair trials–something else I can verify based on having elicited or observed sworn testimony from neutral observers, including (in 1998) the Inspector General of the Eighth U.S. Army. Kudos to him for having the courage to speak the truth under oath. He testified that some of the Korean judges were actually asleep in one trial. Do Koreans really think that American parents will tolerate this?
If this is the kind of ooze that a supposedly “conservative” paper prints as fact, I question the popular support on which our soldiers could count in the event of war.
Better not to have them there at all.
The Great Famine of 2006: USAID Weighs In
It’s the best news yet: the United States, via USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, will have no part of North Korea’s plan to cut off food and and demand fungible, unmonitorable “development aid.” The Chosun Ilbo is reporting on Natsios and Marcus Noland’s speeches at the Woodrow Wilson Center, which I was forced to miss Monday. There are two stories, the first of which I graf here:
Andrew Natsios told a symposium hosted by the private U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea that since Washington’s food aid to the North goes through the UN World Food Program (WFP), it would have to stop if WFP staff leave the country as Pyongyang has demanded. Natsios said development aid to the North, which it asked for instead, was not allowed by law and needed fresh parliamentary approval. He added development aid required even stricter monitoring than food relief.
Natsios warned direct, effectively unmonitored food aid from South Korea and China often failed to reach those who need it most and could thus increase the number of North Korean refugees.
The other story reports:
North Korea’s intention to bring an end to food aid provided under a decade-old World Food Program project has prompted a mixed reaction. Some analysts accept the move as part of Pyongyang’s effort to ease its dependency on foreign aid, but others believe the plan could lead to severe consequences for hundreds of thousands of hungry North Koreans.
Addressing a symposium on North Korea food and human rights issues, Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, called North Korea’s decision a mistake. Insisting that malnutrition remains a serious threat to children in the country, he warned that the United States would refrain from shipping any form of humanitarian aid to the North if the WFP is not present to monitor its distribution.
Such critics claim surveillance over the allocation of relief packages is vital because Pyongyang reportedly abuses such aid while slashing food imports and using funds elsewhere, including on military spending. Recent reports by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights show as much as 30-percent of the food donations did not reach the targeted recipients.
Relief workers add unconditional shipments of assistance from South Korea and China, which come with little or no monitoring, are aggravating the situation, with the number of refugees poised to surge as more vulnerable North Koreans are denied their basic necessities.
It was especially gratifying to see Natsios echo a theory I’ve harped on here repeatedly: how can you trust a nation to disarm when it won’t even allow outside monitoring of food aid or other human rights conditions? It’s also good to see the growing criticism of South Korean and Chinese aid policies, because ending that aid is our only chance for a truly multilateral approach with effective monitoring. If the North Koreans, deprived of Chinese and South Korean aid, can’t feed their elite and military officers, they’ll be forced to allow monitoring.
On the same day, Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard add their voices through the pages of the Washington Post, calling for more attention to North Korea’s “chronic food emergency.” Note that Noland’s death toll estimates from the first Great Famine are between 600,000 and 1 million, making them the lowest of all credible estimates. They then dismantle “apologist” explanations for the famine, laying the blame where it must plausibly lie:
In the mid-’90s, North Korea was battered by severe weather, including floods. But the country’s agricultural decline had begun well before those events. Rather than purchasing food on the world market or seeking multilateral assistance, the regime dithered. The government blocked humanitarian aid to the hardest-hit parts of the country and curtailed commercial imports of food as assistance was ramped up. Pyongyang in essence used humanitarian aid as balance-of-payments support, enabling dubious military white elephants such as the purchase of fighter jets from the Kazakh air force and centrifuges from Pakistan.
Grain production today remains below its 1990 level. With North Korea into the second decade of the food emergency, it is implausible to blame natural disasters. Failed economic policies and a misguided emphasis on food self-sufficiency remain problems, but underneath these proximate causes is a more fundamental political fact: the absence of human, civil and political rights. With no channels for redress, the large urban non-elite — accounting for roughly 40 percent of the population — faces a chronic food emergency.
They then address the “roadblocks” North Korea has put in the way of fair food distribution:
The primary conduit of the relief effort has been the U.N. World Food Program (WFP). The WFP still cannot monitor shipments from port to recipient. It still is not permitted to use Korean-speaking staffers (although the North Koreans now allow them to take language lessons), and aid workers are restricted in their movements. Roughly 50 workers — all the North Koreans will accept — are responsible for overseeing the distribution of food to roughly 6 million vulnerable individuals in a country the size of Louisiana.
Our estimates suggest that up to half of aid deliveries do not reach their intended recipients. They are diverted to the less-deserving or siphoned off into emerging markets.
Noland and Haggard then attack both the “starve them out” approach and South Korea’s almost-no-strings-attached aid:
But in the short term, the international community faces an ethical dilemma. It is tempting to walk away in hopes that the intensification of misery will contribute to regime change. But such a stance woefully underestimates the staying power of this dictatorship, and it assumes that others will not step in to fill the gap.
Yet, if the world is going to continue to provide aid, we should be clear-eyed about the terms on which it is provided. Two bilateral donors, China and South Korea, supply large amounts of aid that is essentially unconditional and outside the WFP ambit. This undercuts the agency’s negotiating leverage with the North Korean government.
Noland and Haggard then discuss the North Korean plan to cut off food aid, which I’ve already discussed here extensively, and close with thisL
But the ultimate guarantee of food security will come only when the North Koreans achieve the human, civil and political rights necessary to hold their government accountable.
Monitored food distribution will be an enormous victory for liberal values in Korea–first, because it will feed the hungry; second, because it will show North Koreans the world’s compassion; third, because it will break down the regime-stabilizing force of food inequality; fourth, because people who aren’t starving have the time andenergy to consider the causes of their misery.
The Death of an Alliance, Part 26
We should have called their bluff.
South Korea allegedly threatened the United States that it would have to rethink the two countries’ longstanding alliance if Washington refused to offer concessions to North Korea in the recently concluded nuclear dismantlement negotiations, a U.S. expert said.
“South Koreans told (the U.S. delegation) . . . if you don’t follow through, get us to the next level, we consider this an alliance issue,” Derek Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday.
He was referring to the negotiation process between South Korea and the U.S. that eventually led Washington to sign onto a principle statement on resolving the nuclear standoff on Sept. 19.
The usual denials follow. Mitchell draws some of the same conclusions about our multilateral diplomacy from this that I have drawn:
Mitchell, a former U.S. Department of Defense official, said there is a “high level of frustration” within the George W. Bush administration and in Congress over the pressure applied by South Korea and China to make the concessions to the North at the six-party talks.
The U.S. “can’t count on major powers at the table,” he said, adding that there are concerns that it may find itself isolated in the negotiations.
Frustration that this Administration has been willing to tolerate, for reasons I’m no longer able to explain. Bluntly stated, the security of the United States from nuclear proliferation is worth more than the privilege of subsidizing the economy of a nation that assails us as imperialist for the grave crime of trying to protect it, and ourselves.
Who needs that?
Don Kirk in the AWSJ, On Human Rights
This is one of the projects I’ve been meaning to write up for several days. Don Kirk himself–he’s most famous for exposing the illegal payoffs to Kim Jong Il that became the 2000 Summit Scandal–was kind enough to forward it, and I offer him my thanks for doing so and my apologies, not only for the delay, but also for not giving the piece the level of discussion I think it merits.
Because most readers won’t be able to access the piece on the Asian Wall Street Journal’s subscribers-only page, I will graf it as much as I think the Fair Use Doctine allows. Bear in mind that Mr. Kirk wrote this before the announcement of the abortive “breakthrough” in the six-party talks:
WASHINGTON — Renewed six-party talks in Beijing on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program are coming to resemble the bad second act of a boring courtroom drama. North Korea and the United States are repeating themselves to distraction. The North says it’s entitled to nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and the United States says no way. The underlying point, as everyone knows, is that North Korea is not convinced it must relinquish its nuclear weapons — and wants to bring all the other parties round to this view.
Count me among those who think this has changed very little in the last two weeks.
Perhaps it’s time for the U.S. to bring up North Korea’s gross violations of human rights to the table again. Leftists in Washington and Seoul say this is just a cynical stratagem for “neo-cons” to beat up on Seoul. But it is that approach that is cynical. North Korea’s 22 million people are oppressed beyond belief. Since the talks between the two Koreas, the U.S., Japan, Russia and China are not accomplishing much, why not publicize Pyongyang’s appalling record.
North Korea’s strategy is all too obvious. The North is pressing for reinstatement of the 1994 Clinton administration agreement that called for construction, at the expense largely of South Korea and Japan, of twin light water nuclear energy reactors. North Korea shut down its complex building warheads with plutonium. But then it violated its word with a secret program for developing warheads with highly enriched uranium. Since the breakdown of the agreement, North Korea boasts that it’s again producing nukes at the Yongbyon complex, even though it denies it has had anything to do with highly enriched uranium.
Given that other observers are now making that AF comparison, Kirk seems to have guessed that one just right. Note also that we have no resolution of the uranium-enrichment issue, except for a vague reference to North Korea’s nuclear weapons “programs.”
The problems with North Korea’s denials are that its officials acknowledged their involvement with highly enriched uranium to a U.S. delegation visiting Pyongyang in 2002. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has also admitted that the rogue physicist A. Q. Khan, the “father” of the Pakistan bomb, provided the North with centrifuges as well as technology for fabricating warheads with uranium at their core.
North Korea’s plan is to go on with denials and demands in an effort at deepening differences between the U.S. and South Korea. Seoul’s government has for the past few years pursued a policy of North-South reconciliation that makes it easy pickings for Pyongyang.
Kirk could also have mentioned that we found a large stockpile of North Korean-made UO6 in Khaddafy’s hands. As for the divide-and-rule stratagem, that also appears to have been highly effective.
Considering the depth of the impasse, might the United States, contrary to all advice, inject another pressing issue into the talks — human rights?
The conventional view is that the United States and others at the table should simply ignore this issue for fear of offending North Korea. The leader of the U.S. team, Christopher Hill, has forcefully rejected North Korean claims to have a right to nuclear power. But he has just as firmly said that talk about human rights is off the table.
That strategy may have been useful in the first round when Mr. Hill appeared to cling to the hope that North Korea might actually sign on to a “statement of principles” that called for abandonment of all nuclear weapons. Mr. Hill at the time was obsessed with demonstrating to the South Koreans that the United States was doing all possible to come to terms with the North, just as Seoul wanted.
“Demonstrating.” Interesting word. That was my theory, too, until Hill gave in on some very substantial, and probably unacceptable demands, and then later remained unmoved by a North Korean repudiation. Given that we’ve passed up so many excellent opportunities to declare North Korea in bad faith, it seems that someone in Foggy Bottom really thinks we can get something out of this deal. I do disagree with this passage:
A deep irony of the U.S. strategy for reconciliation — that is, reconciliation between Washington and Seoul — is that Ms. Rice herself has softened her tone toward North Korea. A day after Jay Lefkowitz, the newly appointed U.S. envoy on human rights in North Korea, answered a question on linking food shipment to human rights progress by saying “we are looking into all aspects of our relations,” Ms. Rice said bluntly, “We don’t use food as a weapon.” This despite her admission that there were “concerns about the ability to monitor the uses of food aid.”
I think that’s a misunderstanding of Rice’s natural and very well-advised reaction to initial reports that twisted Lefkowitz’s comments into a threat to use food as a weapon. North Korea itself was quick to pick up on that spin at the very time it was issuing eviction notices to foreign aid organizations. The fact is, the United States should demand that all of its aid is used for its intended purposes, but it should not use food as a weapon.
The South Korean argument for placing human rights off limits is that first it’s necessary to reconcile with Pyongyang. South Korean leaders, beginning with former president Kim Dae Jung, who made his Sunshine policy the centerpiece of his presidency from 1998 to 2003, believe Seoul can turn to human rights in the North after fully normalizing relations.
This argument fails on at least two counts. First, as the North Korean regime has grown richer, according to the World Food Program, the rich-poor gap is deepening. More than 200,000 people remain in prison camps, and hunger and disease may again reach the same scale as in the late 1990s, when two million people are believed to have died. Second, “normal” relations between North and South Korea are not going to happen. The North is not opening up to “normal” mail, phone calls, family visit exchanges, or even viable rail and road links. It seems more than a little heartless to suggest that North Korea’s suffering millions just hang on, be patient, and we’ll get around to you after shoring up the strength and power of your worst oppressors in Pyongyang.
Perhaps we will again soon arrive at a point when someone can heed this advice:
Since the talks are going nowhere and the North is not about to make concessions, what is there to lose? The talks will not have been a complete failure if the United States can turn them into a chance to demonstrate to both Koreas, and others at the table, the need for urgent action on North Korean human rights abuses. It would link this issue directly to the vast economic aid program that the U.S. and South Korea is dangling as bait in the forlorn hope of getting the North to give up its nukes.
A prediction: that’s probably the only way Congress will ever fund energy assistance or LWR construction. Without some significant progress on human rights or transparency, I suspect that it’s not going to pass, especially with increased attention on excessive spending. This has now become a negotiation between Congress and the State Department.
EconoWar Update
High fuel costs are starting to have a significant impact on the Chinese economy, reports the WaPo:
FOSHAN, China — Known widely for its porcelain, this grimy city in southern China is the source of much of the world’s tiles and bathroom fixtures. Yet several factories have shut down in recent weeks, and nearly all are running at a reduced clip: Here in Guangdong province, the heart of China’s industrial boom, many manufacturers cannot find enough gasoline and heavy oil to keep their operations going.
How is the government trying to ameliorate this?
In the first half of the year, China’s refineries produced more than 26 million tons of gasoline, according to state statistics. Refineries have responded to recent pressure from local governments by increasing supplies, considerably easing the shortages. Yet for each ton of gas that the two state-owned giants refine and sell inside China, they lose up to $125, according to Dong Tao. In other words, China’s central government is forcing losses on its state-owned refineries to subsidize domestic gasoline.
Letting the market set the price of gas would increase inflation in China by roughly 2 percent, said Andy Xie, an economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong. Rising inflation could spawn unrest among the country’s hundreds of millions of rural poor.
At times like these, threats of trade pressure and asset freezings have particular force. I’m just saying . . . .
Speaking of which, that Macanese Bank that was fingered in the recent supernote scandal has halted all business with North Korea:
The measure was announced by Banco Delta Asia while massive withdrawals continued, reaching 300 million Hong Kong dollars (about 40 billion Korean won) on September 17 alone, a size accounting for 10 percent of its total deposits.
Since most banks are capitalized at around 7%–and if Gordon Chang is right, much less in China–it would seem that Delta is now insolvent per generally accepted accounting practices. If state intervention doesn’t stabilize and bail out Delta, one wonders how many depositors will withdraw their funds from other banks to make up for their lost deposits, or how many other banks will also lose funds in Delta. Thinking smaller, there could also be a significant impact on North Korea’s business activities, such as they are. I seem to recall that the Korean Friendship Association did its business through Macau.
‘Peace In Our Time!’ Update
Found Pork: Another expense we can spare while we’re paying for Katrina recovery:
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea estimates it will cost as much as 15.5 trillion won (US$15 billion; euro12.27 billion) to finance energy aid to North Korea in exchange for the country dismantling its nuclear programs, a top official has said.
As my well-informed source on Capitol Hill has already reported–how I love writing that phrase–Congress will never pay for this. I mean, whose district is Pyongyang in again?
Fool Me Twice: Meanwhile, Time thinks this is all very reminiscent of the Agreed Framework, and wins awards for understatement with this passage:
One potential sticking point in all this is verification. Analysts have long suggested that North Korea wants a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to attacks, rather than as part of an offensive strategy to invade South Korea. To maintain its deterrent capability, the North would need only a few weapons and a rudimentary delivery system, and hiding such a small cache in the country’s underdeveloped hinterland would not be difficult.
Like I say, a real understatement. This is why I think human rights is such an excellent issue to test the regime’s sincerity. If they’re not willing to risk having inspectors roam around and possibly stumble upon mass graves, children’s prisons, sarin stockpiles, and gas chambers, then they’re probably not that trustworthy about nukes, either.
The Elusive Meanings of Words: Finally, we can end on an encouraging note. In the wake of North Korea’s morning-after public renunciation of the six-nation agreed statement, the other five nations show signs of moving back toward demanding a North Korean clarification that it will abide by the plain meaning–at least where it’s discernable–of its agreement.
“We will stick to the text of the Beijing [agreement], and I believe we can make progress if everybody sticks to what we agreed to,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters at the United Nations. At the same news conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed, saying, “I also think we have to stick to the text of the agreement.” Officials in Japan and China echoed those sentiments.
Whoops. Anyone missing there? Who gets the cookie?
I agree that parts of the text are hopelessly vague, and have said so since Day One. But the relative timing of NPT compliance and LWR construction is not open to reasonable interpretation. But the broader point is this: whether North Korea demands and preys on vagueness or negotiates in bad faith when there is none, an agreement requires a meeting of the minds, and a party that isn’t willing or able to reach one isn’t a viable negotiating partner.
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More than you ever wanted to know about Oranckay (see comments), although I’m not sure his comparison is entirely fair. Nice of him, at least, not to criticize Norbert Vollertsen too harshly.
The Scent of Wet Hippies
Christopher Hitchens has a must-read article on deceptive reporting of the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition as “anti-war.”
The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across “International ANSWER,” the group run by the “Worker’s World” party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the “resistance” in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a “wide range of progressive political objectives” indeed, if that’s the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper—to mention only two radical left journalists—who have exposed “International ANSWER” as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.
There’s a surprising degree of disillusionment at last weekend’s protest at . . . Daily Kos, and mainstream Democrats want nothing to do with them. Meanwhile, some of the reporting has been downright sloppy in its gullible consumption of tasty lies.
Personally, I was pleased that they were rained on, but it’s Tuesday, and Washington is still permeated with wet hippie whiff. I’d have gone to MOPP I just to take photographs for your viewing pleasure, but the Sergeant Major ended my plan with just one look.
The Great Famine of 2006: A Growing Chorus of Outrage
When it comes to North Korea, food aid is not our weapon. It’s already North Korea’s weapon. Our goal should be to feed as many innocent people as we possibly can, with or without the North Korean government’s cooperation. The distribution of food is the most important human rights issue of all.
I’ve been tracking the reports of a return of famine conditions closely this year, but it wasn’t until several days about that I became convinced that North Korea was serious about cutting off food aid, something I’m convinced will kill millions. Fortunately, the news media appear to have noticed the story, and this may save lives. The BBC takes the highly unusual step of criticizing the productive disincentive of socialism, and then says this:
The problem with this system is that market reforms, instituted in 2002, have sent prices soaring at a higher rate than wages. “Who can afford this stuff in the markets?” asked Mr French.
The answer: only the elite. Government officials, senior managers of state enterprises, security forces, and the leadership of the army are all unlikely to go hungry.
But a typical urban family can now only afford to buy 4kg of maize - the cheapest commodity - a month.
The quote has a familiar ring, and an intrepid googler with more time than I might be able to confirm that the BBC has printed this quote before. That doesn’t deprive it of veracity. The BBC may also be a step behind in another way–for not having read Prof. Andrei Lankov’s report that the regime is trying to reconstitute its Public Distribution System, perhaps to regain control that they never really intended to relinquish in the first place.
The L.A. Times, which long ago outran the WaPo and NYT in quality of coverage on humanitarian issues, also covers the story (registration is free):
U.N. humanitarian affairs chief Jan Egeland said Friday that North Korea was not ready to feed its people on its own, and that he was trying to persuade Pyongyang to continue food aid to the country’s children.
. . . .“My heart goes out, really, to the children of North Korea, and I appeal to the government to help us feed them,” Egeland said.
. . . .The isolated nation, which has a policy of juche, or self-reliance, faced severe famines over the last decade that killed an estimated 2 million people. Though North Korea is better able to feed its population and expects a good winter harvest, about 7% of its 22.5 million people are still starving and 37% remain chronically malnourished, Egeland said.
“Our assessment is that they will not be able to have enough food,” he said. “We are very concerned because we think this is too soon and too abrupt.” . . . .
Because North Korea will still accept development assistance, U.N. officials are negotiating ways to continue feeding the hungry in a different guise. Meals for schoolchildren could be reclassified as an educational program, Egeland said, adding that the World Food Program already pays some workers with food.Development aid, Egeland noted, typically is used to build infrastructure, bolster agriculture and promote self-sufficiency.
But some international donors worry that giving development aid makes them appear to endorse Pyongyang’s harsh communist regime.
“Many of them are not interested in that,” Egeland said. “They are interested in meeting humanitarian needs only. This could lead to a big decrease in programs.”
Among the Korean papers, the Korea Times has probably covered the story best. This Korea Times article details allegations by Rep. Chung Moon-Hun about the inequality of food distribution, and criticizes Seoul’s unilateralist policy of giving aid that is inadequately monitored (more on that here). The report comes complete with a province-by-province breakdown map. This is must-read stuff, and would merit an entire post by itself had I more time this week. More recently, it discusses the “baffled” reaction of foreign NGOs about Pyongyang’s expulsion order:
Radio Free Asia said that senior officials at NGOs, such as Ireland’s Concern, France’s Triangle Generation and Germany’s German Agro Action, are frustrated over North Korea’s decision to end their on-going aid activities.
Ann Omahony, head of Concern’s Asian affairs, said North Korean authorities have asked the NGO to hand over its work to them or to leave the country by Dec. 31. But it is impossible to do so because it defeats the purpose of NGO’s existence, the station quoted her as saying.
. . . .
According to the station, Patrick Valbluggan, chief of North Korean aid at Triangle Generation, is also at wit’s end over the North’s sudden request for a shift to development assistance.
Only a few weeks ago, Triangle’s staff were asked to leave the North by the end of this year without any reason given, he said.
The Joongang Ilbo has more. The Chosun Ilbo reports that the U.S. government is mulling over the WFP’s proposal to give North Korea its “development aid,” and is “would discuss the matter with the international community.”
The Daily NK has an interview with Marcus Noland’s partner in research, Professor Stephen Haggard of UC Berkeley. Again, this would be a blog entry in itself, but for the fact that I have two weeks’ worth of great material I haven’t had time to write, edit, and publish with the appropriate care. Haggard reports that even with current WFP efforts to monitor distribution, as much as 50% of the food aid is diverted. Clearly, more monitoring is necessary, not less. Another must-read.
Perhaps feeling the pressure to insert humanitarian issues—ie., the monitoring of food aid—into the nuke talks, North Korea stops to tell a transparent lie:
A source who recently traveled to the North on Tuesday quoted officials there as saying Pyongyang would normalize food rations on Oct. 10, which marks the 60th anniversary of the Workers Party of Korea. The source said he was told that cereal rations, which averaged 300 g a day per person and were cut to 250 g a day earlier this year, would be increased to 500-700 g from that day.
. . . .The World Food Program says North Korean authorities slashed per-capita cereal rations from 300 g to 250 g in January. That was the lowest amount since January 2001. The source said a normal adult should consume about 700 g a day.
The daily minimum for survival is 500 grams, and North Korea’s claims of a sudden capacity to provide it don’t jibe with recent reports in the least. Start with this one from earlier this year, which discusses the reduction to PDS rations to just 250 grams per person per day. This report quotes a South Korean agricultural expert, who expected a terrible harvest this year. Then read this appeal, and this one from August, from WFP country director Richard Ragan. The appeals suggest a slightly improved harvest but note that 6.5 million North Koreans—a third of the surviving population—still depend on WFP food aid.
Where did North Korea so suddenly and improbably get all this additional food? If the raised ration is as imaginary as it seems, what will the people of North Korea do? A final graf from the BBC report:
“I’m not in the business of predicting numbers that are going to die,” [WFP official Gerald Bourke] said. “North Koreans are very tough people. They are very accustomed to deprivation. But that doesn’t take away the urgent need for food aid.”
Note: A very, very big disappointment for me this week was that pressing work duties forced me to miss hearing the remarks of Andrew Natsios and Marcus Noland on food aid and famine in North Korea at the Woodrow Wilson Center yesterday. I’m trying to get copies of their remarks, and would appreciate any help on this (as if I’ll find time to write about it).
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What’s Next? Outlawing Room Salons? More proof that Roh is the political (if not the psychological) equivalent of a ledge case. I mean, this is political suicide if I’ve ever seen it.