Archive for November, 2005
Posted by joshua on November 30, 2005 at 1:56 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The Protest Babes of LiNK: Yesterday Beirut, today Seoul, tomorrow Pyongyang. It takes a person of courage and vision to stand up for a just but unpopular cause, but beauty and talent certainly help to popularize that cause. This week, I’m officially convinced–for the first time–that our side is winning the information war in South Korea. More than any other single group, LiNK is responsible for this. In case you didn’t take note, by the way, it’s freezing cold in Seoul now.
Take that, Hanchongryeon. Freedom is beautiful! More pictures please–big, high-resolution ones, this time.
Posted by Andy Jackson on November 29, 2005 at 6:06 am · Filed under Uncategorized
(By guest blogger, Andy Jackson)
This is the first in a four-part series on lectures concerning human rights in North Korea delivered at Sogang University in Seoul on November 26, 2005. The text in block quotes were taken from my notes of the translation of Kang’s lecture. Any inaccuracies in the text are strictly my own.
************************************************
Kang Chol-hwan is not one to pull his punches. He has seen and experienced too much to care for diplomatic language. His youthful, even boyish, looks belie urgency and anger; urgency to end the suffering of his compatriots in North Korea and anger at both the regime in Pyongyang and its supporters south of the DMZ. Those factors make Kang rhetorically pugnacious, even by Korean standards.
As Kang came to the podium, the now famous picture of him with President Bush flashed on a screen behind him. His speech was translated from Korean by a member of one of the sponsoring student groups.
Thank you.
LiNK (Liberty in North Korea) for sponsored a trip I took to the United States. I visited ten universities including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley and Columbia, among others. I thank LiNK. They are passionate about human rights in North Korea. I also feel encouraged by the interest on American campuses in supporting the cause of freedom in North Korea.
I remember, when I was a university student (in South Korea), hearing a North Korean song. Some students were singing it. When North Koreans hear that song, they usually turn the radio or TV off because it is so long and boring. So I asked them ‘why are you singing that song.’ They were surprised to find out that the song praised Kim Il-sung. There were many pro-North Korean books and flyers on campus. It was almost impossible to debate (campus leftists) because they were so completely indoctrinated.
I do not understand why there was so much anti-Americanism on Korean campuses. Even in Japan, on which the United States dropped two atomic bombs, there is not that much anti-Americanism. America is not perfect. It has made mistakes but it does not deserve the high level of criticism that it receives on Korean campuses….
The Pyongyang regime has put a great deal of effort and expense to influence South Korean college students. The United Nations and many nations are addressing human rights in North Korea but the South Korean government is silent.
I do not understand why those who were involved in the democracy movement (in 1980s in the ROK) are not concerned with North Korean human rights. They compare Park Chang-hee and Chung Doo-hwan to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il but they are incomparable. After the anti-Kim Il-sung movement in 1958 (see here) even distance relatives were put into labor camps in the resulting purge. Kim Dae-jung’s torture at the KCIA center at Namsam would be just a normal beating in North Korea….
What the South Korean Human Rights Commission worries about, such as sexual harassment, is not a big deal compared with what goes on in North Korea….
South Koreans ask me why there are no protests in North Korea. North Koreans are tougher than South Koreans because of the more mountainous terrain. North Koreans fight a lot (more on the North Korean propensity for fighting here).
But the regime was able to instill deep fear into the North Korean people. There are public executions. The prisoners are starved and beaten. Their bones are broken. They are gagged so they can’t speak against Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. Guards used to gag them with cloth but the prisoners would sometimes spit the cloth out, so now they are gagged with springs or stones. When the guards force the stones into the prisoners’ mouths, they usually break out their teeth. They then carry the prisoners out and publicly execute them.
There will be no public protests in North Korea because they are too afraid.
At this point Kang cut his lecture short and gave the rest of his allotted time to a defector who had once worked in one of North Korea’s intelligence services. That man’s statement will be the subject of my next post
You can read more on Kang’s experiences in the Yeoduk prison camp here.
Posted by joshua on November 28, 2005 at 3:13 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Too many interesting things in the news today to discuss in too little time–
North Korea
The North Korean government has been unable to meet its own food distribution target of 500 grams of cereals per person per day, the World Food Program said in a report issued on Friday.The United Nations agency’s weekly “Emergency Report” said that its workers in North Korea visited public food distribution centers in the North two months after Pyongyang ended its brief flirtation with a market mechanism to allocate food supplies and returned to doling out supplies itself.”With cereal cuts continuing, approximately 3.6 million out of WFP’s 6.5 million targeted beneficiaries will be not be given cereals this month,” the report said.
500 grams is actually an increase from this year’s low of 250–the equivalent of two medium- sized potatoes.
- But what they lack in food, they make up for in chutzpah, although on the other hand, you can’t eat chutzpah.
- The Kremlinologists are buying up shares in Kim Jong Il’s might-be-gay son, about whom you can read more here.
- The U.N. Goes to Pyongyang, and the results are mildly surprising, though hardly a reason for unbridled enthusiasm: “North Korea hosted United Nations legal experts to a seminar in Pyongyang last week on refugee issues, the leader of the UN delegation told Yonhap’s Washington correspondent by phone from New York on Tuesday.”The North Koreans were generally sympathetic and showed no adverse reaction,” said Palitha Kohona, chief of the UN treaty section’s office of legal affairs. “They were very enthusiastic.”
- North Korean Christians, Crushed with Steamrollers. Plato’s Stepchild leaves a mark on The Guardian. If you call yourself a human rights activist and you’re not talking about North Korea, you’ve left your moral authority unzipped and we’re all embarrassed for you.
- APEC Post-Mortem: Did I miss these welcome words from G.W. Bush (ht: China-e-Lobby)?
And what of North Korea? The Korean war “has never really come to an end,” Bush astutely declared. (That’s Pyongyang’s view, so it should also be ours.) He pledged a “comprehensive diplomatic effort” to give the Six-Party talks some teeth. He also underscored the humanitarian dimension of the Korean crisis. “Satellite maps of North Korea show prison camps the size of whole cities, and a country that at night is clothed almost in complete darkness,” Bush said. “We will not forget the people of North Korea.”
I can’t exactly recommend his diplomatic efforts, but the words on human rights are
certainly welcome. I guess I picked the right plaque.
South Korea
- The Seoul High Court has ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to stop delaying the passport application of Kim Dok-Hong, who defected with North Korean “Goldstein” Hwang Jang-Yop. Hong is reputed to know where many bodies are buried (literally, one suspects) regarding the North’s drug production, counterfeiting, and other illegal activities. It’s not a story the governments of either Korea want told to the U.S. Congress.
- More Dissent on Human Rights in the North: “A government-funded North Korea research institute voiced some rare criticism yesterday of the administration’s stance on human rights in the North.The Korea Institute of National Unification, an organ under the prime minister’s office, also urged that Seoul join international efforts to press the reclusive nation to end its abuses of its citizens.” Sell your shares in Chung Dong-Young.
- Not all inter-Korean ties are improving with equal speed. The predictable laggard: military ties. Too bad; those are the ties that may have the most potential to avert fatal miscalculations.
- The Long Arm of Kim Jong Il reached North Korean defector Lee Han-Young in Switzerland, where its agents fatally shot him. Now Lee’s widow has won a $93,000 judgment against the South Korean government for the latter’s negligent failure to protect her husband. “The court said that government officials providing security for Mr. Lee had disclosed information on his whereabouts to South Korean private detectives wittingly or unwittingly working for a North Korean assassination team.” How does someone unwittingly work for a North Korean assassination team? Just wondering. . . .
- The Head of Korea’s Radical-Left, America-Hating Teacher’s Union is resigning. The replacement is widely expected to be even worse.
- Falun Gong Blacklisting is to be expected in China. But in South Korea (via China-e-Lobby)?
Iraq
- The fallout and backpedalling continue over South Korea’s ill-timed announcement of troop withdrawals.
- Returning soldiers are continuing to note a vast discrepancy between their own experiences and what they see on TV.
- Seen This Poll Yet? The WaPo says “the survey itself cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack. The RTs in RT Strategies are Thomas Riehle, a Democrat, and Lance Tarrance, a veteran GOP pollster.” Results:
Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic Senators hurts troop morale — with 44 percent saying morale is hurt “a lot,” according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale. . . . Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to “gain a partisan political advantage.”
On that last item, I have a bit more to say. Personally, I see four kinds of Iraq criticism, and vast distinctions between them.
- The first is Michael Moore School, which is patently opposed to any U.S. military action and roots for those who kill our soldiers and Marines. This is anti-American and unpatriotic. Now comes the mandatory disclaimer where I assert that of course it should be legal, as I also assert that this view should also be shunned the way neo-Nazis are shunned. I also think it’s still a numerically small but vocal part of those who are discontented.
- The second is the John Edwards-Al Gore School. It’s the wimpy sentiment that agreed with the idea of going in, but can’t stomach the casualties and bad intel, post-facto. These people are just wimps; none can offer a cogent defense of that view, but it’s probably fairly widespread among softer heads and empty suits. It usually begins with the words, “Knowing what I know now . . . .” The subtext is this: “What? You never told us that people die in wars. You mean they have terrorists over there?” It was your job to know then, Senator Emptysuit, just like it’s your job now to weigh our next set of options intelligently.
- The third is the John Murtha School. It’s opportunistic and partisan, and I suspect that it’s a close cousin of “the second.” It is the kind that supported the Iraq Liberation Act and Clinton’s own hawkish statements, and that made the statements about WMD’s that Republicans are running on TV. It’s the kind that had no resolve to go on when a Republican President faced an increasingly unpopular war. These are people who have forgotten who we’re fighting (insert your own gruesome beheading picture). Then again, Don Sensing, whose son is a Marine in Iraq now, thinks John Murtha is a lot smarter and s good measure more devious than some give him credit for. Interesting theory, which I’ll keep in mind as events unfold.
- The fourth is the Lieberman-McCain-Clinton School. It mixes those who opposed the war from the start and those who supported it, but who agree that it was badly managed in many ways. There are too many criticisms and too many things I could say about each criticism. This school wants us to correct past errors and win the war. Generally, however, these critics understand that (1) we’re there now; (2) we’re fighting al-Qaeda there now; (3) we can’t afford to give al-Qaeda other enclave; and (4) it’s neither possible to surrender to al-Qaeda nor to make peace with al-Qaeda. You can only kill the die-hards and give the fence-sitters a reason to opt for the finer things in life. This is what even determined war supporters should recognize as patriotic dissent.
Posted by joshua on November 28, 2005 at 6:59 am · Filed under Uncategorized
This certainly sounds like a marriage made in hell:
Iran reportedly offered North Korea natural gas and oil as compensation for help with Tehran’s nuclear missile program. Citing unidentified Western sources, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported that a senior Iranian official in mid-October made the proposal during a visit to Pyongyang. The magazine said it was unclear how the North responded.
It added North Korea was an important source of missile technology for Iran and its Shahab-3 missiles are based on North Korea’s Rodong rockets.
Damn good thing no one would put me on the NSC. I would have turned Abadan into a smoldering heap of cinders years ago (a blockade would do just as nicely and would be a fairly simple task for our Navy). You can’t build much of a nuclear program without 90% of your revenues, and it certainly simplifies the whole question of pouring all that diplomatic energy into sanctions that Russia, China, and France are certain to oppose, weaken, and circumvent anyway.
I’m convinced that the UN option is going to drag on interminably and render a toothless result. It has little deterrent value, which is why the Iranians are pressing on with their nuke program despite the sanctions threat. On the other hand, the shock of a sudden loss of most of its income might bring the mullahs down if we also gave sufficient encouragement to Iran’s discontented population. Any oil we seize could be sold at market prices; the income could be placed in escrow for the use of a democratic oppposition movement.
Now before you go apopleptic and call for your smelling salts about how simplistic all of this is, just bear in mind how much less complicated our diplomacy with North Korea might be today if Bush I or Clinton had done something simplistic to Yongbyon back in the early 1990’s, when that was still an option.
My personal three-word formula for sleeplessness? Mullahs with nukes. No responsible chief executive lets that come to pass.
Posted by joshua on November 28, 2005 at 6:38 am · Filed under Uncategorized
James J. Na, who somehow finds the time to run two excellent blogs–”Guns and Butter Blog,” gunsandbutter.blogspot.com, and “The Asianist,” www.asianist.blogspot.com–has a new guest column on the trafficking of North Korean women and the State Department’s foot-dragging on carrying out the directives of the North Korean Human Rights Act.
Timothy Peters of Helping Hands Korea, a Christian relief project, complained that, despite the intent of the law to help North Korean defectors, the State Department has been “seriously out of step with the spirit and letter” of the act, and “not a single North Korean refugee has been assisted” in asylum-seeking since the passage of the law, leaving them to the mercy of Chinese police, North Korean agents and human traffickers.
Scholte, a leading advocate for North Korean defectors, is emphatic about what the U.S. should do. Her prescriptions include fully implementing the North Korea Human Rights Act, pressuring China to allow access to the refugees, and funding organizations willing to help, including North Korea Free Radio and others that relay the truth about the outside world to North Koreans.
And what about the truth of what’s happening inside the North? North Korean women are forced to make desperate decisions to stay alive and feed their children:
As for Cha and Ma, they are simply thankful to have their daughters back. Despite having been a victim of sexual slavery, Cha apologized to her dead husband — for living, in order to save her children. Cha’s final words were: “If I ever see my husband in the other side… I want to be his wife again. I want to pray for so many girls who suffered and wasted their lives in China and other countries.”
Short of telling the news media that these women are Muslims under U.S. occupation, I wonder what you could add to make that story compelling enough for most of them to care? Where are the feminists?
Read the rest on your own.
Posted by joshua on November 27, 2005 at 12:07 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Defining Genocide Down: For a moment, leave aside discussions of gas chambers, infanticides, and concentration camps. In terms of the numbers of dead, all probably pale in comparison to the death toll from North Korea’s famine in the 1990’s. While there is substantial evidence that the famine was a crime against humanity that killed millions, neither it nor any of the regime’s worst crimes meet the legal definition of “genocide.” We all have Stalin to thank for that, and his murderous legacy brings the question of defining genocide back into today’s headlines. My analysis here.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on November 26, 2005 at 9:55 pm · Filed under Famine & Food Aid, Human Rights
The president of the Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, is calling for a historical reappraisal of one of the last century’s darkest events:
Yushchenko was addressing a candlelight ceremony marking the 1932-33 famine induced by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s orders to requisition grain and break the spirit of Ukraine’s “kurkuly” farmers who resisted his drive to collectivise agriculture. The day had been chosen as the official commemoration day for the famine that was never recognised by the Soviet Union. The president told 5,000 people in a Kiev square that up to 10 million died in the famine and pressed his case for the United Nations to declare it a genocide. Historians’ estimates put the figure at about 7.5 million.
. . . .
Mourners placed 33,000 candles in Mykhailov Square, corresponding to the number of lives the famine claimed daily at its height. Flags on public buildings bore black ribbons. The sound of a young woman wailing wafted through loudspeakers and the names of countless victims were read out. The systematic confiscation of grain and livestock in Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, left millions to die in their homes or in the street, with soldiers dumping bodies into pits. Cannibalism became rife.
The definitive history of the Ukrainian famine is the British historian Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow. I’ve previously noted some basis for comparison between the Ukraine’s famine–so infamously denied in Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning reports for the New York Times–with the famine in North Korea. [This piece on Duranty and efforts to pull his Pulitzer, from the Columbia Journalism review, is a must-read].
But Is It Really Genocide?
I’ve already tabulated the differing estimates for the death toll from the North Korean famine. Those which come from reliable sources range from as low as 600,000 to as high as 3.5 million. The former figure, which is Marcus Noland’s low-range estimate (his high-range estimate is one million), may be understated because it likely fails to consider deaths from opportunistic diseases, or deaths by those who fled the famine-stricken areas and were thus not recorded in official records. The latter figure, from Medicins Sans Frontieres researcher Fiona Terry, may overrepresent areas that were more severely affected by the famine. The more objectively likely figure is Andrew Natsios’s estimate of 2.5 million dead, which is an aggregate of refugee interviews, statistically controlled projections, and census data from North Korean county offices, which Natsios generally trusts.
The lawyer’s frustration about the famine in the Ukraine–and that in North Korea, if the facts ultimately show a similar degree of malice aforethought–is that neither fits the internationally accepted legal definition of “genocide.” For the same reason, nor does Hitler’s persecution of homosexuals, nor the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. All of these are examples of persecution on the basis of imputed membership in political and social groups, which don’t fit the definition in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (right sidebar, under “Resources”), which defines “genocide” this way:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring a out its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’
Thus, mass starvation of Christians or Albanians would count; the persecution of the Falun Gong probably also qualifies; mass starvation of Ukrainian kulaks or North Koreans classified as “hostile” would not. We owe that distinction to Stalin himself, writes the scholar Martin Shaw:
In the UN debate before the Convention was agreed [in 1948], Soviet representatives succeeded in excluding political groups from the list of those protected; as Leo Kuper (1981: 39) writes, this is a ‘major omission’. Social classes were also left out.
Stalin, who pioneered the use of famine against “hostile” political and social groups, had ample reason to define genocide down. Shaw continues:
The Convention said that genocide was about the destruction of national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. It excluded the annihilation of groups defined by other characteristics such as class or political affiliation - so that Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks (or ‘rich’ peasants: Episode III) and eastern European political elites could not be counted. But in the same year that the United Nations adopted the genocide convention, it also adopted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From a universal human standpoint, it is clearly untenable to lay down that the destruction and mass killing of some sorts of human group (races, nations or religions) should be regarded as a particularly heinous crime, while that of others (classes, professions or political groups) should not. Yet the restrictive international definition gives special status to the former groups.
Professor,
blogger, and friend of OFK Rudy Rummel applies the term “
democide” to state-engineered mass-killings, thus circumventing the Genocide Convention’s parsing.
This excellent discussion by Professor Yaroslav Bilinski continues the discussion of whether the Famine of 1933 was a genocide. Other governments have been accused of using the same tactic–most notably, the now-deposed Marxist government of
Ethiopia, whose own collectivization program was one cause of the famine that inspired Live Aid.
Stalin, the Kims, and Class
Starvation in North Korea is largely a matter of political classification, and to some extent, of geographic misfortune (see the subheading on “triage” at this post). North Korea’s political classification system is quite complex, as this fascinating testimony from uber-connected Pentagon analyst Katie Hassig tells us, but that system can be generalized into three main groups:
Since the 1950s, the Kim regime has subjected its people to a series of political examinations in order to sort out those who are presumed to be loyal or disloyal to the regime. After a three-year period of examination that began in 1967, then-president Kim Il-sung reported to the Fifth Korean Workers’ Party Congress in 1970 that the people could be classified into three political groups: a loyal “core class,” a suspect “wavering class,” and a politically unreliable “hostile class.”
For an even more detailed tabulation of all 51 subcategories, get a load of this. But North Korea did not invent political classification. Stalinism also placed Soviet citizens into political categories based on pre-revolutionary class:
The peasantry was tentatively divided into three broad categories: bednyaks, or poor peasants, seredniaks, or medium-prosperity ones, and kulaks, the rich farmers. In addition, there was a category of batraks, or landless agriculture workers for hire (farm hands).
After the Russian Revolution, Bolsheviks considered only batraks and bednyaks as true allies of the proletariat. Serednyaks were considered unreliable, “hesitating” allies, and kulaks were class enemies by definition. However, often those declared to be kulaks were not especially prosperous. Both peasants and Soviet officials were often uncertain what constituted a kulak, and the term was often used to label anyone who used hired labor or had more property than considered “norm” according to some criteria.
Class and the Disparate Impact of the North Korean Famine
Numerous international aid organizations have taken note of great class-based disparities in the distribution of food aid. Most of the best-known humanitarian organizations have expressed their concern over this disparity. The most circumspect of these is Amnesty International, which was infamously less so elsewhere. In a 2004 report, Amnesty described the disparity at length, before stating, in its final recommendations:
The North Korean government should . . . [e]nsure that food shortages are not used as a tool to persecute perceived political opponents and that there is no discrimination in the distribution of food aid.
Medicins Sans Frontieres, which actually pulled out of North Korea over the latter’s lack of transparency in the distribution of food aid, had this to say:
Even population groups such as children, pregnant women, and the elderly, who are specifically targeted for assistance by the United Nations World Food Program, are being denied food aid.
MSF essentially accused the regime of discriminating against certain classes in its distribution of food:
North Korean refugees across the Chinese border spoke of widespread famine, and reported that the authorities had distributed international aid according to social position and party loyalty.
Most scathing of all, and the most recent to weigh in, was Refugees International (this file is a big, fat pdf):
In North Korea access to public goods–food, education, health care, shelter, employment–cannot be separated from the all-pervasive system of political persecution. Based on an original registration conducted in 1947, the North Korean population is divided into three categories: core, wavering, and hostile, with the latter constituting 27% of the total. There are more than 50 subcategories.
The class status of each family is for life and transfers from generation to generation. Members of the hostile class are the last to receive entitlements, which is disastrous when a comprehensive welfare regime such as that established in North Korea collapses, as it did from 1994 onwards. Thus, an entire class of individuals is persecuted through the functioning of North Korea’s political system. In this context, there is no meaningful way to separate economic deprivation from political persecution.
. . . .
Based on Refugees International’s interviews, and the testimony collected by other human rights organizations, most North Koreans crossing the border into China are fleeing state-sponsored denial of their human rights. Members of the “hostile class” and residents of areas deliberately cut off from international food assistance have an especially strong case to be considered refugees in the sense of fleeing targeted political persecution. . . . Not since Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge has a government succeeded in creating such an all-encompassing reality of oppression and restrictions on the basic rights of the majority of its citizens. (emphasis mine)
To Fiona Terry of Medicins San Frontieres, the North Korean government’s manipulation of international food aid was studied and intentional:
The teams realised that the government fabricated whatever they wanted aid workers to see: malnourished children in nurseries when more food aid was desired, and well-fed children when donors needed reassurance that food aid was doing good. Refugee testimonies corroborate this concern: some report having carried food from military storage facilities to nurseries before a UN visit, and others speak of being mobilised to dig up areas to exacerbate flood damage in preparation for a UN inspection.
When driving through some towns MSF personnel saw filthy, malnourished children dressed in rags, scavenging for grains along the railway track. But when asked about these children and the possibility of assisting them, the authorities denied that they even existed. MSF began to understand that the North Korean government categorises its population according to perceived loyalty and usefulness to the regime, and those deemed ‘hostile’ or useless were expendable. (emphasis mine)
How many of its people could North Korea consider expendable? Terry, writing in The Guardian, claimed that “in 1996, Kim Jong-il publicly declared that only 30% of the population needed to survive to reconstruct a victorious society.”
Would a Court Convict Kim Jong Il?
Of the fine legal definition of genocide, we have spoken. But what of Kim Jong Il’s culpability for the famine as murder? Disparate impact can be circumstantial evidence for an intent to kill, but falls short of being conclusive proof. This is not to give life to the myth that circumstantial evidence alone cannot be the basis for a conviction; it assuredly can. But was this disparate impact the result of mere coincidence, official negligence, or malice aforethought? The answer to this question may have to await the trial of Kim Jong Il.
[Update: According to this must-read report, the answer is probably “yes.”]
Posted by Andy Jackson on November 26, 2005 at 10:20 am · Filed under Uncategorized
(By guest blogger, Andy Jackson)
UPDATE: I have posted on the content of the four major presenters. The posts are listed as: Kang Chol-hwan’s lecture at Sogang University, How North Korea tried to subvert the ROK democracy movement, How could you not care? and North Korea is not a socialist state.
ORIGINAL POST: In conjuction with events next month sponsored by Freedom House and several Korean organizations, Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) is sponsoring events supporting North Korean human rights on December 9 and 10 in Seoul.
As a build up to those events, the Seoul branch of LiNK co-sponsored several lectures this Saturday with Gyodubo and Students’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights at Seoul’s Sogang University.
I have long believed that LiNK and groups like it would help pull Korean students’ heads out of the sand regarding North Korea. While it is difficult to quantify, it seems that their efforts are starting to pay off as alternatives to the leftists are emerging on campuses across Korea. It is a little early to tell how much support pro-North Korean human rights groups are gathering but I am encouraged by the work they are doing.
LiNK-Seoul has developed quit a bit in since it sponsored a symposium at Yonsei University last year. At that time it was just trying to get its foot in the door in Korea, which necessitated their being less ‘in-your-face’ than they are in the USA and Europe. As LiNK’s Executive Director, Adrian Hong explained last year:
[W]e are, for the time being, merely a facilitator. There was a lot more to LiNK’s trip to Seoul than was visible at Yonsei. We met with every major NGO and group, public or underground, working with NK human rights. Some groups we had worked with in the past, others we were being introduced to. Two major responses were evident. The first was that we were too young to be taken seriously, but great for photo ops. The second, was that we were too American to be taken seriously, and anything we said was automatically discounted and even cut-off in mid-sentence. Most of the meetings ended up being worth less than the free tea we were served- just opportunities for “human rights leaders” to lecture us on the lack of understanding we had of the “daily dangers” South Koreans faced from North Korea, and our “ignorance” of Korean history and politics.
You can imagine, then, why we were reluctant to be too forthright in our charges at the Yonsei event.
LiNK will work for a bit to shed the image in Korea of us as “outsiders” and “meddlers.” It will take some time, but it is anything but impossible, particularly because many of us are not only of Korean heritage, but also of Korean citizenship. We have found kindred spirits in Seoul and it’s universities already, and groups of people have approached us about starting chapters in Seoul.
What I saw this Saturday told me that LiNK has found its voice in Korea and chosen its allies in the struggle for human rights for those Koreans living north of the DMZ. The left-wing groups and Pyongyang apologists that they worked with in the interest of expediency last year are gone. In their place are kindred voices in the struggle.
However, they are still non-partisan, which as a practical matter means they have to keep some right-wing groups at arms-length and forgo some potentially useful assistance.
The event started at 1:20 with about 90 people in attendance. They were mostly Korean students with a few foreigners. Adrian Hong was there along with a representative of Freedom House.
The three main lecturers were Kang Chol-hwan, Tim Peters and Kim Young-hwan. I will go over the content of their presentations on Monday evening (Korean time).
BTW, I should note that there were no protesters there.
Posted by joshua on November 26, 2005 at 1:10 am · Filed under Uncategorized
In my recent post about the North Korean Freedom Coalition’s meeting with Ambassador John Bolton, I mentioned that one of my own contributions to the meeting was the creation of a plaque to commemorate the meeting and thank Amb. John Bolton for his work on behalf of the North Korean people. One of his key staffers, the one who wrote the now-famous “hellish nightmare” speech, no less, has dropped a comment at the bottom of the thread, one I’m just too proud to let anyone miss:
Josh,
I am the staffer who had the pleasure of meeting with you and your colleagues in New York a few days ago. While I will steer clear of the debates in this thread, I would like to confirm that the plaque you presented him with is now on display directly outside of his door.
Regards,
Mark
That’s not bad advertising space, even for New York. In a world that seems to have lost any empirically justifiable or compassionate basis for its human rights priorities, it’s a good feeling to be able to bring a situation in urgent need of world attention into the light. Thank you, Mark.
[Post back-dated 12 hours in consideration of the Yangban’s live-blogging.]
Posted by joshua on November 25, 2005 at 9:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
KCNA has responded to CNN’s “Undercover in the Secret State:”
“The video tape is full of sheer lies negating the popular and class nature and the democratic principle of the DPRK’s laws and tarnishing its image from A to Z,” the North’s official KCNA news agency said in a commentary. . . .
KCNA said people “who know about the DPRK even a bit claimed that the way of speaking and dressing of those who appeared on the screen and the background against which the scenes were shot were quite different from the reality in the DPRK, a clear proof of a sheer fabrication.”
Given how little media attention the N. Korea human rights story has received thus far, the Reuters story apparently felt compelled to include this backgrounder:
North Korea has been accused of gross human rights violations, including live human testing of biological agents and operating prison camps. A UN General Assembly committee on November 17 adopted a resolution expressing serious concern about the state of human rights in the secluded state. South Korea abstained from voting from concern for provoking the North. China, the North’s ally, voted against.
The overall effect of the denial is to draw even more attention to the charges, and to charges, and to the role of neighboring nations in covering for the regime’s inhumanity toward its people–probably not what Pyongyang would have hoped.
[Post back-dated one day.]
Posted by joshua on November 25, 2005 at 12:21 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Andy Jackson, a/k/a The Flying Yangban, has graciously agreed to liveblog the events leading up to and including the Freedom House Seoul conference here, at this site, starting this very night.
If you’re not familiar with his work at The Marmot’s Hole or his own site, Andy is an instructor at Ansan College in the Seoul burbs, where he is very actively involved with LiNK. On that note, I regret not having linked this post of his sooner; sounds like they are really taking the battle into “enemy” territory. Given the violent tendencies of South Korea’s extreme left, which has a strong presence on college campuses, that takes no small amount of physical courage.
I consider it a major “get” to have Andy guest-blogging here; he’s the closest thing you can get to an “OFK East.” Welcome! We’re looking forward reading to your posts. Now all we need is a volunteer for Brussels next year. . . .
Posted by joshua on November 25, 2005 at 11:25 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Speaking of enemy territory, Yonsei University has recently gained a reputation as being one of Seoul’s more violent protest venues. As a soldier, not knowing this, I walked all over the area in search of Ewha girls and never ran into any trouble, but then again, I wasn’t there to talk politics. U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow was:
Around a dozen students who said they were the student organization of the left-leaning Democratic Labor Party staged a protest outside the hall. One held a placard that read, “Alexander, do you dare say we are ‘friends’?”
Vershbow, who has no working experience in Korea, said some people warned him in advance of radical Korean students. But he said once he met them, he found they respect diversity and are capable of making up their own mind. He added he was aware of how movements led by Korean students contributed to the country’s democratization.
Kudos to Vershbow for having the vision and guts to do this. The man is going to turn me into a fan, particularly if he keeps talking like this:
Vershbow reiterated several times that North Korea’s human rights problem must be addressed alongside the nuclear dispute. The envoy said “many efforts” were being made to include Korean in a visa waiver program, which was brought up at the Korea-U.S. summit on Nov.17, but this would take time.
It would have been nice of the Chosun Ilbo to give us more specifics about what he really said, but what’s encouraging is that someone is taking on the Fronks, right on their home turf. I wonder if the riot police broke with tradition and actually entered the campus grounds. Either way, I bet the place had more than its usual armed camp look.
Vershbow also had some interesting comments on Seoul’s Iraq announcement, which you can read for yourself.
Posted by joshua on November 23, 2005 at 4:56 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Our Message at Their Doors. Adrian Hong addresses a crowd of supporters in front of the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade here–in Korean.
The things I’ve heard from many sources tell me that the Freedom House Conference in Seoul could be a galvanizing event. As with FH’s conference in DC last summer (see sidebar links), I have no doubt that LiNK will play a major role. The political stars are also starting to line up our way. Early indications suggest that the GNP–despite, or perhaps because of, its opportunistic leadership–is picking up on the potential of this message.
Even the Democratic Labor Party is starting to search its soul (via Antti Leppänen’s superb but unpronounceable blog, which I should have blogrolled months ago).
The party (DLP) needs to have a discussion and formulate an opinion on the questions of the return of kidnapped fishermen, human rights of North Korean refugees, workers’ rights, democracy, and the DPRK political system. These are issues which no more shall be avoided on the pretext of causing discomfort to DPRK.
Imagine that. It’s almost a better ideological fit with the Kim Moon-Soo wing of the GNP than the paleocons it’s offering up for the next election.
Expect strange things to happen in Korean politics in 2006.
Posted by joshua on November 23, 2005 at 4:13 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
On this side of the Pacific, the news is less encouraging. What follows is another Washington leak to OFK, one which must remain without attribution. My source is extremely well-placed to comment on the matters of which he informs me. I wish I could say how well placed.
Why, some of us want to know, has the North Korean Human Rights Act lodged in the State Department’s windpipe? Why, over a year after the bill was signed into law, does an executive agency that’s nominally answerable to the President of the United States fail to accept North Korean refugees who knock at the embassy gates? I specifically cite Section 303 of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, which is now binding law:
The Secretary of State shall undertake to facilitate the submission of applications under section 207 of the Immigration and Nationality Act [meaning, asylum applications] (8 U.S.C. 1157) by citizens of North Korea seeking protection as refugees (as defined in section 101(a)(42) of such Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(42)).
In plain English, that means that our embassies violate federal law if they fail to “facilitate” asylum applications at our embassies abroad. Yet Tim Peters not only informs me that our embassies are refusing to take these refugees, he’s said the same to Congress under oath, and he has it on film, thanks to CNN. One overseas ambassador, so another source tells me, went so far as to seek legal advice from Foggy Bottom as to how to interpret the law. He was told in no uncertain terms not to ask again.
What do I conclude? State is doing its damnedest not to comply with the law. Who in this administration has the juice to make that happen? Somewhere, a Keyzer Soze must be at work.
My source tells me that Keyzer Soze is one Nicholas Burns, a career State Department official who held a prominent role–State Department spokesman–during the Clinton Administration. Burns, my source tells me, wants to get us to Agreed Framework II, which is the diplomatic equivalant of wanting to make Gigli II. Here is some info from Burns’s official bio:
Ambassador R. Nicholas Burns is the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the Department of State’s third ranking official. Appointed by President Bush, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 17, 2005 and was sworn into office by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As Under Secretary, he oversees U.S. policy in each region of the world and serves in the senior career Foreign Service position at the Department.
Prior to his current assignment, Ambassador Burns was the United States Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As Ambassador to NATO, he headed the combined State-Defense Department U.S. Mission to NATO at a time when the Alliance committed to new missions in Iraq,
Afghanistan and the global war against terrorism, and accepted seven new members.
From 1997 to 2001, Ambassador Burns was U.S. Ambassador to Greece. During his tenure as Ambassador, the U.S. expanded its military and law enforcement cooperation with Greece, strengthened our partnership in the Balkans, increased trade and investment and people-to-people programs.
From 1995 to 1997, Ambassador Burns was Spokesman of the Department of State and Acting Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Secretary Madeleine Albright. In this position, he gave daily press conferences on U.S. foreign policy issues, accompanied both Secretaries of State on all their foreign trips and coordinated all of the Department’s public outreach programs.
Mr. Burns, a career Senior Foreign Service Officer, served for five years (1990-1995) on the National Security Council staff at the White House. He was Special Assistant to President Clinton and Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Affairs. He had lead responsibility in the White House for advising the President on all aspects of U.S. relations with the fifteen countries of the former Soviet Union.
Under President George H.W. Bush, he was Director for Soviet (and then Russian) Affairs. During this time, he attended all U.S. – Soviet summits and numerous other international meetings and specialized on economic assistance issues, U.S. ties with Russia and Ukraine, and relations with the Baltic countries. He was a member of the Department’s Transition Team in 1988, and served as Staff Officer in the Department’s Operations Center and Secretariat in 1987-1988.
My source says that Burns doesn’t want our State Department taking any actions that would unduly offend Kim Jong Il, such as taking in refugees, or letting any pesky part-time Special Envoy muck it all up with unpleasant remarks about investigating infanticides, concentration camps, or gas chambers. Hence, we hear relatively little from Lefkowitz, and shouldn’t expect to hear much more of consequence. Just to be sure–according to a different source–State has placed individuals sympathetic to the Burns world view in Lefkowitz’s office . . . to better keep him inside the range of his electronic ankle bracelet.
Congress is impatient about the progress of legislation it supported overwhelmingly. That overwhelming–make that unanimous–support certainly includes some strong proponents of “engagement,” whatever that means–Tom Lantos and Jim Leach, to name two. This should not be a political issue, but it has become one.
Whether Nick Burns is the Keyzer Soze of this plot is a matter beyond my personal knowledge, but my source harbored no doubts and volunteered the information. My own research adds nothing to either discredit or support what my source tells me, and frankly, given that Burns’s primary function in recent years has been to toe the official line, I’m unsurprised by that. You can’t be a very effective spokesman if your personal views are public knowledge.
If this is in fact true, what really astonishes me the most? That five years into this presidency, we still have a quasi-Clinton State Department, one so dedicated to the discredited policies of the previous administration that it’s willing to flout a federal statute to get us there.
Posted by joshua on November 23, 2005 at 7:08 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Again, I must note that this isn’t the ex-Prez, but a popular South Korea columnist with a similar-sounding name.
The core of the Roh Moo-hyun administration consists of people who protested loudly at human rights abuses in the decades when South Korea was a desert in that regard. Many young men and women in those days were beaten during demonstrations, arrested while escaping, some tortured, and a few of them died.
That earned the survivors the decoration they carry on their chests today. The prime minister and other leaders of the administration brag about it now, as who should say, “Where were you when we languished in prison?” and, “Who are you to criticize, when you never said a word then?” What underpins their hold on power today is a national sense that they should be rewarded for the courage with which they protested against the suppression of human rights and fought against the dogmatism and undemocratic practices of the oppressor.
If they gained power, many citizens believed, they would display an unusual sense of mission to improve and safeguard human rights. The government is betraying that trust. It is blind, dumb and speechless to the human rights situation in North Korea.
I think you see where he’s going there.
The greatest moral crime of the abstention is that it crushes any nascent resistance forces in the North. The desperate efforts of the North Koreans to recover the minimum rights to subsistence and living free from the threat of incarceration in concentration camps and public execution have been dealt a terrible blow by Seoul’s abstention. It calls the very legitimacy of the Roh government into question.
True, except for the last sentence. Governments I don’t happen to have much use for–and Roh’s is surely one–don’t lack for legitimacy simply because they make bad decisions. The government was duly and fairly elected; ergo, it’s legitimate. The fact that it’s likely thoroughly infiltrated with Friends of North Korea (FRONKs) and ordinary idiots–and yes, I mean you, Chung Dong-Young–is an issue for the voters.
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