Archive for May, 2007
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 31, 2007 at 6:35 am · Filed under Human Rights, Anju Links
Their message:
On May 21, 2007, Freedom House released a new report, Concentrations of Inhumanity. The report written by Hidden Gulag author, David Hawk, carefully details the criminal acts prohibited by Article 7 of the ( Rome ) Statute of the International Criminal Court which are being carried out in North Korea on a massive scale. You can download the full report at www.nkfreedomhouse.org.
Freedom House and Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) cordially invite you to a panel discussion to be held on JUNE 6, 2007 at 1:30-3:30pm at the National Press Club in Washington , D.C. The panel will feature David Hawk and David Scheffer, former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues.
RSVP is kindly requested. More information may be found below and in the attached flyer. Please feel free to circulate this invitation to other interested parties.
RSVP at barnes@freedomhouse.org. Here’s the link to David Hawk’s latest report.
And you’ve seen my posts on Camp 22 and Camp 16 by Google Earth, right? Yeah, I thought so. Sorry for mentioning it yet again.
Anju Links:
* More riots in China over the one-child policy.
* Lee Mung-Bak’s stock is rising with me, albeit from a fairly low price. Lee’s canal plan is the height of silliness, but you can’t fault Lee for is his political instincts, meaning he thinks he can get votes by standing up to the North Koreans, and what’s more, he’s certainly done more of that than Park Geun-Hye. The great irony of 2009 could be role reversal: a hawkish South Korea and a dovish America. As I’ve said before, South Korea alienated so many American conservatives during Roh’s term that in the event of a real security crisis, its best hope for substantial American help would be to raise a militia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Try holding along the Naktong line with that.
* A fool and his credibility are soon parted. Chris Hill is sounding increasingly desperate in his efforts to sustain hope in the lousy deal he signed. Parse his words carefully, if you have the interest, for one grain of substance to support that hope.
* Why were all of the North Korean students in Beijing suddenly called home?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 29, 2007 at 5:47 am · Filed under Appeasement, Diplomacy, Money Laundering
State must really regret having let the Banco Delta issue enter the mainstream of our nuclear diplomacy with the North Koreans. What a terrifically mangled excuse it has become for North Korea’s nonperformance.
The United States believes a banking dispute blocking a nuclear disarmament accord will drag on and has pressed North Korea to start shutting its reactor in return for a firm US promise of a solution, a report said Monday. [AFP]
This is just odd. You’d think that we could just write a check for $25 million if it was just about that sum. The fact that it isn’t suggests that North Korea really just wants an account for laundering future sums, free and clear. In which case, I can’t imagine any bank wanting to expose its shareholders that way.
The United States said it had lifted the restrictions on the accounts in March. But the North has had problems arranging a transfer via a foreign bank since banks are unwilling to touch apparently tainted money.
The US-based Wachovia bank said earlier this month it was considering a US State Department request to help process the transfer.
But South Korea’s DongA Ilbo newspaper said Monday that efforts to use US banks such as Wachovia had come unstuck because of the US Patriot Act, under which the funds were originally frozen.
It quoted a diplomatic source as saying that Washington, at a US-China forum last Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, asked Beijing to help liquidate BDA or let other banks take it over.
Good for Wachovia. North Korea certainly does seem determined to wreck this deal. For once, I wish them success.
See also (Anju Links for today):
* Gordon Cucullu and I have a very long piece in Front Page, here.
* Cindy Sheehan has posted a long “resignation letter as the ‘face’ of the American anti-war movement,” filled with bitterness at the left and the media for only covering her when she was useful as a partisan tool (but not when she was traipsing around Camp Humphreys with North Korean agents or Hugo Chavez). She ends with these words:
Good-bye America …you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.
It’s up to you now. [Daily Kos]
I wonder where Ms. Sheehan’s cycles of grief will end, because it ought to be evident and understandable to any compassionate observer that the loss of her son unhinged her. I’m not sure losing a child would affect me less, so I won’t judge. What I do know is that her son died a hero, and I’d rather take this time to remember Casey Sheehan, not to deconstruct — or exploit — his grieving mother. I hope these last two years have been a catharsis for her, and that she’ll find inner peace.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 24, 2007 at 6:11 am · Filed under Anju Links
* Can we really separate nukes from human rights? North Korean defectors say that the regime used political prisoners to help prepare its nuclear test. The report is given plausibility by the proximity of the nuclear test site to Camp 16. You will recall that this site may have been the first to publish pictures of that camp on the Web, though it was no more than a matter of finding the place on Google Earth.
* This UPI report by Lee Jong Heon would suggest that the Kaesong Industrial Park is a raging success, but the Daily NK has taken a much closer look at how the various companies’ plans are working out, and finds those plans falling far short of the original expectations.
* This report on life in Hamheung makes it seem just about as hard as the cities of the Northeast, like Chongjin and Hoeryong.
* North Korea is struggling to maintain its isolation: China is cracking down on the underground railroad, and North Korea is increasing its jamming of foreign broadcasts.
* South Koreans are getting tired of sending their hard-earned money to Kim Jong Il, only to hear that people are still starving and tensions aren’t declining.
* More good news from the war: the Taliban appears to have met with disaster in its Spring offensive after serious losses among its commanders. Commanders can be replaced, but it will take years for the new commanders to reach the same level of skill and experience. It would seem official that the situation in Anbar is dramatically improved when war critic Joe Klein admits it. Ironically, the “surge” was concentrated mainly in Baghdad, and while things in Baghdad have improved, the improvement has been less striking there than in Anbar. Both of these developments, though good news, won’t mean a thing in the longer term unless each government behaves responsibly and effectively to retake and hold the territory from which the terrorists are driven. Every insurgency is won or lost by a government’s ability to establish its authority and serve the people. They’ll need us there for a while to help — and pressure — them to make the right decisions and extend their authority.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 22, 2007 at 10:05 pm · Filed under Anju Links
* Freedom House has released an extensive new report on North Korea’s concentration camps. The author is David Hawk, who wrote “The Hidden Gulag.”
* John Bolton is leading the charge against Agreed Framework 2.0, and his latest effort is this piece at OpinionJournal.com. He doesn’t quite accuse Chris Hill of conspiring to launder money — I did — but he does a good job of explain our dizzying series of retreats on the Banco Delta issue. Thanks to a reader for sending.
* According to this report, Swiss authorities are questioning whether North Korea is the maker of the Supernotes. While I can’t easily dismiss claims from the Swiss, the substance of the criticism seems rather weak on closer examination. First, the criticism is that only a government could have done something this sophisticated (North Korea was a government when I last checked). Second, they don’t offer any specific evidence or an alternative theory. Third, the Swiss have some interest in disputing the U.S. version, which is that the Swiss sold them much of the equipment for the operation. Finally, the news report even quotes favorite OFK laughingstock Klaus Bender, without referencing Bender’s baseless accusation that the CIA is behind all of this, printing the notes somewhere near where I live. It really boils down to whether you think North Korea could do something this complicated. Well, they built nukes and ICBM’s, didn’t they?
* Purge or reshuffle? Kim Jong Il has made some personnel changes among his senior military officers. North Korea has also named a new Foreign Minister, but it’s not the man who negotiated the February 13th Agreement.
* If there’s any hope for our North Korea policy, it’s sustained by stories like this one. We’re now moving to undermine the Iranian regime, which is something we should have been doing at least two decades ago. At this late stage of the Bush Administration, it’s doubtful that we can do much, particularly if we can’t stick with a policy — like the financial strategy against North Korea — when it actually does start to work.
* More rioting in China, this time, over forced birth control.
* Here’s an update on the North Korean food situation, which is bad and getting worse, but not yet catastrophic. What is striking is how little relation there is between the policies of donor nations and the humanitarian imperative. All of it is driven by the donor government’s feelings toward the regime itself. It’s almost as if they know that’s where the aid is going anyway. Meanwhile, the UNDP has left North Korea, and it looks like it’s for the foreseeable future.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 21, 2007 at 6:36 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A snag in what is probably the easiest phase of the North Korea nuclear agreement has sparked new criticism of the Bush administration but U.S. officials appear committed to pursuing a solution, even if it reverses previous policy.
More than a month after Pyongyang was due to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear complex under a Feb 13 deal, it has not done so, insisting it first receive $25 million in once-frozen accounts.
“It’s tricky but I think some way forward will be found because everybody has such an interest in getting this issue stabilized,” said Gary Samore, a non-proliferation expert and vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations. [Reuters, Carol Giacomo]
If you can call one side’s complete non-performance and the addition of absurd, non-agreed demands “a snag,” then this story will no doubt lull you in the manner Carol Giacomo transparently intended. For the rest of us, it’s just depressingly predictable to see us betraying every actual and potential ally to sustain those who mean us harm.
There isn’t much of interest I can say about this kind of stupidity that I haven’t already said dozens of times, and it’s pretty depressing to see just how low the collective IQ of our diplomatic brain trust really is. To hear people straining to break law and logic to preserve a deal that does nothing for us but decorate the display cases of presidential libraries has a cauterizing effect on one’s frontal lobe. Life supplies that sort of thing in ample quantity as it is; why fill your spare time with it, too? It makes for exceedingly dull blogging for you to read, and for me to write, with the occasional exception:
It is “perplexing to see the U.S. now take a series of unilateral steps to unravel this policy (of U.N. sanctions and related actions) and reward North Korea for doing … well nothing,” Michael Green, a former White House Asia adviser during the period when Bush refused to talk to Pyongyang, wrote in the Financial Times.
Plus, I’ve already told you what the plan is and in general terms, how it will turn out. The Administration will succeed at burying this story through the remainder of its duration. The real problem issues — uranium, human rights, inspection, and verification — are being delegated to “working groups” that not even the wire services will care about during an election year. Perhaps, then, what I have to say for now might be better said to a wider audience, so I’m going to focus on writing pieces for publication for a while. Whenever this story becomes interesting again, I’ll have more to say here.
In the end, of course, the only people who can save North Korea are the North Koreans themselves. We can steepen the odds against them for a while, but inevitably, a change is coming, for better or for worse, because the current system isn’t sustainable and can’t be reformed without releasing the whirlwind. Just as inevitably, people will eventually wonder why the Agreed Framework of 2007 didn’t stop the North Koreans from building, testing, and selling extremely dangerous things, and we’ll be right back to a much scarier redux of where we stood in 2001 – wondering what we were thinking.
See also: Rep. Ed Royce on the State Department’s money laundering deal.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 14, 2007 at 6:27 am · Filed under NK Economics, U.S. Politics
The N.Y. Times reports:
Peru and Panama are considered most likely to win early Congressional approval. Colombia is more problematic, because Democrats are demanding that, besides the new measures, more protections be added to prevent violence against activists trying to organize workers.
The South Korea accord, if put in place, would lead to the largest amount of increased trade. But it is opposed in its current version by Democrats who want greater access to that country’s markets for American beef, automobiles and auto parts. [NY Times]
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 14, 2007 at 6:23 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Money Laundering
Whoever [in the United States or in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States] knowingly engages or attempts to engage in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000 and is derived from specified unlawful activity, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).
– U.S. Criminal Code, Title 18, Sec. 1957
So here’s something I though I’d never see: U.S. government officials more-or-less openly engaging in a conspiracy that would land anyone else in a federal prison for international money laundering. Section 1957, which prohibits transactions in criminal derived property, is one of the two main statutes the feds use to prosecute money laundering. The other, section 1956, contains a list of “specified unlawful activities,” of which counterfeiting is one. All I can say is thank goodness for prosectuorial discretion:
After recent talks with the U.S. bankers in Hong Kong, Park, a former investment banker who heads the Korea Working Group at the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent institution funded by the U.S. Congress, has gone public with the new proposal.
It would treat Banco Delta Asia or BDA as a “distressed bank,” enable Pyongyang to obtain its money, and make it possible for the U.S. investment bankers to purchase the BDA license, giving them a foothold in Macau’s fast-growing market, he said.
Separately, the State Department — in what would amount to another dramatic change on North Korea — signaled it would consider allowing North Korea to transfer the $25 million to an account in a U.S. bank. [Reuters, Carol Giacomo]
Yet this money is so tained that not even the Bank of China will touch it with the U.S. and Chinese governments’ reassurance and encouragement, and even the ownership of much of this money is still disputed or simply unknown. Or, as one “senior U.S. Official” put it last November, “It is all one big criminal enterprise. You can’t separate it out.” If you prefer something written and on-record, start at page 14 of Treasury’s final report. Continuing with the Reuters piece:
“They’re still working with their bankers and if there’s any requirement for an opinion from the Treasury Department as to whether or not this is a transaction that the financial institutions involved would feel comfortable doing, then the Treasury Department will take a look at that and see what it is that they can do,” spokesman Sean McCormack told a news briefing on Wednesday.
The fact that our State Department is seriously considering this — as of last week, they were in New York with the North Koreans negotiating the terms day-by-day – is incomprehensible. When the February 13th Agreed Framework collapses (note that I didn’t say “if,” a prudent administration would seemingly try to preserve a Plan B to that it can re-apply pressure, and so that it can preserve the negotiating pressure we still have now. State’s plan seems to be predicated on throwing away as much negotiating pressure as it possibly can.
Last year, Treasury engaged in a highly effective campaign of shuttle diplomacy (second subheading) to put financial pressure on North Korea and send a message to other banks that might be tempted to handle criminal proceeds (knowingly or intentionally “handling criminal proceeds” turns out to be a reasonably good working definition of “money laundering”). After all we’ve yielded on UNSCR 1718, weapons sales, and now this astonishing act, it’s hard to see other nations taking such efforts seriously in the future. We’ve sacrificed plenty of important principles since February. To those, you can now add this retreat in our efforts to clean up the international financial system, efforts that are integral to our efforts to shut down terrorist financing.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 14, 2007 at 5:45 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
It’s a surprising reversal to see the Washington Post in particular speaking so critically of the results of something for which it spent so many years and so much ink advocating.
North Korea first made clear that it would take no action until the banking issue was settled by the unfreezing of its accounts. The administration conceded that. Then Pyongyang demanded all of its money back, including that linked to criminal activity. Again, the administration gave in; on April 10, it made all $25 million available for withdrawal. But that, too, failed to resolve the issue: Now the North is insisting that it be able to transfer the money to bank accounts in South Korea, Italy or Russia — and thereby formally break the taboo the U.S. Treasury had managed to create on its use of the international banking system. Guess what? The Bush administration is once again going along.
Administration officials say all this, along with the breaking of the deadline by (so far) 24 days, will be worth it if the reactor is shut down. That’s true. But it should be remembered that the commitments on which Pyongyang is currently in default are the first and easiest in what is supposed to be a three-stage process. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted in February, only if Kim Jong Il complied with the second stage — by disclosing and disabling all nuclear facilities — would it be possible to conclude that he had made a “strategic choice” to give up nuclear weapons. State Department negotiator Christopher Hill said last week that he still believed that that could happen by the end of this year. Again, we hope he’s right. But so far, the record is this: In 84 days, North Korea has done nothing but extract concessions from the United States. [Washington Post]
The Chosun Ilbo reveals why Hill is acting with such desperation to save this deal:
With the atmosphere souring, U.S. top nuclear envoy Christopher Hill is under fire from hardliners at home who feel the U.S. was deceived by North Korea. Appearing discouraged, Hill in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington said he might lose his job if the February agreement is not implemented within this year.
Japan is considering additional sanctions on North Korea if Pyongyang continues to drag its feet, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Thursday. [Chosun Ilbo]
Emphasis mine. I’m somewhat surprised to hear Hill admit that in public. If you attended and don’t agree with that quotation, by all means drop a comment. In any event, by the end of this year, the administration won’t have time to put any alternative plan in place. Even the New York Times is surprisingly impatient.
Vagueness was apparently the only way to get North Korea and the White House — who still aren’t sure they want a deal — to sign on. It says nothing about the sequencing of concessions and rewards or what ”disablement’ and “abandonment” and “denuclearization” mean.
What makes this especially hard is that nearly all nuclear technology can be diverted to make weapons. That means that there are many North Korean genies, not one, to be wrestled back into the bottle — and a frighteningly large number of ways they can spring back out again.
To meet their commitment to disable the Yongbyon reactor, the North Koreans could do something easily reversible like disconnecting cooling pipes, or they could make it a lot harder on themselves by pouring concrete into the tubes that hold the fuel rods in place. The agreement offers no direction. It also doesn’t say what is supposed to happen to the reactor’s 8,000 fuel rods, which contain at least a bomb’s worth of plutonium. The Americans will want them put into stainless steel cans and shipped as quickly as possible out of the country. Nor does it say what should happen to the Koreans’ inventory of separated plutonium or the four to 10 weapons they may have built.
Jon Wolfsthal, a former Energy Department aide who spent a month in Yongbyon in the mid-1990s preparing for the canning of fuel rods, says that Washington and its allies are going to have to decide which parts of the program they most want to see gone and what level of irreversibility they will insist on. “The more we ask for, the higher the price the North Koreans will demand,” he said.
And then there is the question of whether the North Koreans will come clean about a possible, parallel uranium enrichment program — and how hard Washington will press the issue. The 1994 deal fell apart in 2002 after the Bush administration accused the Koreans of hiding such a program. Since the February agreement, some U.S. officials have suggested that they may have overstated the North’s progress, a suddenly convenient truth for the White House. [Carla Anne Robbins, NY Times]
Robbins really just restates the obvious fact that we had to make this agreement almost completely meaningless to get North Korea to sign it. Having done a fairly good job of explaining just how little this deal does to actually, you know, denuclearize North Korea, she then tells us what it will take for us to save it: “a lot of international support, a lot of patience, a thick checkbook and a very thick skin.” What I would really rather Robbins answered was the question she so effectively raised: “Why?”
The good news is that so far, no one is blaming the United States for this state of affairs yet. That will continue to be the case as long as we keep meeting every new North Korean demand, no matter how preposterous.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 7, 2007 at 5:12 pm · Filed under An Alliance?, Six-Party Talks, Diplomacy, U.S. Politics
The proponent of the “hawk-engagement” theory of North Korea policy looks to be the first casualty of the unraveling of Agreed Framework 2.0. The AP tries to shoehorn this into its standard anti-Iraq War meme, but it’s a strained fit for on Cha, an architect of a soft-line diplomatic approach that is clearly failing:
Cha leaves amid concerns over North Korea’s failure to comply with deadlines to eliminate its nuclear weapons programs. [AP]
Reporter Matthew Lee’s story is what you’d expect of a reporter with a lot of ideological baggage and little knowledge of North Korea policy or Cha’s view of it. Here’s an abstract of the paper that defined Cha’s views:
Victor Cha of Georgetown University explains why President George W. Bush should continue U.S. engagement with North Korea, contrary to the opinion of hard-liners in his administration who contend that engagement is a failed—and potentially dangerous—policy. Cha agrees with skeptics in the Bush administration who argue that the Clinton administration’s engagement of North Korea did not fundamentally alter the regime’s malevolent intentions. Indeed, despite a variety of economic and political incentives from the United States, South Korea, and Japan, North Korea has neither dismantled its weapons of mass destruction program nor discontinued work on developing ballistic missiles. He disagrees with the skeptics, however, that Pyongyang sees engagement as a sign of U.S. weakness. Cha proposes a policy of “containment-plus-engagement” that would use a combination of carrots and sticks to “prevent the crystallization of conditions under which the North Korean regime could calculate aggression as a ‘rational’ course of action even if a [North Korean] victory was impossible.”
The timing of Cha’s departure belies any claim that February 13th’s deal shows much promise. If anyone knows how much trouble this deal is in, it’s Cha. And if Cha saw any reasonable chance of sticking around to claim credit for a diplomatic breakthrough, barring some very compelling family crisis, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. And of course, it’s not negotiation or engagement that are the problem here. The problem is a negotiating style that sees pressure for reform and negotiation as mutally exclusive.
Is it too much to hope that he’ll be followed swiftly by Chris Hill, Nick Burns, and every other proponent of this facially ludicrous initiative? Probably. But when we’ve reached the point where the North Koreans have violated every term of the deal and added a demand that we launder their money for them, it’s time to consider new sanctions against the regime. For cosmetic purposes, we should not walk away from the talks or the process, but we should be realistic about what we can expect from them. North Korea has made its own intentions clear.
Update: Another curious fact is the recency of Cha’s visit to Pyongyang, and his role as direct messenger to the North Koreans. One has to wonder what the North Koreans told him, what he told the President, and what the President said in response. Somehow, Cha sees the current policy as something he doesn’t want to be associated with. And in fact, it’s pretty light on “hawk” and pretty heavy on “engagement.” He’d have some reason to differ with the idea that the flagrant North Korean violations of AF 2.0 should be met with this kind of impotent response.
The chief U.S. negotiator at North Korean nuclear talks said Friday he does not believe Pyongyang is stalling on a pledge to abandon its nuclear weapons, even though three weeks have passed since it missed a crucial deadline.
….
“I know it’s tough to watch the days roll by,” Hill said. “We think our best interest is in being patient.”
President Bush and other top administration officials have warned repeatedly that U.S. patience is not endless. But Hill’s comments suggest a willingness to allow Kim Jong Il’s government time to have its money in hand first, which Pyongyang insists is a condition to stopping its nuclear operations.
Hill told an audience at the Johns Hopkins University school of international studies that North Korea is not using the banking issue to avoid implementation of a nuclear agreement that was considered a breakthrough after a long period of deadlock. [AP, Foster Klug]
Klug also reports on a parting shot from Richard Lawless:
Also Friday, Richard Lawless, U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for Asian security affairs, said a plan to have South Korea take responsibility by 2012 for commanding its military in wartime would strengthen the U.S.-South Korean alliance.
South Korea, Lawless said at Johns Hopkins, is eminently capable of defending itself, with U.S. support, in the event of an attack. He said the countries were taking their time to make sure everything goes smoothly in the transition.
The recent news from the Pentagon suggests that the ROK’s government’s relations with the Pentagon haven’t improved that much under Robert Gates. The unpleasantries of the last few days may mean that Gates has had some time to absorb just a bit of Rumsfeld’s foul mood toward the South Koreans. Klug, the AP’s main man in Washington covering the Korea issue, follows this story closely enough to be sensitive to Lawless’s unusually direct tone. It’s too bad that Lawless will be long gone by 2012. For his part, Gates might not want to shake the world that much in for the rest of his tenure.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 7, 2007 at 1:24 pm · Filed under Uncategorized, NK Economics, Human Rights, U.S. Law, Human Trafficking, Google Earth
[Update: I’ve made indirect contact with a North Korean defector familiar with how Pyongyang Soju is made. Based on that information, the product is not manufactured in a forced labor camp. I hope to have more specific information about the materials and labor practices later.]
The Chicago Tribune and the Hankook Ilbo are both reporting that North Korea is about to export of shipment of soju to the United States.
US-North Korean trade is rare as Washington imposes sanctions on Pyongyang, which it lists as a state sponsor of terror. Imports need approval from the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. But Steve Park, 59, the Korean-American importer, told Hankook he secured the office’s approval last July. Park said a cargo ship carrying 2,520 boxes of soju, or some 60,000 bottles, left the North’s western port of Nampo for the United States on April 9.
“If the customs procedures go as scheduled, the soju will be sold at US stores, marketplaces and restaurants as early as late this month or early next month,” Park was quoted as saying. [AFP]
Let’s hope customs procedures don’t go smoothy, and there could be a few more hurdles to stagger past:
Alcohol importation into the U.S. needs authorization from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Because North Korea is subject to U.S. sanctions, Park Il U would also need a license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
North Korea is among the countries subject to the U.S. Trading With the Enemy Act. Washington agreed in February to begin discussions with North Korea on removing it from the list, one of a series of economic and political concessions offered in exchange for the North’s promise in an international agreement to start dismantling its nuclear program. [Chicago Tribune]
Leave aside for a moment such questions as how Kim Jong Il will spend your money, or what all those upstream factories are dumping into the Taedong (or, as Richardson notes, that the stuff tastes putrid). When it comes to North Korea, I posit that all labor is slave labor to one degree or another, and the odds that Mr. Park’s soju is made by laborers who can choose their jobs or negotiate their wages are next to nil. Park says his soju is made somewhere in Pyongyang; this article claims to show a picture of inside of the bottling plant. That may answer one of your questions, but if you’re inherently skeptical about what the North Korean government says, then wonder with me just how sure can we be that Mr. Park’s soju isn’t distilled, say, here:
Google Earth gives us a closer view of Camp 18’s distillery:
As North Korean gulags go, Camp 18 is one of the less horrid places to find yourself enslaved. It’s run by a slightly less sadistic secret police organization, the Peoples’ Safety Agency (North Korea has a proliferation of them, and they’re all in competition with each other). Just across the river, at Camp 14, the usual guard force, the National Security Agency, is in charge, and conditions are far more brutal.
Still, Camp 18 does have its very own public execution site:
Typically, the political criminal is sent to Camp 14, but in his infinite mercy, Kim Jong Il sends his family to Camp 18, just across the Taedong. That means that at this spot, just 3 1/2 miles upstream from the distillery, a husband might even be able to stand on one side of the Taedong River and watch his wife’s execution on the other side.
Of course, I have no way of knowing where Mr. Park’s soju is really made, and my point here is that neither do we, and neither does Mr. Park. I rather doubt he cares. I did call up the importer to ask for his side of the story, but he didn’t return my call. Nor do I think he particularly cares how Kim Jong Il spends the profits of this commerce. His merchandise probably dulls the mind somewhat less than self-serving pap like this:
“The North Korean government shows a positive response to this business in that its product is to be exported to the US, which has long been considered as a hostile country, through legal procedures,” he said.
“I think this will serve as a good opportunity to improve relations between the two countries in the future.”
Huzzah for Mr. Park if he sleeps soundly at night. If his soju sales take off, he has other products to add to his line. For example, according to survivor Kang Chol Hwan, at Camp 15, a/k/a Yodok, there was “a distillery for corn, acorn, and snake brandy.” Former guard Ahn Myung Chol reported that at the worst of the Camps, the infamous Camp 22, there was a “distillery that produced soy sauce and whiskeys.” And if Pyongyang soju really is made in Pyongyang, we’re still talking about labor conditions that are highly suspect. The State Department lists North Korea as a Tier 3 country for human trafficking concern. That’s the worst classification that can be assigned, shared by only 11 other countries ”whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.” Here’s a section from State’s 2006 human trafficking report on North Korea:
The Government of North Korea does not fully comply with minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. The government does not acknowledge that trafficking is occurring, either within the country or transnationally. The government also contributes to the problem through forced labor prison camps, where thousands of North Koreans live in slave-like conditions, receiving very little food and no medical assistance…. The D.R.P.K. regime reportedly provides workers for foreign investors operating in North Korean industrial parks. There are concerns that this labor may be exploitative, with the D.P.R.K. government keeping most or all of the foreign exchange paid and then paying workers in local, nonconvertible currency.
A Tier 3 designation supposedly means that ”it is the policy of the United States” not to provide that country aid, but tell that to Chris Hill. And since the State Department is in charge of this regulatory scheme, it’s also meaningless for keeping out products made with forced labor, which the Tariff Act defines this way:
… all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty for its nonperformance and for which the worker does not offer himself voluntarily. For purposes of this section, the term ‘’forced labor or/and indentured labor’’ includes forced or indentured child labor.
If we know that a product is made with forced labor, as we have reason to suspect in the case of Kaesong, it can’t legally be landed in a U.S. port. But what if we only have reason to suspect, and we have no way of verifying the actual facts? In such a case, even a Tier 3 classification has few real consequences for a country’s ability to export goods to the United States unless. There is a Labor Department black list, but it does not include a direct ban on the import of suspect goods. And good luck with arranging that plant visit to Pyongyang, much less Camp 18, whose existence the regime denies entirely. If you think it will do any good, here’s how you can write a letter to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs to nominate a particular product for that list.
Later today, I’ll be filing a request to the Office of Foreign Asset Control under the Freedom of Information Act. I’ll be seeking a copy of Mr. Park’s license request, certain policies used to evaluate the request, and the license itself (along with other OFAC licenses for North Korea). I’m going to be looking for any information about where Mr. Park’s merchandise is made and what assurances he can make regarding the labor conditions there.
If you’re a journalist and want the first look at this information, please e-mail me, because journalists get expedited FOIA treatment. I’ll write the request and help you analyze it, and you get a chance to report it first. A win-win?
The FOIA request will probably take months to bear fruit, and if it does, it may show us few of the facts we really need, so I need your help. If you know anyone who has escaped from North Korea, please ask them what they know about how and where Pyongyang Soju is made, and then please drop me a line at the e-mail address in the third right-hand sidebar. If anyone can provide a statement containing specific information that Pyongyang Soju is made with forced labor, we can use the procedures of 19 C.F.R. sec. 12.42 to block its importation into the United States.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 6, 2007 at 11:05 pm · Filed under Appeasement, Diplomacy
What do you get for making concessions to North Korea? Demands for even more ridiculous concessions!
North Korea has demanded the United States allow it to open an account at a bank in New York and its funds at a Macau bank be transferred there, a Japanese daily reported in Sunday.
….
“The United States hurt the credibility of North Korea by imposing financial sanctions. The United States must correct this,” the source quoted an unnamed North Korean official as saying, according to the Japanese daily.
“We can prove to the international community the funds are clean by transferring them to a bank in the United States.” [Reuters]
So North Korea now wants an American bank account in which to deposit the proceeds of counterfeiting U.S. currency. They are now literally demanding that we launder their money for them.
Have we become a nation of masochists? Yes sir! May I have another?
Update: Naturally, South Korean banks are already lining up to volunteer for the job. How typical.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 5, 2007 at 8:40 pm · Filed under Terrorism/Iraq, U.S. Politics
It’s very simple.
Step One, rig a girls’ school with explosives.
Step Two, blow up the school and a few dozen little girls, and bask in the fascination (three parts horror, one part masochistic adoration) of news media everywhere.
Step Three, wait for for Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Barbara Boxer to declare you the victor. Wait for atrocities to be rewarded and mass murder to be misdiagnosed as a liberation struggle. Wait for Michael Moore to call you and your fellow terrorists “Minutemen” again.
So who has really done more to give those girls a future: “feminist” politicians, or the men who preempted Step Two?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 5, 2007 at 8:19 pm · Filed under The Fifth Column
If you thought North Korea bought its South Korean supporters, you underestimated just how unnatural this intercourse really is. We know the going rates for the various Il Shim Hue operatives were cheap, but South Korea’s violent far-left unions are actually helping to keep Korigula’s palaces stocked with Hennessey. South Korea’s unions, particularly the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, have a history of trashing public property during their demonstrations, so when they make extortionate demands for city funds to celebrate May Day with their North Korean friends, the towns’ officials had better listen.
The country’s two umbrella unions, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, demanded hundreds of millions of won from local governments for an inter-Korean labor convention to mark May Day, Changwon city government and the South Gyeongsang provincial government confirmed yesterday.
In a joint letter, the two labor federations asked the provincial and city governments for 410 million won ($440,480) and 50 million won, respectively, according to the local governments. [Joongang Ilbo]
This was no small ransom, and not one the municipalities felt free to refuse lightly.
After some internal discussions, the provincial government decided to offer 100 million won, but the city government said it has not yet reached a decision due to opposition from the city council.
“We have only one option ― to divert some city budget for other expenses and later make a supplementary budget. But it is difficult to persuade the city council because that option might cause problems when supporting other civic groups in the future,” said an official at the city government.
A union spokesman, characterizing this Stalinist propaganda spectacle as a “cultural event,” explained that the poor unions and North Korea couldn’t afford the travel costs (the North’s funds are committed to other urgent priorities, like nuclear weapons, submarines, and more artillery to aim at Seoul).
The two labor unions confirmed having provided $60,000 in cash to a North Korean labor group, the General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea.“At a working-level meeting in Kaesong, North Korea, the two labor unions offered the money for the airfare of the North Korean labor group,” said an official at the confederation.
The North Korean labor group had asked for 100 million won in cash for flights and accommodations in advance as a condition for joining the convention, according to the labor groups.
Am I mistaken, or isn’t it still illegal for South Koreans to provide funds directly to the North Korean regime? Not that it matters to anyone anymore. South Korea’s fifth column has come of age. No mere puppet now, it has become a lucrative tool for North Korea to extract taxpayer funds from South Korean municipalities — an engine fueling the oppression in the North and a destroyer of civic culture in the South. And of course, the national government of South Korea also subsidizes these thugs.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 5, 2007 at 6:22 pm · Filed under Uncategorized, Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
It’s Day 21 since Peace in Our Time Day, and here’s the latest “peace in our time” update: Yonbyong is running; no IAEA inspectors have gone to North Korea and none have been invited; there have been no substantive six-party sessions since March; North Korea denies having the uranium program it previously admitted; North Korea may or may not be running away with the ransom in dirty money that held this deal up, even though it wasn’t part of the deal; and North Korea refuses to discuss its abductions of Japanese citizens. But Japan is standing firm, and America may actually be yielding to Japan’s insistence:
The United States will not remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism until progress is made regarding the North’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens decades ago, a White House official said Thursday.
Dennis Wilder, a senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, said President George W. Bush will reaffirm that position while meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this week. [….]
“We aren’t going to de-link the abductee issue from the state sponsor of terrorism issue,” Wilder told reporters. [Joongang Ilbo]
What are we prepared to do about this? Not much, apparently. “We hope the process is back on track very soon,'’ Alexander Vershbow said in a speech to civic groups today in Seoul…. I can’t say when our patience will run out'’ [Bloomberg, Heejin Koo]. Chris Hill is lowering expectations as if his career depends on it:
“I know there is a lot of concern and I share that concern about the missed deadline,” Christopher Hill, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told a forum in Washington.
But he added, “I think we can put ourselves into the position that by the latter part of this calendar year, we can get through phase one and phase two and for us to work on phase three.” [AFP]
In other words, the Administration’s plan to run out the clock and pop smoke proceeds apace, and the abject failure of it all is mostly unnoticed for now, because most of the media don’t want to talk about the failure of something almost all of them support, results notwithstanding.
The one good thing to be said of giving up everything is that there’s nothing else to give up once the experiment fails. Should we license them to print our money? Forget the uranium program they already admitted having? Set even fewer firm deadlines, and say even less when North Korea ignores them? Forget inspections completely? How much worse can you do than an agreement “Kim Jong” Bill Richardson tries to claim credit for? Well, I can imagine. But then why not just drop the pretense that it’s a denuclearization agreement and call it an aid program for the world’s most oppressive oligarchy?
No matter what you think our Korea policy should be, the Bush Administration gives you something you can detest. To defend it, however, you have to be prepared to sacrifice either your principles, on one hand, or the pleasure you’ve taken in hating George W. Bush, on the other.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 5, 2007 at 6:00 pm · Filed under An Alliance?, Diplomacy
Because of Agreed Framework 2.0, South Korea thinks it’s set for the duration of the Bush Administration — which it is — so it now feels free to demand our taxpayer dollars rather than ask for them politely. There are unpleasantries like Washington’s decision to sell off its ammunition stockpiles in Korea, but no matter; South Korea is certain war will never come (no, we still can’t leave).
South Korea also feels free to ignore our requests not to give Kim Jong Il so much free money, thus undermining the nuclear diplomacy Seoul has demanded for a decade and finally gotten. Witness this feeble request from our ambassador in Seoul, Alexander Vershbow:
“We do believe that progress on inter-Korean relations should be closely coordinated with progress in implementing the Feb. 13 disarmament agreements,” Vershbow said yesterday. “One rail is North-South engagement and the other is progress on denuclearization. The train needs to roll forward on both.”
He said South Korea and the United States must “maintain a consistent and mutually reinforcing policy for North Korea so the six-party talks and North-South engagement send the same message.” [Joongang Ilbo]
Unfortunately, the South Koreans don’t see these policy differences in absolute terms, but in relative (dialectic) terms. To them, our February surrender reaffirmed that Their Way prevailed and Our Way — a policy of regime change by pressure that in fact never really existed — has been abandoned. There’s no new consensus between allies, if that was our hope. The negotiation has just moved another step in their direction. “Consensus” is a concept that scarcely exists in Korea’s political culture. It’s generally crowded out by concepts like status, dominance, and getting your way through determined incrementalism.
South Korea may speak of the need for the United States to “negotiate” North Korea’s disarmament, but the governments of Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Dae Jung never made disarmament, nuclear or otherwise, a part of their dealings with Kim Jong Il. To the extent “negotiation” implies give-and-take, the term mischaracterizes the give-and-give that has characterized South Korea’s recent dealings with the North. To Seoul, denuclearization was treated as an American problem at best, and an American obstruction at worst. Now, it has concluded that we’ve been removed as an obstruction and anchored safely in place as an unquestioning benefactor. Thus, South Korea feels free to keep buying off North Korea with our money while ingoring our objections to this.
At a routine press briefing, Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung declined to comment on Vershbow’s remarks, but said South Korea will not give up on the North despite the setbacks in the nuclear crisis.
“We cannot give up the inter-Korean relations under any circumstances, and we must never stop trying to seek alternative solutions,” Lee said.
South Korea has this tribute money to spend because of the generosity of U.S. taxpayers and the American soldiers Koreans love to hate. Now, contrast the largesse South Korea lavishes on North Korea with its parsimony toward us:
South Korea’s defense chief said the top United States military commander here spoke “inappropriately” about how Washington and Seoul would split up the cost of moving the American bases.
During a Senate hearing in Washington Tuesday, General B.B. Bell, who commands the U.S. Forces Korea, said Seoul must increase its share of the cost of maintaining a U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula. Otherwise, Washington may have to reassess its base relocation plan here, Bell said.
In a news briefing yesterday, Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo of South Korea did not hide his irritation about Bell’s remark. “I understand that a commander must think about the welfare of his soldiers,” Kim said. “But, the relocation of the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division and Yongsan garrison is proceeding under an agreement by the two countries, and it is inappropriate for the USFK commander to mention the possibility of a reassessment.” [Joongang Ilbo]
This is not merely a contrast of two select anecdotes; South Korea’s aid to Kim Jong Il ($1 billion) exceeds what it pays to contribute to America’s defense of its territory ($ 780).
For this reason and others, the fundamentals of the U.S.-ROK alliance are bleak, and Americans should be happy about that. Is Kim Jong Il someone in whom we want to entrust the power to embroil us in another Asian land war? Is the U.S. presence in Korea — a uniquely volatile intersection of cheap liquor, eleven-bravos, taxi drivers, sloppy journalism, and “civic groups” — advancing America’s political goals? Can’t one of the world’s largest economies defend itself from an economic wreck with a dwindling, stunted population? Doesn’t America have other, higher priorities for its Army these days? It’s obvious where this leads, and one day, we make thank Roh Moo Hyun for making it all seem so obvious.
During the Bush Administration, the Pentagon reduced USFK from 37,000 troops to 29,000, with most of those reductions coming from the Army. This decline was largely driven by the loss of South Korea’s constituency of support among the American conservatives in just six short years. Conservatives watched the ascendancy of the Korean left, its inexhaustible apetite for appeasing North Korea, its general diplomatic incompetence, and its delusional fulminations of America-hate that reached the highest levels of its government. They watched the Korean right fall silent, barely admitting to its support for America or pointing out the benefits that the alliance brings (it stands for nothing and is paying the political price). Overall, South Koreans are as anti-American as many Muslim populations. American conservatives have come to resent this deeply, and on a more detached level, have come to realize that the two countries no longer share enough common goals, interests, or values to support a military commitment as large, expensive, and risky as USFK.
The force reductions would have been more sudden, but for the survival of so much of the center-left foreign policy establishment after the Clinton-Bush transition, and even after Bush’s reelection in 2004. After six years of internecine struggle between the establishment and conservatives over the course of George W. Bush’s Korea policy, the establishment finally prevailed in 2007. This came at a high cost for South Korea, however; conservatives now attach South Korea itself to the bitterness of their alienation. American Liberals have long wanted a reduction of U.S. forces in Korea. Liberals and “progressives” here haven’t been in a more isolationist, anti-military mood since Vietnam. And most “moderates” are “moderate” because they really don’t know and don’t care. Who is left? A stagnant vestige of diplomats, businessmen, and retired officers with no real base of political support. These “realists” have invested their last reserve of credibility in an arms control agreement grounded on Kim Jong Il’s honesty, China’s good faith, and South Korea’s loyalty.
That’s why it’s hard to see Korea continuing to benefit from such generous terms after 2009, no matter who wins the next elections. Conservatives won’t repeat the mistake of leaving men like Chris Hill, Nicholas Burns, George Tenet, and Jack Pritchard with the run of their camp to sabotage them again. Plenty of liberals may be sympathetic to South Korea’s instinct to appease, but they won’t expend political capital to keep more of our troops posted in Korea. Their voters want them to cut military budgets, and that will force Pentagon planners to take another hard look at USFK.
South Korea’s best hope might be Hillary Clinton, who comes prepackaged with Wendy Sherman, Bill Richardson (who is running for Secretary of State), and various proteges of Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright. Still, readers may remember Mrs. Clinton’s accusation that South Korea suffers from “historical amnesia.” And does anyone think Hillary Clinton will be as tolerant of being crossed by conniving politicians in Seoul as George W. Bush turned out to be?
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