Archive for June, 2007
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 30, 2007 at 6:02 pm · Filed under Abductions
A group of family members of Japanese abductees is looking for native English speakers to edit their translations of a book on Japanese who were abducted by the North Koreans. If you’re interested in helping, all they ask is that you translate one chapter. From the summary, some of the stories look pretty compelling:
Chapter 1: The Yokota family — Their 13-year-old daughter, Megumi, disappeared on her way home from school. Her family made every possible effort to find her, but in vain. 27 years later, they learned that their daughter had been abducted by North Korea. The family’s new struggle has begun, and Megumi has become the symbol of abduction.
Chapter 2: The Masumoto and Ichikawa families — Rumiko Masumoto and Shuichi Ichikawa were kidnapped during a seashore date on a hot summer day. When the Japanese government finally made contact with North Korea almost a quarter century later, the families were told the cruel fact that the couple had already deceased in North Korea. But who would believe it?
Chapter 3: The Chimura and Hamamoto families — Yasushi Chimura and Fukie Hamamoto were also kidnapped during a date. They returned home after 24 years as a result of a Japanese and North Korean meeting in October, 2002. However, Yasushi’s mother, who had been long ill, passed away shortly before her son’s return. Yasushi wailed at her picture, “Mother, I’m home!” The couple was also heartbroken, since they left their three children in North Korea.
Chapter 4: The Arimoto and Matsuki families — Keiko Arimoto was unacquainted with Kaoru Matsuki. Keiko vanished from Denmark in 1983, and Kaoru from Spain in 1980. One day in 1988, a letter from a third person, revealing their life together in North Korea, arrived out of the blue. They must have taken a huge risk of being caught and placed the letter in a traveler’s hand. The letter was folded many times and postmarked in Poland.
Some of the information in the book, specifically that about Hitomi Soga, a/k/a Mrs. Charles Jenkins, looks at bit dated, so a volunteer with some subject matter knowledge would be best. In related news, a “source with ties to North Korea” says that Kim Jong Il is now promising to conduct a thorough “investigation” into abductees, representing a change from the blanket denials we’ve seen before. Anything for a few yen, I guess.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said Tokyo will refuse economic aid to Pyongyang unless it sees progress in a dispute over citizens kidnapped decades ago to help train North Korean spies in language and culture. [Reuters]
If he’s ready to release a few more, an announcement like this is an expected prerequisite, though by no means a guarantee. I should emphasize that this report screams, “DUBIOUS!”
The source said Kim told those involved in the kidnappings “not to sabotage investigations or cover (things) up.”
“Evidence must be produced to prove deaths. DNA tests must be conducted,” the source said. “Their families must be allowed to come out and say what the situation is.
“If they are still alive and do not want to return to Japan, they should come out and say so,” the source said. “But there is truly no record of some of them entering North Korea.”
Japan strongly opposes removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism until North Korea resolves this issue. If Japan’s strategy procures the release of more of these hostages, that should also provoke some thought in South Korea. Stay tuned.
Some Anju links:
* The FTA truly looks dead if the Democrats have made the decision to oppose it, as I had speculated here. You can say that the various members of Congress are only thinking of the financial interests of their constituents, but when I last checked, for those whose districts don’t include Incheon, that’s a big part of their job.
Each nation’s negotiators had to consider not only (a) their own country’s domestic interests, but also (b) whether the draft agreement could withstand the domestic politics of the other nation’s ratification process. It turns out that our negotiations did surprisingly well at (b) and surprisingly badly at (a), while South Korea appears to have overlooked (b) entirely in its drive to drive the hardest bargain it could. President Roh gave them no cover on (a) by actually selling the merits of a fair deal to his people, meaning that he had plenty of leverage over American negotiators to make a deal they could never sell back at home. An FTA would have done far more for South Korea than the United States, and thus, South Korea became the victim of its blind drive toward a hard bargain.
* The IAEA is saying it has agreed with the North Koreans on how to shut down Yongbyon, and that all that’s left to do is for the six parties to meet and pick a date. Funny, I thought the date was April 13th.
* Some interesting observations about Kim Jong Il’s personality from Hwang Jang Yop, via the Daily NK.
* China is having trouble staying ahead of the Internet and other alternative publications in its game of whack-a-mole censorship. [RFA]
* Because starving the people isn’t enough, North Korea is collecting property taxes.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 26, 2007 at 7:01 am · Filed under Uncategorized, NK Military, Resistance, Anju Links
* There’s another report that a North Korean border guard has defected, only this time, he brought a few things with him:
At the time of arrest, Kim was armed with an automatic AK rifle, 5 magazines, 30 cartridges and [a]sword. [Daily NK]
Then, the Chinese caught him. They’ll send him back to North Korea, where he’s certain to face a firing squad at 19 [because Koreans calculate age from the time of conception, he’s just 17 or 18 in Western terms]. The clear lesson: resist, don’t let them take you alive, and take as many Chinese police with you as possible. Is that really the message the Chinese want to send? That’s going to be the result, because discipline among the North Korean border guards is unraveling. The force has had desertions, and even mass desertions, but incidents in which guards defect with their weapons are still rare. That may change.
* At a press conference yesterday, Chris Hill was asked about the timeline for implementing AF 2.0. At the end of this year, he expects Yongbyon (but only Yongbyon) to be shut down, sealed, and disabled. He also expects the “working groups” driving us toward a full normalization of relations to be functioning, but just functioning – no benchmarks for progress. Hill seemed to suggest that a full declaration of North Korea’s nuclear programs would be “the next phase,” but he didn’t say when, specifically, he expected that full declaration. Rather than insisting on a declaration re-admitting the existence of North Korea’s highly enriched uranium program, he said we need “clarity” on the issue. When asked if the United States was now prepared to buy back North Korea’s nuclear weapons, Hill was conspicuously evasive. Sorry, I can’t quote or link my source. Summary: the goal posts will continue to slip gently toward 2009 because we’re being vague about our expectations. We’re either approaching the Moment of Truth or the long stall into the election season.
* Christopher Hitchens talks about limits of pacifying Muslim rage. He concludes that there are none:
Rage Boy keenly looks forward to anger, while we worriedly anticipate trouble, and fret about etiquette, and prepare the next retreat. If taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean living at the pleasure of Rage Boy, and that I am not prepared to do. [Slate]
Do not miss: Hitchens’s link to the photo essay of rage boy — one pissed-off Kashmiri Muslim who has posed for what must be a dozen different news photos.
* Al-Qaeda terror against the civilian population of Iraq is not “sectarian violence,” and it is dishonest to describe it as such. It’s also dishonest to obscure al-Qaeda’s role in so much of it, but that’s meant to steer us away from a logical conclusion: we may be tempted to run away from warring factions of faceless thugs, but we can’t just run away from al-Qaeda.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 25, 2007 at 6:47 am · Filed under Famine & Food Aid, Human Rights, Korean Education, "United" Nations
Each entity has recently brought particular discredit on itself, and in each case, there is a North Korea nexus. The UNDP recently failed a UN internal audit after U.S. diplomats outed the organization for allowing its Pyongyang operations to become, as a U.N. staffer put it, “an ATM machine” for the regime. It turns out that North Korea used some of the funds to buy overseas real estate and dual-use equipment, and that the U.N. even had a stock of counterfeit currency in one of its safes that handled North Korea program-related funds.
The U.N. Human Rights Council had completely failed to apply any consistent principles to the most grave human rights violations in the world, as I’ll explain in more detail below, because its members are some of the worst violators.
We’ll start with the UNDP, following the sequence of the press release from the Republican Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee:
(WASHINGTON) - An amendment to the State & Foreign Operations Appropriations Act that redirects $20 million in U.S. contributions to the UN Development Program for democracy and small business initiatives was approved today by the House of Representatives. A separate amendment to halt U.S. funding for the flawed UN Human Rights Council is expected to pass later today.
Drafted by U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the amendments reflect what she said was “palpable bipartisan frustration with the slow pace of UN reform and the alarming deterioration of the UN’s commitment to protect human rights around the world.”
[….]
“Rather than cooperating with U.S. officials in investigating these allegations, UNDP officials have circled the wagons and resorted to rhetorical denials in the press,” said Ros-Lehtinen. “The $20 million cut proposed in my amendment will send a clear signal about our demands and expectations for greater accountability from the UN Development Program, while also continuing to make a substantial contribution to UNDP’s core programs.”
The bad news is that the funds that are cut will be redirected to two other U.N. programs.
The Democracy Fund, an initiative proposed by President Bush in 2004, increases cooperation between democratic countries and supports new and transitional democracies. It has been successful in making grants to programs in more than 100 countries around the world to support civic education, voter registration, access to information, and democratic dialogue, among other things.
The Ros-Lehtinen amendment also would restore $6 million for the UN Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. This initiative, modeled on the Democracy Fund, is designed to make technical assistance grants to promote positive environments for business and innovation around the world.
The House also finally acted against the U.N. Human Rights Council, about whose highly suspect membership I first blogged here. The Council was meant to be a reformed replacement for a predecessor body, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, whose credibility was irretrievably lost when Libya was allowed to chair it. Unfortunately, reforms in the Council have been a great disappointment, and as I noted here recently, the Council recently dropped its Special Rapporteurs for Cuba and Belarus, and was considering whether it should do the same in the case of North Korea.
Minutes of the most recent debate over condemning North Korea’s human rights record in the General Assembly will give you some idea of the politics. The usual suspects expressed a general opposition to “country-specific” resolutions, but naturally, they do not extend that principle to the United States or Israel. It was the moral equivalent ignoring gas chambers while issuing suspect accusations about flatulence in a crowded elevator.
A separate amendment which prohibits U.S. funds for the UN Human Rights Council is expected to pass later today also by voice vote.
Earlier this week, the Council, formed in 2006 to replace the failed UN Human Rights Commission, voted to end inquiries into human rights abuses in Cuba and Belarus and to make permanent its inquiry of the democratic state of Israel. By contrast, the Council has failed to condemn genocide in Darfur, the sprawling gulag of North Korea, political and human rights abuses in Cuba and Belarus, and bloody repression in Burma and Zimbabwe.
The action against Israel took place as news reports documented the horrific actions by Hamas against innocent Palestinians, including those in Gaza clamoring to enter Israel. The Ros-Lehtinen amendment prohibits U.S. contributions to the UN regular budget from being used for the nearly $15 million annual budget of the Council.
“We were right to refuse to dignify that poisonous talk-shop with our membership, and we must refuse to support it with our tax dollars,” said Ros-Lehtinen. “By pulling its membership from the broader UN General Assembly without any membership criteria, the Council has gone further than its predecessor in giving gross human rights violators the power to shape the international human rights agenda,” Ros-Lehtinen said.
There are two more links on the U.N./human rights story that you shouldn’t miss. One is this rather depressing but very enlightening Claudia Rosett narrative of the Council getting nothing done except to sustain its own existence. As a follow-up, Rosett snapped some pictures that illustrate vividly where your tax dollars went. The jobs that these officials should be doing were never intended to be paths to personal enrichment. It takes a unique kind of person to do this work with the dedication it demands, but from the looks of things, the U.N. member states didn’t send that kind of person to New York.
That things are working this way under a Democratic Congress is telling. First, you have to wonder why Republicans never made this move when they were in the majority in the case of the Human Rights Commission (the UNDP scandal is very recent). In some ways, the Republicans seem almost more effective now that they’re in a narrow minority.
The second point is that the Democratic leadership didn’t make an issue of this. The problem for the U.N. is that poll results like these transcend party lines. They can’t continue to have a hold on U.S. taxpayer funds when only the most liberal districts in New York and San Francisco would still fund them.
Some Anju Links:
* North Korea will execute four by firing squad in public. They’re accused of being “human traffickers,” but it’s likely they’re actually defection brokers who help people escape.
* When the regime runs out of rations for the people, it issues “ghost” rations.
* Here’s another in-depth portrait of a North Korean refugee’s difficult adjustment to life in the South. I’m no fan of Norimitsu Oniishi because he doesn’t get the big picture, but he does fine detail well.
* Forgotten War: Growing numbers of South Koreans have only the vaguest idea of who attacked who during the Korean War. That may have something to do with how badly the subject is being taught in Korean schools. In spite of the teacher’s union’s propaganda (see also 1, 2, 3, 4), views of the North are substantially less positive and more wary than they were five years ago.
There were also changes in the historical view of the Korean War. In December 2002, more opted for “a proxy war of the U.S. and the Soviet Union” (44.5 percent) than “an illegal invasion by North Korea” (31.2 percent). In the latest poll, more than a half opted for an illegal invasion by North Korea (52.3 percent), followed by a proxy war (35.7 percent). Among college students, the view that the war was an invasion increased sharply from 17.7 percent to 41.7 percent, while those seeing it as a proxy war declined from 67.2 percent to 54.7 percent. [Chosun Ilbo]
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 24, 2007 at 12:52 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, WMD, Diplomacy, Anju Links
The minute we have bilateral talks, the six-party talks will unwind. That’s exactly what Kim Jong Il wants.
– George W. Bush, Presidential Debate, Sept. 30, 2004
George W. Bush seemed to understand the stupidity of holding both multilateral and bilateral talks with North Korea when John Kerry was proposing them back in 2004. To truly discredit that idea, however, Bush had to flip-flop and try it on himself.
Now we know what the worst of both worlds looks like. First, we got together with the representatives of five other nations that were mostly in competition to take the biggest bite out of our ankles. Then, we signed the worst deal the collective malice of four nations could extract from us (the fifth nation, Japan, was our ally). Now, we’re back out on our own re-negotiating the same terms we thought we’d agreed four months ago … this time, bilaterally.
Having sent Chris Hill on that fool’s errand, the Bush Administration wants us to join it in celebrating the possibility that North Korea just might finally do one of the things it was supposed to have done two months ago. Apparently, getting even that out of Kim Jong Il meant we had to bring more goodies, including a direct meeting with Condi Rice, promises to fully normalize relations, and most incomprehensibly, a centrifuge. No, I am not kidding:
According to a report, the U.S. envoy suggested to North Korea that the U.S. could increase the pace of normalization of U.S.-North Korea relations and exempt North Korea from its list of terrorist sponsoring countries if it actively participates in denuclearization and dispels suspicions of highly enriched uranium (HEU) production.
In addition to that, he also suggested to North Korea that U.S. could buy a centrifuge for the country….
Meanwhile, the Chosun Sinbo, which is a newspaper for the pro-Pyeongyang federation of Korean residents in Japan, stressed in an article on June 22 that, “Thanks to Hill’s visit to the Pyongyang, the North and the U.S. will soon have normal relations and the six party talks accord will be fulfilled sooner or later.” [Donga-Ilbo]
Third-tier presidential candidate “Kim Jong” Bill Richardson wasted no time claiming credit in a breathless press release:
North Korean leaders made a promise to me to invite Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill to meet in North Korea…. This high-level meeting comes on the heels of progress made toward shutting down the Yongbyon nuclear facility.
(There’s still no word on whether Richardson asked his friends to shut down Camp 22 and free the 50,000 men, women, and children who are dying there today. The press release listed the contact name of Gilbert Gallegos at (505) 412-2644. I called Mr. Gallegos, but he wouldn’t return my call. Maybe he’ll return yours. I think we should keep calling.)
Sean McCormack, who is State’s mouthpiece, couldn’t admit that we sent Hill to Pyongyang to make more concessions to North Korea just so that it would do things it had previously agreed to do for other concessions. Instead, he tried to project hawkish sobriety: “We are testing the proposition that North Korea has made that strategic decision.'’ [Bloomberg] The Administration’s own spin undermined that message:
Victor Cha, former Asian affairs director with the National Security Council of the Bush White House, said Thursday in Washington that Hill’s visit to the North is intended to signal Washington’s willingness to normalize relations with Pyongyang and urge the North to give up its nuclear programs quickly. [Joongang Ilbo]
Cha was flat-out contradicted by Hill on another point:
Cha said Hill’s purpose in traveling to Pyongyang was not to discuss specific measures such as shutting down the nuclear reactor, but to confirm each other’s commitment to the ultimate goals of normalization and complete denuclearization.
Cha was skeptical that the North would be able to get rid of all its plutonium- and uranium-based programs by the end of this year. [Joongang Ilbo]
The parties clearly did discuss (and probably negotiated about) the specifics. Hill came out to the cameras later to claim that North Korea had re-agreed shut down Yongbyong on ‘’a three-week timeframe … starting Friday.'’ [AP, via NYT] On that note, it looks like another of my predictions were accurate: Yongbyon will be “sealed” in some very superficial and reversible manner. Said Hill, “The North Koreans are going to shut the thing down and then put seals on it to keep it shut down…. The actual disabling, where you break it and it can’t be brought back on line, that’s a few months down the road.” [WaPo]
The other goal posts seem to have moved, and some are disappearing from view.
A few days ago, there was much rejoicing over North Korea’s agreement to let in some U.N. inspectors. I could have spoiled all of this by pointing out that North Korea is practiced at kicking U.N. inspectors right back out again, that the inspectors will be tightly leashed to one small area, and that the U.N. is powerless in any event. I could have pointed that out, but the North Koreans saved me the trouble:
North Korea has put on hold a visit by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency scheduled for next week, according to Reuters. An official at Pyongyang’s embassy in Geneva said, “As of now, US$25 million of the frozen funds in Banco Delta Asaia [sic] have not reached our bank account” in a Russian bank.
He added, “We have no objection to them preparing the visit as a plan, but we are not ready to give our official confirmation for the visit as scheduled by the agency.” The IAEA planned to send working-level delegates to Pyongyang to discuss ways to monitor North Korea’s shutdown of nuclear facilities. [Chosun Ilbo, June 22]
Bill Richardson did not claim credit for this, by the way.
The Russians protested that the transfer “from Macau to a Russian commercial bank has been completed,” which at least means all eyes are now on them while they enjoy North Korea’s idea of public diplomacy [Reuters].
[Update: The IAEA is pressing ahead with its travel plans. It’s not clear whether the North Koreans have dropped their objections, or whether they’ll let the four IAEA officials in. In any case, this is supposed to be for making advance arrangement, not an actual visit to Yongbyon.]
It also looks like North Korea is still lying about the uranium.
Asked if he discussed about the North’s uranium-based nuclear program, Hill, without providing specifics, said that “we discussed all aspects of the six-party process. And all aspects means all aspects.” [Chosun Ilbo]
And this:
[Hill] said the United States would continue to press North Korea to allow inspection of and relinquish all materials and equipment related to its nuclear program. “I don’t want to go into specific elements of our discussions except to say we of course did discuss the need to have a comprehensive list of all nuclear programs, and I would just say ‘all’ means all,” Hill said, according to Reuters. [WaPo]
There’s no sign that we’ve even reached the issue of Kim Jong Il’s existing nuclear arsenal. Hill tried to put an optimistic face on all of this, but he had to admit to “the realization … that we are going to have to spend a great deal of time, a great deal of effort, a lot of work in achieving” the objectives of the denuclearization deal [Chosun Ilbo].
Of course, Hill and his bosses don’t really have a lot of time. That’s the fact I believe they’re counting on.
————————-
* Two Words: Hennessey, Strychnine. The Daily NK’s sources say that Kim Jong Il didn’t have heart surgery after all, but had a procedure known as “Percuteneous Transarterial Coronary Angioplasty (PTCA)” and was back to work shrinking the number of his subjects the next day.
According to the doctors, Kim’s health was not bad except for kidney hypertrophy and some symptoms of diabetes. After examination he received the relatively simple PTCA treatment instead of surgery….
The Japanese source said that the “German doctors promised to keep Kim Jong Il’s procedure a secret and to coordinate a faked story with North Korea authority.” Therefore, the spokesperson of Berlin Heat Center revealed that 6 members of the center stayed in Pyongyang from May 11th to the 19th, treating only three laborers, a nurse, and a scientist. [Daily NK]
* The Chinese auto industry isn’t ready for the export market, judging by this. I hope that all of the recent scandals about the safety of various Chinese products will harm China’s economy, because I’m not one of those who believes that a stronger Chinese economy in the service of the Chinese Communist Party is good for the United States, or for China’s neighbors. I also think that an economic recession is the most likely trigger of political change that will weaken or end one-party rule.
* A P-38 fighter found frozen in a Greenland glacier is being flown to England after a restoration. It’s the second attempt in 60 years.
* We are still in denial about Iran’s role in supporting our enemies — including Al Qaeda — in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Iran has launched a harsh crackdown on dissent and deviation from its medieval theology. This regime not only seems exceedingly unpopular, but the Iranian people seem to be talking about the many reasons for that.
* Pakistani extremists have released six Chinese women they had abducted, after accusing the women of being prostitutes. It really does appear that things in Pakistan are deteriorating fast. If Pakistan falls under the control of the extremists, what will be do to get their nukes away from them?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 20, 2007 at 6:59 pm · Filed under NK Economics, Money Laundering, U.S. Politics
Kevin Hassett, Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, asks, “Why did the Fed help North Korea launder money?“ I’m no economist, so I’m interested in how the transaction could affect the Federal Reserve system. Hassett thinks this transaction simultaneously inseminated the Fed with dirty money and politics, and he doesn’t think we’re going to like what we see at the end of the gestation. You ought to read the whole piece, but here’s a graf:
It may or may not have been sound foreign policy to make this concession to the North Koreans. The problem for the Fed is that there are enough people in Washington who think it was a catastrophic error. There will almost certainly be a lengthy investigation into the matter. If that investigation turns up legal technicalities that go against the Fed, then hearings will happen, and heads may roll.
The worst outcome is this: If somebody in Congress disagrees with the Fed’s monetary policy, they now have a weapon they can use against the central bank. That can’t be good for monetary policy.
Back in 1993, Alan Greenspan, Fed chairman at the time, was widely criticized for attending President Bill Clinton’s first State of the Union address, allowing himself to be photographed sitting next to Hillary Clinton. He was rapped because Americans rightly expect the Fed to focus on monetary policy, and stay out of the political fray.
By allowing the New York Fed to be a pawn of the State Department and the North Koreans, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has introduced the Fed into a complicated diplomatic game that has nothing to do with its legal responsibilities.
He isn’t sitting next to Hillary Clinton; he is sitting next to Kim Jong Il. It is hard to imagine why anyone at the Fed would think that is a good idea.
See also:
* Chris Hill talks about AF 2.0 and timing, starting with the shutdown of North Korea’s most expendable nuclear facility, and moving on to its least expendable ones:
“Our sense is we will be down to a matter of weeks,” he said. “We are not talking about months.”
In the next phase, the North would declare all its nuclear programs and disable all facilities in return for a further 950,000 tons of fuel oil.
Mr. Hill said that from a “technical point of view” it would be possible to conclude this part of the agreement by the end of the year. [NY Times]
“Weeks not months” is one of Hill’s favorite stock phrases, but truth has always been closer to “months, if not years.” Even taking Hill’s most optimistic estimate at face value, it brings us to the very eve of 2008, when everyone including Kim Jong Il will watching the primaries, and when Bush’s term will be a year from expiration. Who really thinks that Kim Jong Il will feel a sense of urgency to move quickly toward compliance under those circumstances, thus handing a lame-duck president he despises the biggest cards in his deck? Who really believes that Kim would pass up the chance to try his luck with President Obama or another President Clinton, from whom he’d undoubtedly get a whole new round of concessions and payoffs?
* Your Chongryon/Chosen Soren death watch continues here.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 19, 2007 at 6:49 am · Filed under Japan & Korea, Japan, Korean Education, The Fifth Column
I’d previously mentioned that Chongryon, North Korea’s fifth column organization in Japan, was forced to “sell” its de facto embassy in Tokyo. As it turns out, the sale was a fraudulent scheme assisted by Japanese sympathizers, without consideration, to evade seizure by the authorities. Japanese authorities have since voided the transaction, and, according to Yonhap, approved the seizure of the building.
We also know more about why Chongryon is dying. I was aware that some adverse tax judgments by the Japanese authorities contributed to this, but I did not know that money laundering and looting by the North Korean regime had also played a role:
Sixteen Chongryon-affiliated credit unions went broke since the 1990s. The Japanese government put in a total of over 1 trillion yen in public funds to protect the depositors. The biggest cause of bankruptcies was illegal loans under fictitious names, a considerable portion of which is believed to have gone to the North Korean regime. Non-performing loans from the credit unions totaled 62.8 billion yen. The RCC won all 18 lawsuits involving the non-performing loans, and the court did not cut a penny from the sum RCC requested. [Chosun Ilbo]
In the end, what killed Chongyon was the revelation of North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens, and of Chongryon’s likely role in them. Those revelations cost Chongryon most of its membership and the income they contributed to it.
Even Mindan, the rival pro-South Korean in Japan, has lost interest in any rapproachement with Chongryon and is treating it like the pariah it deserves to be. The latest developments have all the signs of North Korea concluding that Chongryon had lost its profit-making potential and deciding to recover the scrap value of its assets. That represents the loss of a significant income stream for Kim Jong Il.
Anju Links:
* The Jubilee Campaign and the Korean Church Coalition will hold demonstrations in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo to protest China’s inhumane treatment of North Korean refugees. The Washington event will take place on July 17th at noon, on the West Lawn of the Capitol.
* South Korea has agreed to renegotiate a proposed free trade agreement.
* There has been a deadly pipeline explosion in North Korea:
“On June 9, a fire broke out at a field in Sonchon County in North Pyongan Province and some 110 North Koreans were killed,” Good Friends, a Seoul-based Buddhist civic organization, said in an e-mail newsletter.
The alleged disaster came when a lot of people came out to collect gasoline from the fuel pipe, which burst and spilled fuel. “People collected gasoline in their vessels, pandemonium erupted, and a fire broke out,” the newsletter said. [Yonhap]
Although Good Friends has good sources in the North, the UniFiction Ministry questions the report. I question the UniFiction Ministry’s outlook on the North in general, but one sign of whether the reports are true would be the presentation of a suspicious re-insurance claim by the North Korean government.
* Objectivity may be too much to ask for when it comes to how South Korean schools portray North Korea. Throughout decades of unleavened rightist propaganda under Park Chung Hee’s rule, North Korea’s standard of living may have been equal to or greater than that in the South. That had changed drastically by the 1990’s, when the portrayal of the North switched to unleavened leftist propaganda, mostly directed by the anti-American, pro-North Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union (see also 1, 2, 3, 4). Now, the human rights group NKNet, with a large number of defectors in its membership, is presenting its own counter-propaganda: “Knowing North Korea Properly,” featuring scenes of the hardscrabble lives and deaths of ordinary citizens outside Pyongyang. This is probably the best we can hope for. Let the kids see all of the information, keep their minds open, and make them up for themselves.
* If you visit one of those North Korean restaurants in China or Southeast Asia, know what you’re supporting.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 18, 2007 at 6:42 am · Filed under NK Economics, WMD, Human Rights, U.S. & Korea, Proliferation, U.S. Politics
Would you trust this man? If you were one of those hoping that the next South Korean election would be the end of our long international nightmare, you were mistaken:
Former Seoul Mayor Lee Myung-bak, the front-running opposition presidential aspirant in December’s election, proposed Monday creating a “Manhattan-like” island near the border with North Korea and building an inter-Korean industrial park there to ease military tension.
Dubbed “Na-deul,” which means a narrow waterway in Korean, the manmade island would be home to a 30- million-square-meter industrial park aimed at “combining North Korean labor and South Korean capital” and helping the communist country open up, Lee told a news conference at his Seoul office. [Yonhap]
Lee makes token appearances at “Yoduk Story” and human rights events, makes encouraging statements about raising the subject of human rights in the North for once, and then he proposes crap like this.
Part of the problem is that Lee is so enthralled with the grandiose, statist, and quixotic that he may leave South Korea looking a lot more like North Korea. What’s more, my gut tells me the man will show a nasty authoritarian streak during his first year in office. The deeper problem with Lee is what his past tells us: the only constant things about him seem to be megalomania and ambition. Instead of core values, he has a finely tuned sensitivity toward the political winds.
Nor is there any South Korean candidate who appears to be any less bad than Lee, though they’re all bad for slightly different reasons.
This proposal also illustrates just how rudderless the Korean right really is. By adopting some of the left’s worst ideas, they send the message to the voters that Roh was right about them. Rather than propose a fundamentally different approach to the North — one which promises more aid, trade, and benefits, but strictly conditioned on tangible reforms and the reduction of tensions — they show that six months from Election Day, they’ve expended all their mental acuity on internecine intrigues and have no original agenda to offer. One gets the sense that their style of governance would be a more corporatist, and marginally more competent, and slightly more corrupt version of the Roh years. In which case, why not just bring back DJ?
For all of its high moral cost and limited financial benefits, Kaesong looks to have just imposed one very big price on South Korea: it appears to be killing a proposed free trade agreement with the United States. It now looks as though the Democrats dislike Kaesong as much as the Republicans ever did, and one of the strongest opponests is Brad Sherman of California, hands-down my favorite Democrat in the House:
Immediately after the hearing, Brad J. Sherman (D. California), committee chairman, said, “For South Korea, the Iranian nuclear development may not be threatening, but for the U.S., the nuclear issues of North Korea and Iran are equally serious non-proliferation problems.”
. . . .
Before the FTA conclusion, Republicans were vehemently against the idea to include the Gaesong Industrial Complex issue in the deal. Now, the Democrats are taking the lead.
Committee Chairman Sherman said, “It is unacceptable given our serious efforts to prevent North Korea’s nuclear development.”
“If goods produced in the Gaesong complex are recognized as the products of South Korea, it will be no different to handing out cash to the North. This is unacceptable,” [David Scott, D. Ga.] added. [Dong-A Ilbo]
Democrats are focusing not just on the issue of how Kaesong supports North Korea, but they’re also alerting me to an issue I wasn’t aware of — a troubling South Korean contract with Iran. Both are legitimate issues for our national security and the prevention of proliferation, and in fact, Republicans really didn’t raise either issue in hearings to the same extent. To their credit, Democrats have been quicker to make the link between our support for the South and the South’s support for the North. It’s about time someone did.
Read the entire article, and it’s apparent the Democrats have caucused about the FTA and decided to oppose it. Nor are the Republicans universally supportive. Now, as Bruce Klinger pointed out below, it’s not just Kaesong that’s killing the FTA, but a series of other special interests that the FTA failed to appease. That’s how politics works. But it’s Kaesong, not all those other issues, that is becoming the banner behind which opposition to the FTA is marching. It’s a troubling development for the Korea Lobby, which was counting on Democrats to support its approach to the North, at least in theory. Instead, it looks like the Dems took a hard look at Kaesong and turned away in disgust. Worse, they’re creating a rare unanimity among conservatives and liberals in a direction that must worry them.
Lee Myung-Bak wants to build another one of those, even though the costs are so much more manifest than the gains. And if the idea isn’t stange enough, North Korea has about 300 miles of wasteland — just look on Google Earth – on which it could be built. Instead, Lee insists on helping Kim Jong Il isolate any reforming influence by building an island to put it on, which reveals just how insincere the reform-through-slave-labor theory really is.
I’ll close with this prediction: South Korea is going to launch a massive P.R. and lobbying offensive to save this deal, but they probably won’t bend much in renegotiations.
Some anju links:
* Drip, drip: AF 2.0 is winning Bush praise from all the wrong people for “going the extra mile,” but another former Administration official is sounding critical about its execution:
Michael Green, a former Bush Asia adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters he was encouraged that six-country talks on more far-reaching aspects of the February accord could resume.
But he worries that “we now have, in some ways, a harder position vis-a-vis the North Koreans than before because they’ve probably taken the lesson that we’re not going to put pressure on them if they delay and — quite the opposite — we’re going to be accommodating.”
Although Treasury officials long insisted they could not endorse releasing the accounts until North Korea and the BDA bank changed their ways, they went along when Bush, urged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Hill, backed the Feb. 13 accord.
Bush, long known for a visceral dislike of North Korean leaders, had grown increasingly frustrated that Pyongyang used the dispute to delay the agreement.
His conservative supporters detest the deal and in recent months, Bush voiced displeasure with Rice and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for putting him in a position of making commitments to Pyongyang that he found distasteful, U.S. officials and diplomats told Reuters. [Reuters]
Bush, probably hoping to appease the rest of us, is expressing his frustration about the BDA funds transfer and the delay that it invited. Two grafs:
* This Seems Premature: As Yongbyon hums along and before U.N. inspectors even know the times and terms under which the North will let them in, South Korea is also making arrangement to ship 50,000 tons of fuel oil to North Korea.
* North Korea has increased its public executions of people caught in possession of cell phones. [AP; Daily NK]
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 17, 2007 at 1:37 pm · Filed under Anju Links
* Seven years after the last “breakthrough” with North Korea, here’s a complete list of what has been accomplished in reforming North Korea and reducing inter-Korean tensions: .
Even symbolic achievements are getting hard to find lately. South Korean politicians still can’t visit Pyongyang, if at all, without being snubbed and shoveled out of the spotlight. At times, I wonder why the North Koreans make much of a distinction between the two main South Korean political parties. Here’s the “conservative” opposition front-runner, Lee Myung Bak (sometimes spelled “Lee Myung Park”):
Former mayor of Seoul and Grand National Party candidate for the upcoming presidential election Lee Myung Park said on the 14th, “After the leadership is determined, the South-North summit talks will be pushed forward if necessary.”
At a press conference, Lee mentioned, “Nonetheless, the Summit Talks will pursue peace policies or economic collaboration as the purpose is not political issues.”
Regarding this he said, “Currently, North Korea disagrees with the change in South Korean government and will most probably have other expectations on the Grand National Party.” What Mr. Lee means by North Korea’s expectations is anticipations of continuous aid towards the North without any breaks. [Daily NK]
Later, Lee proposes to raise the average national income of North Korea to $3,000, which has to presuppose some pretty wild class disparities. The best than can be said of this is that it isn’t much dumber than the idea of digging a canal all the way down a mountainous peninsula, the long way. Lee has also made some encouraging statements about North Korea policy, but this leaves me thinking the man just says whatever he thinks the audience wants to hear. I can’t say that I’m very surprised, in light of Lee’s history.
* The New, “Reformed” U.N. Human Rights Council is deciding whether to appoint a new Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea. The outgoing Vitit Muntarbhorn was as effective as could be expected, but the military coup in his native Thailand has probably undermined his chances for a new term. With the United States soft-pedalling the issue and North Korea raising strident objections, the Council will probably (a) drop the position, as it did in the cases of Cuba and Belarus, or (b) it will appoint a typical U.N. bureaucrat to do a typically awful job. I just can’t help thinking what a horrendous waste of money this experiment has become.
* Running Out the Clock: Two months after North Korea failed to meet even one of its AF 2.0 obligations, Christopher Hill is now saying that he’d be pleased if we hold the next session of six-party talks in early July, which probably translates to August or September in North Korean. Today, North Korea is saying that it will invite in U.N. inspectors, but only to one place — Yongbyon — and without saying when or under what circumstances. I’m still waiting to see what their next round of unilateral amendments to February 13th will be. They’ll probably make new demands. After all, they think they can get them. For that matter, so do I.
* North Korea has reopened the Emperor Hotel-Casino, which it had previously closed under alleged Chinese pressure.
* The Army has begun a very large offensive against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and one statistic I wanted to make sure no one missed is this one:
The officials I met in Baghdad said that 90% of suicide bombings in Iraq today are the work of non-Iraqi, al Qaeda terrorists. In fact, al Qaeda’s leaders have repeatedly said that Iraq is the central front of their global war against us. That is why it is nonsensical for anyone to claim that the war in Iraq can be separated from the war against al Qaeda–and why a U.S. pullout, under fire, would represent an epic victory for al Qaeda, as significant as their attacks on 9/11. [Sen. Joe Lieberman, Writing in the WSJ’s Opinion Journal.com]
If you believe that prayer influences events on earth, this would be a good time. Meanwhile, Harry Reid’s approval rating has fallen to 19%, half of Dick Cheney’s and tied with Scooter Libby’s, according to Rasmussen (ht: Gateway Pundit). Part of this has to be Reid’s awful presentation. I’ve met tax accountants with more charisma. But part of must be because of the dumb things Reid says. That’s pretty much what I had expected and hoped would come of last fall’s election. The voters hate war — don’t we all? — but they need to think about the other alternative, or the absence of one, to judge and compare it to the status quo. You can’t consider the option of a precipitous withdrawal without considering how it will only accelerate the war and bring it closer to us.
* We may soon have a much clearer vision of that alternative. Iraq after a sudden U.S. withdrawal might look a lot like what Gaza will look like six months from now. I guess I could never be so hard-hearted as to, you know, dance in the streets at the suffering of others, but I really can’t quite summon the will to care much, either. At what point do you have to just admit that some people can’t be saved from themselves? Has any people ever willfully done itself as much harm as the Palestinians have, or missed so many chances to join civilization? Imagine how many groups of people have been through far worse and done a far better job of improving their lot. The Kurds, the Armenians, and the South Koreans are examples that come to mind. In one way, I can see good coming of the Hamas takeover. Can anyone think of a better antidote to Hamas’s popularity than letting the people who voted it into office live under that kind of regime for a while? That’s just the dynamic that cost al-Qaeda its welcome in most of Iraq. After three or four years of life under Hamas, when Gaza has completed its transition to a fetid, stifled, oppressive heap of rubble, I can imagine that the Hamas honeymoon will be over. I’m tempted to say that the most ironic event here is Hamas looting Arafat’s office and stealing his Nobel Prize, but here’s an irony that exceeds even that: in six months, when the streets of Gaza are ruled by hooded thugs preying on citizens and dogs feeding on garbage and corpses, many of the same people who demand we leave Iraq immediately will call for us to join an international peacekeeping force in Gaza. I can see no circumstance under which I’d support that. When the Palestinians are ready to rejoin civililization, we should be ready to assist them with training and material support, but a choice between two competing brands of terrorists is not a very attractive investment for that now.
* Yesterday, one of the public libraries near where I live held a book sale, and we did well for ourselves. One of the bargains was a boxed set of all the Star Wars films that I actually care to watch again. We’re watching “The Empire Strikes Back” now, and it’s better than I remembered. I also picked up two Kafka novels, a Johnny Cash CD, and a copy of “1984″ to replace the one I’ve destroyed from overuse. When I told my wife what I’d found, another customer, one of the near-bright, had to slash at the kind of wry sarcasm that really only works if you really are as smart and insightful as, say, Mencken: “He was only off by 20 years.” After a pause, I could only respond, “Yeah, if you say so.” I wonder if it ever occurred to him how dumb he must have sounded saying this as he picked his way through a used book sale at a taxpayer-funded library, wearing his double-X-fat Hawaiian shirt and dorky straw hat, wondering whether he should drive to the buffet or the mall next. Personally, I’d just passed over a copy of David Corn’s “The Lies of George Bush” because, you know, the FBI had probably put it there as bait and embedded it with a metallic homing chip … and then off to the camps in Utah with you. No doubt, this guy considers himself an intellectual. Idiots often do.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 16, 2007 at 10:13 pm · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, WMD
Yesterday, the press reported that after months of multilateral bungling, we had finally transferred either 20 or 25 million dollars of frozen assets to the disposal of Kim Jong Il for whatever purposes he chooses. Those assets had gathered in a shady Macau Bank known as Banco Delta Asia until September 2005, when the Treasury Department published an interim rule noting that they were, in large part, laundered proceeds of counterfeiting and drug dealing. Does anyone think Kim’s purposes will now include the feeding of his desperately hungry subjects?
[Update: According to more recent reports, the Russians have now taken their own turn at bungling the transfer. It’s not completely clear whether Kim Jong Il is spending it yet.]
There are almost too many levels on which this is repellent for me to know where to start, but let’s start with this: it will not help us disarm Kim Jong Il (in fact, our suspicions about how Kim has been spending the U.N.’s money suggest exactly the opposite (ht)). Returning this money was never a part of the new Agreed Framework Bush’s man, Chris Hill, signed on February 13th. That agreement marked a staggering reversal of a strategy that had once demanded the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of all of North Korea’s nuclear programs before it would receive any regime-sustaining benefits or payoffs. The policy we abandoned had also promised an element of principle: it seemed to suggest that Kim Jong Il’s treatment of his own people would be on the agenda one day, though exactly how was never clear.
The shutdown of one decrepit reactor and the invitation of a few U.N. inspectors were a part of the agreement, but those things did not happen by April 13th, a deadline that came and went two months ago. Here is the 60-day scorecard for North Korea’s compliance, if you can’t already guess what it might show. As of today, 60 days later, none of it has changed.
My guess is that putting a piece of yellow tape over the reactor door and letting in some U.N. inspectors are two concessions that Kim Jong Il will eventually give for the right price. After all, each is easily reversible for any convenient pretext. Call them “pink” lines. The “red” lines that Kim will never cross are his agreement to fully disclose all of his nuclear programs or let us verify the completeness of that disclosure. If I’m right about that, the February agreement really looks like a thinly veiled excuse for both Kim and Bush to “discuss” those matters for the next 18 months, as the press obligingly looks the other way, and as the Bush Administration prepares to exit from office claiming that peace is at hand. In reality, it will have solved nothing, but will have helped to perpetuate a tyranny that uses famine as a weapon of mass terror, manslaughter, or murder; that gasses children with their parents; that treats the handicapped like untermenschen; that kidnaps the innocent citizens of its neighbors and distant nations; that runs gargantuan concentration camps of unspeakable cruelty; and that murders infants it suspects of being racially impure. Even as these topics are politely swept out of our diplomatic conversation, Kim Jong Il will keep building a new plutonium reactor much larger than the one at Yongbyon, he’ll continue his parallel uranium enrichment program, and of course, he’ll keep the bombs he already has.
———————–
Standing next to this, it’s almost insignificant that this transaction appears to violate a section of the criminal code prohibiting transactions in “criminally derived property.” Although an uncharactically uncritical press has said little about it, several of this President’s co-partisans in Congress have just demanded a GAO inquiry into whether this transaction was itself money laundering (Here’s the full text of their letter to the GAO). How much of this money did Kim Jong Il collect by counterfeiting U.S. currency or trafficking in narcotics? The State Department won the bureaucratic struggle before Treasury completed its investigation, but just last fall, a “senior administration official” said of Kim Jong Il’s deposits in BDA, ”It is all one big criminal enterprise. You can’t separate it out.” Treasury’s final report on BDA’s North Korean deposits described their criminal connections and suspicious history in exhaustive detail.
Then there’s the fact that this transaction violates two U.N. resolutions the United States so recently expended such political capital to secure. The latter of those, Security Council Resolution 1718, was passed just last October, after North Korea’s partial success at testing a nuclear weapon and complete success at eventually extorting Dane Geld from us. One of 1718’s provisions required that nations giving money to this Caligula of the East “ensure” that those funds were not used for his personal pleasure or weapons of terror, even as his people live hand-to-mouth to survive each day.
What have we given up for those dubious benefits? A chance to gain everything that Kim Jong Il will never give us, including a lasting peace, by ending Kim Jong Il’s misrule. Treasury’s pressure on North Korea’s money laundering was reported to have “dealt a severe blow to [North Korea’s] economy,” “dried up its financial system,” “brought [its] foreign trade virtually to an end,” and had a “snowballing … avalanche effect” that created “huge pressure” on the regime. The Banco Delta action and Treasury’s implicit threats to take similar actions elsewhere cost Kim Jong Il financial relationships not just in Macau, but in China, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea. Eventually, Kim was forced to start selling off his gold reserves, and even reportedly confided in Chinese President Hu Jintao that he feared the collapse of his government. Without question, that pressure was also our best hope of getting a disarmament deal on favorable and verifiable terms, if we’d only had the courage to insist on them.
———————-
North Korea is only one of the issues on which Bush has lost his sense of direction. Others have noticed the change in a broader sense. The irony here is that Bush appears to be trying to court the favor of those who loathe him because of Iraq, but even he can see that to follow invasion with surrender — and the terror and genocide that would undoubtedly follow — can only assure failure when success is still possible. Instead, he surrenders everywhere else: endless nuclear diplomacy with Iran even as it kills our soldiers, a fruitless giveaway to North Korea, and soon, more largesse for the corrupt and unpopular collection of geriatric terrorists known as Fatah. It’s a wonder that even 29 percent of the people can support an approach that seems calculated to alienate everyone.
In a country that is so sharply polarized between fighting terror and surrendering to it, a middle way is an exceedingly difficult route to chart unless you have an exceptional compass and rudder. Lacking these — and let’s face it, it was either this or John Kerry – the best you can do is choose sides and hope that no more than 45% of the people will despise you. The middle way does not consist of appeasing some terrorists and fighting others. It consists of picking your battles judiciously and fighting with the force of arms only when you must. In the case of North Korea, we were fighting with our soft power, and we were winning, until we threw away so much of what we had gained. Had we applied that power wholeheartedly, we might be talking about how to feed and reconstruct a post-Kim Jong Il North Korea by now. Instead, we’ve assured that Bush’s successor will be tempted to make the same bad decisions he and his predecessors made. That’s why we’ll be talking about this issue until Kim Jong Il’s rule collapses under the weight of his own brutality and inefficiency, or until his ticker gives out from all the excess and binge-drinking.
Our hopes for that latter outcome also dimmed this week after a team of German doctors reportedly flew in, performed either artery or heart surgery on Kim Jong Il, and once again compounded the interest on their nation’s rather substantial debt to history. As they say, “first, do no harm.” So the outcome of this struggle, as with so many others, will be decided by the balance of incompetence. The government that exercises more stupidity than the other will lose, probably dragging about four million innocents down with it, give or take two million.
————————–
There is still a small amount of time for Bush to reverse this disaster. North Korea’s bad faith should be manifest to anyone. Today, North Korea is demanding that the United States abandon its global missile defense plan and drop all sanctions against the regime, presumably even those covering dual-use technology. If North Korea wants additional reasons to stand on its “pink” lines, stall our demands on the “red” lines, and extract even greater concessions, it will link those new demands to its own compliance on disarmament, just as it did the issue of its dirty money. Certainly North Korea will never allow broader inspections of its suspect facilities or re-admit the existence of its uranium program. Any of those occurences should make it clear to anyone amenable to reason that Kim Jong Il will never disarm voluntarily. The seventh year of Bush’s presidency ought to conclusively refute the harshest critics of his North Korea policy for the first six years, as indecisive and halfhearted as it was. Now that we have given Kim Jong Il everything they’ve been saying we should give him, can they explain why he still won’t disarm? Having moved beyond what should be obvious, it will be time to take our soft power campaign back to where it had been, to the next level, and to its logical conclusion.
We must get rid of Kim Jong Il to disarm North Korea of nuclear weapons, but we need not invade North Korea to get rid of Kim Jong Il. Indeed, a reduction of our obsolete force structure in South Korea would be a prudent first step. The last thing we want is to be dragged into another Korean War, and the presence of 29,500 American service members in South Korea is a boon to Kim Jong Il’s propaganda. Today, with the threat of a North Korean invasion diminished, our troops are less needed to defend the South, but are more at risk as hostages to the North’s artillery and missiles. It is time for us to move beyond the military and diplomatic solutions that have failed us. We should instead shift our focus to the political and economic vulnerabilities of Kim Jong Il’s brutal, unpopular, and inefficient regime.
See also: GI Korea’s take.
Update 2: Chris Hill reacts to North Korea’s latest offer — no specifics or dates — to finally invite in U.N. inspectors:
Obviously, it is a welcome step. It’s got to be followed by a number of other steps,” said Hill, speaking to reporters on a trip to the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator. “Everyone has a lot of work to do in the days and weeks ahead.” [WaPo]
That’s nothing. Wait until you see all the work he has to do explaining what the North Koreans actually did to shut the reactor down. An insider source tells me to expect something very superficial and reversible — think yellow tape across the door – though even that concession has been sold for a tyrant’s ransom. Watch.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 12, 2007 at 11:51 pm · Filed under NK Economics, Human Rights, Human Trafficking, U.S. Politics, Anju Links
[Update: The USTR will reportedly call for renegotiation of the entire deal, in part to make the draft FTA compliant with U.S. labor standards. More at the bottom of this post.]
Absolutely stomach-turning.
After all of the Bush Administration’s brave rhetoric about ”forced labor” and ”material support” for ”atrocities,” it ended up signing a free-trade agreement that could very well have allowed slave-made, axis-of-evil Kaesong imports into the United States. Then, because there was no denying the staggering hypocrisy of this, the Administration kept the whole thing a big secret. Until now. Thus dies the Bush Administration’s last reserve of credibility on human rights in North Korea.
The unlikely hero of this story is Democratic Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, a Ways and Means Subcommittee Chairman, who has written a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Susan ”It Won’t Happen” Schwab, thus exposing the secret agreement, called “Annex 22-C,” on what are euphemistically called “outward processing zones:” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 12, 2007 at 10:19 pm · Filed under Counterfeiting, Money Laundering, U.S. Politics
You may recall that in this post and in this piece for Front Page Magazine, I suggested that our own State Deparment’s attempts to return $25 million to the North Korean regime — much or most of it proceeds of crime — could violate U.S. money laundering laws, as well as two U.N. resolutions the United States successfully lobbied for less than a year ago. As it turns out, great minds think alike.
Now, with Russia about to step up to facilitate this faustian transaction, six House GOP foreign policy heavyweights have signed a letter asking the General Accountability Office to determine whether it’s legal. The letter cites the very same sections of the criminal code I’d cited in the pieces linked above (cool!). Among the members is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Here’s the text; my deepest appreciation to both of the readers who forwarded it: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 12, 2007 at 9:59 pm · Filed under Korean Politics
The most surprising news of this Korean political season was buried near the bottom of a news story about the contest between the candidates for the Grand National Party nomination. Only the interesting news wasn’t about the GNP candidates:
The GNP had by far the most support among parties with 52.9 percent. Next was the radical Democratic Labor Party with 10.3 percent, and only then Uri with 9.1 percent. The Democratic Party garnered 5.1 percent, the New Party for Centrist Reform, a[n] Uri splinter group, 3.5 percent, and the People First Party 1 percent. [Chosun Ilbo]
The DLP, a minor party, now leads the ruling party, albeit from a modest position. New readers may not realize that a sizeable portion of the DLP was recently exposed as little more than a North Korean front organization, and yet, the party still polls ten percent.
This reminds me to ask — isn’t Uri dead yet? Whatever happened to those bold plans by Comrade Chung and the Dancing Piggy to form a new leftist “People’s” party from the ashes of Uri? I do not know of another campaign in which a party of significance (which is what you are, by definition, when you’re in charge) was so absent from the public debate. Not that I’m complaining. After all, their actions tell us all we need to know about what they stand for.
Still, you’d think that six months before South Korea elects its next president and National Assembly, its ruling party would be taking advantage of every photo opportunity to trumpet what it’s accomplished in improving relations with North Korea. While I would argue that the improvement consists exclusively of South Korea winning the privilege of giving the North unconditional aid, there are always some who are fooled by mostly meaningless gestures — joint ceremonies, athletic events, the one-time passage of a single train, and tightly controlled hostage reunions. I tend to believe that Uri’s voters have always voted their emotions anyway, especially those centered around race, pride, and nationhood.
In the wake of Agreed Framework 2.0 and its unfolding failure, however, the strain of North Korea failing to throw the South Korean left a bone is showing. Today, North Korea snubs the South Korean government by not inviting its officials to a photo op to commemorate the 2000 summit, and Prime Minister Han Myung-Sook accuses the North of electoral meddling. Now the North is raising tensions along the maritime border, accusing the South of violating it and implicitly threatening violence. This shouldn’t astonish any watcher of North Korea or South Korean politics, of course. South Korean political factions frequently fail to seal strategic internecine alliances before elections. It’s no wonder the ruling party and its testy North Korean ally are having some trouble getting their act together just six months before the next election. Fortunately for them (but less so for the Korean people) the same can be said of their opponents, who will probably win by default alone.
Still, the aid rolls in, although we already know who will eat it. As I’ve suggested before, South Korea should send corn, not rice, because the North Korean elite are the ones who eat rice.
Some Anju Links:
* Things certainly aren’t looking good for the FTA in Congress, are they?
* Here’s your deceptive headline of the week: “Korean Couple Drown ‘Due to Poor English’.” Well, no. They drowned due to an unfortunate combination of a car accident and a flood. Specifically, they drove off a road into a flooded river. After this, explains the Chosun, they called 9-11 and apparently couldn’t explain that their car was filling with water. This is a tragic and horrible situation, and if the 9-11 operator really hung up on them, she should lose her job at the very least. It’s also irrelevant to the cause of death unless the EMT’s could have been dispatched, arrived, launched a boat, and rescued the unfortunate couple in less time than it took for the car to fill with water and sink. In other words, not every sad story has a victim.
* Kim Jong Il Death Watch: Predictably, the South Korean National Intelligence Service says he’s hale and healthy, but I intend to continue circling these rumors like a buzzard.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 10, 2007 at 2:11 pm · Filed under Media Criticism, Terrorism/Iraq
I couldn’t help but feel dismay when I say the byline on this story. Remember this guy? I would not have even looked for the byline, asking myself who wrote this crap, had I not seen this passage:
In eastern Baghdad, a U.S. helicopter fired flares on a crowd on a square, hours after clashes between American troops and Shiite militia that left at least five people dead. The military said the flares were part of an automatic self-defense system.
If I have a greater criticism of the media in Iraq than their tendency to hire local stringers of questionable allegiance, it’s their idea that one can report on military matters despite one’s complete ignorance of them. So for Mr. Hanley’s benefit, I’ll write slowly.
Flares are not weapons. The military does not fire them at people. They are not projectiles, have almost no muzzle velocity, are attached to parachutes, and do not explode or break up on impact. Automatic flare dispensers are attached to aircraft to divert surface to air missiles. Their purpose is defensive. Unfortunately, almost any bright light or reflection can set them off, and when that happens, they can scare people or set fires. The flares only burn for a few seconds, however, so the risk is mitigated unless the aircraft is flying at a very low altitude.
Hanley might have bothered to explain these things, rather than suggest to his readers that the military “fired” some vaguely napalm-like projectiles at crowds of civilians, a suggestion that is nothing less than mendacious. It is the metaphorical equivalent of what he himself charges. But then again, Hanley downplayed and minimized North Korea’s use of refugees as human shields in 1950. Why? Because Hanely is a professional atrocity mongerer who thrives in the shadows of vagueness and ignorance and knows what the Pulitzer Committee likes. Just about every 13 months, Hanley retreads the same old No Gun Ri story as a shocking “new” revelation all over again.
Journalism requires more than the ability to write a clear sentence. It requires the persistence to find the relevant facts and the integrity to report them. Hanley is the sort of hack who puts his entire profession in a bad light because he refuses to do those things.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 10, 2007 at 1:21 am · Filed under Uncategorized
The UN has released the results of a preliminary audit report on the UN Development Program’s operations in North Korea. Those operations were shut down following revelations that the UN gave the regime cash with few conditions and little accountability, and essentially became its “ATM machine.” Among the juicy revelations is that the UN was keeping a large sum of counterfeit “supernotes” in a UN safe. The UN now concedes that the UNDP violated UN rules:
A statement by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who called for the audit in January under pressure from the U.S., said the preliminary report “identifies practices not in keeping with how the United Nations operates elsewhere in the world.” But he insisted that the audit does not back up U.S. charges that UN funding on a large scale was systematically diverted to North Korea’s regime.
The audit, conducted by the internal Board of Auditors at the UN, based its preliminary findings on interviews with UN staff and on reviews of documents in New York. But the auditors did not have access to documents or staff in North Korea, leaving many of their conclusions murky.
Ban said a follow-up visit to North Korea is required in order to get more detailed information. But the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has already rejected such a visit, and critics of the UN said they doubted it would happen. [Chicago Tribune]
The State Department must have had higher hopes for accountability and full disclosure, because it told the Washington Post just where it thinks the money went:
About $3 million in United Nations money intended to help impoverished North Koreans was diverted by the Pyongyang government toward the purchase of property in France, the United Kingdom and Canada, according to a confidential State Department account of witness reports and internal business records. Millions more, the department reported, went to a North Korean institution linked to a bank alleged to handle arms deals.
….
During 2001 and 2002, the UNDP also transferred more than $8 million of other agencies’ funds to the North Korean government, the State Department said. Pyongyang then transferred at least $2.8 million of the UNDP funds to North Korean diplomatic missions in Europe and New York to “cover buildings and houses,” including purchasing buildings in France, the United Kingdom and Canada, the probe found.
The UNDP said the national government received $2.2 million. The agency has no means to determine how North Korea financed its purchase of expensive houses, Morrison said, but he said the UNDP has verified that its money was used to fund its programs.
Worse, some of the gear the North Koreans bought with the aid money had potential military applications: GPS equipment, computer equipment, and a mass spectrometer.
The State Department also alleged that the UNDP paid nearly $2.7 million for “goods and equipment” to a North Korean financial institution that is linked to Tanchon Commercial Bank (also known as Changgwang Credit Bank). President Bush designated that institution in 2005 as the main North Korean financial agent for sales of ballistic missiles and parts used in the assembly of weapons and missiles.
A UNDP official said the State Department has cited to the agency two financial institutions linked to Tanchon — Zang Lok and the International Financial and Trade Company. The UNDP found one payment, for $22,000, sent via Zang Lok in 2004 and none for International Finance.
According to this subsequent AFP report, the U.S. Mission to the UN has essentially confirmed the Post report. The UN claims that the U.S. accusations do not comport with its records, an inconsistency that isn’t that hard to explain.
Some Anju Links:
* We’ve seen a lot of bad reporting come of journalistic tours of North Korea. It takes an exceptional reporter to find humor, compassion, and truth in a carefully guided itinerary designed to suppress those things, but the L.A. Times’s Mark Magnier did it:
Our senior tour guide, whom we nickname “Good Cop,” is in his mid-30s, speaks English well and appears relatively comfortable around foreigners.
Our second tour guide — we nickname him “Mini-Me” after the diminutive character in the Austin Powers films — is a decade younger, betrays no sense of humor and shows a pretty deep distrust of foreigners.
Mini-Me also appears to hold sway over his older colleague, which on the face of it is unusual in Korea’s strong Confucian culture, hinting at superior political credentials and the underlying fear that binds society. “This is the last time I say this to you, no pictures,” he barks in a typical warning. “Or there will be uncomfortable events.”
The two are assisted by a young female guide in training, whose main function seems to be sitting strategically near the back of the bus to keep a close eye on us, and a driver, for a group of seven visitors.
* The Daily NK reports that a tidal wave has killed 100 people along North Korea’s northwest coast:
Receiving information from a people’s unit chairperson, a source in Yongcheon said that “people in Dosan-ri and Bosan-ri in Yongcheon make living by collecting sea shells, and around 70 households were affected.” Another source said that the dead included fishermen fishing in the coastal sea of Cholsan, women, and students collecting seashells.
Collecting seashells in North Korea is done by boarding a boat on a coastal sea as the tide rises. When it ebbs, people get off the boat and collect seashells on the foreshore. As the tide rises again, they need to get back on the boat. This practice caused the death toll to rise. The dead included young students who began school in March, who were helping their parents in other cities make a living.
The disaster happened in March. Although as many as 2,000 others were injured, the regime ordered everyone to cover it up; consequently, the injured received no outside assistance, but a few of the bereaved got new color televisions.
* British American Tobacco is pulling out of North Korea, in another setback to those who believe North Korea is ready for, or can be changed by, major corporate investment. Further proof: North Korea’s largest source of foreign exchange may be counterfeit cigarettes, and you have to wonder how much BAT’s technical assistance may have contributed to that. You will recall that I had a dry-run radio debate with former Ambassador Donald Gregg on the subject. Unlike Gregg, I could see no good in North Korea devoting its agricultural resources to growing anything but food, given what we know about how Kim Jong Il will spend his share of the profits.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 10, 2007 at 1:16 am · Filed under Kim Jong Il
[Update: Mostly dead or slightly alive? The Daily NK passes along an alleged eyewitness report of a recent sighting in which Kim seemed relatively healthy. Once again, I strongly suggest a fresh consignment of whiskey, bacon, and maybe some Italian sausage as a gesture of, you know, friendship. Heck, if we can get him to consume enough of it, we might eventually be able to get some corn into the bellies of his poor subjects. If the report is authentic, it’s telling that the Daily NK can even get to those permitted access to His Porcine Majesty.]
Last September, I passed along reports that Kim Jong Il’s radiator was about plugged up, and that he could barely walk under his own power. For those of us ardently hoping that he’ll be with Saddam very soon, this new report ought to give us some ghoulish delight:
Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s reclusive leader, has been so unwell that he could not walk more than 30 yards without a rest, western governments have been told.
Diplomats in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, are increasingly convinced that the 65-year-old dictator needs heart surgery to restore his apparently flagging health. He has had to be accompanied by an assistant carrying a chair so that, wherever he goes, he can sit and catch his breath.
Speculation about the state of Kim’s health was heightened when a team of six doctors from the German Heart Institute in Berlin flew to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, for eight days last month. Kim, who also suffers from diabetes, was believed by diplomats to have been among those on the list for treatment by the combined medical and surgical team. But a spokesman for the German team said they had only treated three labourers, a nurse and a scientist. [London Daily Telegraph, Sergei Soukhorukov]
Maybe we should make another exception to our “luxury goods” sanctions for bacon.
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