Archive for July, 2007
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 31, 2007 at 7:05 am · Filed under Korean Politics, Anti-Americanism, Terrorism/Iraq
The Taliban have now murdered a second South Korean hostage. I don’t know what I can say about the Taliban that I haven’t already said, other than that the odds are good they can be tracked down for their trials and whatever appropriately miserable fate awaits them in Pol-e-Charki Prison. There have been a lot of stories recently reporting that dozens of their fighters have been killed. Stories like this may or may not indicate a more significant trend. Insurgencies can often survive heavy casualties like this and quickly replace the losses if their clandestine infrastructures — their command, control, and logistics — survive intact. But the Taliban have lost a lot of their top commanders this year, which suggests that the replacement commanders are back-benchers who make mistakes, and those mistakes are getting their people killed. Good. Yesterday, the Fourth Rail reported that the Chairman of the Taliban’s Military Council was killed in a “targeted raid” in Helmand Province, in the Southwest near Iran. If the trend can be sustained, it will cost the Taliban recruits and money. Obviously, the last thing we want to do at a time like this is to free other experienced terrorists or leaders, or give them cash.
That’s what some in South Korea are proposing, although I give great weight to Sonagi’s translations suggesting that the Taliban are catching most of the rage in the chat rooms, as they should. Roh Moo Hyun called for “stern countermeasures,” but then confused matters by adding that he still opposes any rescue attempt — he favors more dialogue, of course. The worst possible kind:
“The government is well aware of how the international community deals with these kinds of abduction cases. But it also believes that it would be worthwhile to use flexibility in the cause of saving the precious lives of those still in captivity and is appealing the international community to do so,” said the statement. [Yonhap]
Which isn’t a very subtle way of saying that he wants Taliban prisoners to be freed, knowing full well that they’d go right back to killing American soldiers and Afghan civilians. You can call Roh may things, but you can’t fault his consistency. Paying protection money has been a bedrock principle of his government from the beginning. And what special distinction does Roh make to suggest that these hostages are more deserving than others as cause to deviate from the principle that we don’t reward terrorism? The United States should quietly and unamiguously refuse to go along with this, but sadly, there’s an excellent chance that we’ll quietly yield to Roh’s pressure instead. We’ve gotten used to this sort of thing recently. Roh would be wise to remember that if things deteriorate in Afghanistan because the Taliban get new blood and money, South Korea is one of the places we may go looking for more forces.
The far-left Democratic Peoples’ Labor Party was less subtle.
July 31, SEOUL, South Korea — Officials of the labor-friendly minor opposition Democratic Labor Party, including party chief Moon Sung-hyun (C), holds a press conference in front of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul on July 31, demanding that the United States take immediate actions to defuse a Korean hostage crisis in Afghanistan. (Yonhap)
Readers will remember that one of the DLP’s two main factions, the so-called “national liberation” faction, was recently revealed as essentially a North Korean front. North’s agents in its midst played a major role in organizing violent anti-American protests that inevitably drew the adoring eye of Cindy Sheehan and the droopy eye of Medea Benjamin.
Why strain so to make this all about America, even when the South Korean people (thankfully) don’t seem to be buying it so far? Two words: election year. Unless Japan lands the Imperial Guard on Tokdo, demonizing America is the only hope the far left has of giving itself a unifying issue. In a sense, the North Korea nuclear issue is off the table for now, which is probably the best thing I can say about Agreed Framework 2.0, as long as it doesn’t last long beyond the election. The left can’t talk about the economy it ruined, either.
[Update: More spinning this into an anti-American issue, via Michelle Malkin]
What you will not see this year is any similar issue being made of China not helping to secure the release of thousands of South Koreans who have been held in North Korea for decades. Remember them? Hardly anyone in South Korea seems to. And unlike the hostages in Afghanistan, who knowingly introduced themselves into a very dangerous place, North Korea’s hostages were kidnapped off South Korean beaches and fishing boats, or are soldiers the North had agreed to return to their families in the 1953 Armistice. Not that I support paying ransom to Kim Jong Il, but if billions are being paid anyway, wouldn’t calling it ransom be a step in the right direction?
There is another alternative. If Roh would threaten to introduce signficant combat forces to Afghanistan if the hostages aren’t released promptly — I mean a battalion or more of ROK Special Forces for at least a year – that would be a significant deterrent. Those forces should not be sent on a mission of raid, rampage, and revenge, which will only make more recruits for the Taliban in the long run. They should take responsibility for stabilizing a limited area of battle space that the Taliban are currently using for recruiting or growing dope. Roh should also realize that the Taliban take hostages in part for propaganda reasons, and that they are watching how their actions are viewed. So far, they’ve generally caught a break, and the captives themselves have been the objects of far more derision. If South Korean government would vocally demonize the Taliban and ignite popular outrage against them — and we know they can do that, don’t we? — the Taliban might conclude that this enterprise is doing more harm than good. Talk of yielding to their demands will only get more people kidnapped and killed.
[Update 2: GI Korea makes a great point: “This whole thing is especially ironic when one considers the Korean government’s attitude the past five years of wanting “independent diplomacy” and a “more equal relationship” with the US, but when it is time to act like a grown up nation it is back to the were the “helpless Korea” diplomacy and America needs to do something.”]
See also:
* “Four North Koreans who sought asylum in South Korea after entering the Danish Embassy in Vietnam earlier this month have been handed over to South Korean officials in a third country, a U.S. government-funded radio station reported Tuesday.” [Yonhap]
* North Korea has held an “election,” and Yonhap helpfully passes along that “all voters across the country took part in the election with ardent revolutionary enthusiasm.” Yonhap’s coverage of internal North Korean events recently has taken on a Rodong-lite flavor, and this report of how Kim Jong Il voted is also passed along pretty much unleavened.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 30, 2007 at 6:29 am · Filed under Korean Politics
It’s not an uncommon event for South Korean political parties to split and re-unite during election years, and as you may recall, Kim Dae Jung’s Millenium Democratic Party looked hopelessly split this time five years ago (before it successfully capitalized on anti-Americanism to eke out a narrow win). It’s anyone’s guess what this hopelessly confusing picture will look like next week, so instead of wasting time on analysis that will be meaningless tomorrow, here’s a brief chronology of what’s happening:
July 24th:
Lawmakers walked away from the crumbling Uri Party yesterday as well as a recently formed party, to join a liberal coalition that has not yet been named, party officials said. Fifteen more lawmakers left Uri, once the governing party. Another four left the Moderate Unified Democratic Party, formed by a merger between former Uri and Democratic Party members.
With the 19 additional lawmakers, the unnamed coalition has 64 seats. That outnumbers Uri, which has 50 seats. The new party is expected to be established by Aug. 5. When that happens, the new coalition will become the second-biggest bloc in the National Assembly.
The 19 defectors will join forces with presidential aspirant Sohn Hak-kyu, currently running first in the polls among liberal contenders, as well as candidates backed by leading civic groups. More legislators are expected to join, including several current Moderate Unified Democrats. Lawmakers with that group criticized the new coalition, calling it the second Uri Party because most Uri defectors chose to move there.
July 25th:
The threatened departure of Kim Hong-up, son of former president Kim Dae-jung, means the country’s newest party could be one of its most short-lived. If Kim joins the yet-unnamed new liberal coalition party, at least 20 lawmakers from the Moderate Unified Democratic Party are expected to follow him.
Park Sang-cheon, one of the heads of the Moderate Unified Democratic Party, tried to stop the exodus. Now, he is losing hope. Kim was once one of Park’s strongest supporters. However, he no longer favors Park’s insistence that supporters of President Roh Moo-hyun are not welcome in the Moderate Unified Democratic Party. The party, led by Park, was a merger between Kim Dae-jung’s Democratic Party and Uri Party defectors who wanted to separate themselves from Roh’s influence.
July 27th:
The dreams of a single coalition of liberals took a dent yesterday.
Chough Soon-hyung, the former Democratic Party member known for leading the unsuccessful impeachment drive three years ago against President Roh Moo-hyun, announced yesterday he was going to run for president. And he said it would not be with the yet-unnamed liberal coalition, at least in part because it is welcoming lawmakers loyal to Roh.
“A coalition of liberals should be a merger that can save the nation,” Chough said, saying the country is “in crisis” because Roh is intervening in elections and restricting the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press.
Chough is a member of the Moderate Unified Democratic Party, which currently has about 30 members. Many are former Democratic Party members. However, as many as 21 MUD Party members are expected to flock to the new coalition, which could have 80 lawmakers or more.
If you can make any sense of that, give yourself a cookie.
See also:
* The Joongang Ilbo has a cell phone interview with one of the Korean hostages in Afghanistan.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 28, 2007 at 12:49 pm · Filed under Korean Politics, Terrorism/Iraq, U.S. Politics
I have resigned myself to a Lee Myung Bak presidency in Korea, something I can do without much difficulty because (a) there will be much amusement, hilarity, scandal, and great blog material, and (b) because I’m not South Korean [Update: or North Korean].
Superficially, Lee is the furthest “right” of the major candidates, and while South Korea’s idea of “right” may not be my thing, it’s the linear opposite of South Korea’s idea of ”left,” which I unreservedly despise. Concepts of “left” and “right” don’t translate well from Korean. I’ve noticed that American liberals don’t often like Roh; they find him generally inept and too cozy with Kim Jong Il’s atrocities. American conservatives wince at Lee’s love of massive quasi-Stalinist public works projects, his lack of personal gravitas, and the sense that as he drifts off to sleep each night, he dreams of waving at columns of tanks from a reviewing stand. That, or columns of scantily clad maidens in tall white boots (maybe we have more in common than I’d thought).
Still, we can take comfort from knowing that a Lee Myung Bak presidency will not be a Roh Moo Hyun presidency. Roh’s historical legacies have been irreparable damage to its highly beneficial relationship to the United States, a creeping Finlandization by China, and the lion’s share of a seven-billion dollar contribution to a putting nukes in the hands of the world’s most ruthless oligarchy.
President Roh Moo-hyun on Saturday told South Korean expatriates in New Zealand that preventing North Korea’s possible collapse is a “very important strategy” for our government because the North “will never wage war unless attacked or collapsing.” Seoul is therefore “concerned” about the suspension of humanitarian aid to the North under UN Security Council Resolution 1718, he added. [Chosun Ilbo]
If the former human rights lawyer has actually read 1718 (full text here), he must have meant to say “unconditional cash payments,” because there is a specific exception for humanitarian aid in 1718. Not that Roh really cares much either way in practice, because his government has ignored 1718 since Day One. I’m unwilling to believe Roh doesn’t know this, but it’s often hard to tell whether Roh is being dishonest or simply ingorant. We know that Lee is dishonest and no intellectual, but hardly anyone doubts his guile. I sense that Koreans have grown weary of fresh faces. They want guile again.
The hopes of those who voted for Roh were once so much higher. Five years ago, Roh was … a candidate so unpopular within his own party that he’d caused it to split, but four and a half years ago, he was the fresh-faced boy who would lead Korea to reunification by throwing off the Yankee yoke. Today, Korea is more dangerous and divided than ever, and South Korea is more vulnerable to the whims of foreign powers, not less. Roh has often been compared to Jimmy Carter, a fresh-faced American boy who who promised a post-Watergate return to clean government and a quasi-pacifist foreign policy focused on human rights. Clean government did not ensue (Bert Lance, Hamilton Jordan), and overseas, the Carter years were boom times for dictatorship and terrorism. It was Iran, a problem nation that has been kidnapping and killing Americans ever since, that finally broke Carter of his illusory ideas about American power, its uses, and the importance of sustaining it.
So it tends to go with elevating fresh faces to high office. What has me thinking about this is Barack Obama, who managed to say something I approved of last week, which is what politicians try to do in election years. Since then, he’s taken a lot of criticism for his enthusiastic youbetcha after being asked whether he would “be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.” A voter unfamiliar with diplomacy may not see the naivete of this, and an especially savvy voter could even see opportunity in such a meeting, since it could be a bold way to challenge an unpopular dictator on his home turf, including in the eyes of his own people, and bring attention to that dictator’s worst abuses in the very way that Bill Richardson never would. It might have been possible to deny that Obama had shown himself as Not Ready, until this:
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.
“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea,” he said.
Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, said it’s likely there would be increased bloodshed if U.S. forces left Iraq. [AP]
A moment later, Obama denied that U.S. forces would leave “precipitiously” because there would be other U.S. forces in the region, forces Obama presumes would neither invite nor inspire yet more terrorism or casualties. Does anyone think that President Obama, having declared Iraq a hopeless disaster (and having thus helped make it so) would re-invade for the same reason he just told us wouldn’t prevent him from withdrawing? Does anyone think the people of this nation or any other will look favorably this leap from the frying pan to the holocaust? James Taranto adds:
Mr. Obama is engaging in sophistry. By his logic, if America lacks the capacity to intervene everywhere there is ethnic killing, it has no obligation to intervene anywhere–and perhaps an obligation to intervene nowhere. His reasoning elevates consistency into the cardinal virtue, making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Further, he elides the distinction between an act of omission (refraining from intervention in Congo and Darfur) and an act of commission (withdrawing from Iraq). The implication is that although the U.S. has had a military presence in Iraq since 1991, the fate of Iraqis is not America’s problem.
Seldom are the unfitness and its consequence captured in a single frame so far before their realization. Obama’s campaign seems to have hit its high water mark, although Hillary Clinton is so widely disliked by so many voters that we can eliminate the possibility that her campaign will “catch fire.” This certainly is a depressing pair of prospects, unless your name is Al Gore (yes, he will run). Much depends on what happens next month, when every thug in Iraq will launch an all-out offensive in anticipation of General Petraeus’s report. Although al-Qaeda is hated by almost all Iraqis, and despite the fact that its military capability is evaporating on the battlefield, it could still succeed at making Iraq the next Cambodia, making Afghanistan the next Iraq, and making America the next Israel. But they can’t do it without the help of invertebrate American politicians.
[Update: Obama, sensing that he has hurt himself, spins tough.]
Which brings us back to North Korea, where Roh Moo Hyun offers his all-inclusive list of circumstances — “unless attacked or collapsing” – in which Kim Jong Il might go for broke. It seems unlikely that a collapsing regime would try to save itself by drawing in yet more enemies, but Roh omits a far likelier circumstance: a clear signal that American power was paralyzed and unwilling to deter the North, even from the air or sea. The worst possible circumstance would be to realize that only after a North Korean first strike aimed at U.S. forces, done with the calculated intent of knocking us out of the war politically. Whether this would turn out to be a miscalculation is debatable, but irrelevant. Our objective is to increase our power to deter at the lowest possible cost by quietly projecting strength and reducing vulnerabilities that undermine that power. Barack Obama’s naive view of our predatory world could be the greatest of them. The potential costs are incalculable.
See also:
* North Korean soldiers are turning to traditional highway robbery. Theft and marauding by soldiers is not a new trend in North Korea, and it’s difficult to know whether it’s a rising one.
* Their government prefers more organized methods. It has summarily demanded a 15% raise in the “wages” paid to the workers at Kaesong, although it’s not clear how much of it actually trickles down to the workers after Kim Jong Il takes his cut, which would naturally follow an expensive reconversion to North Korean won at the official exchange rate.
* If it’s censorship to arrest someone for burning a flag or immersing a cross in urine, why isn’t it censorship to arrest a man who immersed a Koran in a toilet — at a university, no less? There are times when I think there’s less freedom of thought at our universities than in most medium security prisons.
* The Daily NK that North Korea is stepping up the brazenness of its songun (”military first”) propaganda in the South. How adherents of that sort of aggressive, militaristic, repressive thinking ever got the name “peace activists” baffles me.
* Congratulations to the Iraqi soccer team on winning the Asia cup. Its last two big wins were against South Korea and Saudi Arabia.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 27, 2007 at 6:16 am · Filed under China, Censorship
I wanted to alk-tay about ina-Chay, but as it turns out, they’re listening to everything we say here.
China’s intelligence services are gearing up for next year’s Beijing Olympics, gathering information on foreigners who might mount protests and spoil the nation’s moment in the spotlight.
Government spy agencies and think tanks are compiling lists of potentially troublesome foreign organizations, looking beyond the human rights groups long critical of Beijing, security experts and a consultant familiar with the effort said.
They include evangelical Christians eager to end China’s religious restrictions, activists wanting Beijing to use its oil-buying leverage with Sudan to end the strife in Darfur and environmental campaigners angry about global warming.
The effort is among the broadest intelligence-collection drives Beijing has taken against foreign activist groups, often known as non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. It aims to head off protests and other political acts during an Olympics the communist leadership hopes will boost its popularity at home and China’s image abroad. [AP, Charles Hutzler]
It’s going to get interesting if thousands of foreign tourists who happen to be politically active on Darfur, North Korea, Tibet, religious freedom, or human rights are denied visas or turned away on arrival, or if they’re followed, harassed, or arrested when they’re there. Can Beijing stop every poster and leaflet from getting into every event? Can they keep sufficient control over the foreign media to prevent multiple small “guerrilla” demonstrations from being staged before cameras? What kind of publicity will it mean for China when the police arrest them and further publicize their causes? The AP found one of the Thought Police to give this disingenuous response:
“Demonstrations of all kinds are a concern, including anti-American demonstrations,” said the consultant, who works for Beijing’s Olympic organizers and asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The government, he said, is “trying to find out what kinds of NGOs will come. … What are their plans?”
I have to wonder how likely it is that anti-American demonstrators would pick Beijing as their ideal site, unless of course the Chinese government decided to stage anti-American protests as a distraction. I certainly don’t put that past them.
What we are talking about here is peaceful speech and assembly, things that are tolerated everywhere in the civilized world. We’re about to find out just how far China will go to silence it. What we’ve seen is that China is increasingly prepared to censor views it doesn’t like right here in the United States. Yet ironically, stories like this are starting to make me more glad than disappointed that Beijing was chosen as the site of the Olympics. No, I wouldn’t go. No, I wouldn’t urge others to go. Yes, I hope the games are a financial and public relations flop of historic proportions for China. But I see the potential for this to plant revolutionary seeds in Chinese society and publicize the very issues that China want to remove from the public discussion.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 26, 2007 at 9:32 am · Filed under Anti-Americanism, Korean Society, Terrorism/Iraq, Religion
By now you’ve heard that the Taliban have murdered their first Korean hostage, and so Korea has now wheeled as one in spontaneous rage at the Taliban, as though they’d issued postage stamps with images of Tokdo, right? Well, not exactly. There are many things I could say about the reactions of Roh Moo Hyun, his government, and his country’s media, but Robert Kohler has pretty much already said those things, and a few others.
Two lessons bears repeating: first, when trying to predict Korea’s reactions to any given event, never underestimate Korea’s instinct for anti-Americanism; second, when dealing with South Korea — as a few of our generals have learned – being nice gets you nowhere. Those two lessons are extensions of one principle that’s not uniquely applicable to Korea: people tend to show their “courage” by standing up to people they know won’t hurt them. Korea just happens to have a special talent for this.
As for a wave of anti-Americanism that some “experts” in Korea are threatening, I’m hoping they’re right. The diplomatic classes of both nations have done a fairly expert job of papering over the depth of anti-Americanism there, and I’d be perfectly content to see a reaction that outrageously irrational get enough press for a few U.S. presidential candidates to start talking about troop withdrawals (remember this?). First, such talk would almost immediately shut up some of Korea’s professional demagogues, whose conniving calculations we tend to underestimate. They know what a precipitous withdrawal could do to their economy. Second, a major U.S. troop presence in Korea doesn’t serve sufficient U.S. interests to be worth its financial cost, or to be worth tying soldiers down where they’re no longer needed. Third, our troop presence is doing us more political and diplomatic harm than it does us diplomatic and military good. Finally, our troop presence puts American hostages within the range of hostile guns and thus limits our options in dealing with North Korea.
As for the Taliban, they must be thinking that they chose the perfect hostages. Not only were their captives turned on by their own people, their government tried to engineer ransom payments to the terrorists and throw all of the blame on their American enemy (my thanks to Michelle Malkin for linking this humble blog). Meanwhile, hardly a word of complaint about the Taliban can be heard in Seoul for, you know, kidnapping and/or murdering Korean civilians.
I’d have preferred to link to more information about the murdered man, Bae Hyung-Kyu, but oddly enough, no one is really writing much about him, and I still don’t have a clear idea of just what his group was doing in Afghanistan. He had a young daughter, and as of this article’s publication, she still didn’t know that her father was dead. Sometimes, you just have to reconcile yourself to contradiction, and for me, this is one of those times. I can simultaneously see this murder for the tragedy it is, chide the hostages from my safe home for putting themselves and others in danger through their choice of venues and methods, and still believe that paying ransom and freeing terrorists only begets more tragedy. And what I’m left with is the breathtaking intolerance of murdering someone for proposing to worship God in a different way than their death cult demands. No layer of hell is low enough them. I wish them a swift arrival.
See also:
* Not wanting to feel even momentarily upstaged at the game of extorting money from South Korea, the industry leader has stomped away (again) from talks aimed at reducing its massive military buildup along the DMZ. These talks have been going on for years without a perceptible reduction in the military threat, and for good reason.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 25, 2007 at 6:54 am · Filed under Refugees, Activism
This is from LiNK’s latest newsletter:
As the number of North Korean refugees arriving in the US for resettlement increases, we can also expect increasing numbers of unaccompanied refugee minors (children or teenagers), many of them orphaned entirely, and all who will be starting new lives in America.
We are seeking families to become foster families for these children that can help to serve as a bridge between two very different cultures. Families with a Korean-American background or Korean-speaking ability are a plus. If you are interested, please email jimin (at) linkglobal.org, with the subject line “Resettlement Families”, as well as your location.
We are also seeking local mentors, translators and general “buddies” to volunteer at resettlement centers across the US, to befriend and to help transition newly arrived North Koreans. If you are interested in volunteering in your local area to help resettle refugees, please send a resume and a cover letter to jimin (at) linkglobal.org, explaining your interest and experience; subject line “Resettlement Volunteer”.
That implies that more North Koreans are coming into the United States than the media have reported. There could be understandable reasons for keeping this quiet. My own meetings with North Koreans have been, well, mixed, as you’d expect with any group of individual human beings, but a high percentage of the refugees (but not all) seemed skittish around people where were not ethnic Koreans, maybe because of some of the propaganda they’ve been raised with. In any event, it looks like an interesting opportunity, and potentially a way to make lifelong friendships.
See also:
* My most ardent reader sent a link to this interesting BBC photo essay from the North, which at least tries to pierce the veil of Pyongyang propaganda monuments.
* Not even Tokyo Rose or Lord Haw Haw would have given us propaganda this hackneyed and loathesome. The fact that writing, thinking, and psychology this hideous have an audience as wide as they do speaks badly of our society.
* “The Taliban takes no responsibility for the killing.“ Far too many of us seem to have implicitly accepted this, but that will change if the Taliban carries out its latest threat to kill its South Korean hostages. Only death cults murder innocents in the names of their gods. This should only deepen the world’s contempt for this gang of cultist thugs, these modern-day Ass assins, and be further evidence of the need for us to eradicate it. If Roh Moo Hyun had an ounce of statesmanship in his wrung-out scrotum, he’d publicly promise Hamid Karzai 100 ROK Special Forces for every hostage murdered.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 24, 2007 at 6:37 am · Filed under Abductions, Activism
The Korean War Abductees Research Institute (KWARI) will hold a press conference next Thursday, July 26, 2007, at 2 p.m. in the Zenger Room of the National Press Club in Washington. The subject will be whether the return of abducted South Koreas should be a prerequisite to a North-South peace treaty. It’s a question you can hardly believe anyone would have to ask — isn’t the first prerequisite to peace that each nation ends its continuing offenses against the other nation’s people? Or so you would think.
Lee Mi-Il – a tiny, frail, and dignified woman whose father was abducted during the Korean War – is the President of KWARI. Lee has dedicated much of her life to getting her father back. I’ve heard her speak before, and she’s a very compelling witness. You can read the full press release here.
In case you were wondering, the man at right isn’t Lee’s father. His name is Kim Yong Nam, and he was kidnapped off a beach near his home as a boy in 1978. He was recently granted a brief and tortuous ”reunion” with his family, on condition that he make up some kakamamie story that the North Koreans “rescued” him. Here, you see him at the moment he was pried away from his brief, tightly supervised visit with a family he hadn’t seen in decades. It’s things like this that leave me unimpressed with so-called “family reuinions” between North and South as a means of engagement. Anything arranged with the North Korean regime will be too controlled and scripted to be worth the ransom the regime will demand. The answer is to demand that North Korea let these people go.
That segues us to a string of messages I’ve exchanged with Sam Kim, President of the Korean Church Coalition. Sam forwards YouTube videos of the Let My People Go events (here, then click “more from this user”). He claims 200-400 attended the various events, and the rally on Capitol Hill looks to have had a strong turnout. I couldn’t guess at a specific number, the crowd looks like at least 200 people. One thing they did right was to design a good banner, order plenty of them, and ask the demonstrators to hold them up. It makes the crowd look bigger, it has more visual impact, and it lets any passing driver get the point in just a quick glance.
See also:
* Things Fall Apart. A seven-story building has collapsed in Hyesan, killing 20, mostly kids and old people.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 22, 2007 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Korean Society, Books & Films, Deprogramming
Back in the 1980s, one of my Russian friends who was then in her early 20s, worked as an interpreter at a joint venture between North Korea and the Soviet Union. She was by no means a prude herself …, but she was somewhat shocked by the amount of sexual banter which her female North Korean colleagues engaged in. For the entire summer when the girls were on their own, they tried to learn as much as possible about the sexual habits of the then Soviet youngsters, and also graphically discussed related subjects among themselves. These sex-crazed North Korean girls ….
But that is another story. At least I have your attention.
For the last year, I’ve been waiting to read Dr. Andrei Lankov’s new book, which is about what all the other North Korea books are not about: daily life. It does not disappoint, and I’ve found it hard to close and put down. Lankov acquired much of his material by living in North Korea among the North Korean people. Without minimizing the regime’s repressive nature, Lankov shows us that the North Koreans aren’t really made of diodes and servos after all. At least in Pyongyang where his experiences seem to have been concentrated, life is still … life. By helping us understand the human motivations that drive North Koreans, he helps us to find ways to reach them.
Lankov doesn’t believe North Korea’s problems will be solved as long as Kim Jong Il runs it. He believes in the power of subversion – that North Korea will only change when we expose the ordinary human needs of its people to a world in which so many more of those needs can be met. I strongly agree. But I don’t agree that it can be done without plenty of smuggling, subversive broadcasting, and in the end, violent resistance in some form. Dr. Lankov has graciously agreed to have the Great Regime Change Debate here. Get your own copy and join us, hopefully in about two weeks.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 21, 2007 at 10:11 pm · Filed under NK Economics, U.S. Law, Human Trafficking
A Korean American businessman has been arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation on charges of hiding his activities as a spy for the South Korean government, AP reported Thursday. According to court documents obtained by the wire agency, Park Il-woo, also known as Steve Park, was a legal resident in the U.S. for the past 20 years and conducted business with North Korea. Park provided information he obtained from his frequent trips to North Korea to the South Korean government in return for payments. [Chosun Ilbo]
I know others have already blogged about this story, but something about that name, Steve Park, sounded familiar, so I searched my archives … and sure enough. According to this post from last May, “Steve Park” is the importer of Pyongyang Soju, the latest great breakthrough in trade with North Korea. OK, you say, “Steve Park” has to be a common name. The thought occurred to me, but our friend at NK Econ Watch (a very nice guy with a great blog) helps us close that loophole neatly. Barring some exceptional coincidence, it’s the same guy. His activities on behalf of some as-yet unnamed foreign government — want to take any wild guesses? – turn out to involve items that raise some scary dual-use issues:
For example, during a recorded telephone call, Park relayed to a South Korean official working in Manhattan that officials of the other foreign government had asked Park to help them obtain certain items, including insecticides and anesthetics. However, the complaint alleges, on three occasions in 2005 and 2007, Park gave false information to FBI agents regarding his contacts with or knowledge of certain South Korean officials. [DOJ Press release, hat tip to Mins036, who is an excellent new addition to the Marmot’s Hole]
Here’s an interesting question to consider: if South Korea was sharing Park’s information with the FBI or the CIA, why would we arrest Park and burn someone who was an indirect source for us? Unless … naw. Couldn’t be. Or could it? The Feds executed search warrants at Park’s apartment, which may yield some phone numbers and e-mails. I sure would love to know which Korean diplomats’ tours are about to be curtailed before they’re quickly and quietly ushered off to cush posts in Italy or Monaco.
Contrary to what the Chosun Ilbo reports, Park was arrested not for espionage, but for lying to investigators and violating our old friend, the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act, found at section 951 of the U.S. Criminal Code. The FARA requires that you register with the Justice Department when you act at the direction of, or under the control of, a foreign government. That’s the same law under which Tongsun Park was convicted for acting as an unregistered Iraqi agent during Oil-for-Food. Steve Park is now staring at ten years in Allenwood, so I hope he has a better lawyer than Tongsun Park did.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 21, 2007 at 8:58 pm · Filed under Six-Party Talks, WMD, Abductions
The irony of North Korea calling another nation “fascist” can’t be appreciated by those who are missing that gene, confined within North Korea, or both. Maybe this is an f-bomb that could only be built in a place where abductees are no more hostages than their captors. It’s probable that the author’s irony was completely unintentional – that he was oblivious to what Earthlings would think when they read his words:
The search [of Chongryon headquarters] was part of an investigation into the abduction of two children more than three decades ago, Shinyo said.
Pyongyang described the raid as a fascistic in excerpts of North Korea’s complaint provided by the Japanese embassy. North Korea also complained about the forced sale of property belonging to the organization.
“The Abe group’s anti-Chongryon campaign has reached such a reckless and hideous phase that it can never be tolerated,” the North Korean Embassy said in a statement earlier this month. [Reuters, Claudia Parsons]
When I say that North Korea will inevitably invent some reason to stall or renege on any inconvenient obligation, the dismantling of the crime syndicate known as Chongryon is a perfect example of just such a contrived provocation. To Pyongyang, the state’s right to kidnap the citizens of other nations off the streets of their home towns is unalienable. Ditto the right to counterfeit our currency and have us launder the proceeds. But of course, handing over kidnapped Japanese, Thais, Lebanese, Dutch, Chinese, Italians, Romanians, French, or South Koreans wouldn’t really cost North Korea anything. For Japan, however, getting its people back looks like it will cost plenty:
Japan will court “disaster'’ if it continues to demand an accounting of its abducted citizens, North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator said today.
“Japan is creating a crisis that infringes on the rights of our people,'’ North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan told reporters at the Beijing Capital International Airport before departing for Pyongyang. “We warned Japan that if it takes one step further, disaster may occur.'’
A rational mind is tempted to think that those people — the ones who are still alive and the ones who aren’t — are expendable to Kim Jong Il, and that he’d probably let them go for the right price. That’s something you can’t say about the nuclear weapons for which he exchanged the lives of two million North Koreans.
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No wonder the last round of six-party talks is being characterized as “a deadlock” by one British newspaper. My money is on that word getting a lot more traffic soon, since despite Chris Hill’s best efforts, North Korea looks to have run out of things it’s willing to give up. In Japan, they’re even saying that Hill is “helping North Korea drag its feet.” Hill can’t be ingorant of the fact that North Korea has a timeline of its own, one that’s focused on the early days of 2009. Having failed to extract any earlier dates – benchmarks, if you prefer – Hill walked away and said this:
“My opinion remains the same — that all of this is quite doable by the end of the year,” he said, referring to the second stage of the deal. “Further fuel oil is contingent on further denuclearisation.” [Reuters]
The best you could say of this is that it could be more discouraging. If Hill means that any further concessions on our part are contingent on North Korea being truthful with us for once, it would certainly be less bad than the sort of thing I think Hill is actually willing to do. To give due credit, the Administration is also making a point of using the word “uranium.” The best analysis of what’s likely to happen next comes from the L.A. Times:
Analysts say they’re not surprised that the talks have bogged down, given the number of problems on the horizon. “I refer to these as the ‘five doubts,’ ” said Scott Snyder, senior associate with the Asia Foundation in Washington.
One is whether the Bush administration is willing to move far enough along on normalizing relations to satisfy North Korea. The communist country is pushing to be taken off the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism as soon as possible. That could take time, however, because such a move would face significant opposition from critics in Washington and beyond. [L.A. Times, Mark Magnier]
Safe to say, barring some meaningful shift toward making North Korea a minimally transparent society, I’ll join in that.
Ditto on the trade and economic front, analysts say, as the U.S. grapples with whether and how quickly to ease restrictions against the North outlined under the Trading With the Enemy Act.
Another big concern is whether North Korea will come clean in any declaration — particularly about its enriched-uranium program, which is not easily subject to satellite detection and therefore relatively easy to hide.
Analysts say they also expect differences between Pyongyang and the five other parties over how and what constitutes a “dismantling” of the Yongbyon facility. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, said this week that North Korea had closed five main nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, completing the first stage of the February deal. Making them inoperable, however, is far more difficult.
Finally, analysts say they will be watching closely to see whether North Korea demands a civilian light-water reactor before it completes its end of the bargain or finds other ways to raise the ante.
Give that man a cookie! And from the looks of things, that ought to tie things up for good, long while.
[Update: The Joongang Ilbo reports that North Korea’s interpretation of the deal (the next link after this update has the full text) may be that its nuclear bombs aren’t “nuclear programs” that have to be declared. Regarding the light-water reactors, here’s an exact quote from North Korea’s negotiator, Kim Gye-Gwan:
“What we are now discussing is the issue of current nuclear plans,” Kim said. “In detail, that means the shutdown and disablement of the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. In order for the ultimate dismantlement to come, a light-water reactor has to be provided to the North.”
In other words, the North Korea will keep Yongbyon ”sealed” yet fully capable of being restarted at any moment until we finish building them two light-water reactors. That’s a term that simply isn’t in this agreement. It’s also the exact same way the North Koreans reneged on the September 19, 2005 deal … on September 20, 2005.
No wonder Chris Hill wants to bury this difference in “working groups.” That strategy could work for an arguably peripheral issue like the abductions of Japanese citizens, but it won’t work here. This could be it for Agreed Framework 2.0. End update.]
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So really, our problem is that despite signing an agreement, not much has been agreed. That’s about what I said back in February when I pronounced this the Not-Quite-Agreed Framework. And the reason why we can’t agree on details is that Kim Jong Il still holds onto secrecy, hostility, and extortion as though they were the keys to his personal survival. Those are all things our policy toward the North has incentivized:
At the heart of the negotiations is whether Pyongyang wants to end its isolation and join the rest of the world or is playing more diplomatic games. The Bush administration has displayed more flexibility in recent months by sending Hill to Pyongyang in June and helping release more than $20 million in blocked North Korean funds from a Macao bank.
“North Korea is often its own worst enemy,” said Peter Beck, analyst in Seoul with the International Crisis Group, a think tank. “They’re the master of playing a bad hand well. But they’re also the master of overplaying their hand.”
I don’t find those perspectives agreeable in all aspects, but I have to admit that they sound about right.
See also, YouTube Edition:
* Speaking of f-bombs. Very off-color, and very funny: You’ve been warned.
* I hope nothing this bad has happened to you this week. I can say that much, but just barely.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 20, 2007 at 12:13 pm · Filed under Korean Society, Religion
They were members of a church group, and readers may recall other church groups from South Korea have also ventured into some very dangerous places.
Taliban gunmen abducted at least 18 members of a South Korean church group in southern Afghanistan, and a purported spokesman for the Islamic militia said Friday it will question them about their activities in Afghanistan before deciding their fate.
The Koreans were seized Thursday in Ghazni province as they were traveling by bus from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar, said Ali Shah Ahmadzai, the provincial police chief.
“We are investigating, who are they, what are they doing in Afghanistan,” Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a purported Taliban spokesman, told The Associated Press by satellite telephone. “After our investigation, the Taliban higher authorities will make a decision about their fate. Right now they are safe and sound.”
The South Koreans’ bus driver, released late Thursday, said there were 18 women and five men on the bus, Ahmadzai said. The Taliban spokesman said 15 women and three men were seized. The discrepancy could not be immediately clarified. [AP, Amir Shah]
Let’s all hope these people get home safely, so we can ask them what the hell they were doing there.
See also:
* Would the Muslim world be so tense if this fatwa had gained wider acceptance?
Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007. [Foreign Policy]
I don’t really know if I want to touch that one, beyond imagining the lawsuits if anyone suggested that here.
* I hate them even more than Illinois Nazis, but you can’t deny that they’re the terminus of a logical progression that has considerable cross-DMZ appeal. Others have noticed, too. Leaving aside the superficial question of fashion, these guys have an uncomfortable proximity to the mainstream of their society.
* Rumors of Kim Jong Il’s failing health continue to spread among North Koreans. In a society where news is so controlled, the mere propogation of rumor has a significance detached from their veracity. That said, I hope the rumors are true that we’ll be rid of Kim Jong Il sooner rather than later. As unpopular as I suspect Kim Jong Il to be in most segments of North Korean society, his death would be an irrecoverable loss to the regime’s ideological cohesion.
* Michael Yon has a moving post about former enemies turning their guns on al Qaeda and experimenting with self-government. They’re not laying down their arms; better, they’re agreeing to point them at the right people, put on uniforms, and become a part of their country’s still-rickety security structure. The experiment is clearly fragile, and Iraq’s current leadership may not be up to the task. A new round of elections may even be in order. Still, this kind of Sunni participation in Iraqi self-government and its attendant restoration of security is an absolute prerequisite to any non-genocidal resolution of Shiite-Sunni differences.
Update:
Those South Koreans who ventured into Taliban territory have inadvertently hastened the apocalypse by creating rare agreement between me and Joseph Steinberg, though his use of the word “traitor” is a predictable excess. My sympathy for these folks just declined by at least half. It’s one thing to push against the boundaries of medieval intolerance, but it’s another thing entirely to throw yourself at its mercy and then expect to be ransomed out or exchanged for Taliban thugs who would go free to murder again. If the actions of these people were as courageous as I was willing to assume, then they assumed that risk. Not surprisingly for Roh Moo Hyun, he speaks and acts as though he’d gladly pay ransom or meet the terrorists’ demands if could. Roh thus helps to assure that there will be more hostages and beheadings in the future.
Still, I can’t understand why some people seem so gleeful about this. Over at the Marmot’s Hole, the venom of some of the comments is just hard to understand without engaging in amateur psychology. The hostages have quickly become surrogates for some pretty powerful anti-Christian sentiment. What’s striking about the discussion is that the Taliban’s murder, kidnapping, intolerance, and ignorance never even became a subject. It was lost among the venom directed at the victims. I grant that these Koreans don’t seem to be adherents of an especially open-minded or intellectual strain of Christianity, and Christianity in Korea can seem annoyingly messianic to a non-believer (worst example: an obnoxious attempt to convert my wife at her mother’s funeral). In the comments below, I’ve conceded the possibility that the missionaries’ motives were more psychological than altruistic, depending on what they were actually doing there.
But let’s keep some perspective here. At worst, the missionaries practiced a far more benign form of fanaticism than their captors. So why are the Taliban getting off without a scratch in this discussion? One commenter actually compares them to bad weather. What a neat trick the Taliban have managed here: they are scoring propaganda points against the South Korean and Afghan governments without even being judged responsible for their terrorist actions. Are these evil human beings, or were these missionaries kidnapped by wild bears that were hanging around their garbage cans? And if the distinction doesn’t matter, then can we start euthanizing the ones we capture without a lot of fuss from the Human Rights Industry?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 20, 2007 at 7:04 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
If you read those breathless reports that North Korea was really, really ready to fully denuclearize, you can catch your breath now:
“We had a big discussion about putting an overall deadline in,'’ Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator, told reporters after talks concluded today. “We had a consensus. Since we were not very successful in meeting the date in the spring, we decided that we should have working groups before we come up with a deadline. It’s a more careful approach.'’
North Korea agreed with the U.S., South Korea, Russia, China and Japan on Feb. 13 to close its Yongbyon reactor, which produced weapons-grade plutonium, in return for 50,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil and an additional 950,000 tons or equivalent assistance when it declares and disables all of its nuclear plants. This week’s discussions were aimed at setting a timetable for accomplishing those next steps. [Bloomberg, Alan T. Cheng and Bradley K. Martin]
Translation: let’s not set deadlines that we all know North Korea won’t meet. That’s a license to foot-drag the tough issues — full disclosure, inspection, verification, and actual disarmament — into the next administration, until some perceived slight or the refusal of some obnoxious North Korean demand is seized on as an excuse to renege on everything. Now let’s hear from the government we’re defending against this grave threat:
“Much of the talks this time focused on whether to set deadlines, if so the scope of the deadlines, and the targets to set within deadlines,'’ South Korean chief negotiator Chun Yung Woo said today. “However, this is a very difficult and complicated matter, so no one really expected this to happen and I think it will be hard to accomplish.'’
That seems remarkably patient until you consider what a good thing the South Koreans have going for themselves. We’ve created too many diplomatic and financial incentives for South Korea to oppose and undermine the realization of American interests.
In unrelated news, the North Korean people are still starving, and nobody still cares.
Ah, back to earth again.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 16, 2007 at 9:48 pm · Filed under Human Rights, Activism, Religion
The Korean Church Coalition picks up an impressive and somewhat surprising endorsement in advance of tomorrow’s rally.
As always, you need not be present to win. If you have an Internet connection or a phone, you can pester your Senators, your Representatives, and your pals at the Korean and ChiCom Embassies:
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 16, 2007 at 8:07 pm · Filed under Blogs & Blogging
Look who’s not going to be posting very much for a while ….
And from the looks of things, well worth it. Congratulations to the new dad and the lovely Mrs. Richardson on their 24-hour, 7-day, 120-decibel bundle of joy.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 16, 2007 at 6:38 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, WMD, Diplomacy
After much speculation, the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that North Korea has shut down its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon. I have always expected North Korea to go through this part of the deal (full text here), as I expected them to let IAEA inspectors back into Yongbyon and the other facilities near it. But to simplify arguments I’ve made here before, those things cost North Korea almost nothing:
- It’s easy to kick inspectors out. They’ve done it before.
- It’s easy to restart Yongbyon. They’ve done that before, too. Opportune moments include election seasons and right after a new president is sworn in and ready to be tested. I’ve heard what I’ll call well-founded rumors that the “shutdown” consists of little more than a strip of tape over each door. It remains to be seen whether North Korea will permanently disable the facility.
- Yongbyon is probably a worn-out wreck anyway.
- North Korea has probably reprocessed all of the plutonium in Yongbyon. For that reason, it was probably fully prepared to shut this reactor down during a round of bilateral talks in Berlin last December, when the outline of this deal emerged.
- Remember that even this is three months late, and we should remember why. We’re behind schedule because North Korea made a new demand that wasn’t part of the deal — the return of $25 million in laundered funds.
- North Korea gets to demand extra payoffs now, and although Chris Hill had suggested (and the deal says) that the immediate payoff at this “initial” stage would be a mere 50,000 tons of fuel oil out of a total of 1 million tons, we’re already upping the payday. The State Department is now renewing talk of removing North Korea from the terrorism list, despite the lack of progress on North Korea’s continuing terrorism against hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of South Korean, Japanese, and third-country abductees. We agreed to begin discussing that removal, but the acts that led to North Korea’s placement on that list will probably be forgotten.
North Korea will add other new demands because (a) it wants the payoffs, (b) it knows that we’ll pay, and (c) it needs to stall because it doesn’t want to make any other concessions. Raising and accelerating unagreed demands for its payday is a classic tactic from the North Korean playbook. It is now demanding the lifting of sanctions, something that should not happen before it fully discloses the extent of its other nuclear programs and weapons. It is calling for the U.S. and Japan to end their “hostile policy” and saying that continuing complaince depends on us. It is also demanding direct talks with the U.S. military, although it has never agreed to talks with the South Korean military that would substantially reduce the conventional buildup around the DMZ. Those talks would be an obvious vehicle to link compliance with this agreement to a U.S. troop withdrawal from South Korea. And although I don’t think we should have ground forces in Korea, those are not the circumstances under which we should reduce or remove them.
If I’m right, this is the last act of compliance we’ll see from North Korea under this deal. And because the deal is so vague about sequencing and substance, who is to say that North Korea’s demands are contrary to the terms? What separates what North Korea has given up so far and what it hasn’t is that from Kim Jong Il’s perspective, Yongbyon is expendable. His existing bombs, his uranium enrichment program aren’t. The deal doesn’t even mention the delivery systems North Korea could use to deliver those weapons, or chemical and biological weapons (also unmentioned). Those include not just missiles, but tunnels North Korea could probably use to drive its weapons right into Seoul, or right up to Osan.
For the Bush Administration and Kim Jong Il alike, the trick now is to preserve the illusion of progress as the disabling of Yongbyon is made permanent or semi-permanent, and as the United States makes a new round of early concessions while North Korea obfuscates on full disclosure. For North Korea, the object is to achieve as many concessions as it can from the United States on conventional forces, money laundering, terrorism, trade, diplomatic relations, human rights, and sanctions. By causing the United States to shift key positions and policies, it will make it all the harder to reassert those positions again in reaction to continuing North Korean misdeeds. North Korea has already racked up some depressing and impressive gains, and it will probably win more before this administration is over.
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