Archive for August, 2007
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 31, 2007 at 7:13 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Diplomacy
Two days ago, I posted about a Tokyo Shimbun report that the North Koreans said they’d only include three sites around Yongbyon in their disclosure. If true, that means the North Koreans have renounced this deal, and it’s game over.
Also two days ago, Chris Hill held an on-the-record briefing at the State Department, and Chris Hill’s skill at schmoozing a mostly admiring media while telling them (and us) almost nothing was a wonder to see. There’s no money quote I can really give you here, because the efforts of a few determined journalists to get Hill to clarify what the North Koreans actually said at Shenyang were long and tortuous. Clearly, Hill became irritated with it. Here’s just a small sample, but watch or read the whole thing yourself. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 30, 2007 at 7:02 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Japan & Korea, Diplomacy, Abductions, Terrorism/Iraq, U.S. Politics
The chief U.S. envoy at North Korean nuclear talks said Wednesday the United States will make sure close ally Japan is satisfied before lifting North Korea from a U.S. list of countries accused of sponsoring terrorists.
Christopher Hill acknowledged the North has raised the terror-list removal repeatedly as a crucial part of a February nuclear disarmament accord. But, he said, the United States is “not going to cup our eyes and pretend a country is not a state sponsor of terrorism if they are a state sponsor.” [AP, Foster Klug]
This was no doubt a matter of intense debate within the State Department. When State hinted at airbrushing the list of state sponsors of terrorism earlier this year, congressional conservatives threatened to rebel and ordered a fresh GAO report on North Korea’s sponsorship of terrorist acts. I republished a portion of the GAO’s list of North Korean-sponsored terror incidents, and I’d hoped to update that with some other things I think the report missed, but I’ve simply not had time.
In the end, Japanese pressure over its abductees was decisive, and that could put real pressure on North Korea to resolve this issue (although with North Korea, disclosure is never full). Japan now holds the key:
“We care very much what our Japanese friends and allies have to say about an issue,” Hill told reporters. The United States, he said, wants to handle the issue “in a way that strengthens our relationship with Japan.”
South Korea’s next president could learn a lesson from this and maybe even bring some of his country’s hostages home, too. Nor did North Korea do itself any favors here. Now that it’s publicly renouncing its full disclosure obligations under the new disarmament agreement (what did I just say about that?) there’s less of an argument to compromise how we define terrorism to save an agreement North Korea says it won’t keep.
By the way, note how little media coverage that public renunciation drew. I know that some journalists who actually know and follow Korea are interested and will ask for clarification, but a public renunciation of North Korea’s obligations merits more coverage than it’s received.
Still, the abductions issue is one where North Korea can afford to be flexible without giving up anything of value to the regime’s security. The hostages themselves have no strategic value to Kim Jong Il except as bargaining chips. For months, there have been rumors within foreign policy circles here that Kim Jong Il would release some abductees. From his perspective, why shouldn’t he? The only explanation is his obstinate cruelty to people whose only offense was to go walking in their home towns at night. And yet we would entrust the safety of our nation to the word of this man.
See also:
* Last weekend, I updated my post on Camp 22, the cruelest of North Korea’s concentration camps, interlacing it with YouTube clips of witnesses accounts. They’re a powerful reinforcement to the words I’ve written and the Google Earth photos I’ve published. A big, big thank-you to USinKorea for finding those clips. That post already gets a significant amount of traffic, often from people who often seem to have known little of North Korea beforehand. Frequently, my visitors’ log shows that they’re clicking their way through all of the links to the photographs. This is one place where I can claim that I’ve likely changed a few thousand minds. If you haven’t done so already, I’d be deeply appreciative if you’d “Digg” that post. Another, earlier post made it to Page One of Digg and attracted 60,000 hits in two days — traffic still streams in from chat rooms months later – so consider the possibilities for getting this message out.
* The newest addition to my blogroll is the superb DPRK Forum, a newcomer which is already one of the top five Korea blogs in my book. This must-read post talks about scenarios for regime collapse. This is an area where I’m fascinated by predictive speculation. My “most likely scenario” is that it will start with a food riot in a northern or east coast city that gets out of hand, causing an overreaction by security forces, and then a backlash by other security forces that breaks into open factional urban combat. The first such popular uprising is likely to be crushed when army units are called in, but now that the word of such things can actually make its way through North Korean society, the ripples of dissent and disgruntlement could lead to further outbreaks of unrest in other cities, or even within the security forces. Or, as when Burma crushed a pro-democracy uprising in 1988, a surviving group of armed resisters could hold out for some time in a remote frontier area.
* An Iraq blog that I plan to blogroll: Talisman Gate. Here’s a post to whet your interest.
* The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions plans to build its own corn noodle factory in North Korea. No doubt, this commerce will also speed up the transmission of marching orders to southern cadres. This bizarre labor-management role-reversal is fraught with delectable ironies. I wonder if the factory workers will ever go on strike, or if the new KCTU bosses will strut around the factory floor wearing top hats and gold stopwatches. Anyway, if the thing ever gets built, there are sure to be smiles in army mess halls all over the DPRK.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 27, 2007 at 9:00 pm · Filed under NK Economics, North Korea
No Arirang for you.
North Korea has suspended its large-scale gymnastic and artistic performance due to damage from recent heavy rains, the country’s state media reported Monday.
“It has now become hard to continue the performance as working people in different parts of the country are all out to recover from the flood damage these days,” the Korean Central News Agency said. “The performance is expected to be staged again after the flood damage is cleared away.”
The “Arirang” festival, named after a famous traditional Korean folk song, was held in 2002 and 2005, but was cancelled last year due to floods. [Yonhap]
I accept cash (See Also, fourth item). The only other person who had suggested that the North Koreans would call off this monstrosity was Daily NK writer Kim Song-A, who also explains why that wasn’t as easy a decision to make in North Korea as it would have been anywhere else:
In 2005, the Arirang performance profited $11mn and having cancelled the show last year, many argue that it would be difficult to abandon the show two years in a row. It’s also possible that this was a measure to inhibit disturbances amongst the North Korean people while further exemplifying the systems prosperity. [Daily NK]
Never mind that going ahead with Arirang and cancelling the summit would have been almost the height of bad manners. Almost, but not quite.
See also:
* Kim Jong Nam is back in Pyongyang, just in time for a severe shortage of all kinds of food, even those pan-friend Chinese donuts he seems to have been living on.
* North Korea can’t give its all to flood recovery when it’s forced to expend construction equipment, fuel, labor, and materials on border fencing to keep its people inside.
* Karan Bhatia, who helped negotiate a pretty lousy FTA with South Korea that Congress may not pass, is leaving. It may not be fair to blame Bhatia, because I don’t know what his instructions were. He may have done his best with a bad hand.
* Roger Simon talks about how American companies that had recently agreed to a Code of Ethics are back to helping China censor blogs and comments. He wonders what bloggers can do, which is an ambitious question that may impute too much importance to us. He has decided on a blog boycott of the Beijing Olympics, except for plenty of writing about their censorship. I’d be agnostic about the Olympics no matter where they held them — I was an atheist in the three-channel days before cable – but China’s dissent-smothing tactics are par for their repellent course. I guess I’ll do what I would have done anyway, then. Rebecca MacKinnon thinks that the corporations helping the Chinese government lack “cojones,” but finds that the Chinese crackdown isn’t really scaring Chinese bloggers that much.
* Here’s an interesting study in visual contrasts that pretty much speaks for itself:
* I wasn’t much of a Park Geun-Hye fan. I think she would have been an unimaginative, reactive, reactionary “stewardship” president at a time when South Korea needs to be led toward reunification by bolder leadership (I fear Lee Myung Bak will lead it sideways, which is at least better than backwards). But during the campaign, Park displayed her intellect, gravitas, and extraordinary cool under extreme stress. She has now added another favorable quality to that list — class – with her gracious acceptance of defeat in the Grand National Party primary. Lee’s camp has also reached out to Park’s people, perhaps sensing that they include some talented minds who could serve the country well. Next step: the campaigns should drop their libel suits against each other (!).
* I’m all for cultural exchanges that reach audiences of ordinary North Koreans and which don’t provide the regime inordinate financial benefits. What would the North Koreans think? “What, no horns?” “I expected their noses to be larger and more hook-like.” If you’ve actually met some North Koreans, you see how deeply ingrained this fear/hate propaganda is. They often act terrified of foreigners; they’re quite literally xenophobic. I’ve long believed, at least since I started this blog, that this was one important reason to insist on direct distribution of international food aid.
* Chris Hill and his North Korean counterpart will meet in Geneva this weekend to talk “next steps.” If the recent Tokyo Shimbun report is true, that step ought to be very clear.
While North Korea last month shut down its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, analysts believe Pyongyang will be reluctant to carry out the next phase of the accord in which it must make a complete declaration of all its nuclear programs and disable all existing nuclear facilities.
“This will be looking at the next steps in the process and how we can … come up with the next set of items for us to take forward as we move into the disablement phase of the six-party talks,” said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.
“I wouldn’t look for this meeting to produce specific conclusions,” he added, saying it was likely to work on recommendations for all six countries to consider.
While the U.S.-North Korea working group is ostensibly to discuss normalization of relations, Casey made clear that North Korea keeping its commitments to give up nuclear weapons was a precondition to the full establishment of diplomatic ties. [Reuters]
A complete and truthful declaration of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and programs is not something that should take more than 24 hours. But just watch it take all year, and for that matter, just watch us give them all year.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 26, 2007 at 10:37 pm · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Diplomacy
A Japanese newspaper on Saturday said North Korea insisted in disarmament talks this month that it would only declare and disable three nuclear facilities — none of them with atomic weapons.
All three sites are in the immediate vicinity of the nearly used-up Yongbyon reactor, which North Korea finally shut down (but never disabled) last month, several months after the date it had agreed to do so. You can see Google Earth images of some of those facilities here.
But in the next stage of the six-nation disarmament deal, the North has committed to declaring and disabling all its nuclear facilities. In a story datelined from China, where talks on the so-called “declare and disable” stage were held earlier this month, the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper said North Korea had announced it would only list three sites. All three are at the Yongbyon facility, the paper said, citing sources close to the negotiations. [Channel News Asia]
For your convenence, here’s the full text of the agreement again, in which North Korea agreed to permanently disable all of its nuclear programs.
Back already? No doubt, you noticed that it’s pretty vague in some important places, such as what programs North Korea has to dismantle, when it has to dismantle them, and how we’ll ever know that. Relax. Chris Hill went to Congress last February and assured our elected representatives that all programs means all programs, including the existing nuclear weapons and the uranium enrichment program the North Koreans are still lying about.
I should mention that this report (which Kyodo also picked up) is unsourced, although Japanese diplomats, who are not fans of this deal either, seem like the most obvious “sources close to the negotiations.” If the North Koreans didn’t say that, you’d expect someone to make the record very clear about that. If the North Koreans really did say that and the implications could cost you your senior fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, you could always downplay it and tell everyone the talks were “businesslike” or some such. After all, what the North Koreans say about their arms control agreements changes from hour to hour. Last week, they said they would declare all of their programs transparently. I didn’t care, and neither should you.
Extending that concept, you could dismiss just about everything the North Koreans say about their nuke programs. I do. Been doing it for years. Even the statements they put their signatures on? Especially the statements they put their signatures on. The North Koreans lie and cheat so much that our greatest diplomatic minds — just stick with me here – can’t tell when they’re lying about their cheating, when they’re telling the truth about their cheating, and when they’re lying about lying about their cheating as part of some reverse-pyschology mind-frigg. Five years later, we still can’t agree which of those things they were doing when they told James Kelly and Jack Pritchard they were, indeedy, enriching uranium, as they sat there smugly and dared us to do a damned thing about it.
What did we do about it? Not much of anything calculated to speed up the rot at the problem’s source. Instead, we pulled out of the first Agreed Framework and temporarily stopped paying the North Koreans for lying to us. And yet, here we are again. Today, North Korea is back to denying that it has a uranium program, we still don’t believe them, we’re still prepared to pay anyway, and we have another deal that (for no small price) freezes their plutonium program until Kim Jong Il decides to flip the switch back to “reprocess.” The only difference is that then, we figured that they had semi-functioning nukes and had possibly tested one. Today, we think we know they’ve tested a semi-functioning nuke. Also, they’ve produced heaps of corpses, but let’s keep this discussion on topic: preserving what passes for peace and security in Korea.
I’ve found that there’s much more predictive accuracy in not listening to what the North Korean say at all. I’ve found that if I just always presume that they’re cheating, not only will I always be proven right eventually, I’ll have more time for a life, which at the moment means figuring out how to put all this crap together. What does the latest North Korean statement really mean? Will we all say “never mind” or pretend it was all an unfortunate mistranslation by Tuesday? Who knows? It probably means just as much as everything else the North Koreans say, and it will probably amount to just about as much as a South Korean prostitution crackdown. There is exactly one reason to listen to what the North Koreans say: to excrete ridicule on anyone stupid enough to believe it.
Regardless of what the North Koreans actually said in Beijing – now that we’ve established just how much that matters – what they will actually do is somewhat predictable. They’ll shut down Yongbyon until sometime between August 2008 and March 2009, when America hits its quadrennial political paralysis. Then, assuming that the reactor hasn’t collapsed from wear and overuse, they’ll do everything up to and including starting a bonfire under the smokestack to crank it up again, while restarting construction on a much larger reactor nearby. They’ll also continue their work perfecting the nuclear delivery systems that this agreement never mentions. But give up their nuclear weapons or nuclear secrets for any price? As if.
See also:
* Deutsche Welle ups previous estimates of the percentage of North Korea’s crop damage from recent floods to 20%. The Daily NK, quoting North Korea sources, put the figure at 14%. It does look like the North has suffered severe crop damage, and that without significant aid — which will be given with few conditions – there will be severe shortages, and possibly more outbreaks of disease. Without conditions, however, it’s likely that famine will be averted around Pyongyang but that conditions in other areas, such as in South Hamgyeong, will be severe.
* “A young woman was asking a favor, ‘Please take my baby first. I can’t get into the train holding the baby.’ The young soldier, unconsciously, took the baby and waited the woman to ride the train. However, she did not appear until the train left the station…. Then the poor young man found a letter inside the baby’s quilt. The letter said ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t had food for three days. I can’t let my child to starve. Please raise her as a good daughter of the Dear Leader. Her name is Kim Myong Shim.’” [Daily NK]
* When I see Charles Krauthammer and Michael O’Hanlon saying pretty much the same things about Iraq, we see the makings of a mature consensus. Good. If part of that consensus is that the first few years of the war were badly managed and that Iraq’s jouney to democracy will be extended at best, the other, emerging part is just how disastrous simply leaving would be.
* When the surge created progress on the battlefield, opponents of the war were forced to ”recalibrate” their focus toward Iraq’s political problems. If this political accord makes it through the Iraqi parliament, there may not be time to recalibrate it again before Petraeus and Crocker report to Congress. I’m not a fan of Nouri Maliki myself, but I don’t disagree with this:
Maliki hit back on Sunday, saying: “There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages, for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin.”
“This is severe interference in our domestic affairs. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton are from the Democratic Party and they must demonstrate democracy,” he said. “I ask them to come to their senses and to talk in a respectful way about Iraq.”
In retrospect, knocking off Ngo Dinh Diem was one of our worst early mistakes in Viet Nam. A bad elected leader is almost aways less bad than one or more bad unelected leaders. I wonder if it’s occurred to Clinton or Levin that their reckless campaign talk could inspire a coup. We have earned the right to expect certain behavior of Iraq’s leaders, but we don’t have a right to select them.
Posted by Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard on August 24, 2007 at 9:37 pm · Filed under Famine & Food Aid, Books & Films
[OFK: In this post, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard respond to Part 1 and Part 2 of my review of their book, “Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform.”]
Josh Stanton has written by far the most thoughtful and cogent analysis of Famine in North Korea that we have seen to date. Stanton’s review is generous, but also raises important questions about virtually all elements of our analysis. In the interest of furthering both scholarly and policy debate, we address the questions that Stanton raises in some detail and roughly in the order that they are raised in the book itself.
Causes and Culpability
In thinking about the causes of the famine, we were interested in the first instance in the interpretation offered by the regime itself, namely that the floods of 1995 were responsible for a catastrophic decline in the aggregate supply of food, both through the loss of output and through the destruction of some stored stocks of grain. This claim is risible: the famine was already underway in the summer of 1995; indeed, North Korea had negotiated bilateral assistance agreements with Japan and South Korea and the first shipment of aid was already en route when the floods hit.
Those familiar with Amartya Sen’s pioneering work on famine know that this interpretation falls within a more general class of explanations that focus on the decline in the overall supply of food: people starve because there is simply not enough to go around. Sen, by contrast, found that a number of famines he studied occurred not because of a decline in aggregate supply, but because food was badly distributed. In particular, Sen focused on cases where the poor starved because they were incapable of commanding the resources to buy adequate food in the face of spiraling prices. He characterized such settings as examples of “entitlement failures” in which distribution, rather than aggregate supply was to blame.
Curiously, Stanton makes the case in favor of a distributional failure more categorically than we do. Our argument is somewhat more complicated and consists of two parts. First, we demonstrate that there was indeed a secular decline in the aggregate supply of food, but this decline began well before the floods of 1995. To blame the floods for the famine is a little like blaming the last batter who strikes out for the loss of a baseball game. Just as the lack of runs cannot be blamed on the last batter alone, so it seems misleading to us to blame the loss of output in 1995 as the underlying cause of the famine when output had been declining for five years. We do not claim that the floods were unimportant; to the contrary, they were devastating. But their impact must be placed in context.
We attribute the declining availability of food in the first half of the 1990s to a combination of external shocks (the collapse of the Soviet Union) and the particular agricultural strategy the country had pursued in preceding decades. We also note—and this is a crucial part of the analysis—that the regime could have compensated for these shortcomings if it had made a number of external adjustments, such as expanding exports, maintaining a capacity to borrow, or seeking aid earlier. We do not therefore deny the importance of declining supply, but underline that shortages were not the result of natural events alone or even primarily, but had important policy causes.
By the early 1990s, the supply situation was therefore already precarious. If famine were to be avoided in the absence of the external adjustments just noted, there was very little margin for error: food would have to be distributed with almost uncanny care. Suk Lee has argued that the regime did in fact try to spread supplies evenly across the country, and that things might have even been worse in the absence of these efforts. He also notes quite rightly that the breakdown of the logistics infrastructure of the country—for example, the absence of fuel to move grain across provinces—played a role and we agree.
We are very skeptical that distribution was neutral, however. There seems to be ample evidence from data provided by the North Korean authorities themselves that Pyongyang was privileged in the allocation of food, for example. There were two distinct forces that gave rise to this unequal distribution of supply. First, we argue that as shortages deepened, local officials faced incentives to hoard, and the inter-provincial system of transfers broke down, leaving the historically food deficit northeast exposed. On top of this decentralized system-fraying there is convincing evidence that the regime also sought to discourage aid to the hardest hit parts of the country. We doubt that they did so to punish deliberately those regions, which in addition to the politically suspect, included large concentrations of the regime’s urban proletariat base as well. Rather, they did so to shore up supplies in even more favored population centers (thus the charge of “triage”). For these reasons, we argue that issues of distribution were central to the observed outcomes.
Stanton raises the question of culpability, and suggests that we are uncertain or divided between us on it. This is not the case, although our thinking on this question has since been advanced by reading the excellent work of David Marcus on famine crimes (The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 97, No. 2. (Apr., 2003), pp. 245-281). We do not argue that the regime set out to starve the people who ultimately died as Stalin did in the Ukraine (with the important exception perhaps of those incarcerated in the country’s vast gulag). But we do believe that the government both showed favoritism in the distribution of food—mostly across regions—and failed to anticipate the ultimate effects of the stubborn pursuit of self-sufficiency as a means of attaining food security. The intent to kill is not required to show criminal negligence, nor to rightly categorize the North Korean famine as a crime against humanity. All that is required is that the authorities could have plausibly known the effects of their actions—and inaction. As Stanton very rightly notes, the failure to fully appreciate the costs of self-reliance is what makes the work of analysts such as Christine Ahn and John Feffer so disturbing.
The Death Toll
One of the most curious responses we have had to our book is that the death count we provide is too low. This response is particularly odd when no real defense is given of higher estimates beyond the fact that someone else has uttered them. In particular, the number of 2.5 or 3 million excess deaths has become a kind of focal point: anything lower is portrayed as a kind of betrayal. Yet there are quite obvious reasons why that number is almost certainly too high, and Stanton actually reviews them quite clearly.
We know from a variety of different types of evidence that the toll of the famine was particularly high along the East Coast and in the Hamgyung provinces in particular. If we take death rate estimates from refugees—a particularly distressed population from these particularly distressed provinces—and project them across the entire country (minus some share of the population which was shielded from the famine), we can get to the 3 million number. But that is quite clearly an implausible extrapolation, particularly in light of the evidence that we present that other provinces almost certainly did not fare as badly. To draw a contemporary analogy, it would be as if we took the deaths from civil conflict in Darfur as a share of the population of those provinces and then constructed an estimate of total civil war deaths in the country by projecting that share onto the entire population of the Sudan.
While recognizing that there are a variety of estimates of the famine toll, we find the estimates from two independently conducted studies to be the most convincing: one by US Census Bureau demographers Daniel Goodkind and Lorraine West (Goodkind, Daniel and Lorraine West. 2001. “The North Korean Famine and Its Demographic Impact.” Population and Development Review 27, no. 2: 219–38.) and the other by economist Suk Lee (Lee, Suk. 2003. Food Shortages and Economic Institutions in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Ph.D. diss., Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, U.K.).
As Stanton correctly observes, both studies are based on commonly used age- and gender-specific population models. These models work off some simple relationships among population size, birth rates, and death rates. As illustrations, if we know population size, and the birth and death rates at a particular starting point, we can project forward population growth; if we know population magnitudes at starting and ending points, we can infer the death rate (assuming the birth rate has not changed). If we know the population size at the starting and end points and the birth and death rates, we can measure “excess deaths” if the terminal population falls short of the projection. Goodkind and West used information from the 1998 WFP nutritional study and the Great Leap Forward to calibrate two variants of their model; Lee relies entirely on DPRK official statistics. Stanton raises a fair point about the application of the Chinese experience to the North Korea case, suggesting that it might bias downward the estimated toll, though the use of the 1998 WFP nutrition survey—the one which reported a staggering scale of malnutrition that was not reproduced in the prior or subsequent surveys—would appear to cut the other way. Similarly one can reject Lee’s finding precisely on the grounds that the underlying official statistics are themselves unreliable. But it seems to us that as imperfect as they may be, two independently conducted studies employing widely accepted methodologies arriving at a common conclusion are more persuasive than simple extrapolations. It may well be the case when future scholars have access to the DPRK’s internal documents that our preferred estimate will be revealed to have been far too low. But for now, the needless deaths of 3-5 percent of the population are more than enough to make the North Korean famine one of the worst of the 20th century.
On Aid
Only in the discussion of aid and diversion did we feel that Stanton missed a key point we were trying to make in Famine. A central question we ask in the chapter on diversion is “what happens to diverted food aid?” Stanton—and he is not alone—seems to assume that it disappears from the total food supply. This would be true if all food aid were consumed or hoarded in stocks by the military. That at least some was stockpiled in this way cannot be ruled out. But we argue that a substantial share of diverted food in fact finds its way into the market where it has the effect of increasing supply and lowering prices from what they would otherwise have been. This diversion has important distributional consequences: intended beneficiaries of food aid do not get it all, or get it only by paying for it. But the additional supplies nonetheless expand total consumption. It is therefore not necessarily a mystery that a high level of diversion could co-exist with an improvement in the overall supply picture and an avoidance of the recurrence of famine. Yet as we also argued, diversion almost certainly implies increasing inequality in the distribution of food, as traders and politically-connected intermediaries and cronies benefit at the expense of the vulnerable population.
Stanton raises some intriguing questions with respect to the relation between aid and markets. Clearly the availability of aid affects prices in the markets, as have other shocks such as the closure of the Chinese border during the SARS scare. However markets in North Korea remain fragmented. On a given day prices for even relatively homogeneous commodities differ across locations—with the price of food consistently higher in the northeast than elsewhere. Trying to better calibrate such relationships is an issue of ongoing research.
Engagement
On no question have we been more taken to task than our position with respect to engagement. On one side, critics like Stanton say that we are idealists falling into the same old trap of “hoping engagement will induce Kim Jong Il to make modest and gradual reforms.” He appears to support a more radical course of action, such as cutting aid dramatically, on the grounds that we don’t know how much aid is getting through in any case (see the discussion on diversion above; again, the point made there is germane to Stanton’s case) and that we simply encourage Kim Jong Il’s bad behavior.
On the other side—and particularly in South Korea—we have repeatedly been criticized by defenders of the Sunshine Policy as hawks and apologists of the Bush administration. Critics have said that to discuss human rights or the famine is likely to be counterproductive and only undermine prospects for a negotiated settlement to the nuclear issue. Our doubts about the efficacy of aid in achieving political or economic objectives are taken as a frontal assault on engagement.
In fact, we believe our position is quite coherent. First, we wrote the book because we believe that the outside world should not be silent on these issues. We find it disturbing, even shameful, that there is such a limited public discussion in South Korea of the human rights record of the regime.
We are also highly skeptical of the argument that anything more than short-term political concessions are likely to be achieved by offering aid as a quid-pro-quo. The record of engagement as a strategy of quid-pro-quos is much more dubious than is typically thought, and may even confirm to the regime that they can sell their bad behavior. And in more recent work on North Korea’s external economic relations, we explicitly make the point that non-commercial interactions with North Korea do not have the transformative effect on North Korea that defenders of engagement claim. Rather, those effects are more likely to come from more strictly commercial relations, such as those that increasingly characterize North Korea’s economic integration with China (see Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, “North Korea’s External Economic Relations,” Peterson Institute Working Paper 07-7 available at http://www.iie.com/publications/interstitial.cfm?ResearchID=794.
Yet we also have pretty unambiguous evidence of the effects of attempting to isolate North Korea or engaging in domestic posturing about regime change. This approach suffers from a fatal coordination problem: China and South Korea will not go along, and they have demonstrated the capability of offsetting pressure that the US and others may bring to bear. In practice, the strangulation approach had a three year run, and failed utterly: a crisis over a suspected enrichment program—unambiguously a violation of North Korea’s commitments—ended up in North Korea’s testing of a nuclear device and a serious threat to the integrity of the NPT. Advocates of isolation and regime change have to come to grips with the fundamental geopolitical constraints under which US policy toward North Korea operates. And while we yield to no one with respect to our antipathy toward the Kim Jong-il regime, we see no other realistic option than to negotiate with it.
We also believe that the various shortcomings of the international aid program do not constitute the basis for a termination of all aid to the country, particularly if supply conditions are precarious. As Stanton rightly quotes us, to take this position—supported by some refugees—is to gamble that a policy that has not succeeded in the past will miraculously have effect, while risking the lives of those deprived of food and assistance in the meantime.
Rather, we support the use of aid, as one of a number of other policy instruments, to encourage the transformation of the regime into one that is less threatening externally, and less repressive internally. Food security for the North Korean people ultimately will only be achieved through a functioning economy which means deepening the institutionalization of the market economy and opening to the world. In the short-term, North Korea may continue to rely on aid, but our objective should be to wean them off the international dole. When humanitarian concerns are not pressing, then aid should be reduced and North Korea should be induced to engage in reforms that will allow it to purchase food on its own. When humanitarian issues are pressing, the outside community should coordinate to the best of its ability and aggressively raise issues of transparency, access, and monitoring; we have long argued that the nature of the bilateral food aid programs of China and South Korea undermines these objectives. Negotiations on economic issues should not begin and end with a discussion of aid and what North Korea will get: rather, they should also discuss questions of reform and opening that will make aid effective, facilitate commercial exchange and socialize North Koreans to engage in the outside world.
This policy does not make for easy soundbites. Advocating them does not necessarily mean that we believe that they will work; dealing with North Korea always involves difficult choices among unappealing options and thus a high degree of frustration. But the other options—containment, isolation, a cutoff of assistance—have had little effect and may have even strengthened the regime.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 24, 2007 at 7:18 am · Filed under Anju Links
More Sunshine, But Overcast Later: The Daily NK tracks the GNP’s North Korea policy. I could more credibly claim to do eye surgery with a whipsaw than say just what that policy is today, but good for them for taking that one on.
Although things can change very quickly in South Korean politics, Lee Myung Bak is clearly a heavy favorite to win. In the increasingly likely event of Lee’s inauguration, I don’t expect that U.S.-ROK relations, or North-South relations will change dramatically. There are still fundamental problems in the U.S.-ROK alliance because the force structure is out of line with the current political, diplomatic, and military realities in both nations.
Likewise, I don’t think that Lee intends to dramatically change South Korea’s policy to the North, only to inject some reciprocity into it. The question, however, is how the North Koreans will react if Lee does insist on some tangible reform, disarmament, transparency, or the release of South Korean abductees. What few in South Korea seem to grasp is just how much Kim Jong Il fears concessions like these. The strength of the North’s reaction will probably surprise Lee and his cabinet.
What then? Will Lee stick to his demands, or will he take the path of least resistance and keep the aid spigot mostly open? Since Lee’s views on North Korea have been so inconsistent, my guess is that he may display occasional flashes of temper or slightly reduce aid, but he’s not sufficiently grounded in principle to know just what to stick to, at least not initially. On the other hand, Lee strikes me as someone whose emotions strongly influence how he deals with others. That means that by the end of his first year in power, whatever the North does to piss Lee off personally will increasingly affect the relationship between the two nations.
One important question is who will be Lee’s foreign minister. If it’s the intelligent and stable Park Jin, that would be a good sign. Park would bring the spine, intellect, and adult supervision that Lee badly needs. I hope that Park has postured himself appropriately in the GNP nomination contest.
Unlike Roh Moo Hyun, Lee Myung Bak is nobody’s bitch. And North Korea’s rulers don’t know how to have relations on any other terms.
See also:
* Don’t forget to stop by tonight for Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard’s long and thoughtful response to my review of their book, “Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid & Reform.” I will leave it at the top of the blog thoughout the weekend.
* Must-Read No. 1:
In a small flat, inside North Korea, a mother and daughter pose for pictures.
And a father and son.
This, their secret family album, shot on a camera-phone, an illegal device in North Korea. Owning one is a crime that could land them in labour camp.
Overwhelmed by hopelessness, struggling to survive, the Park family has decided to try to escape.
To do so will cost them their every last penny. They all know it could also cost them their lives. [Channel Four News]
This one is a remarkable piece of journalism that you shouldn’t miss. It tracks the flight of an entire family from North Korea to Thailand. Tellingly, the family is relatively well-off in the North. Big hat tip to NK Econ Watch, and I see that Richardson also has this one.
* Must-Read No. 2: “Concession to North Korea over the NLL is tantamount to an act of treachery, like giving away Dokdo to Japan.” Via GI Korea.
* Mind Games: The summit is postponed, but as of today, the Arirang Festival is still on. NK Econ Watch, the Florida Masochist, and GI Korea all have posts on this. My money is on Arirang being cancelled, too, in the end. Arirang is all about projecting a utopian ideal.
* Nuke Talks ‘Positive’ But Still Stalled:
Working-level talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear ambition were held in the Chinese city of Shenyang last week after dealing with how to proceed with the February agreement on dismantling the North’s nuclear weapons program. The six nations closed the two-day meeting on Aug. 17 in what a South Korean official called a “positive and friendly” mood, but they failed to reach agreement on how to disable the communist country’s nuclear facilities.
The lack of an agreement apparently came as a disappointment to the chief U.S. nuclear envoy, Christopher Hill, who earlier said he hoped to have a “common definition of disablement” by the end of the meeting.
But after the talks, North Korea’s deputy chief negotiator said it is prepared to reveal all its nuclear programs and facilities in a transparent manner under the six-party disarmament deal struck in February. [Asia Pulse]
If I try to visualize this problem from an alternative perspective — say, the cultish groupthink of Machiavellian sociopaths — my strategy would be to send well-mannered technocrats who have no political ”juice” and who are empowered to give away nothing. That way, I’d be able to stall for time while avoiding media discussion of my negotiating tantrums and creating the minimal appearance of good faith negotiations. Chris Hill isn’t stupid enough not to see through this, but he chooses not to (publicly, at least) for reasons that are expedient for him. The North Koreans aren’t the only ones playing us.
* Food Prices in N.K. Rise: The Daily NK conveys reports of dramatic fluctuations in food prices, and even hoarding. Oddly enough, the signs started to appear before the floods.
* UNDP Scandal: “The United States urged the U.N. ethics chief to rule on a whistleblower complaint by a former U.N. staffer who raised concerns about his agency’s operations in North Korea, according to a letter obtained Wednesday.” [AP]
* The Legacy of Sunshine: Ten years later, not even senior North Korean officials can define basic economic terms:
“North Korea has published a dictionary of capitalist terminology to help its people grasp basic concepts like ‘principal’, ‘interest’, ‘insurance’, ‘income’, ‘labor force’ and ‘rent.’ North Korea compiled 1,000 of the terms into a dictionary in June last year. Copies of the 220-page work were mostly given to economic officials or elite members of the regime. Former unification minister Chung Dong-young said while in office that he was embarrassed when North Korean people didn’t understand what interest is.” [Chosun Ilbo]
No doubt, there were plenty of times when the North Koreans were (silently) embarrassed for ‘Comrade’ Chung, too. Maybe they can write him a manual of instruction on how to be a man. On the other hand, Chung characteristically underestimates the economic sophistication some North Korean officials, and we know that some of them understand the concept of insurance very well indeed.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 23, 2007 at 9:16 pm · Filed under Famine & Food Aid, Books & Films
[Part I is here.]
IV. Aid
We will probably never know how many people died in North Korea’s last Great Famine, but can we prevent the next one? This regime seems so indifferent to the suffering of its people — even determined to perpetuate it — that well-meaning aid agencies have been forced to compromise basic humanitarian norms. Those compromises are understandable, but the standards were meant to keep food from being used as a political weapon.
The compromises triggered what the authors call a “race to the bottom” as the regime gave access only to agencies that were pliabile and willing to overlook irregularities. (For an illustration of how a typical WFP shipment is distributed – and diverted – start on Page 102.) The hostages to this tactic have always been those North Koreans who really did benefit from international aid.
In some ways, those agonizing choices became much less agonizing when North Korea decided to expel the WFP in 2005, followed by the latter’s “stunning concession” — the authors’ words – to the regime’s demand to dramatically scale back the entire program, the number of foreign staff, and their access to the recipients of the food [238]. Thus, international food aid has lost much of its significance as a factor in North Korea’s food supply, which moots a lot of this discussion. Today, the WFP is supposed to be targeting 1.9 million North Koreans for food aid, compared to 6.5 million in 2005. Donor governments have been so suspicious of the new, highly restricted WFP program that donations haven’t materialized, and the WFP still isn’t feeding even that smaller target group.
And yet, contrary to my predictions, a new famine didn’t result. Why not? Lately, I’ve questioned my previous assumption that the WFP really was keeping 6.5 million North Koreans alive. If diversion was actually higher than even Noland and Haggard’s estimates – roughly 30 to 50% of international food aid before 2006 [230] – and if the North Korean people were not sharing as much of that aid as we’d believed, then the impact of the loss of that aid would also be less than we’d have expected.
Noland adds strong support to that possibility by helping to translate and publish a phenomenal new survey of nearly 2,000 refugees by Yoonok Chang. That survey found that less than 2% of refugees reported having received any international food aid at all, and only 57% were even aware that other nations were providing food aid. We’ve seen other evidence, in the form of this guerrilla camera footage, of large-scale diversion of South Korean food aid provided outside of WFP channels. Noland and Haggard point to previous examples of Japanese and WFP aid that was filmed as it was being sold in markets [119]. Then there were the cans of donated food that turned up in the North Korean submarine that ran aground on the South Korean coast in 1997 [109]. The South Korean NGO Good Friends even claims to have obtained a North Korean document allocating 30% of food aid to the military, 10% to select bureaucracies, 30% to the military-industrial complex, and the rest to regional distribution centers, which presumably exercised their own form of trickle-down favoritism [118].
Did North Korea’s domestic production rise enough to make the difference? Almost certainly not. The 2005 harvest was the best in years, but it was still only a slight and temporary improvement over the harvests during the famine years. The 2006 harvest was way down because of flooding. This year’s will almost certainly be much worse.
V. Engagement
Noland and Haggard state,
“It is an obligation of those who seek to engage with North Korea — as we believe we must — also to speak the truth about the conditions in which North Koreans live.” [18]
I would support a truthful and forthright kind of engagement with the North Korean people. Unfortunately, the North Korean government will not engage with those who speak the truth about those conditions. Speaking the truth also requires a willingness to put up with fulminations about “human scum” and “sea[s] of fire.” Given the choice, statesmen have clearly chosen engagement over truth. It’s not so much the Rodong Sinmun that subdues them as the hissing from the foreign policy establishment and governments that do not share our interest in speaking those truths.
This collective failure shouldn’t surprise us too much. The “international community’s” nominal leader, Ban Ki-Moon, built his career on ignoring this crime and appeasing its perpetrators. His most visible effort on North Korea has been to order the audit and phase-out of a the UNDP’s operations there due to the exposure of massive irregularities with them. Noland and Haggard want the WFP and donor nations to “continue to highlight government practices that impede the delivery of food to vulnerable groups, including diversion ….” [231] That’s rather kind of them after they’ve explained what pains the WFP took, and still takes, to avoid any criticism of the regime that might endanger their access.
In the end, Noland and Haggard can’t conclude with anything better than a slightly more idealistic version of what has never worked with Kim Jong Il: the hope that engagement will induce Kim Jong Il to make modest and gradual reforms, but doing nothing that would actually force him to make them by threatening his power base and lifestyle. Here, the authors’ ideas lack clarity, focus, and most importantly, originality. Having told us the extent to which experience suggests otherwise, they attempt to argue that sotto voce pressure from the outside could actually sway North Korea to adhere to international humanitarian norms [232].
What if other nations completely shut off trade, aid, and remittances? If so, the authors believe, the likelihood of regime changes rises to 40% in the first year and nearly 100% in the medium term [223], although they believe that this would come at a prohibitive cost to the North Korean people. It’s hard to dismiss their argument against such a course easily:
We applaud those with the courage to make such a sacrifice for themselves. But we are much less comfortable with the notion that the outside community should make that decision for vulnerable North Korean citizens. [230]
Yet in 2006, apparently as this argument was written [238], Kim Jong Il performed that experiment for us, and on the usual subjects. As a result, it’s never been less clear how many needy people international aid is reaching. ”Famine in North Korea” may exponentially expand your factual knowledge of how the North Korean people live and die. As with every detailed and honest analysis, it sometimes raises facts that lead in contradictory directions. If you’re looking for solutions, however, ”Famine in North Korea” has little new to offer. Instead, take the facts from this otherwise extraordinary book and apply your own thinking to them.
VI. Questions
* Have you been able to show a correlation between the delivery of international food aid and food prices in North Korean markets? How about bilateral aid from countries like South Korea and China that do little or no monitoring? Is there any difference in the effect on market prices, and if so, what does it tell you?
* You say that North Korea’s food problems “will not be definitively resolved until that regime is replaced by one that [is] more responsible to the needs of its citizenry,” [3] but you also express doubt that the North Korean regime will reform [17]. I see this as a recurring contradiction in your book: investing the only slender hope you hold in a fundamental change in the regime’s character, a change you both seem to doubt will ever come. Was there some debate between the two of you over this? Can you harmonize the apparent contradiction or do you simply coexist with it?
* No one seems to be able to even agree on how many people are left in North Korea. What’s your best guess?
* In the summer of 2005, the WFP estimated that it was providing the marginal survival ration for 6.5 million North Koreans — that is, the amount of food it added to the diets of these people was just enough make the difference between the table and the grave. How was it that North Korea could reject most of that aid without triggering a massive new famine?
* I wonder if Josette Sheeran, the new WFP Administrator, has read your book. Has her office corresponded with you?
* What can you tell us about the scale and distribution of hunger in the North Korean military forces? Do you have enough information to suggest preferential distribution between, say, the army and the navy, or between different army units?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 22, 2007 at 9:21 pm · Filed under Famine & Food Aid, Books & Films
The time stamp on this post may be the most telling part of it, for I first got my hands on Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard’s “Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform” back in late March. The intervening months have been very busy for me, and the book raised more points of discussion than I can cover here.
Noland and Haggard are two of the finest, most respected scholars of all things North Korean and economic, and their work does not make for light reading. They do not attempt to give us a sense of what the famine was like or emote about its human toll. Their analysis is dry, factual, and as objective as any book on this subject can be. That approach will stop you at Chapter One if you’re looking for a North Korean “Harvest of Sorrow” or “Hungry Ghosts.” This is not that book; instead, it is a record of economic history, a first draft of a statistical indictment, and the fusion of several scholarly papers meticulously and dryly documenting why this famine didn’t have to happen.
You will see that I also have some criticisms of this book, but you’ll get an idea of its importance by the amount of thought I’ve put into this review. At its best, “Famine in North Korea” reflects the meticulous character of the men who wrote it and the depth of their knowledge of this subject. That is more than enough make this book well worth its price.
As I wrote this, I had also contacted the authors’ publicists, seeking their comment on this review, and asking some questions that their book raises. I am now pleased to report that both Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland have read the following review and have provided a response, and I offer them my deepest thanks for honoring my thoughts with theirs. I will publish this review in two parts. Their response will be Part 3, so aside from comments and responses, they will have the last word. With recent flooding raising fears of food insecurity rising in the North, their response carries added relevance today.
I. Crime
The two most important questions I brought to this book were how many died, and why. Let’s address those questions in inverse order. The exceptional Havel-Wiesel-Bondevik report does not think that the famine was intentionally engineered like the Ukrainian famine (with the exception of labor camp inmates, whose rations were clearly kept at a starvation level) [55]. I’ve gone back and forth on this question myself.
Noland and Haggard don’t seem all that certain, either; they struggle with conclusions about intent and culpability. This is just the first of many times in their book when you suspect Noland and Haggard aren’t necessarily in perfect agreement. Early on, Noland and Haggard warn us that “outsiders’ first response to genocides is denial,” [2] though they never quite levy that charge. Instead, they make an extensive statistical case that removes all reasonable doubt about the most important question. The North Korean famine was not ultimately caused by any lack of resources, but by a misallocation of those resources:
As is immediately obvious, aggregate supply [of food] exceeds [estimated minimum needs] for the entire decade of the 1990s regardless of the production numbers used (emphasis in original). [Page 46]
Noland and Haggard believe that North Korea’s “songbun” system of political castes “did not directly determine access to food, but had powerful indirect effects” such as the right to live and work in places where food was relatively abundant. They document how the regime directed multiple food shipments from the WFP, China, and South Korea to its West Coast, accessible to areas that were politically favored, instead of sending them to the East Coast, where the need was greatest [64-65]. No area was spared completely, of course; even in Pyongyang, the authors report that 4% of citizens were “wasted” from malnutrition [198; see maps on 201-02]. In the end, one hardly needs to know exactly what Kim Jong Il had in mind:
The state’s culpability in this vast misery elevates the North Korean famine to a crime against humanity. [208]
Then there is the question of priorities. The authors document how a fraction of the regime’s military spending could have fed feed its people and how it responded to the arrival of international food aid by purchasing more unspecified “commercial” imports [44-47].
The greatest value of this book may be how conclusively it destroys the reprehensible falsehoods spoken in Kim Jong Il’s defense, and in favor of artificially sustaining his rule [67]. Crude apologists like Christine Ahn parrot the party-line excuse that the weather and an American “embargo” caused the famine. Sophisticated apologists like John Feffer blame the weather and North Korea’s lack of good agricultural land, but try to absolve Kim Jong Il of “culpable slowness” in reacting to the famine. To Noland and Haggard, the question is more than one of production:
This problem could probably be solved purely by expenditure switching: shifting the composition of imports away from other priorities. But even taking existing expenditure preferences as given, the improvement in the performance of the export sector needed to address this constraint are modest: the annual import shortfall is not large, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. [211]
In plain terms: food is cheaper than Omega watches and missiles [44].
II. Reform
The most insightful moments of “Famine in North Korea” describe the relationship between markets and hunger, the unequal distribution of hunger, and how the North Korean authorities failed – sometimes, it seems, intentionally – to make economic adjustments to mitigate this lethal misallocation. To Noland and Haggard, North Korean “reform” is a misnomer for the spontaneous, bottom-up development of markets by people who would have starved without them.
In 2002, the state temporarily ratified some of the least reversible changes in an effort to regain control over an economy that was largely extralegal [16]. The tolant mood didn’t last. By 2005, the regime had regained enough control to transition from half-measures to drastic reversals and punitive confiscations, though the ideological purity of local officials appears to vary. The most bizarre scheme? The coercion of starving citizens into purchasing bonds that operated more like a lottery, with only a lucky few getting back their money, plus a prize [190].
III. Statistics
Noland and Haggard’s death toll estimate for the North Korean famine, between 600,000 and 1 million, is among the lowest offered by experts on the subject. I don’t believe Noland and Haggard are trying to minimize anything, but they’re statistical outliers. Unfortunately, the book never explains how these men, who who deal in statistics with such exceptional sophistication, arrived at their own.
Noland and Haggard survey, discuss, and criticize other estimates in great detail, but ultimately favor two that are based on age- and gender-specific population models based on a 1998 WFP nutritional survey and death rate statistics from China’s Great Leap Forward. Then they stop there, without explaining how they applied those models to North Korea. Instead, they summarily conclude that “in our view, the most sophisticated attempts to measure excess deaths put them in the range of 600,000 to 1 million.” [76]
There are some problems with this model, however. First, as the authors admit, North Korea’s economy was largely an industrial one by 1994, while China’s was mostly agricultural [211]. Second, one of the studies they favor calculates mortality only for 1995 through 2000 [75], thus truncating mortality before and after that period. Finally, there are some obvious questions about any estimate based on official DPRK statistics or the WFP’s 1998 nutritional survey. Both must have been subject to North Korean government control and manipulation. For example, maps on Pages 93 to 95 purport to show the areas where the WFP was permitted access, yet the “access” areas indicated after 1996 include North Korea’s worst concentration camps, including Camp 22, which is easily large enough to show on those maps. No international inspector has ever been let near those camps; the regime denies that they even exist. There’s little question that the mortality rate in those areas would have been both severe and unreported.
Let’s return to the problem of using an agricultural economy’s model for an industrial economy, because the concentration of people away from their food sources poses what I’ll call the problem of the “goners.” In any famine, people wander away from their homes in search of food, but the problem is greatly concentrated for large numbers of people concentrated in factory towns like this one, as opposed to smaller concentrations of people surrounded by other farming areas. According to Andrew Natsios, “goners” was a grim expression aid workers applied to wandering famine refugees few were likely to survive. Defector Yomiko Chiba vividly described the arrival of scores of goners in Sinuiju in 1995. They wandered in from the countryside and began showing up dead on the town’s streets, which concerned local officials. Chiba was a teacher, so the regime mobilized her and her students to collect and bury cartfulls of goners of all ages and both genders. Natsios also wrote of having witnessed mass burials of famine victims in unmarked graves and described defector accounts of daily collections of corpses at railroad stations.
I do not relate these stories simply because they are grim. I relate them to raise the strong possibility that because their identifies and causes of death may never have been recorded, ”goners” might not show up in death statistics would likely exceed the number of “goners” in mostly agricultural areas, such as 1950’s China. Goners from cities could also have a ripple effect on nearby agricultural areas and areas along roads, railways, and other escape routes. The North Korean regime also rounded up “goners” without travel permits and put them in 9/27 camps [170], or perhaps in institutions such as hospitals and orphanages. In both cases, mortality in those institutions was generally higher than elsewhere [73]. Family members who died after being left behind by their providers might show up in local death statistics, but if no family members survived at all, they might not be reflected in refugee surveys, on which the authors also rely. We’re left with too little information about the authors’ favored Chinese models to know if they account for those questions.
Perhaps Noland and Haggard can answer them, but regardless of their final toll, they would make a stronger argument had they done more to explain it. It’s always to a challenge explaining complex statistical analysis to economic novices like your correspondent. In the end, the estimate I put the most weight on is the one that’s best explained to me. Here, I still credit Andrew Natsios, the former Administrator of USAID, current Special Envoy for Darfur, and a former aid worker in North Korea. Natsios estimated the toll at 2.5 million in “The Great North Korean Famine,” a extraordinarily powerful book that will inevitably, and perhaps unfairly, be compared to this one.
Noland and Haggard take issue with Natsios’s weighted estimate because it places too much statistical weight on North Hamgyeong, in the far northeast, which was “by consensus, the worst affected province.” [75] That was my guess, too, but Noland and Haggard cite a refugee survey’s finding that 62% actually thought that South Hamgyeong province was the worst affected [70], though 60% of those surveyed were from North Hamgyeong. That makes sense; after all, it’s a much longer walk to China from Hamhung or Hungnam than it is from Chongjin. And as I’ve mentioned above, North Hamgyeong statistics almost certainly fail to report death statistics from forced labor camps that occupy a significant portion of the province’s land area.
It’s tempting to declare this whole discussion hopeless. Last winter, hundreds died when a heavy snowstorm cut an entire district off from its food and fuel supplies. Were these famine victims, too? I don’t claim to know the answer. All of these estimates must rely on questionable data, and even if we learn that the actual toll matches Noland’s lowest estimate, it still would be the highest death toll caused by government policy toward its own people since the Khmer Rouge fled Phnom Penh. But there’s nothing academic about this discussion if you’re a policy-maker, a war crimes prosecutor, or a North Korean. Unless you accept Stalin’s maxim that a million deaths is a mere statistic, we are dealing with a discrepancy of at least 1.5 million tragedies.
[Continued tomorrow …]
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 22, 2007 at 6:50 am · Filed under Famine & Food Aid, "United" Nations
Not only is the UNDP scandal not going away, it’s confirming how little has changed with both the U.N. and Ban Ki Moon. For the U.N., corruption and cronyism still triumph over accountability. For Ban, the fear of offending Kim Jong Il and of controversy in general to be the guide that principle and promises of reform aren’t. A pattern emerges in which (1) Ban is confronted with U.N. inefficiency and corruption; (2) Ban promises bold reforms; (3) Ban engages in “quiet diplomacy” that we later learn accomplished nothing (But what do you people know? It’s too quiet for you!).
Yesterday, I passed along a report that ”[t]he U.N. ethics office found evidence that the United Nations Development Program retaliated against an employee who tried to expose its alleged wrongdoing in North Korea, a letter leaked on Monday said.” Today, I am bumping that item up into its own post to highlight Claudia Rosett’s latest piece on the subject. Now, we can learn how the UNDP can assert – accurately – that the U.N. Ethics Office has no jurisdiction to investigate the UNDP, an organization whose annual budget of $5 billion is twice that of the Secretariat:
But it also turns out that the UNDP, which has no ethics office of its own, is refusing to recognize the “jurisdiction” of the U.N. Secretariat’s Ethics Office. Benson discussed this in his memo, urging the UNDP’s Kemal Dervis to reverse course and abide by the advice of the Ethics Office, and allow a U.N. investigation to go forward into whether Shkurtaj was sacked — wrongly — for following U.N. ethics guidelines promulgated on Dec. 19, 2005, which state that it is the “duty” of staff members to report any breach of U.N. rules, and that any staffer who does so in good faith has “the right to be protected against retaliation.”
The UNDP won’t play ball. A UNDP official says the agency is making its own arrangements for a “complementary external review,” that would cover both its North Korea operations and Shkurtaj’s allegations, and that there will be a board meeting to discuss the matter this Thursday, August 23. That’s not much comfort. This is the same board that is not allowed by UNDP management to see the UNDP’s own internal audits, and whose 36 members include not only the U.S. (which has been trying to clean up the UNDP), but such ethics-challenged governments as those of China, Russia, Belarus, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and North Korea itself.
At the U.N. Secretariat, this intra-U.N. stand-off led to a bizarre series of exchanges at Monday’s noon press briefing, in which reporters tried to find out what Ban plans to do about the UNDP’s rejection of the “jurisdiction” of the U.N. Secretariat’s Ethics Office. According to U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas, this turf problem was news to Ban himself, and he is now “examining” the Ethics memo.
I doubt that Ban is as detached from such matters as he claims to be. We speak of a man for whom feigning ignorance of evil is habitual and whose word means nothing:
Last fall the U.S. Mission to the U.N. began trying to pry information from the UNDP about its strange and secretive doings in North Korea. When damning details surfaced in January, Ban promised a system-wide audit of the U.N., and an audit within three months of the UNDP in North Korea. Ban then reneged. The system-wide audit was postponed — apparently forever. In March, with the North Korean government refusing to accept stricter practices for UNDP operations in the country, the UNDP closed its office in Pyongyang. But instead of shipping all its records immediately out of the country, the UNDP stored some at the Pyongyang offices of the U.N. World Food Program.
And though the U.N. appears to have no problem rushing emergency teams into North Korea in response to Kim’s latest demands for flood aid, the U.N. has been strangely incapable of getting auditors into the country.
The reaction of his mouthpiece is classic:
“The secretary-general’s strength — you should know it by now — is one of diplomacy, of quiet diplomacy.”
If that is so, then let’s take stock of just what Ban Ki Moon’s quiet diplomacy has ever accomplished. If Ban wishes to redeem the value of his quiet diplomacy — and the costly bureaucracy he leads — let him apply it to closing Camp 22 forever.
See also:
* Five North Korean refugees have entered the Indonesian Embassy in Hanoi, seeking asylum in South Korea.
* There are some mildly encouraging signs of transparency in a new World Food Program emergency relief operation in the North, following the floods there:
The WFP said visits by its own assessment teams to 11 counties in two provinces have confirmed the extent of the losses there, adding that more visits would be made. [….]
“The flooding in the DPRK is serious. WFP has worked out satisfactory arrangements with the government so that we can provide emergency food aid to hundreds of thousands of people who need our help,” said Tony Banbury, WFP’s regional director for Asia.
The agency said the government had “indicated its acceptance” of monitoring visits by WFP staff to ensure food reaches the needy. [Channel News Asia]
I’d only say that it merits watching. Given the track records of all involved, you can’t conclude much without knowing more details.
* Front-runner Lee Myung Bak again shifts his position on North Korea, in a favorable direction:
“I think we have to (provide support) within the humanitarian boundary,” Lee told a group of reporters at his office in Seoul. “Basic economic cooperation is difficult to carry out, but humanitarian aid must go on.” [Yonhap]
So can we forget the Kaesong Archipelago, then?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 20, 2007 at 8:43 pm · Filed under Refugees, Activism
Do you still remember their story, the arrest of Adrian Hong and the courageous LiNK activists, and the shame on our Consul General in Shenyang? I had given up all hope, but others did not, and their persistence has been repaid with six lives.
WASHINGTON, D.C., Aug. 20 - Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) today announced that six North Korean refugees imprisoned by Chinese authorities last December were recently released from a prison in Shenyang. The six - which include two teenage boys, one woman in her early twenties, and three older women - were arrested in Beijing last December after seeking asylum at a foreign mission in China. They arrived in South Korea on July 19.
Three of LiNK’s field workers were also apprehended for aiding the six North Korean refugees, and imprisoned for ten days before being deported to the United States. LiNK actively operates a network of underground shelters for North Korean refugees in unfriendly nations.
The release of the six could mean a dramatic reversal of China’s policy of repatriating thousands of North Korean refugees and allowing them to resettle in third countries, consistent with the nation’s obligations under international law.
“We recognize the importance of the release of these refugees,” commented Hannah Song, Deputy Director of LiNK. “We hope this marks the beginning of a shift in Chinese policy, in tune with their international obligations under the UN Refugee Convention.”
It is estimated that the People’s Republic of China has repatriated tens of thousands of North Koreans in recent years. A small group of organizations works to rescue refugees in the underground in China.
“It is our hope that this will soon become the rule, rather than an exception,” continued Song. “In light of the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, measures to protect the human rights of these refugees are long overdue.”
I think the LiNK people are probably too realistic to believe this really represents a change in Chinese policy. I certainly don’t believe it does. China found this particular case embarrassing and an irritant in its relations with the United States, which in turn came under pressure from LiNK and other activists. It reasoned that letting six go after nine horrendous months in captivity would further the greater evil of pitching thousands more North Koreans back into the furnace. The Chinese were pressured by the State Department, but first, the State Department itself had to be pressued to do what ought to come instinctively to those who represent our values abroad. The Wall Street Journal comments:
Beyond the happy ending for these six, however, lies the larger tragedy of the tens of thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of North Korean refugees at risk in northeastern China. Here, the U.S. efforts fall short. There is much more it could be doing to turn an international spotlight on this imperiled population.
At the very least, Washington could speak out more forcefully against Beijing’s policy of tracking down and repatriating the refugees. That policy violates its obligations under the International Convention Regarding the Treatment of Refugees, to which it is a signatory. China won’t even permit the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees access.
Instead, the State Department worries about rocking the boat in Pyongyang and Beijing….
You can join or contribute to LiNK here.
See also:
* The Daily NK looks at the North Korean way of flood reconstruction. They are also suggesting (as I did here) that North Korea won’t hold a summit in Pyongyang unless the city is returned to its showpiece condition, such as it was. I think propaganda is obviously a large part of why both of these unpopular Korean leaders want this summit. For Kim Jong Il, the idea is to have footage of Roh coming to his kingly throne to kowtow, as DJ did before him. But with a severe shortage of serviceable equipment and a lot of broken roads and bridges in the way, Pyongyang may not be fixed by October. Roh already looks cynical and manipulative for having called this summit. Thanks to the perfect timing of the heavens, he may not even be able to close his final deal to exchange his country’s interests for a few votes.
* I’m Shocked, Shocked, to See Discrimination Going On Here! “In the recommendations, UNCERD expressed discomfort about a prevalent notion in Korean culture of ‘pure-bloodedness,’ saying, ‘The whole concept came very close to ideas of racial superiority.’” Gee, ya think? Needless to say, I’m always deeply divided whenever I’m in substantial agreement with the Global Nanny State.
* If we really want to put pressure on the ChiComs, I should take a hiatus from this blog and start one called DangerousChineseProducts.com. It would have links to stories like this one, complete with pictures and lot numbers of the affected products. As a parent, I’d honestly like to have one place to go to find this stuff out. The Chinese leadership has to be pretty worried that manufacturers won’t want their merchandise to say “Made in China.” The absence of accountability always comes back to bite you.
* Hey! Nice meetin’ you got here!
* “We should pull out and let them have their civil war,” even if it means genocide, a possibility I had just raised. That’s what a member of Congress, and of the Out of Iraq Caucus, told me and a small group of others yesterday. It was a breathtakingly irresponsible statement coming from a member who voted to authorize the war, and who now wants to pull them out yesterday because (gasp) someone there shot at us (what? no cakewalk?). A moment later, the member said that there absolutely would not be genocide, with a degree of confidence that I wish I could share. I’ve decided not to name the member (a) because I’m not sure he knew he was on-record with a blogger, and (b) out of respect for his willingness to give so generously of his time to hear the views of those he didn’t agree with. A cardinal rule of persuasion is that you should never discourage people from listening to your views or migrating toward them. Personally, I thought he was genuinely a likeable person. Professionally, I’m sometimes often disturbed by the superficiality of knowledge of those who govern us (no doubt, he’s more fluent with other issues). Still, I see less disagreement from the left that genocide would be the result of a leaving Iraq too soon, meaning that if you’re in the pull-them-out-yesterday camp, you have to be willing to accept what’s going to be on your TV screens later. It will make Bosnia look like a rehearsal.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 20, 2007 at 8:34 am · Filed under Famine & Food Aid
The secrecy of North Korea’s regime and the recency of the floods mean that we should be wary of estimates we hear about the severity of the damage they caused, and that goes double for some of the detailed statistical compilations the papers are printing. We do know there were fatalies; South Koreans have found corpses that were washed downstream across the DMZ. Beyond that, things are less certain. North Korea officially claims that the floods killed 300 people and left 300,000 homeless. Those figures don’t jibe with each other. In a mountainous and underdeveloped country, any disaster large enough to make more than a quarter of a million people homeless — the size of a small city — would have claimed more lives.
This parade of statistics seems even more suspicious:
The UN said today that 58,000 homes were damaged in the flooding, 50 percent of the country’s health clinics were destroyed, and as much as 70 percent of arable land was under water. More than 800 public buildings, 540 bridges, 70 sections of railway and 500 high-voltage power towers also were destroyed, according to the UN. [Bloomberg; emphasis is mine]
According to other reports, the floods destroyed up to 450,000 tons of cereals, about 9% of the country’s annual food needs, but 11% of this year’s domestic rice and corn crop. Those figures are difficult to reconcile, and they almost certainly originate from the regime.
If the truth really is that bad, the North Korean government probably wouldn’t be able to pull those statistics together that quickly. Certainly the U.N. wasn’t given the access to the North Korean countryside needed to do that assessment independently. But such an assessment is essential if we’re to know the real extent of the humanitarian impact and mitigate it effectively. If we learned anything from the Great Famine, it’s that we can’t trust the North Korean regime to tell the world the truth, not even for the sake of saving the lives of own people alive.
Still, North Korea seems less opaque than usual this time. Its television stations have actually aired footage of the damage. Some novice Korea-watchers (a term that inevitably includes journalists with wide audiences) are ready to declare perestroika. I am underwhelmed. The floods struck the area around Pyongyang, the same area where most of North Korea’s TV sets and viewers are. North Korea’s propaganda machine may be crude, but it’s not unsophisticated. Ignoring the pink elephant in the room — or the flooded subway — would be unsophisticated. Instead, the government does its best to shape the public’s perception of a bad situation. That’s especially understandable if resident of Pyongyang have become less afraid to express their dissatisfaction.
Here’s some of the footage.
Here’s a Yahoo slide show of news photos, and a selection of them:
[Korea News Service/Reuters; the second photo from left is also claimed by KCNA and AFP, so it’s fair to assume that all of these photos are from North Korean government sources.]
Last year’s floods also affected the capital, but with less apparent severity than this year’s. But here’s a statistic for you:
Last year the nation was hit by what its state-run media called the worst flood in the country’s history, which left as many as 54,700 North Koreans dead or missing. [Bloomberg, Bill Varner]
That figure is casually dropped into the middle of that last report. Imagine — 50,000 people erased from the face of the 21st Century Earth, and 99.9% of the world will never even hear it happened. The floods of 1995 and 1996, which are blamed by some for triggering the Great Famine, were also fairly severe, but they were concentrated further north (more).
If this disaster is being treated differently, it might be because it’s affecting people the regime doesn’t consider expendable. Pyongyang is a city of privileged people. Only citizens of good political background are allowed to live there. There is a conspicuous absence of handicapped people in Pyongyang, a mystery that may finally have been explained. The capital contains North Korea’s most politically privileged and necessary people, and much of what they eat is grown within a 100-mile radius the city.
This time, letting the victims suffer and die isn’t an option, and if these floods really are the “worst ever in history,” there may be too many hungry people around Pyongyang to sustain them on what’s taken from more expendable people. What’s more, this Reuters photo is supposely of a cornfield in long-suffering South Hamgyeong Province, meaning that some ”expendable” areas were hard-hit, too.
[Reuters/Korea News Service]
Only North Hamgyeong, Ryanggang Provinces appear to have been spared, and those areas may have already been experiencing a food situation that was bad and getting worse. This is a country with no margin of error in its food supply. So if Kim Jong Il is telling us the truth, he’s in no position to make unconditional demands. But he’ll make them anyway, and sadly, other nations will deliver with few questions asked. Even the United States has contributed $100,000. It’s a very small amount, but nothing suggests that the North is ready show any transparency in how the aid is distributed.
What a shame. In the ruined fields, there is an unprecedented humanitarian, political, and diplomatic benefit to be reaped. What if, instead of pouring cash and aid into the black hole of North Korea’s Public Distribution System, thus leaving the people vulnerable to its corruption, diversion, and political manipulations, international donors insisted on distributing their aid directly? This time, Kim Jong Il might not be in a position to refuse. There could be no greater humanitarian and political benefit that could be reaped from the ruined fields of North Korea than the sight of compassionate foreigners delivering food, tents, clean water, medical supplies, and even medical services. In the space of weeks, the regime’s base of support would begin to question all of the xenophobia, national supremacy, and self-sufficiency with which it had been so deeply inculcated. Proponents of engagement have a historic opportunity to show their sincerity by demanding — just once, after ten years – that engagement finally do something for the North Korean people.
Too bad that opportunity is already being thrown away.
See also:
* Lee Myung Bak has won the opposition Grand National Party’s nomination for the presidency of South Korea. Lee is now heavily favored to win the general election in December. So far, it looks like Park Geun-Hye will accept the result, meaning a split ticket is less likely. Here’s some of Lee’s more recent ruminations on North Korea policy, via the Daily NK. Although Lee’s lastest statements are encouraging, he has been all over the map on the subject. Lee will run largely on economic issues, but his formula for recovery is massive public-works projects. I wrote a profile of Lee a couple of years ago, when it occurred to me that this man could amount to something.
* I’m also underwhelmed by the fact that in the year 2007, North Korea is finally contemplating getting its own Web domains. I’ll be whelmed when ordinary North Koreans have access to them, and to sites in other countries.
* Bloomberg reports that the North Korean economy actually shrank last year.
North Korea’s economy contracted in 2006 for the first time in eight years, as the communist country agreed to begin dismantling its nuclear weapons program this year in return for energy assistance.
The economy shrank 1.1 percent last year because of energy shortages and bad weather after expanding 3.8 percent in 2005, South Korea’s central bank said in a report released in Seoul today. This is the first time the economy has shrunk since 1998.
“Adverse weather conditions caused a decline in agricultural and fisheries production,'’ the Bank of Korea said in an e-mailed statement. “The nuclear issue also led to worsened international relations and energy shortages and appears to have resulted in an overall worsening of its economy.'’
One other possible explanation you wouldn’t expect South Korea to highlight is that our enforcement actions against the North’s money laundering had a devastating impact. That would not only show just how effective those actions were, but just how much of the North’s economy was based on or linked to illicit activity.
* The latest from the nuke talks:
North Korea is prepared to come clean with a complete inventory of its nuclear programme under a February six-country disarmament deal, its deputy chief nuclear envoy said on Saturday.
Two days of talks on how to go about dismantling the North’s nuclear weapons programme ended on Friday in the capital of northeast China’s Liaoning province, Shenyang, where the U.S. envoy said more wrangling was needed to thrash out key terms.
“We will be making a transparent disclosure of all nuclear programme and nuclear equipment,” North Korean foreign ministry official Ri Kun was quoted by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency as telling reporters in Shenyang.
“More wrangling needed” must mean North Korea is still denying the uranium program. Meanwhile, as I predicted, the news media are paying almost no attention to talks on the full normalization of relations between the United States and North Korea.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 18, 2007 at 10:09 am · Filed under NK Economics
If the Wall Street Journal says the FTA is now dead, it must be so:
Only two months after pressuring Seoul to insert labor and environmental concessions, House Democrats now say they won’t approve the FTA in any case. [WSJ]
But if the WSJ says “House Democrats” say it, is it necessarily so?
This news reaches us via Brendan Carr, whose post on the subject will do just as well if you’re not a WSJ subscriber. His blog is a funny and interesting read, and I admire him for his straightforward language (a good quality to look for in a lawyer, I will add). That said, if the FTA really is dead, the Joongang Ilbo hasn’t caught on (hat tip to Brendan’s commenter Sperwer).
OFK readers will recall that I first predicted the FTA’s death, more prematurely than presciently, on previous occasions. The first was in April of 2006, and the second was in this April 2007 post. The same day as the April 2007 post, the two countries’s negotiators cut through a year of wide and seemingly inflexible differences and reached a draft agreement. They did this after I had posted a long chronology of the ugly history of the negotiations and the campaign of anti-FTA/anti-U.S. distortion and demogoguery in Korea, and reasoned that the Korean government had done so little to defend the FTA or explain its potential benefits that it had no room to negotiate or compromise on issues that were essential to the U.S. side. I believed that as a result, the FTA would fail, and that the attempt would actually leave relations between the two countries in a worse state than before. Having failed to answer its own far-left base and unwilling to risk its anti-U.S. voter appeal, Roh’s government had walled itself into taking unreasonable positions that I thought the U.S. side would never accept. Based on the comments I’d seen coming from the U.S. Trade Representative and her negotiating team, I didn’t think we’d cave. I was wrong. We did cave.
The patient lived, but so did the tumor, and that same bad deal now went to a hostile Congress.
The words that deserve to be remembered here were those of former congressman James Leach, who diplomatically predicted both the transfer of power in Congress last November, and that the FTA would have to pass in a Republican Congress or not at all (the second bullet of my “random observations” of this hearing was based on Leach’s comments). And sure enough, the deal ran into immediate trouble in Congress, even though the draft was signed while Congress was in recess. This led to my third prediction of the FTA’s death, which I’m relieved to report is holding up. So far.
I assume that like drunken Irish wakes, blogs are places where one’s true feelings about the deceased can be spoken. Mine are that although this is a lost opportunity in many ways, I’m still glad this particular FTA deal failed. First, remember that this deal could have passed, even in this Congress, had it been more even-handed and had “outward processing zones” (read: Kaesong) not been sitting there in Annex 22-C screaming “slave labor!“ I should say that well-informed friends tell me that this would never happen, and that Annex 22-C was just token language we agreed to to shut the South Koreans up. I answer them by saying that none of us thought we’d ever launder $25 million in Kim Jong Il’s drug and counterfeiting money for him this time last year. I know what the law says about importing slave-made goods, but I’ve lost my trust in this administration (or future ones) not to exempt North Korea from every law of God or man. Second, after Roh’s miserable stewardship of these negotiations — and, for that matter, the entire U.S.-ROK relationship — this is not a deal he deserved to bring home. Like Rudy Guiliani, I don’t believe that anti-Americanism should be cost-free, and that when self-described allies encourage or fail to respond to it, we shouldn’t reward them, treat them like allies, or help them argue to their voters that theirs is the most profitable way of dealing with America.
In the end, however, a ROK-U.S. FTA on the right terms serves the economic and diplomatic interests of both countries, if nothing else because it could serve as a counterweight to the growing influence of China over the South Korean economy. Maybe next year.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 17, 2007 at 12:10 pm · Filed under Appeasement
There must be something contagious in Korea.
The South Korean Embassy has put out the text of the agreed ”rules” for the upcoming delivery of new instructions to southern cadres North-South summit, which a friend graciously sent me. It’s good fodder for reflecting on the Sunshine Policy, the legacy of which leftist President Roh Moo Hyun and tyrant Kim Jong Il would have us celebrate with them. So what is there to celebrate?
If there’s a new spirit of openness to be celebrated after a decade of massive wealth transfers to Kim Jong Il — or even a hint of it – it’s certainly not apparent in the rules that the North Korean Ministry of Public Security wrote for the occasion. What’s more apparent is that South Korea has acquired the habit of easy and casual acceptance of North Korean control. Want to do business here? Stay inside the fence, don’t talk to the workers or give them gifts, and listen to our creepy blaring propaganda. Want to meet your abducted relatives for a brief moment? Don’t expect them to speak freely. Want good relations with us? Silence our critics. Want our sports teams to visit you? Suppress all dissent and revere our Leader’s portrait as a sacred icon. Want our officials to visit you? Don’t let us see or hear any free speech. Want to visit us? Suspend the preparedness of your military and bow to our total control. And even then, as we will see, your safety will only be “conditionally” guaranteed.
In principle, you’d think that cultural exchanges and “engagement” have the potential to change North Korea, and occasionally, we will even see a shred of evidence that it worked that way. Far more often, we see evidence of exactly the opposite, or that the motives behind the various acts of “openness” are downright suspect. Read the rules and reflect on how little ten years of the Sunshine Policy have accomplished to change North Korea … with the sole exception of its nuclear weapons program. Who’s really changed who here? Bracketed comments are mine, pic from here:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 15, 2007 at 5:48 am · Filed under Korean Politics, Appeasement, Famine & Food Aid
[Update 8/18: Called it: “The two Koreas on Saturday agreed to reschedule the inter-Korean summit slated for late August in Pyongyang to Oct. 2-4 after North Korea requested a delay because of its extensive flood damage, the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said.”]
Would Kim Jong Il host a summit in Pyongyang if he couldn’t make a propaganda spectacle of the visit? Yesterday, I relayed the latest reports of serious flooding North Korea that have reportedly killed hundreds and destroyed thousands of homes. The damage apparently affected most of North Korea’s West Coast, all the way from the Yalu River to at least the Taedong. What I didn’t realize was that downtown Pyongyang also took a serious hit.
With the rapid rise in water level of Daedong River due to the localized rainfall, damage is supposed to be serious in several places within Pyongyang. The rainfall which poured on the city could not be properly channeled to Daedong River, leading to the submersion of the 1st floor of the Botong River Hotel.
The hotel is a first-rate hotel, a nine-floor building situated in 1973 on the edge of the Botong River in Ansang-dong, Pyongcheon-district. It is a place usually occupied by foreign businessmen seeking out Pyongyang. The US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who visited Pyongyang in June, was supposed to have shared drinks with Kim Kye Gwan. [Daily NK]
If the city is a mess, that may explain why the North Koreans failed to show to discuss the necessary arrangements. Or not. After all, this is North Korea, the ultimate enigma, the kind of place not just anyone can blog about. Still, not even the agnostics out there could help but enjoy watching all of the machinations of the politicians wrecked by a vengeful God.
A more grave question is how this will affect the food situation. As any visitor or avid Google-Earther can attest, the farms and fields in the area around Pyongyang are clearly better tended than those in other areas, where conditions look almost semi-arid. This “core” area probably gets first pick at the supply of seed, fertilizer, and pesticide. It’s the only place where you’ll see what look like viable feedlots. Second, North Korea’s infrastructure is a wreck, and the flood apparently caused considerable additional damage, according to North Korean sources quoted by Reuters:
Tens of thousands of hectares of farmland were flooded, and 800 public buildings, more than 540 bridges and 70 sections of railway destroyed, it added. [Reuters]
Which leads to another, more direct, impact on summit plans:
Subsequently, it is highly possible that the [South Korean] government, which has pursued an overland visit to North Korea, will turn its position. The Kaesung-Pyongyang highway which was used at the time of Kim Man Bok’s, Chief of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), visited to North Korea was known to be swept away.
In the case of railroads, experts analyze that visiting North Korea on the Kyunghui Line (from Seoul to Shinuiju), unless the safety issue is resolved, would be difficult since the foundation of the railroads has been weakened. [Daily NK]
What if food production in the area near Pyongyang is disproportionately affected? Admittedly, we can’t expect reliable crop damage estimates like this one for months, if ever. How will this affect the regime and the population? Normally, Pyongyang always gets the first pick of all resources, especially food. But this time, robbing Peter to pay Paul may not be an option. During the Great Famine, a wrecked infrastructure meant that the regime could not move food from one part of North Korea to another overland, and its ports are also dilapidated. No evidence suggests that the infrastructure is in better shape now than then. Recent reports suggest that the food situation in the East is marginal, so there’s not much to be diverted from there, and diversion could throw those areas into crisis.
Crop losses in Pyongyang alone won’t spell disaster, however, just one more setback in a steady series. My guess is that North Korea will ask for and get food aid from South Korea and China, even if that aid has to land at Nampo. Even the United States is considering giving aid. Because North Korea actually places some value on the population living near Pyongyang, the regime will distribute enough of that aid to keep them reasonably healthy. There will be corruption, diversion, and waste, of course, and that will take some toll of bitterness and disillusion. If much good cropland was lost, this could add to North Korea’s long-term food dependency.
See also:
* North Korea is accusing the United States of “’sitting idle’ and turning a blind eye to the protracted captivity of 19 South Korean hostages,” which is pretty ironic if you know what the North Korean government does to any Korean missionaries it catches working its turf.
* Ignore the openly-expressed desire of so many of its German readers that we not succeed in Iraq. Ignore the gratuitous political chops. This lengthy report by Der Spiegel on Iraq is absolute must-reading, a sincere attempt at objective truth-telling in a degree of depth and breadth that makes its flaws seem trivial.
* Talking about news often means dwelling on the mean, selfish things people do to each other, and since this is a blog about Korea, it’s nice to have the chance to tell a story this uplifting about an ordinary Korean hero’s sacrifices for the sake of others:
Peter Nguyen doesn’t just tear up when he talks about Jeon and that day on the high seas. You can actually see rivulets streaming down his face. “They are tears of gratitude,” he says. “If the captain had not rescued the 96 of us that day, I wouldn’t be here. The storm would’ve claimed our lives.” [….]
Jeon’s bosses who had heard about the captain’s defiance ordered him yet again to drop them back into the ocean on makeshift rafts. Reluctantly, the captain ordered his men to make some rafts. He stood on the deck watching the boat people, talking in hushed voices and huddling close to their families.
Then, in a corner, Jeon saw a young mother. She was holding a tiny infant, barely two months old. There was no way that baby was going to make it on a bamboo raft on the Pacific, Jeon thought. He ordered his men to stop making the rafts. [OC Register]
Read the rest here.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 14, 2007 at 6:31 am · Filed under Appeasement, Diplomacy
It’s not assured that the South Korean public will see President Roh’s going-out-of-business summit for what it is, but if it does not, it won’t be because South Koreans didn’t hear from enough cooler heads about it. Richardson presents a broad sampling of reaction from the (mostly conservative) Korean papers that dominate their country’s market. Most share a skeptical view and agree on that this is an obvious, cynical election-year ploy. There isn’t anything Roh is proposing to do in this meeting that he couldn’t have done in the last five years if North Korea had reciprocated some of the good will he offered them.
Current events remind us why, and why we shouldn’t assume that Roh would even get that last chance to ask. The North Koreans are no-shows for a meeting today when they were supposed to fine-tune the logistical details of the summit. When will the pre-meeting take place? The North Koreans say they’ll get back to Roh’s people at their earliest convenience. If it’s ever a pleasure doing business with these people, you’re either smoking dope or buying it from them in bulk.
The opposition, fearing that it will be stuck paying for Roh’s next agreement, is asking to make the terms of any deals public, and for a vote :
The Grand National Party (GNP) decided to thoroughly verify agreements to be reached with North Korea at the second inter-Korean summit meeting through the process of confirmation by the National Assembly. The GNP also decided to ask the government to make public the agenda, discussion procedure, and results of the summit meeting. [….]
In a phone interview with the Dong-A Ilbo, GNP floor leader Kim Hyung-oh said, “We are concerned that a series of inter-Korean agreements could impose a heavy financial burden on people of South Korea, including the ministries already planning massive aid for the North,” …. [Donga Ilbo]
This way, the actual terms of the next giveaway become as much a part of the national conversation as the summit itself. There’s also a greater danger that Roh could make foolish political concessions that the North Koreans will seize on long after he leaves office. Presciently, OFK favorite Professor Sung Yoon Lee had written about this just before the summit was announced. He first notes that nuclear states do not develop nuclear capabilities at such expense “only to bargain them away for money or food - blandishments that carry a short expiration date,” unless it follows a fundamental change in the character of the ruling regime. Then, he gives an idea of what’s behind North Korea’s interest in a last-minute “peace framework” with Roh:
North Korea knows better than any other that a peace treaty is just an agreement on paper, one that often conceals the true hostile intent of the signatory. At the same time, North Korea calculates that the conclusion of such a peace treaty with the US would create enormous pressure for the eviction of US forces from the South. With the signing of a peace treaty and all the political spin celebrating the dawn of a new era and genuine peace on the Korean Peninsula, the very raison d’etre for US troops in South Korea would vanish. [Asia Times]
I’m one who thinks that the South can defend itself without American troops, but whatever one’s feeling on that topic, one genuinely hopes that South Korea will maintain a high enough state of readiness to deter the North from trying anything rash. Here, the news is already bad before these two unpopular Korean leaders have even sat down. Roh may have just agreed to delay a major U.S.-ROK military exercise, Ulchi Focus Lens. North Korea is also demanding that those exercises be cancelled before it will honor the rest of its Agreed Framework 2.0 obligations. North Korea has run out of easy giveaways and has now reached the point where further concessions would do significant harm to its plans. Not that North Korean stalling is contrary to the Bush Administration’s own plans at this point.
Via GI Korea, here are some of the best questions Roh will never ask Kim Jong Il, as presented by Suzanne Scholte of the North Korean Freedom Coalition:
- Who will represent the North Korean people?
- Will [Roh] ask for the political prison camps to be closed? [OFK: more]
- Will Roh ask for the return of the South Korean abductees and prisoners of war as well as the abductees from other nations? [OFK: more]
Read the rest here. Sadly, some American politicans are just as good at sidestepping those questions. Let’s close the discussion with these questions. First, has a decade of the Sunshine Policy made South Korea safer? Second, has it changed North Korea for the better?
See also:
* The NGO Anti-Slavery International has released a lengthy and detailed report on North Korea’s forced labor camps. I’ll be reading the entire thing and commenting on it further as appropriate; here are links to the full report, an article summarizing it, and a petition you can sign (it goes to the Chinese Ambassador to the UK and then asks you to write your MP, something I haven’t had since 1776; I still signed the petition). Thanks to a reader for forwarding.
* KCNA has admitted that severe flooding has yet again struck North Korea. According to Reuters, hundreds are dead, 30,000 homes were destroyed, and North Korea’s roads and bridges were badly damaged. Floods last year contributed to a significant decline in food production, and cropland lost to erosion can take decades to replace. It’s another part of Kim Il Sung’s lasting legacy of agricultural guidance: he ordered thousands of acres of trees cut down to put marginal acreage into production. Instead, he got flooding that washed away some of his country’s best farmland. Natually, foreign observers won’t be able to actually visit the damaged areas to assess humanitarian needs, but South Korea will soon be hit with a big demand for reconstruction aid. Just like after the Ryongchon explosion.
* Speaking of Douglas Shin, a reader (thanks) directs me to the gorgeous new Web site of his organization, Crossing Borders. You may not agree with their goals, but I do. You can’t replace a bad idea with no idea. It will take a belief system that can inspire people to break the grip of North Korea’s cultish deification of the Kims. It’s a matter of how you go about it, of course.
* More tyranny tourism. Though mildly interesting and appropriately skeptical, it’s the same circuit of monuments that all visitors follow and probably won’t be anything new to readers of this site.
* “The number of truck bombs and other large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago, according to the U.S. military command in Iraq.” [USA Today, Jim Michaels]
* Christopher Hitchens deconstructs unrealistically prosaic mythology about Al Qaeda in Iraq. Hitchens doesn’t draw the connection, but those myths are almost photonegatives of 9/11 conspiracies. Both are false realities designed to rationalize away threats from forces we can’t control and transfer them to forces we can control.
* Not Ready, Part V: ”Asked whether he would move U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight terrorism elsewhere, he brought up Afghanistan and said, ‘We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.’” I’m going to have to make myself a chart, or a weather vane, to keep track of Obama’s bi-policy disorder.
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