Archive for September, 2007
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 24, 2007 at 6:41 am · Filed under Southeast Asia, Democracy
Updates below:
- 9/21: Original post, background of the protests.
- 9/22: Monks march to Aung San Suu Syi’s home in record downpour; 10,000 protest in Mandalay.
- 9/23: Protests hit 8 cities; Rangoon turnout at 20,000; World leaders speak out against use of force to quell protests, but the U.N. is silent.
- 9/24: Rangoon protests draw 100,000; Their hold on power seriously threatened, junta generals threaten to use force; Bush to announce new sanctions before U.N. General Assembly; Burmese entertainers join the opposition.
- 9/25: New protests launched; Rising fears of a crackdown; Government declares curfew, sends troops to key locations.
- 9/26: 5,000 monks and 5,000 students continue to defy ban; police beat, arrest 300 monks, fire tear gas and warning shots, then fire on crowds, killing between 1 and 8.
- 9/27: 70,000 protestors risk death to demand freedom.
- 9/28: Death toll rises to at least 10, possibly scores; Japanese journalist killed; bloggers and journalists smuggle out photos and video as government cuts off internet access; despite rumors of turmoil within the junta, the crackdown appears to be working.
- 9/30: The rebellion is crushed; probably scores dead; monk’s body seen floating in the Irrawaddy; all peaceful means of change are exhausted.
- 10/2: Senior defector reports thousands of monks, students massacred; others imprisoned pending transportation to remote areas. U.N., world do nothing.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 24, 2007 at 6:38 am · Filed under An Alliance?, U.S. Military, U.S. & Korea, History
A few days ago, a reader asked me how much the presence of the USFK cost American taxpayers. This is a research project I’ve taken on before, only to be confronted by few answers from credible sources. You’re about to see what I mean here.
Writing for the Nautilus Institute, Selig Harrison claimed in 2001 that the annual cost was $42 billion per year. Another Nautilus alum, Doug Bandow, claimed in his recent Korea book that withdrawing from the ROK would save us $40 billion a year; presumably that’s an annual cost estimate. But then here, Bandow said the annual cost was “upwards of $15 billion;” while here, Bandow said the figure was “about $15 billion.”
Another interesting stat: writing at Cato, Bandow estimated the cost of IMF bailout of South Korea at $57 billion. It isn’t clear whether Bandow means to U.S. taxpayers or to the IMF as a whole. We pay most of the bill, of course.
Troop Strength:
The reader also asked me how U.S. troop strength had changed in Korea. The Time archive — unlike the New York Times’s, it’s free and availble for most of this century — notes that U.S. troops strength peaked at 400,000 during the Korean War, but had fallen to 50,000 by 1959, where it stayed until the North Koreans seized the Pueblo and attacked the Blue House in 1968, resulting in a major U.S. buildup. According to page 13 of Don Oberdorfer’s “The Two Koreas,” our troop strength was up to 62,000 by 1969, but Nixon reduced that by 20,000 by 1971, declaring that America’s primary role would be to provide air and naval cover while Asian armies defended their own countries. That concept became known as the Nixon Doctrine.
The actual reduced strength appears to have been 43,000, a number that persisted mostly unchanged up to 1988, despite President Carter’s expressed desire to withdraw most or all of them. Intense South Korean lobbying and State Department opposition killed the plan. Troop strength remained stable through the Reagan years as well.
In 1989, South Korea was shaken by its first big anti-U.S. riots, and an angry U.S. Congress passed legislation to cut troop strength. The cuts were shallow, however; by 1991, total strength had fallen to “over 40,000.” By 1995, Choe Sang Hun was reporting that it was at 37,000. That’s where the figure stayed from 1998 to 2002, when I was there.
Then came the ugly days of late 2002 to early 2003. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s subsequent troop cuts, announced in 2003 and begun in 2004, reduced that to 29,500 by 2006. Seasoned Korea reporter Don Kirk reports that the number is supposed to fall to 25,000 by the end of this decade, but Global Security claims that the number is to be reduced to 24,500 by 2008. The latter figure is more consistent with other reports I’ve read.
The graph above shows that the cuts of 2004-2008 are the steepest in USFK history aside from the drawdown following the 1953 Armistice and that following the 1968 “surge,” after the test of wills between Kim Il Sung and LBJ.
Still, don’t take that last figure too literally. South Korea has much experience with aggressive lobbying and bargaining to forestall the exodus of Americans in uniform. Although the trend suggests a long-term decline in U.S. forces, especially ground forces, a collapse in North Korea could briefly reverse that trend.
An Abbreviated, Cynical History:
Since this week has the blogosphere buzzing about the New York Times’s archives, here are some interesting finds to put your tour in Korea in perspective. I found all of these pieces while researching the other information above.
* Who knew? The fine pan-Korean tradition of counterfeiting American money dates back to at least 1954.
* August 1954: Syngman Rhee came to Congress to sell his master plan: using only South Korean and Taiwanese troops — with American air and naval support – he would invade and conquer Red China. Rhee was no doubt right that many Chinese already hated Mao, but China in 1959 was more than the world’s most populous nation. It was a nation still basking in the fervor of a revolution that hadn’t broken most of its promises yet. Thankfully, Congress rejected Rhee’s plan, but it also gave him a standing ovation, perhaps because Rhee was as eloquent as he was ruthless: “[T]he Communists have made this a hard world, a horrible world, in which to be soft is to become a slave.”
* Admit it. You’ve been tempted to see a world as it would be if only someone would round up the hippies and give them all haircuts. This piece from June 1961, in the immediate aftermath of Park Park Chung Hee’s coup, tell us that Park was destined to be that someone. Another explains how the Americans were wrong-footed by Park’s move, although it seems unlikely we were sad to see the end of Syngman Rhee’s rule by then.
* November 1959: Ever wonder why your wife can’t use the PX unless she’s command sponsored?
* Back in April 1963, Louis Armstrong played the Walker Hill on its opening night, but Satchmo was wise enough to make sure the check cleared first. And this: “[W]hile we do not allow prostitution, we are not going to insist on couples producing a marriage license.”
* October 1964: A look at mooses, hooches, and camp-town culture in South Korea’s bad old days. Bonus: how Camp Howze got its name.
* 1968 was a scary year in Korea: the seizure of the Pueblo in February; North Koreans crossing the DMZ to kill American soldiers; low-grade guerrilla warfare and generals cussing each other out at Panmunjum; and, of course, the Blue House raid. In retrospect, it appears that Kim Il Sung was seriously considering either an invasion or the sponsorship of an insurgency. The fact that South Koreans ratted out most of his infiltrators may have been decisive. If you set your mental Wayback Machine for that year, you can understand why Park Chung Hee revealed something of a seige mentality.
* Kwangju, June 2, 1980: The incident is now famous for the brutal overreaction of the ROK Army when it retook the city, but we tend to forget that those who seized the city were anything but nonviolent democracy activists. Their seizure of the city cost over 100 lives. They seized iron pipes and automatic weapons, literally ran amok in the streets brandishing them, and waited for the Army. Here is the final, fateful paragraph of that story:
Nor can the Carter Administration realistically hope to bolster the position of President Choi, since he has little power and indeed may be a virtual prisoner of the military in the presidential compound, the Blue House. To be sure, American and South Korean troops are joined in a combined command, and in theory this gives the U.S. some control over more than half of South Korea’s 600,000-man armed forces. But such authority can amount to very little. General Chun himself flagrantly ignored a Korean-American agreement on prior consultation last December, when he ordered reserve units to help him arrest some 40 rival officers. More cooperatively, the Seoul government last week asked General John Wickham Jr., U.S. commander of the joint forces, to release some Korean units under his command for “crowd control and internal security.” He obliged.
Thugs are careening through the streets in stolen jeeps, pointing stolen weapons at people, in full control of one of South Korea’s major cities. Removing hindsight from the picture, wouldn’t it seem that a measured amount of “crowd control and internal security” is needed? And what would have been the effect had Wickham refused?
See also:
* On the Sunday talk circuit, Condoleezza Rice says she expects answers from North Korea on proliferation and calls for full transparency on its nuclear programs, but avoids mentioning the Syria story.
* If you want to watch South Korean TV in Pyongyang, all you need is the right antenna and the courage to risk your life, and your family’s: “There is no technical difficulty in receiving South Korean TV if they are on an elevated apartment with spacious veranda heading the Southern direction. All of the 7-8 channels including KBS1, KBS2, SBS, MBC, EBS, China HAO TV and others can be directly received.” The antennas have become a hot item on the black market, and even some members of the elite are customers. [Daily NK]
* Also in the Daily NK: A look at all the labor and resources wasted on building Kim Jong Il his own private railroad station, and Arirang as mass child abuse. If they treated circus animals like this in America, there would be outrage.
* Like GI Korea, I believe it’s officially fair to describe South Korea’s UniFiction Minster Lee Jae-Joung as a holocaust denier.
* Seizing on allegations of North Korean-Syrian proliferation, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is calling for a cutoff of U.S. funds for North Korea, as well as a cutoff of funds to the U.N. Development Program, which passes out cash to both North Korea and Iran. No links or details yet — don’t have time at the moment — but I’ll provide the full statement later.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 22, 2007 at 10:44 pm · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Proliferation, Axis of Evil
I wonder how Chris Hill is going to talk his way out of this one:
Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.
The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.
They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
Israeli special forces had been gathering intelligence for several months in Syria, according to Israeli sources. They located the nuclear material at a compound near Dayr az-Zwar in the north. [Sunday Times, London]
Not just “material,” but North Koreans, “a number” of whom were reportedly killed in the Israeli strike. The Washington Post’s latest story is consistent with this version and corroborates parts of it. According to this AFP story, President Bush saw the intel and was still unprepared to abandon Agreed Framework 2.0. With the reports steadily leaking out, it’s going to be hard to sustain the charade now. One can only imagine the ferocity of the debate behind the scenes.
The latest reports certainly add a whole new level of curiosity to reports that Syrian diplomats are in Pyongyang for high-level talks. The Council on Foreign Relations has much interesting background on how this is affecting the diplomacy, including speculation on why the latest session of six-party talks was suddenly called off. It looks like the North Koreans will have time to get their story straight.
Personally, I blame Bill Richardson.
Previous post on “Orchard” here.
Update 23 Sept 07: The Sunday Times is still reporting more details.
ISRAELI commandos from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit – almost certainly dressed in Syrian uniforms – made their way stealthily towards a secret military compound near Dayr az-Zawr in northern Syria. They were looking for proof that Syria and North Korea were collaborating on a nuclear programme.
Israel had been surveying the site for months, according to Washington and Israeli sources. President George W Bush was told during the summer that Israeli intelligence suggested North Korean personnel and nuclear-related material were at the Syrian site. [Sunday Times, London]
The further down you read the more speculative some of it sounds. Unfortunately, the quality of reporting is inversely proportional to the opacity of the governments and the secrets they keep. It seems to be in the interests of absolutely everyone — including the Bush Administration — to keep this one off Page One.
News of the secret ground raid is the latest piece of the jigsaw to emerge about the mysterious Israeli airstrike. Israel has imposed a news blackout, but has not disguised its satisfaction with the mission. The incident also reveals the extent of the cooperation between America and Israel over nuclear-related security issues in the Middle East. The attack on what Israeli defence sources now call the “North Korean project” appears to be part of a wider, secret war against the nonconventional weapons ambitions of Syria and North Korea which, along with Iran, appears to have been forging a new “axis of evil”.
The operation was personally directed by Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, who is said to have been largely preoccupied with it since taking up his post on June 18.
Digg it here.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 20, 2007 at 7:12 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Drugs & N Korea, Axis of Evil
North Korea was dropped from the U.S. list of countries producing illicit drugs, a sign of further relief of tensions between the two countries.
“North Korea is not affecting the United States as much as the requirements on the list,'’ Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Christy McCampbell said on Sept. 17 in Washington, according to a transcript of her speech on the State Department Web site. [Bloomberg]
And that decision is based on what? On absolutely nothing but the interests of Chris Hill’s next book deal, of course. It’s what stinks so much about this entire deal. You wake up one morning and see something like like this without so much as a word of public discussion beforehand, knowing that it couldn’t possibly be based on any verifiable fact, and knowing that hardly anyone else will even notice, much less care. It’s my addiction to futility that keeps me going.
Indeed, it seems like only yesterday when the North Korean dope freighter Pong Su was caught off the coast of Australia unloading $144 million in high-quality heroin. Youtube has video of the Australian Navy sinking the ship. North Korea is still a suspected supplier of drugs to addicts in Japan, South Korea, and presumably anywhere else its retailers can find customers. North Korea even grows its own opium, and some of that opium is grown in Camp 15, one of Kim Jong Il’s concentration camps. Here’s a satellite photo of one of the fields identified by a survivor, courtesy of the U.S. Commission for Human Rights in North Korea.
North Korea is also reported to be a producer of high quality meth (see below). So did our State Department actually go there and verify that (a) the fields are fallow, or (b) that this was actually an operation run by rogue gulag inmates? Not a chance. Their answer isn’t that North Korea is out of the drug business. The answer is that it’s somebody else’s problem. Never mind that drugs are a fungible and generally untraceable commodity. Some recent articles on North Korea’s illegal drug production:
To say that North Korea is not producing and pushing drugs when all of the evidence we have suggests that it is is quite simply a lie — a dirty, expedient, political lie that only shows Pyongyang that we will embrace its lies as our own. It rewards crime and mendacity, and thus invites more of it. Does this bode well for an honest process of disarmament? Or, for that matter, our national drug policy? The Administration is simply playing politics with the inconvenient fact of North Korea’s dope dealing, the same way it played politics with its money laundering, the same way it played politics with its illegal arms dealing, the same way it wants to play politics with the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Each case demonstrates a new low in disregard for law and truth for the sake of a dubious objective. There are even signs we’re willing to ignore just the latest exposure of North Korea’s proliferation. So just how thorough does anyone suppose our inspection and verification regime will be?
If I had known in 2004 that I was actually voting for a Jimmy Carter foreign policy, I would not have voted at all.
See also:
* Orchard Update: Sleep well. More suspicious ships are headed from North Korea to Syria, but we’re ”tracking” them! For the last several weeks, in fact:
The U.S. military and intelligence community have been tracking several shipments of material they believe have left North Korea and are destined for Syria or may have already landed there, a Pentagon official confirmed.
This same unnamed official, asked to clarify just what the Israelis bombed last week, said that ”none of the information he had reviewed as part of his job indicated any nuclear material was involved.” But in my roundup of the Orchard story here, you will see that the intelligence community has largely been frozen out of this story, probably to prevent leaks like this one doing further damage to Chris Hill’s shaky sellout.
Some of the material is believed to have been high-grade metals that could be used in weapons such as missiles or solid-fuel rocket technology. But “there is concern with shipments going into the region and with their eventual arrival in Syria,” the official said. The United States is also looking into the possibility material had been shipped from North Korea to Iran and traveled overland into Syria, he said, adding there were indications a ship had docked in Syria recently.
Several of which have apparently already slipped through and unloaded. Nor is it clear whether this missile proliferation story has anything to do with Orchard.
Another U.S. official said he has seen satellite imagery of that attack that shows a hole in the center of a building’s roof with the walls still largely intact. That would strongly indicate a laser guided bomb was used with a fused warhead that exploded after the bomb entered the building roof. The photo is highly classified and not expected to be publicly released.
Axis, shmaxis.
* More scary news from the axis, via the Hahvahd Crimson:
Most troubling, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a Paris-based Iranian protest group, alleges that North Korea is sharing nuclear technology with Iran. Kim Jong Il equips rogue states with weapons and nuclear know-how, both of which may potentially fall into terrorists’ hands.
* Three Words: No Police Protection.
A request by Iran’s president to lay a wreath at the World Trade Center site next week has been turned down by police and blasted by U.S. diplomats as an attempt to turn ground zero into a “photo op.”
That has to be one of the most offensively cynical things I’ve ever heard from the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism. Here’s a flashback to the 9-11 Commission Report:
In sum, there is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers. There also is circumstantial evidence that senior Hezbollah operatives were closely tracking the travel of some of these future muscle hijackers into Iran in November 2000.
I’d read that quote aloud in every police and firefighters’ union hall in Manhattan, pass out mapquests of Ahmedinejad’s itinerary, and watch the fun ensue. On the grander scale, that seems a smaller breach of decorum than letting a pack of whooping loonies take over somebody’s embassy and hold its staff hostage for more than a year. Not only would a serious public beating be a domestic humiliation for Ahmedinejad, we probably underestimate the value of the impact it would have on Middle Eastern audiences. Our long-term goals might be better served by offering more funds, arms, and training to the Iranian guerrillas Michael Totten interviews here.
* Does Air Koryo reuse its sandwich bags and plastic cups? I have no way of knowing, and I reckon the reporter who wrote this story has no way of knowing, either. There’s seldom more than a grain of interesting information in a journalist’s traverse of the standard Pyongyang circuit of approved monuments and sites. Here is that grain:
“Delete the picture!” guide Kim Hyon-choi scolded one man among a small group of foreign journalists. “You mustn’t take pictures of the bad side of our country, ugly things. … We will confiscate them.”
On subsequent days, however, the rules changed. No photos of soldiers. No photos of the rickety electric trams in the capital. No photos from the moving tourist bus. The tour guides seemed more afraid of one another than they were of the foreigners, each one whispering in private that he or she wanted to offer more freedom but feared being ratted out by the others.
That’s a first. Although it’s tempting to make too much of the remark of one man, I’ve never heard of any of these loyalist selectees privately admitting fear or disagreement.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 19, 2007 at 5:36 am · Filed under Terrorism/Iraq, Islam
Mullah Abdullah Jan, the Taliban commander who led the kidnappings of 23 Korean hostages in Afghanistan, was killed in an air strike by U.S. forces. U.S. forces launched an airstrike on a house in Ghazni province where a council of Taliban commanders was meeting on Monday night, the Associated Press reported. Twelve Taliban leaders were killed including Abdullah, the commander of Qarabagh district in Ghazni, AP said on Tuesday, citing Ghazni provincial police chief Ali Shah Ahmadzai.
Abdullah was believed to have planned and carried out the kidnappings of the Korean missionaries on July 19. Abdullah was directly and indirectly in contact with press around the world during the hostage crisis, including Korean media. According to the Afghan government, at least four other Taliban leaders who were involved in the kidnappings have been killed this month, including Mullah Mateen, a commander under Abdullah. [Chosun Ilbo]
If anything can undo the damage Roh Moo Hyun did by paying ransom, it’s this. But deterrence is also needed for those who’d pay ransom. That’s why we should have frozen the assets of the South Korean (and reportedly, Saudi) entities involved in these transactions under Executive Order 12,224. More here.
So how long before a Stockholm-afflicted hostage denounces the United States for this? Place your bets, and feel free to add your favorite “72 virgins” comment below. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 18, 2007 at 9:33 pm · Filed under Books & Films, Deprogramming
[OFK: This post is a follow-up Q&A to my review of Professor Andrei Lankov’s new book, “North of the DMZ.” Prof. Lankov is a lecturer at the Australian National University, now on leave and teaching at Kookmin University. You can see more of Prof. Lankov’s books here, and you can find plenty more of his work linked on this blog. Two of his more notable recent articles include “The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism” and “How to Topple Kim Jong Il.”]
Q. I’ve described you as possibly the West’s only authentic expert on North Korea, but I’m constrained to put that in its rightful context. You only lived in Pyongyang a year, and it doesn’t sound like you had many (if any) opportunities to visit the countryside or the provincial cities, or to really get to know any North Korean people. What other first-hand or otherwise reliable knowledge were you able to acquire about North Korea?
I do not think I am the “only authentic expert” — if you look at Russians or Chinese or South Koreans there are people who know much more than I do. The major problem for the students of North Korea is the hyper-secretive nature of the regime. Even basic things, like market prices, can be learned through complicated operations which in other countries would be applied to, say, counting missile silos. This led to a paradox: quite frequently a foreigner can learn more about North Korean when s/he lives outside this country. By talking to defectors in China and/or South Korea one can get more reliable information than by spending years in the gilded cages of the foreign embassies. So, if one wants to be a North Korean specialist, one has to: a) read as much as possible on the subject (there are good books, largely in Korean); b) talk to defectors; c) do it systematically for many years.
Q. Tell us about the trucks run on charcoal and corn stalks.
It’s more about technology. Frankly, I do not know how a gas generator works. They put wood or corn stalks or anything which contains carbon, and it is transformed into an inflammable gas. There is a page in Wikipedia dealing with this subject (note a Saab with a gas generator on trailer): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator
Q. You mention that a very high percentage of North Korea’s population wears some kind of military uniform on a daily basis. We sometimes hear estimates of North Korea’s military strength being around 1 million out of a total population of approximately 18-23 million. Yet it sounds like many of these soldiers are part of “shock detachments” that spend more time performing construction labor than preparing for war. Do you think this total strength figure is skewed or even overstated in some ways? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 18, 2007 at 6:47 am · Filed under NK Economics, Inside NK, Famine & Food Aid
I had really wanted to publish a Q&A with Professor Andrei Lankov this morning, but since Yahoo’s e-mail service has gone from bad to worse, it’s simply not possible for me to even open up my e-mail to pull up his responses. So spread the word: Yahoo! mail stinks.
Meanwhile, there’s a wave of fresh evidence, most of it via the Daily NK, to support Lankov’s thesis that North Korea can’t control the spread of chaos or the erosion of its economy and society. Now, those trends appear to be accelerating.
Earlier this year, we read about severe floods that are said to have flooded 15-20% of North Korea’s cropland and caused massive damage and loss of life. The floods affected a belt of land approximately South of the red line on this map (click for full size). Note that because the farm land in that part of North Korea is its most productive, the actual crop losses are probably much more than 15-20%.
The floods may also be having a spillover effect in other regions of the country, particularly the barren Northeast, which has always depended on other areas for its food supplies. The Daily NK, in the context of a story on the spread of child sexual exploitation in the North, also reports that the food situation in the northeastern regions is worsening. You will recall that the transporation system and food supplies in those areas were already tenuous before the floods, that the electrical supply has been disrupted by possible sabotage, and that several outbreaks of disease have been reported there in recent years.
In North Hamkyung province, the civilians are lacking three crucial necessities: rice, water and electricity. “Due to the paralysis of transportation methods in North Hamkyung, they are not even able to receive the minimum supply for flood victims. Other regions are able to receive the partial amount of the supply for flood victims given by the South, but North Hamkyung is suffering the most out of all provinces.”
This report seems to indicate (seems, because it’s not that well translated) that authorities in Chongjin have tried to reassert control over food supplies and supply rations to some of the more vulnerable people — which is obviously a good thing — but at the expense of market-traded food supplies that fed a lot more people. On top of it all, Sinuiju has lost its water and power supplies, meaning that every part of North Korea is now undergoing some kind of disaster.
There has been a continuance of water shortage in Shinuiju since July. The newsletter stated that, “There has not been a single drop of water in the entire city of Shinuiju. Only after September 9 were the civilians able to receive some tap water, but the tap water supply only runs from 3:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. for one hour.”
“The people in Shinuiju are not able to go to sleep because they are waiting to receive the water. The electricity is provided for five hours each day, but due to the low electric pressure, they are not even able to use the water pump.”
Finally, this report claims that students in North Korea’s technical college have also lost their rations; at the time of the report, many hadn’t eaten for 10 days. Even North Korea’s public education system, which had been one of its rare successes, is dissolving as hungry kids skip school.
This is the strongest collection of evidence of a reemerging food crisis since the end of the Great Famine. This time, we could actually prevent the next one — even in the “closed” counties (see map) where international food distribution was never previously allowed.
If Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard are right about the regime’s dire economic condition – and no one knows more about the North Korean economy than they do – an offer by the international community to create an independent network to distribute food to the people would be an offer Kim Jong Il couldn’t refuse. And since that’s been an elemental part of how humanitarian relief has been conducted everywhere on earth in recent decades, it doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable demand. It might be the closest North Korea will ever get to a “soft” landing.
Just imagine the nightmare that reconstructing this broken country will be. There will be a tremendous temptation to invite the Chinese in to help, which will naturally translate to overpowering Chinese influence on the far northern regions, possibly even “occupation zones.” If we’re to prevent that, we need to be prepared to fly humanitarian relief supplies into the North, although I emphatically believe that all of the armed forces that protect them should be South Korean.
One of the reasons why I support non-permissive engagement with the North Korean people — broadcasting; smuggling in newspapers, leaflets, books, VHS tapes, radios, cell phones; building connections between organized exile groups and discontented North Koreans — is that the system is changing, for better or for worse. Unquestionably, post-revolutionary North Korea will be a chaotic place with hideous social problems. To some degree, we can mitigate that chaos and shape a better future for Korea by building the foundations of a civil society now. The way we could begin to do that is to begin explaining ideas like pluralism, democracy, economic freedom, and tolerance to its people now.
See also:
* It looks like Comrade Chung is moving toward capturing the leftist UNDP’s nomination for president. At this rate, he’ll be nominated just after Lee Myung-Bak’s inauguration, which would suit me fine.
* Did North Korea just admit to having a uranium program … again? I’d like to see whether they’ll show us the centrifuges.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 17, 2007 at 5:41 am · Filed under WMD, Proliferation, Axis of Evil
In the wake of the first reports about a reported Israeli air strike in Syria, a new crop of reports has considerably muddied facts that initially had seemed much clearer. Journalistic politics is certainly a part of the problem. Some of the reports are alarming, while others seek to downplay, and anyone who claims to be objective about war, diplomacy, and WMD today is lying.
You probably know where I stand on Agreed Framework 2.0 by now. If the more alarming reports are true — that the target was a nuclear device or nuclear “material” supplied by North Korea – it ought to be game over. If the less alarming reports are true — that the target was a facility where Syria and North Korea were doing cooperative nuclear research — it’s still a clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, which still isn’t even a year old, which passed unanimously, and which is almost completely forgotten (but shouldn’t be).
In many cases, the reports point to multiple locations or threats. Bear in mind that in such cases, those theories aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. The goal here is to simply relay and contrast the reports, and to let you find where they’re consistent, and where they aren’t. In the end, the only firm conclusion I could draw was that the reports deserve to be taken seriously, and that if North Korea is at all sincere about its dealings with us, it will promptly and fully answer those questions. Otherwise, we would simply be pretending that we can deal with people who keep cheating before the ink dries on their signatures.
Clearly, proliferating during a process of denuclearization would violate the spirit of the agreement. If it does not violate the letter of the agreement, it’s only because we settled for a deal too vague to say what it should have said very clearly. These are serious questions. It can’t be business as usual unless we get satisfactory answers.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 16, 2007 at 12:45 pm · Filed under Inside NK, Books & Films
[Update: I’ve since received some responses to specific questions I asked Prof. Lankov, so the discussion should begin either later tonight or tomorrow AM, depending on other stuff I need to do first.]
I first read Andrei Lankov’s work when both of us were blogging on NKZone, through his columns in the Korea Times, and through his more recent scholarly works. I imagine that most readers have also read something of those works.
The first time I met Prof. Lankov in person was in April of last year, when I invited him and a group of Korea bloggers out for dinner. Along with Lankov and myself, present were Andy Jackson and Robert Koehler, the Dram Man, and Oranckay (The Big Hominid, to my lasting regret, couldn’t make it; the lovely and charming Mrs. Koehler joined us later for drinks). Talk about your stimulating dinner conversation. And even within that group, I found myself struck silent by the stories told by the affable, funny, middle-aged professor from the former Leningrad who liked to make light of his heavy Russian accent. Not that I had any trouble understanding him. I don’t know when I’ve ever said less and listened more.
I’ve never seen Lankov’s office, but having met him and read his book, I can picture it: it must be crammed with papers jammed between books in three languages, others piled in crossways stacks on desks and on the floor to keep them separated. There’s probably little natural light because the window sill is also piled with books. Lankov has made himself a walking lexicon of North Korea, able to answer intelligently about everything from its relative scarcity of trees in its countryside to the availability of pineapple in its markets. Yet I can understand how he can be both the academic rival of Bruce Cumings — and man whose arguments Lankov’s research has done much to discredit — and his personal friend.
Andrei Lankov has written such a book for us in “North of the DMZ” — entertaining, insightful, and stuffed with facts that somehow manage to be innocuous and highly significant. I’ve had very little time for leisure reading these days, so I read “North of the DMZ” in installments during my commutes on the Metro. This book will absorb you. It certainly absorbed me, for example, on the day when I so engrossed in reading it that I failed to notice my stop, the end of the line, or the fact that the train had reversed direction and gone halfway back down the line to Washington.
The fact that Lankov’s book reads the way he speaks makes it both entertaining and more insightful. There were times I could almost hear him saying ”norss karrrEEya.“ He paints in light, subdued strokes and tones of post-Soviet cynicism, sarcasm, and black humor. For a book about the ordinary lives of North Koreans, Lankov’s perspective has the inestimable advantage of seeing through the state’s procrustean choreography of the thoughts and words of the people. Any author can see that much, but Lankov can also see the doubts and the humanity that lie beneath.
Yet Andrei Lankov certainly isn’t Korean and doesn’t even claim to speak the language especially well. Not that it matters much; during his year of study at Kim Il Sung University, his access to the country and its people were tightly controlled. He had few opportunities to leave Pyongyang, see the countryside, or visit other North Korean cities. He was monitored everywhere he went, couldn’t strike up casual conversations on the streets, couldn’t form friendships with North Koreans, and couldn’t be a dinner guest in a North Korean home. He has returned to North Korea since then — enough to show him that things have changed dramatically since the 1980’s — but he surely didn’t acquire his encyclopedic knowledge of North Korea from travel alone. He has obviously interviewed many defectors, spoken to many other knowledgeable persons and read their works, and followed the news closely.
Rather than diving into the overcrowded field of books about its politics or diplomacy, Andrei Lankov set out to write a book about everyday life. In the beginning, he tells us,
[E]ven under the most repressive of social and political conditions, the vast majority of people still attempt to live normal lives and generally succeed at that. These lives include work and leisure, love and friendship – with not that much space left for the politics. There was a lot of political repression going on in 1984 North Korea to be sure, but this repression constituted only a relatively small part of this country’s daily life.
He then goes on to obliterate that part of his own argument by giving us a lengthy list of basic amenities of a “normal” life that are absent from the lives of North Koreans: the ability to bathe or shower in your own home, clean clothes, a refrigerator, meat or fish put put in said refrigerator, regular electricity, telephones and telephone books, trash collection, cell phones, mini skirts, construction equipment, a choice of hairstyle, passenger cars, domestic air travel, foreign travel, goods on the shelves, the freedom to date and fall in love, health care, ethnic minorities, apolitical music, old books, a radio with a tuner, the freedom to choose one’s spouse freely, leisure time, a full meal, mindless entertainment on the TV, the Internet, a peaceful night’s sleep.
Other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Lankov tells us that most North Koreans who don’t live in Pyongyang will probably never see the place. Other things that we consider commonplace are rare luxuries in North Korea: a meal in a restaurant, a bath, new clothes, the stiff drink you’ll need to get through the next day, or a bicycle (unless you’re female, in which case you’ll have to ride around in drag; either way, there’s a good chance the bike was made in a prison camp at Chongjin).
Even more telling are the parts of this book that describe the things that are a part of life in North Korea: Maoist criticism sessions, midnight “home inspections” by the police, mandatory membership in a neighborhood “peoples’ group,” constant “ideological education,” mobilizations for public works labor, document checks for any guest you invite to your home, and the cable radio — which is probably the closest existing relative of Orwell’s telescreen and almost completely immune to outside monitoring. Then, for those who don’t happen to live in Pyongyang, famine and plague are constant threats. And wherever you live, there’s the fear that eventually in your lifetime, you’ll be accused of saying the wrong thing:
[I]n the 1970s a vet was treating a pig when he uttered something like “in this world only pigs can live happily”. This was interpreted as a counter-revolutionary statement; the culprit was arrested, tortured and shot, while his family was sent to a prison camp.
Danger often comes in the form of a neighbor who informs on you. He may inform for some small reward or benefit, or because the police expect him to. In the latter case, the neighbor would know that it would be no help to you (and a great risk to him) to defend your innocence. So ends your life; so ends your family. Hardly anyone’s definition of “normal” life.
Even this descrption is weighted toward the privileged life in Pyongyang. A few of those features of life might be familiar to people in parts of Indonesia or Cameroon simply because poverty exists in those countries, too, but any of them is a world away from life in nearby Pusan or Sapporo. One wonders if life in North Korea’s bleak northeast — places like Chongjin, Hoeryong, or Hamhung — is even the equal of life in Harare, Kinshasa, or Luanda. The state of things beyond the gilded gates of Pyongyang is the most consequential yet opaque measure of North Korea’s discontent. Lankov also distinguishes Pyongyang from the rest of North Korea, but life in the provinces is still mostly unknown to the outside world, and one senses that this is also true of Lankov.
If Lankov’s book might not persuade you the ordinariness of North Korean life, it will bolster another of his arguments — that knowing more of the outside world has been and will continue to be a powerful agent of subversion in the minds of North Koreans. I agree in in principle, if not necessarily in every application. But that is another story, and that is the subject of a debate I hope to host here at Andrei Lankov’s earliest convenience.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 14, 2007 at 7:06 am · Filed under China, China & Korea, Diplomacy
Tired of hearing about South Korean officials leaking our secrets and technology, or about North Korean agents gradually pulling a smothering blanket of juche over the South? Had enough Robert Kim already? Take heart. The bad guys have troubles of their own:
For years, Ambassador Li Bin was China’s go-to diplomat for the tense Korean Peninsula. After studies in North Korea, Li had served several tours in the Chinese embassies in Pyongyang and Seoul. Fluent in Korean and gregarious in nature, he also struck up an unusually personal relationship with Kim Jong Il, the secretive North Korean leader.
It turns out, according to knowledgeable Chinese officials, that Li was also a resource for the South Koreans, who exploited his insider knowledge about Kim and the closed-door North Korean government. During a tour as China’s ambassador to Seoul from 2001 to 2005, the officials said, Li regularly provided the South Koreans with information on Kim, the North and China-North Korea relations. [Washington Post]
I’m so used to seeing the South Koreans end up on the losing side of the Great Infiltration Game that I’m tempted to suspect that Li could have been a double agent, feeding the South Koreans the kind of prosaic estimates they’re so ready to hear. Lee’s leaks sound valuable, although it’s questionable whether we capitalized on them fully:
They included a sustained supply of information on Chinese and North Korean diplomatic exchanges, the officials said, as well as gleanings from Li’s personal contacts with Kim. These tidbits were current, they added, because Li had served as Kim’s escort and interpreter during recent visits to China and again had a chance to observe the North Korean leader up close. Li’s leaks were provided to U.S. as well as South Korean officials, the Chinese sources said.
In the end, it was Lee’s love of one particular South Korean custom – drinking himself into a verbose stupor — that did him in. At the moment, he’s warehoused at a think tank while his fate is determined, but Chinese authorities are not famous for being understanding about such things. You can read more about Li Bin here.
See also:
* Agreed Framework 2 Updates. Now that North Korea has “shut down” Yongbyon and allowed U.S. inspectors pretty much full access of the facility by all accounts, the State Department is saying that we’re ready to ship the first 50,000 tons of fuel oil to North Korea, out of a projected total of 950,000 tons when the agreement is fully fulfilled. Before you read on, plant yourself fully in a stable chair, because I think that’s exactly what we should do. Read the agreement and what we said we’d do during the “Initial Phase.” Yes, all of those deadlines are long gone. Yes, the agreement itself is a bad agreement. But it’s an agreement we signed, and North Korea has met those initial conditions, meaning we’re obliged to do what we (should never have) promised to do. The test ought to be the next phase, when North Korea has to fully disclose its nuclear weapons and programs. Far better that the failure point be North Korea’s failure to abide by its commitments than ours.
* Summit Updates. At first, I was dismayed that Roh Moo Hyun said he wouldn’t talk nukes with Kim Jong Il during the next summit. But on second thought, what value to you really think a private discussion between those two individuals would really add to the diplomatic process? My new view: the less they talk about, the better. Here’s a case in point. South Korean officials are admitting their readiness to transform a hotly disputed area of rich fishing waters in the Yellow Sea — still of undetermined size – from South Korean territory to a neutral “peace park.” You will recall that six South Korean sailors died defending that stretch of water not so long ago. It’s nothing less than a national betrayal for Roh to be openly discussing moving back the very borders of his country just two months before the end of his term. Although there’s no apparent reward for Roh’s country, Roh stands to receive a handful of votes on the extreme end of the political spectrum. With that kind of dubious bargaining, I certainly see no good and much bad coming from this summit.
* I recently added an RSS for North Korea’s official news service to my news reader tab just for giggles and the occasional grain of insight. In this missive, North Korea and the Union of Rogue States Undocumented Centrifuge Owners’ Club, sorry, Non-Aligned Movement denounce human rights. Next up: Christmas, springtime, mini skirts, and puppies (and Jews, of course).
* Circuses Before Bread. A new movie is good news for fans of North Korean cinema, although I suspect North Koreans will be both better entertained and more effectively propagandized by staying home and watching “The Host” on their VCR’s. I have to think that if I were a North Korean, my apetite for frivolous things would be inexhaustable.
* Burma Watch. The generals have launched a brutal crackdown against those who took part in a recent wave of anti-government protests.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 13, 2007 at 7:04 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Proliferation
Update:
North Korea may be cooperating with Syria on some sort of nuclear facility in Syria, according to new intelligence the United States has gathered over the past six months, sources said. The evidence, said to come primarily from Israel, includes dramatic satellite imagery that led some U.S. officials to believe that the facility could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons.
The new information, particularly images received in the past 30 days, has been restricted to a few senior officials under the instructions of national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, leaving many in the intelligence community unaware of it or uncertain of its significance, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler]
Calling all diggers.
Original Post:
If so, this is the biggest North Korea story of the decade (ht to Richardson). The story is hidden in the middle of a New York Times story covering last week’s fracas between Israel and Syria, something that would otherwise be an ordinary page 15 story. But this time, along with conducting air strikes on unspecified targets, Israel was overflying Syrian territory with reconnaissance aircraft:
One Bush administration official said Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea. The administration official said Israeli officials believed that North Korea might be unloading some of its nuclear material on Syria.
“The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” the official said. He said it was unclear whether the Israeli strike had produced any evidence that might validate that belief. [N.Y. Times, Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper]
This report raises some extremely grave questions without doing much to answer them. Can we verify the Israelis’ suspicions to a reasonable degree of probability? How certain are we that North Korea is only selling nuclear “materials,” and at what stage of refinement, enrichment, or reprocessing are those materials? I already have one grave doubt, although it isn’t dispositive to the concern: the words, “selling … what little they have left.” I cannot believe that North Korea would permanently give up all of its nuclear weapons or materials under any circumstance except the overthrow of Kim Jong Il’s regime. I can believe they’re selling off excess materials that could prove cumbersome in the event of more robust inspections that move beyond the immediate vicinity of Yongbyon, the box within which they’ve been kept so far.
Depending on those answers, the implications are tectonic. The first of these is a perfect illustration of why every agreement North Korea signs should come stamped with the following prominent disclaimers:
FOR COSMETIC AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY
NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR AN ACTUAL POLICY
DO NOT TAKE INTERNALLY
This would be a deal breaker for Agreed Framework 2.0 and Agreed Framework 2.1, so the State Department’s less principled personalities have an incentive to disbelieve the story, and to discourage everyone else from believing it. In circumstances like those, legitimate questions about this report will be especially difficult to sort out from illegitimate ones, and if this story gets legs in our current political climate, count on plenty of addlebrained conspiracy theories to fog up the image.
Second, this would be a great leap over The Red Line, as articulated by one of State’s more dovish alumni, Jack Pritchard.
Third, a North Korean discount sale on nuclear material (or weapons?) would make the decision not to impose a blockade on North Korea irresponsible, although there are good reasons (read on) to impose it as softly as circumstances permit.
Fourth, treating this report with the importance it merits risks some obvious political consequences (see addlebrained theories, above). It tests a public grown weary — though mostly, of discomforts borne by other people — at a time when congressional support for President Bush’s Iraq policy seems to be gradually regaining some of its rigidity.
It could also favor left-wing candidates in South Korea’s upcoming election. Given what we’ve learned about South Korean apathy about contributing to terrorist threats to Americans, South Koreans would probably vote for the politician least likely to cooperate with the United States in dealing with this threat. There’s little question that Roh would think nothing of the security of the United States and exclusively of domestic politics. And although I’ve long believed that we’ve mostly failed to use our considerable leverage to control South Korean policies that threaten our own security, there would be great benefits in having South Korea as an ally again, even if only to a limited degree.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 13, 2007 at 6:59 am · Filed under An Alliance?, Diplomacy, U.S. & Korea
Commenter Michael Sheehan dropped a link to a must-read by former senior NSC advisor Michael Green, on Roh’s bumbling open-air negotiation with President Bush last week. Green also thinks that Roh knew what he was doing, that he did it for domestic political reasons, and that he set his own goals back in the process. In other words, typical Roh:
Watching the exchange later on YouTube.com, I felt great sympathy for my former national security colleagues in both countries, since I’ve also had to “explain” apparent gaps between the leaders on more than one occasion. However, this one was the biggest I had ever seen and veteran White House reporters knew what they were watching.
The exchange over the peace treaty issue reveals how unpredictable Roh is in these summit meetings. Before going in front of the press, the leaders and their staffs usually huddle to anticipate any questions and to put the best possible spin on their meeting. That rarely works with Roh. I cannot think of another foreign leader ever pressing the president of the United States to “clarify” a position in front of the press in this way. There is a certain charm in a head of state who will not be scripted, I have to admit, but in this case it was hard not to suspect that Roh had an objective in mind and was not merely extemporizing.
What was Roh’s objective? The obvious answer would be that he wanted to extract a public commitment from Bush on delinking the peace treaty from denuclearization. But if this was Roh’s goal, he set it back with this exchange. [Joongang Ilbo]
You can’t help suspecting that Green was asked to convey this message.
See also:
* Lee Myung Bak is articulating his North Korea policy: massive aid, but not unconditional aid. Interesting, but I’ll wait to see how words translate to actions. More than most politicians before elections, Lee is a man with great ambitions for things that his treasurers can’t afford.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 12, 2007 at 6:15 am · Filed under Anju Links
* 
Canadian Oil-for-Food scandal figure Maurice Strong, who took $1 million from Saddam Hussein as a senior U.N. official and confidant of Kofi Annan, has resurfaced in China. You’ll remember that Strong was also Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy to North Korea, and that the North Korean-born Tongsun Park, now serving a five-year prison sentence, was his bag-man and informal advisor on North Korea. All of which may go far to explain why the U.N. stood around performing a colonoscopy on itself while Kim Jong Il starved 2.5 million people and killed hundreds of thousands more in his killing fields.
* Also in U.N. scandal news: former Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth will lead the “independent” panel investigating irregularities in the UNDP’s North Korea program, and the firing of the whistleblower who revealed them.
* If you’re going to be in Washington with some free time at 2:30 on September 19th, one of South Korea’s few heroes of the Great Famine will speak — the Venerable Pomnyun, leader of the Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement. More info and registration here.
* The South Korean-financed, appeasement-minded, and well-connected Korea Society spent last weekend touring North Korean diplomats and their families around Washington, D.C. The Korea Society is led by a former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, whom I debated here, but the State Department assures us that the visit involved no diplomatic contacts. Bullshit really is an industry in this city.
* Meanwhile, North Korean defectors are still showing up in Thailand, and South Korea is apparently still doing nothing for them.
* So Roh Moo Hyun wants to have a summit with Kim Jong Il where they won’t talk nukes or human rights. I could ask why they’re having a summit at all, and I could ask why South Korea has a Human Rights Commission, but those questions are asked well enough by ruNK, DPRK Forum, The Nomad, and Andy Jackson (don’t miss the Marmot’s comment). Front-runner Lee Myung Bak is now publicly urging Roh to raise the nuclear issue.
* What’s a band of wackadoodle 9/11 “truthers” to do if it can march right through Haight-Ashbury without drawing a crowd?
* If you read Korean, the Epoch Times covers a protest meeting led by Son Jong Hun, the brother of Son Jong Nam.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 11, 2007 at 6:30 am · Filed under NK Economics, Money Laundering
North Korea is a land made in the vision of John Edwards: to a greater extent than almost anywhere, there are two North Koreas. That division is even preserved by a semi-official, hereditary caste system. That’s why it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that North Korea’s economy is near collapse; one of the North Korean economies — the peoples’ economy — collapsed a dozen years ago. What was left of it was severely disrupted by the Great Famine, when hundreds of thousands of people left the gutted factories that no longer paid them to become fugitives in China, vagabonds in their own country subject to internment in so-called 9/27 camps, or corpses.
Then there’s the palace economy: the system of privileges, rations, and benefits that sustains the military, the party, and the system of control. Its favors range from Japanese televisions and bicycles reportedly made in a prison camp in Chongjin to Mercedez S-Class sedans. That’s the economy that sustains Kim Jong Il’s luxurious life and his grip on power. Last year, I reported in exhaustive detail about how the palace economy was devastated by the Treasury Department’s crackdown on the illegal proceeds that fuel it. More recently, we learned the interesting fact that last year, the North Korean economy declined for the first time in years. I speculated (see also, third item) that Treasury’s enforcement measures might have been a cause of this, a fact that the original South Korean report conspicuously did not bring up. My theory now has some strong new support from two of the foremost experts on the subject.
In a new article for Newsweek, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard — fresh from their appearance on this humble blog — are also talking about the significance of those developments. They believe that this time, North Korea really is ready to disarm and reform because it’s out of options, and because the absence of other options means that this time, we’re negotiating from strength:
We think we know why North Korea is softening, or at least appears to be. We’ve been working on an in-depth profile of the North Korean economy, and it is in serious trouble. The North Korean economy had been in weak but steady recovery since 1999, growing about 15 percent over the next six years despite its isolation and increasing backwardness. Then came a new setback. Last year the national income contracted by 1.1 percent, according to the South Korean government. Our research suggests the main reason for the downturn was that U.S.-led sanctions hit harder than most people realize. Now more than ever, North Korea needs the financial benefits of a nuclear deal to survive.
The sanctions struck a feeble economy from many sides. The United States led actions to shut down North Korea’s missile trade, and put the squeeze on its illicit smuggling and counterfeiting revenue. The black-market rate on North Korea’s currency plummeted after a small bank in Macau, central to the North’s money-laundering activities, was shut down. Japan effectively cut off a heavy flow of remittances to Pyongyang from North Koreans in Japan. We estimate that together with legal arms sales, revenue from contraband—including the production and trafficking of drugs, counterfeit cigarettes, smuggling of liquor and endangered-species parts, to name a few—may have accounted for as much as half of North Korea’s exports in the late 1990s but has fallen to roughly 15 percent in recent years due to sanctions. In the meantime, aid now finances 40 percent of imports. There are benefits to playing nice in the nuclear talks—or pretending to. [Newsweek, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, emphasis mine]
This article is too fascinating and too significant not to read in its entirety, even if I don’t agree with Noland and Haggard that North Korea has made a strategic choice to reform or disarm. North Korea will remain true to form and try to hide as much as possible and change as little as possible. Like all of the other announced “breakthroughs” with North Korea before this one, any still-unrealized reforms will only seek to recognize the economic realities that have already spun out of the regime’s control. To the extent it recognizes them, it will only be to reestablish its control.
The real question is whether it will succeed. The more repressive the state, the more powerful the pressures for change that build within its society. In North Korea, probably the most repressive state of all, those pressures are potentially explosive. Any relaxation of official control could spark that explosion, and Kim Jong Il knows it. Yet as time passes, it becomes progressively more difficult and more expensive to contain those forces. Who will pay for all that barbed wire and concrete? Will it be us?
Kim Jong Il might have been forced to choose between utter bankruptcy and terminal reforms a decade ago, but South Korean aid allowed Kim Jong Il to choose neither. I agree with Noland and Haggard that the palace economy is unsustainable without outside aid, and in the wake of this year’s floods, I don’t think that’s ever been more true. So much depends on our next move, and that of Lee Myung Bak, South Korea’s presumptive next president. A coordinated strategy between the two ex-allies — along with Japan — might just force the softest landing for North Korea that can be conceived.
Or, we could decide to keep feeding this beast.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on September 11, 2007 at 5:32 am · Filed under Inside NK, Resistance, Religion
A new Newsweek piece about North Korea’s underground movement reports on the plight of Son Jong Nam. If Son still lives, he sits on death row in Pyongyang for spreading his faith. You will recall that I previously wrote about him here, and told you how you can join in a campaign to save his life. Newsweek estimates that there are between 20,000 and 100,000 underground Christians in North Korea. You can’t bring Christianity to such a place on a shiny bus. It takes resourcefulness, guile, courage, and determination to pull something like this off. This kind:
Missionaries say Christians often keep their Bibles buried in the backyard, wrapped in vinyl. Preachers based in China sometimes conduct services by mobile phone. In five to 10 minutes the pastor reads Bible passages and prays for the sick and needy. Services are kept short; the regime uses GPS trackers to locate the phones. [Newsweek, Christian Caryl and B.J. Lee]
Son knew the risks he was facing going into this. Although he is legally a citizen of South Korea, don’t expect to hear a single word from the South Korean government to save Son Jong Nam’s life. South Korea has other priorities.
Note that there’s a significant inconsistency in the story: according to the previous source I quoted, it was Son’s pregnant sister in law who miscarried after being kicked by police. In Newsweek’s story, the woman was Son’s wife.
New readers may not have seen this detailed chronology of what appears to be growing anti-government dissent and resistance. The obvious cautions apply: it’s almost impossible to verify most of the fragmentary reports we hear from the world’s most closed society. On the other side of the ledger, there’s little question that the North Korean regime has extinguished some extraordinary courage in its death camps and dungeons without the word ever reaching the outside world. In all probability, that’s going to be the fate of Song Jong Nam, too. But no chance to save Son, or the next brave men and women who will follow him, should be missed.
Another interesting fact I would never have guessed: “Billy Graham’s late wife, Ruth, attended Christian boarding school in Pyongyang as a teen in the 1920s.” Heh? I’ll file that one right next to the ones about Mohammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver.
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