The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987. The DPRK continued to harbor four Japanese Red Army members who participated in a jet hijacking in 1970. The Japanese government continued to seek a full accounting of the fate of the 12 Japanese nationals believed to have been abducted by DPRK state entities; five such abductees have been repatriated to Japan since 2002. As part of the Six-Party Talks process, the United States reaffirmed its intent to fulfill its commitments regarding the removal of the designation of the DPRK as a state sponsor of terrorism in parallel with the DPRK’s actions on denuclearization and in accordance with criteria set forth in U.S. law. [U.S. Dep’t of State]
But not in parallel with North Korea actually resolving the specific questions raised in this GAO report about its recent alleged sponsorship of terrorism, or its proliferation of nuclear technology to a fellow terror sponsor.
By the way, there is no rest of this report, at least as it pertains to North Korea. That’s the entire thing. You can examine prior-year reports here, although they’re not much longer than this one. The facts cited in each year’s report vary considerably, but some adjectives have clearly been sacrificed for the cause, along with the entire purpose of keeping this list in the first place. After all, terrorizing people seems to be the most effective way to be removed from it.
BETTER THEM THAN US, PT. 2: Ten North Koreans were killed in that Israeli air strike on a nuclear reactor in Syria:
The intelligence officers told NHK the 10 killed North Koreans, who were helping build a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria, were believed to be officials from the Munitions Industry Department (No. 99 Department) of the North Korean Worker’s Party and North Korean sappers, or engineer soldiers. They said the bodies were cremated in Syria and their remains transported to North Korea the following day. [Chosun Ilbo]
I find it even more intriguing that two or three more North Koreans can’t be accounted for. In light of previous reports that Israeli commandos were on the ground in Syria at the time, my initial thought was to wonder if that has anything to do with how we got those photographs from inside the reactor. The Daily NK, however, reports that South Korean intelligence is trying to track down some of those unaccounted-for North Koreans.
MARCUS NOLAND AND STEPHAN HAGGARD predict lean times for North Korea this year:
“The country is in its most precarious situation since the end of the famine a decade ago,” said the paper from the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Stephan Haggard, who wrote the paper with Marcus Noland, said the sharp increase in world prices for commodities had sent ripples through the communist state’s economy. [….]
“The North Korean rice market is much more integrated with world markets than most people think,” Haggard, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, said by telephone. [Reuters, Jon Herskovitz]
UNICEF is also reporting that the food situation is worsening, although their report doesn’t add much detail that you haven’t read here before.
NORTH KOREA’S REJECTION of a South Korean plan to exchange permanent liaison offices with the North could mean a reduction of overall contacts. Perhaps not coincidentally, South Korean subsidies for the Kaesong Industrial Park are declining, and there are signs that investor interest is also fading.
SOME PICTURES OF A PROTEST at the Chinese Embassy for North Korean Freedom Week, courtesy of the Daily NK. This time, the Chinese didn’t throw rocks or bottles.
I HAD TO MISS A SPECIAL SCREENING of the new South Korean film, “Crossing,” because of work obligations, and I especially regret that after reading this:
The screening was a somber affair. The audience began shedding tears during a scene in which the main character, Kim Yong-soo (Cha In-pyo), a former player for the South Hamgyong provincial soccer team, leaves his sick and starving wife (Suh Young-hwa) and his 11-year-old son Juni (Shin Myung-chul) and sets out for China in search of food.
More tears came as Kim’s wife succumbed and a distraught Juni chased after the truck carrying off his mother’s body, crying that she not be taken away. Kim eventually makes his way to South Korea, but it’s there, through a refugee settlement broker, that he learns of his wife’s passing. “Why does Jesus exist only in the South?” he laments. “Why do you neglect North Korea?”
An In-ok, a former North Korean refugee, cried bitterly in the back of the theater, watching as the film told a story reminiscent of her own. An was separated from her 13-year-old son Lee Myung-ju while being chased by Chinese police after fleeing from the North in 2003. Eventually the audience, which had been quietly wiping tears away, started crying together. Even after the film finished at around 5 p.m., many in the theater sat frozen in their seats, overcome with sadness.
Dennis Halpin called the film a “masterpiece,” and said it made clear the North Korean tragedy. He compared the film to “The Diary of Anne Frank”, saying the movie could reveal to the world the miserable fate facing millions of North Koreans just as “Diary” exposed the horrors of the Holocaust. Peter Beck called “Crossing” the best film yet made about the subject, and said he hoped many people would see it to gain a better understanding of the situation in the communist country. [Chosun Ilbo]
Dennis Halpin is the former U.S. Consul General in Pusan and a senior Republican staffer in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Halpin, the House’s top Korea expert, works closely with Ranking Member Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and who worked for Henry Hyde before her. Peter Beck, a fluent Korean speaker and avowed liberal, now leads the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
As I suspected, the China’s censorship-by-thug on the streets of Seoul is not proving popular among Koreans. The Chinese government seems to be coming to grips with the P.R. disaster it has made for itself. Its diplomats, though not quite in a full kowtow position, are offering either an apology or whatever it is that Asian diplomats offer when national pride prevents one:
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry expressed regret Monday to China’s ambassador to Seoul, Ning Fukui, over the incident, which led to the arrests of four people including one Chinese student. Ning said he regretted the “extreme behavior” of the Chinese protesters and expressed sympathy to South Koreans injured during the rallies. [AP, via IHT]
“What I want to stress is that Chinese people, especially Chinese students here, have good feelings for South Koreans,” the Chinese ambassador told reporters. When asked if the Chinese embassy will cooperate with the police investigation, however, Ning avoided a direct answer. “I don’t know in detail,” he said. [Yonhap]
A Foreign Ministry official said the envoy [Chinese] apologized and expressed his sympathy with Korean police officers and reporters who were injured in the violence. The violence against police officers “should not have happened,” he said. [Chosun Ilbo]
Today, however, the Chosun Ilbo constradicts itself and says the Chinese government not only “stopp[ed] short of an apology” by merely “express[ing] sympathy” to the people its mobs attacked on the streets of Seoul, but is also telling the home folks a slightly different story:
In a briefing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said, “It was an action for justice by well-meaning Chinese students who tried to prevent Tibetan secessionists from obstructing the Olympic torch relay for the Beijing Olympics. Their motive was well meant, but their action became violent. The Chinese government expresses sympathy with the victims of the violence.”
When reporters asked if the Chinese government had no intention to apologize to the Korean people, Jiang merely said, “Chinese people on the scene were well-meaning …. But their action for justice became violent when they tried to deter Tibetan secessionists from obstructing the Olympic torch relay.” [Chosun Ilbo]
It seems semantic to Westerners, but in Asia, the nuance of apology and regret overshadows the character of relations between nations. Lee Myung Bak is now forced to express “strong regret” for the incident (read: the actions of the Chinese) and seek arrests, prosecutions, deportations, and other “stern measures.” This is entirely appropriate when a regional hegemon looses its mobs on the streets of a neighbor’s capital city to control what views can be expressed there.
South Korea’s Foreign Minister is going to raise the issue in Beijing this week. If this were just a diplomatic tiff, it could be handled quietly. YouTube has obviated that course. And legally, the Korean authorities are compelled to act. Everyone in Korea has seen the video, and the Korean police are now scrolling through that video to identify the particular Chinese thugs who threw rocks and bottles, and who beat and kicked protestors.
President Lee, it should be remembered, has made an issue of restoring the public order that Roh had allowed to erode. If he lets these goon squads escape real punishment, the Korean street will be furious, and rightfully so. If the South Korean authorities prosecute, the Chinese street will be furious, and it will probably be lost on many of them that doing the same thing in China would likely earn them a stretch in the laogai or a fatal beating in a local police station. For a day, Seoul became for politically repressed Chinese youth what Tijuana is for sexually repressed American youth.
“It is deeply regrettable that foreigners staged illegal, violent protests at a time when people here are refraining from violent rallies since the new government took office,” Justice Minister Kim Kyung-han told the Cabinet. [Yonhap]
Prime Minister Han Seung-soo said his government will handle the case in accordance with “law and principles.” “As the national pride has been considerably hurt by the incident, legal and diplomatic measures that can restore the national pride will have to follow,” Han, a former foreign minister, was quoted as telling a Cabinet meeting by Vice Culture Minister Shin Jae-min, who serves as a government spokesman. [Yonhap]
And here, in one word, is what politicians of both parties now find themselves up against: pride. The people of both countries — Chinese and Koreans alike — are in that queasily familiar aggrieved mood, by which I do not mean to suggest moral equivalance for an instant, for this reason:
According to Chinese students here, the Chinese Embassy in Seoul contacted Chinese students in each college to urge them to take part in the torch relay ceremony. [Joongang Ilbo]
I wonder if the students will tell the police the same thing, although you have to know that those flags, t-shirts, and buses didn’t appear by themselves.
Public furor here has grown, with major broadcasters replaying the footage of the clashes and interviews with witnesses. Media reports stated that more than 10,000 Chinese people took to the streets during the 24-km relay in Seoul. Many were students studying in South Korea, while some flew from China to counter rallies by those protesting against Beijing’s recent crackdown on Tibetans, police said. [Yonhap]
South Korean conservatives are especially incensed.
The level of common sense displayed by the Chinese hooligans is detestable, but how poorly must they view Korea and Koreans for them to treat us this way? Korean politicians until now have been unable to say what they wanted to China, while the so-called learned people in Korea, regardless of their ideology, have made it a habit of letting things quietly slip when they involve issues with China. We must ask ourselves whether this passive approach to China had led to such rude and haughty behavior by the Chinese. [Chosun Ilbo]
One commentator is comparing Beijing 2008 to Berlin 1936, a comparison that I’d frankly call defensible. But I suspect that this view is probably more typical of ordinary South Koreans who saw the video of the Chinese students’ behavior on TV:
“For a country hosting such a massive event, the Chinese Embassy should have paid more attention to making sure their people were under control,” said Lee Ji-young, a 30-year-old office worker in Seoul who was in the middle of the crowd watching the torch relay. “What I saw on Sunday was complete madness, and the police were so busy trying to protect the torch that they didn’t have time to protect Koreans.” [Joongang Ilbo]
And then there are South Korea’s “netizens.” There are thousands of angry comments, but things have gone beyond that:
Some angry Internet users have displayed signs of extremism. On one Internet bulletin board, a list containing the personal information of some of the Chinese nationals whose faces were made public via television footage of the demonstration, was posted. The information included names, schools and mobile-phone numbers. The board also contained such hostile commentary as: “Let’s protest against Chinese students” or “Find the leaders at each university.”
On the same day, overwhelming traffic forced the Web site of the Chinese Students Association in Korea to shut down. In addition, an Internet community site was set up with the motto of punishing the Chinese nationals. The site drew some 1,000 Internet users who went through the procedure of signing up as members, a requirement of many Internet sites in Korea for access to the bulk of the information on any given Web site. [The Hankyoreh]
Outrage on the right was to be expected. But I found it more interesting that the Korean left, too, is at least acting incensed. The Hankyoreh called it “nothing short of lawlessness” and said this:
With behavior like that the Chinese protesters were doing their own damage to China’s dignity. They all either waved or wore Chinese flags and went about revealing nationalist tendencies with slogans and signs saying things like “Tibet is Chinese forever!” They physically attacked Koreans protesting China’s armed suppression of Tibetan protests, which was enough to prompt the people of the world to wonder whether Chinese nationalism is going so far that it is becoming violent. If the Chinese think those who express other views are to be attacked and erased, then it is nothing more than an expression of an intolerant collectivism. It was a far cry from the mature democratic society China is trying to show off through the Olympics. [The Hankyoreh]
Here is a photograph in which a man described as the leader of a “progressive” party is demanding an apology from China. Robert even links to a statement from Peoples’ Solidarity for Participatory Democracy accusing the Chinese government of organizing the student mobs. This is one of the more ironic things I’ve heard all year. If PSPD is not a North Korean front group, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, and PSPD has certainly joined hands with other groups on the left that have engaged in some fairly violent means of protests. The difference being: on those occasions, it was Koreans who were engaging in violence.
In a role reversal of 2002, Korea’s right stands to gain from a nationalist reaction. This time, the left follows and hopes for restraint it certainly didn’t seem interested in six years ago.
To a degree, this is healthy. South Korea had become far too prosaic to drift in the malificent currents that China’s regime has channeled into the authorized political culture, though China’s favorables have fallen sharply in recent times. If the hostility exceeds a degree of enlightened wariness and descends into addlebrained provocations on both sides, it would pit a well-armed superpower against a much smaller and richer nation that still hosts 29,000 U.S. military personnel.
It’s also true that the stupidity of the Chinese who created this melee has made a great P.R. success of a modestly attended demonstration on behalf of North Korean refugees (remember them?). What remains to be seen is whether the focus will shift from the imperial boorishness of the Chinese to the suffering of Korea’s ragged and exploited brothers and sisters in China. I don’t mimimize the magnitude of China’s affront against Korea this week, yet that still pales in comparison to this:
In northern China, [Jasper] Becker joined a Chinese shopkeeper to hunt for refugees, for whom the Chinese government was paying 60 [illegibile] bounties. They found one near a garbage dump. “As the shopkeeper fished around in his pocket for some plastic twine, a dirt-covered face scabrous with pellagra that looked about fifty years old shrunk back into the shadows of a hood made from grey sackcloth, like a medieval leper,” he writes. The woman, who was in fact only 28, had crossed the border in a final effort to avoid starvation. As a prisoner, she would be sent back to North Korea, to face possible torture or even death in a labor camp. Becker bargained with the shopkeeper for her freedom, ultimately paying about $24, “the market price for a North Korean life.” [Time, Austin Ramzy]
I hope the original topic of discussion will not be lost.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says the Bush administration should have sought direct dialogue with North Korea earlier. The Illinois senator said Sunday he felt disturbed to hear the North is likely to have helped Syria pursue a covert nuclear program. He said such suspected activities took place while the U.S. suspended direct talks with Pyongyang. [KBS]
Which would distinguish those suspected activities from these suspected activities, which took place during The Gilded Age of Peace in Our Time, when direct bilateral talks were as frequent and casual as the San Francisco bath house scene in the 70’s.
Obama stressed the need for dialogue not only with U.S. allies but also countries hostile to Washington.
And yet for some reason, all of that dialogue failed to persuade them. Probably our deficiencies of audacity, hope, and change. It is well known among the inmates of Camp 22 that Kim Jong Il has great difficulty resisting the allure of superficial bromides and pablum.
CIA Director Michael Hayden said Monday that the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in September would have produced enough plutonium for one or two bombs within a year of becoming operational. [AP, Pamela Hess]
And according to this report, the Syrian reactor was “nearing completion.”
What Bruce Cumings is to North Korean history, David Albright is to North Korean proliferation.
The North Korean officer approached a South Korean guard post Sunday on the western part of the frontier, an official at the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
The 28-year-old second lieutenant, identified only by his surname Ri, told South Korean guards he was seeking asylum in the South, Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unidentified South Korean military official.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff official declined to confirm the news report, and spoke on condition of anonymity because the case was still being investigated. [AP]
It’s the first such cross-border defection in a decade. One defection doesn’t have the statistical depth to suggest a trend, but you have to wonder if this has anything to do with the food situation. If lower-ranking officers are at the bottom of this new kind of of “food chain,” one recent report suggests that officers of higher rank have lost their rations, too:
An inside source in Yangkang Province said in a phone conversation with Daily NK on the 21st, “As a whole, compared to last year, the quality of our diet has fallen significantly. In particular, life for public servants has become more difficult.” The source said, “It does not make a difference to civilians like us because we are used to working in the jangmadang to make a living and getting by without national provisions.
Nowadays, the cadres of Party organizations and their family members, those who did not traditionally work in the jangmadang because of the plentiful provisions they received from the State, have set out on this path of trade.” The source continued, “Since April, the government has only been giving out provisions to the head of each department of the People’s Safety Agency in Hyesan, Yangkang Province.
As for the remaining staff, only 15-days worth of one-serving provisions have been supplied. The discontent among the agents of the People’s Safety Agency over the discrimination is quite significant.” [….]
An inside source in Hoiryeong, North Hamkyung Province also relayed, “ We have not been able to provide rice to laborers since April. Even for the office workers, provisions have been limited to 15 days worth of rice per individual or have stopped altogether, so the price of food has been skyrocketing and people have been fighting to acquire rice.”
The source said, “Nowadays, office workers are worse off than laborers. Middle-rank officers who have been receiving provisions up until now have been rushing to obtain rice with the sudden cease in provisions.” [Daily NK]
[Update: It occurs to me that with the imprecision in the Daily NK’s translation, I should not have assumed that “officer” necessarily means military officer.]
The Daily NK reports that as the food situation worsens, North Koreans are turning to “alternative” foods, and to crime. Some of the crime stories sound like the kinds of crimes that happen everywhere. Those stories may reflect that we have more sources of information, rather than a real crime wave. One development that seems significant is the use of firearms in the commission of crimes. If true, it suggests that discipline in the security forces continues to erode, or that more weapons are in the hands of criminals. Banditry isn’t many degrees away from mutiny, and that’s especially worrisome to a regime that can no longer feed its secret police and its field-grade officers.
So far, the Daily NK reports, there is no widespread starvation, due to hoarding that’s probably helped drive up food prices. The obvious cautions apply: this is hearsay, of course. Hearsay is the only source of unofficial information we’re going to have from North Korea for the foreseeable future, so all we can do is evaluate it in light of other known facts.
Click here for a full schedule of events. Regettably, I’ve got too many other things going on to attend and blog most of those events. Having a life has its disadvantages.
The most disastrous Olympic torch run in history has ended with a new low:
On Sunday, clashes broke out in Seoul near the relay start between a group of 500 Chinese supporters and about 50 demonstrators criticizing Beijing’s policies, carrying a banner reading, “Free North Korean refugees in China.” The students threw stones and water bottles as some 2,500 police tried to keep the two sides apart. [AP]
And so we add another excellent reason, if any more were needed to avoid Beijing 2008: your safety. Our State Department is both powerless and unprepared to protect the safety of Americans in Beijing, but hey, at least you’re still safe in your own damn country. That’s more than they can say in Seoul today, where the Chinese government went to its population of visiting students in South Korea and recruited a highly disciplined force of ambassadors to show you that the transcendental brotherhood that is The Olympic Spirit must never, ever be contaminated by politics:
… unless they’re officially approved and sponsored, of course.
That photo, by the way, comes from Dan Bielefeld, who attended yesterday’s protest against China’s brutal treatment of North Korean refugees. His photos of the demonstration and the ChiCom counter-demonstration are an absolute must see. Dan’s photos show Chinese throwing objects, including what appears to be a glass soju bottle. Other Korean protestors held up rocks and tools that the students had thrown. Dan himself was hit with something, although (thank God) he’s OK.
One Chinese student swatted at the demonstrators with a flagpole. Another student was arrested for allegedly throwing rocks, police said. Police said four other people were arrested for trying to disrupt the relay. Authorities deployed some 8,000 police — some riding horses and bicycles — to protect the torch. [AP]
At one point, the two groups clashed with Chinese students kicking an elderly South Korean protester and hurling rocks at a group that raised banners chastising Beijing. [Reuters, Jon Herskovitz]
Being a glass-half-full sort of guy, I look at things like this and tell myself that a billion people can’t all be assholes. But until these last few weeks, I had no idea how low humanity had sunk in China, and how little self-awareness the Chinese seem to have about their plunging esteem in the eyes of the world, or the degree to which their own behavior is driving that trend. I’m guessing the “Master Race” act will not be popular in South Korea. You have to sense that the ChiCom authorities have abandoned the idea of showing the world their maturity and are just going for the domestic appeal of nationalism.
The torch run also met protests in Japan. At least the ChiComs won’t have to worry about protests where the torch is now – North Korea.
One North Korean defector poured gasoline on himself in the middle of a street along the route and tried to set himself on fire, but police quickly surrounded him and carried him away. The man, 45-year-old Son Jong Hoon, had led an unsuccessful public campaign to save his brother from execution in the North, where he was accused of spying after the two met secretly in China. [AP]
When the torch was passing Sincheon Station in Songpa-gu at about 3 p.m., however, a North Korean defector was arrested after jumping into the relay route to snatch away the torch. He said he was protesting against China’s forceful repatriation of North Korean refugees. “Many people died because they were sent back, and I tried to show my protest by putting out the torch,” he said. [Chosun Ilbo]
In spite of the widespead violence of the Chinese, only one or two Chinese were arrested, depending on which account you believe. Here are some video clips:
Those are images that South Koreans should study very carefully … and possibly accustom themselves to. I’m trying to imagine any other country whose people would behave like this in another country’s capital.
Our long national slumber is ending with a very cranky awakening, and editorialists are starting to transform Chris Hill into a political liability for the Bush Administration:
We still have no idea whether North Korea engaged in or is engaging in surreptitious uranium enrichment to complement the plutonium processed at Yongbyon. And we have not even asked Kim to dismantle his existing nuclear arsenal. Exactly what is it about this picture that has convinced Christopher Hill, the State Department’s top negotiator with Dear Leader, to keep pushing for a normalization of relations? John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador, provided a window into State’s soul when, writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, he reported that Hill was set to offer North Korea a deal whereby it would simply acknowledge U.S. “concern” with proliferation activities. In other words: Don’t bother telling us what you’ve done or proving that you’ve stopped doing it — just listen while we tell you we’re miffed. No one could deny the exquisite nuance of this approach, but effective diplomacy it is not. At this writing, the declaration dispute is still unresolved, and President Bush would do well to keep Hill from resolving it. [Editorial, National Review]
Michelle Malkin is calling it “faith-based diplomacy.” Her Bolton photographs alone makes her postings worth a visit, although I don’t see much support for either (a) a decision by the Administration to really push for verification — it’s all pretty much for public consumption — or (b) a CIA plot to disrupt the deal.
Again, the theory that fits with other known evidence is that key committee chairs and ranking members in Congress threatened not to fund this deal unless the Administration finally provided answers to questions that they’ve been asking since last September’s strike. The Administration found itself boxed in by Congress and internally divided, so it was forced to deliver the goods. This information was just too damning to keep quiet about for long.
Winston Lord and Lawrence Gelb are two senior members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, a constituency that has been pushing, conditionally, for Agreed Framework 2.0 ever since the death of Agreed Framework 1.0. The establishment has supported, in principle, the idea of making a deal and sacrificing adjectives to get one, but they’ve always kept one eye on the exits in case the North Koreans just wouldn’t play along. Maybe the flaw for which they can be most faulted is failing to recognize the inevitability of that condition, but either way, there are signs that the audience is leaving the theater. It’s got to sting when a former adviser to Jimmy Carter says this:
The two of us can hardly be counted as conservative die-hards opposing deals with Pyongyang. We believe that Washington and its allies are rightly committed to exploring even the remotest chance that Pyongyang might give up its nuclear weapons. While reaching for that larger goal, our negotiators can seek to cap North Korea’s nuclear inventory and head off proliferation.
We oppose both abandoning the September 2005 agreement and allowing Pyongyang to eviscerate it. Better to let the talks continue than to make one-sided concessions. Better to sharpen North Korean compliance or — failing that — to string out our own.
Bush can sustain international unity by making clear that his goal is to hold Pyongyang to its 2005 commitments. This is the only way to preserve American credibility and bargaining leverage. It is also the only way to maintain political support in Washington for these difficult negotiations.
Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world. — The Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:8 (37a)
Let me be first nice Jewish boy to say it: ”G-d bless Sam Brownback.”
One of the Senate’s oldest traditions is the nomination ”hold.” For judicial appointments, holds are the exclusive prerogrative of home-state senators. For ambassadors, senate custom allows any senator to place a hold on any nomination, which cannot go forward until the senator lifts it. Holds can be placed and maintained in secret, although the Senate has a poor record for keeping secrets recently. Holds need not be explained. Some result from little more than personal vendettas. Some are used to extract concessions from agencies.
Senators from both parties place holds, and there’s nothing rare or unique about them. In the 1990’s, several Republican senators put holds on Richard Holbrooke’s nomination as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. In 2004, John Kyl — reportedly egged on by John Bolton — put a hold on the nominee to be ambassador to the IAEA. In 2006, Democrat Dick Durban of Illinois put one on the President’s nominee for Ambassador to Australia. In 2007, John Kerry put one on the nominee for Ambassador to Tanzania, who was a native of Wisconsin. Earlier this month, Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey put one on the nominee to be Ambassador to Armenia.
You will recall that in this post, I wrote about Kathleen Stephens, the State Department’s nominee to be the next U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea. Though well qualified for the job and (so I am told) a nice person when you meet her, Ms. Stephens is also a long-time crony of Christopher Hill, the man who would excuse North Korea from answering for its human rights atrocities, its support for terrorism, its abductions of the citizens of other nations, its counterfeiting of U.S. currency and money laundering, its nuclear proliferation, or its refusal to disclose all of its nuclear weapons programs before being relieved of key U.S. sanctions. Hill has long been Ms. Stephens’s protege, and there is every reason to believe that her views closely match Hill’s; in fact, Stephens’s key policy initiative in her current job was to push for a full peace treaty with North Korea. There is less reason for confidence that Stephens’s views would align with those of a new, more conservative government in Seoul.
Provided Ms. Stephens’s views do not conflict with her duty to obey the law, it is her right as a citizen to hold them, no matter how wrong or discredited I may believe them to be. Of course, not everyone has a right to represent the United States as an ambassador. An ambassador represents the interests and values of an entire nation, and that requires an extraordinary degree of trust.
Senator Sam Brownback has spoken with Ms. Stephens twice to let her explain her views. He doesn’t have that trust, and so he’s holding the nomination. He’s under enormous pressure from the Administration and the State Department. In spite of that, he went to the Senate floor yesterday to explain his views openly:
You could read more about this here and here in the Chosun Ilbo, but the media have mostly phoned this one in and failed to explain Sen. Brownback’s thinking. That’s why I’d like to try to explain what they haven’t.
Back in 2003, Sam Brownback sponsored something called the North Korean Freedom Act. The State Department’s appeasement crowd, which was not then as dominant as it is today, reached out to friends in the Senate and blocked it in the Foreign Relations Committee, back when Senator Richard Lugar was Chairman.
The following year, a watered down version appeared as the North Korean Human Right Act. That April, hundreds of people, most affiliated with LiNK or the North Korean Freedom Coalition, descended on Capitol Hill to lobby for the NKHRA. We didn’t have appointments, mind you. Hundreds of us just descended on offices in teams of a dozen each and registered our support for the Act’s passage (and often, that consisted of explaining our views to 19 year-old staffers who couldn’t find Korea on a map).
At the time, I was fresh out of the Army, and I was summarily elected leader of an ad-hoc team that was thrown together of other teamless individuals. Of those hundreds of amateur lobbyists, we may have been the only ones to actually meet a senator. Out of sheer blind luck, we entered Sen. Lugar’s office just as he was walking out of it with an Army general and an Army colonel. Personally, Lugar was congenial and generous of his time. I gave my very best two-minute closing argument. Lugar feigned interest convincingly and listened politely. And probably for completely unrelated reasons, the North Korean Human Rights Act made it out of Lugar’s Committee that year. In October of 2004, the the North Korean Human Rights Act passed both houses by voice votes. The President signed it just before Election Day 2004 in a modest ceremony. And much like the feeling of wetting one’s self in dark suit, many of us had a warm feeling inside, but no one really noticed. And so everyone — especially the State Department’s East Asia Bureau, of which Kathleen Stephens has been Deputy Assistant Secretary since 2005 — forgot about the North Korean Human Rights Act.
You may not remember that the Act required the State Department to make human rights a “key” part of its negotiations with North Korea, or that it required expanding radio broadcasts to 12 hours a day, or that it required U.S. consular facilities overseas to “facilitate the submission of applications” by North Korean refugees for political asylum.
You can be forgiven for forgetting, because none of those things has actually happened. I told you why back in November 2005. My reliable source told me that Nicholas Burns, the unofficial high priest of the appeasement wing, sabotaged the funding and implementation of the Act. And as a result, our consulates in China are turning away North Korean refugees at the gates, Radio Free Asia spent much of last year in a hiring freeze, less than 50 North Korean refugees have gotten into the United States, we have a part-time Special Envoy who wears a shock collar, and human rights are a functional non-issue in our talks with the North Koreans.
As a matter of policy, you may well disagree with all of my views on those things, and if so, I encourage you to express that view to your member of Congress, as I have done to mine and yours. If you don’t like the law, there are ways of changing it, but the list of acceptable methods does not include allowing members of the Executive Branch to defy it.
I understand that the issuance of regulations, the formulation of policies, and the creation of budgets takes time, but it doesn’t take nearly four years. There is no rational explanation for State’s behavior except that it considers itself self-governing and above the law. That attitude has made State some enemies in Congress this week over the much-delayed Syria revelations, but this deserves to be just as big a scandal.
You will see, incidentally, some Google Earth images of Camp 22 in that speech, and if you think those photographs look familiar, you’re right. At the very least, full disclosure requires me to mention at least that much and let you infer the rest on your own. Not that anyone who got this far confused me with a disinterested or unbiased observer. If you’re disinterested, then you did not click that last link.
Kathleen Stephens may be perfectly qualified technically and linguistically, but an absence of respect for the law is a disqualification for any public servant in a democracy. And as with every single politician human being alive, there are issues on which Senator Brownback and I would probably disagree, but on this issue, he deserves more than the commendation of the few people who will read this — he deserves to be remembered by history. Here is a man who made a difference, and here, by itself, is a reason to remember that one man, driven by conscience alone, defied his President and his friend to save the lives of people who will never see, know, or vote for him.
[Update: Watch the CIA’s video on the al-Kibar reactor:
I’d love to know how they got those photographs of the reactor’s interior, and I can only guess that some trusted person who is now in a much safer place took them.]
How stupid and how evil does Kim Jong Il have to be to get the attention of Congress in an election year? This stupid and this evil:
The United States on Thursday released an intelligence document with photographs of what it said was a Syrian nuclear reactor built with North Korean help. [Reuters; interesting fact sheet at that link, btw]
“The belief is that the reactor was nearing completion,” said one official familiar with the content of the briefings. “It would have been able to produce plutonium.” [Washington Times, Joshua Mitnick]
The evidence is, to say the least, hard to dismiss:
The officials said the video of the remote site, code-named Al Kibar by the Syrians, shows North Koreans inside. It played a pivotal role in Israel’s decision to bomb the facility late at night last Sept. 6, a move that was publicly denounced by Damascus but not by Washington.
Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core’s design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows “remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon,” a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video “very, very damning.” [WaPo, Robin Wright]
There’s no reasonable defense to the charge that North Korea has crossed the Red Line in a very big way. No wonder the State Department stonewalled Congress for so many months. No wonder Chris Hill has feared this day like Kennedys fear sobriety checkpoints.
If there is one explanation for why Agreed Framework 2.0 got as far as it did, it’s the fact that the media and Congress haven’t been paying attention. They are now. People are about to have what will be, for many of them, a first opportunity to kick the tires of the Edsel Chris Hill was trying to sell us. And nobody — Republican or Democrat — is defending Bush now. Let’s begin with the reaction that will matter most:
The Arizona senator, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who has touted his experience in security issues as a strength in his campaign, said the North Korean nuclear disclosures were “troubling but not surprising.”
“North Korea has not acted in good faith for more than a decade,” he said. “The goal of our diplomacy must be an agreement that advances America’s national interests in the full denuclearization of North Korea and the cessation and full accounting of North Korea’s proliferation activities.”
He said any agreement must be completely verifiable and take into account the interests of allies South Korea and Japan. “In addition, it would be a serious mistake to exclude from the negotiations our legitimate concerns regarding North Korea’s egregious human rights abuses,” McCain said. [Reuters]
And with that, Bush is orphaned and exposed as a hypocrite on human rights. Good for McCain, though it’s a bit of a stretch to turn this into an attack on Obama. Granted: in a blind taste test, I’d pick Obama as the most likely proponent of a policy this naive, but you can’t hold Obama responsible for this one (or much of anything else; he came to Washington, stopped for a cup of coffee, and decided to run for President).
Republicans in Congress were also critical:
After receiving a classified briefing for Congress members, Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra on Thursday called it “is a serious proliferation issue, both for the Middle East and the countries that may be involved in Asia.” [Rep. Peter Hoekstra, via AP]
Hoekstra is one of those who has been demanding answers since last fall, along with Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, but other reactions, such as that of Democratic Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, are somewhat more surprising. As was this:
“Reports that North Korea - over a period of several years - helped Syria build a nuclear reactor make clear that any deal to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear programs must also stop its proliferation activities and include vigorous verification.
“Unless we are able to confirm that North Korea is no longer in the nuclear proliferation business, the United States should not lift sanctions on the North. Our goals are, and must remain, both shutting down North Korea’s nuclear programs and ensuring that North Korea does not transfer dangerous technology to other irresponsible states. [Sen. Joe Biden, Press release]
Biden then calls for the United States not to cut off the six-party talks, which these senators aren’t calling for, and for that matter, I’m not calling for, either. Talks have cosmetic value and do little harm, as long as you keep your expectations realistic and apply enough pressure. So score one for Senator Biden over Senator Strawman.
Although Democrats are probably more supportive of Bush’s new policy than Republicans, your base of support is never strong when most of it is in the other party:
Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Middle East subcommittee, accused the Bush administration of selectively leaking the classified information, which he called “bizarre behavior.”
While reporters without security clearances were selectively given information “most of us got no information whatsoever,” Ackerman said as he opened a separate hearing on U.S. policy toward Syria. [AP]
And in the end, no one will really care much what the policy’s few remaining defenders say. If the Democrats become strong in their opposition, Bush’s left-of-center defenders will fall silent. Their support is on consignment.
“The United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation facilities or nuclear weaponization facilities,” he said. “The lack of any such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor is part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent lack of fuel, either imported or indigenously produced, also is curious and lowers confidence that Syria has a nuclear weapons program.” [David Albright, via the WaPo]
If we caught a North Korea freighter carrying nuclear bombs to Bandar Abbas, Albright would no doubt point out that they were not yet loaded onto bombers. Ironic, as Richardson notes. But dig this:
U.S. intelligence officials will also tell the lawmakers that Syria is not rebuilding a reactor at the Al Kibar site. “The successful engagement of North Korea in the six-party talks means that it was unlikely to have supplied Syria with such facilities or nuclear materials after the reactor site was destroyed,” Albright said. “Indeed, there is little, if any, evidence that cooperation between Syria and North Korea extended beyond the date of the destruction of the reactor.”
And also, there’s no conclusive evidence whatsoever that Bill Clinton has received so much as one extramarital hummer or lied about it under oath since 1996. The point being? And in any event, I wouldn’t be so sure about that:
Asked yesterday whether the North has assisted Syria’s nuclear program since the Sept. 6 bombing, officials said, “Not at that site.” They declined to elaborate. [Washington Times]
There will be (forgive me) fallout from the briefing and Congress’s reaction. For one thing, it’s hard to believe that Chris Hill feels that his job is secure these days:
Mr. Hill was put in charge of the talks more than three years ago in the hope of finding a new way to deal with the North Koreans. But support for him has wavered, and President Bush has repeatedly warned aides not to agree to anything that “makes me look weak,” according to former officials who sat in on meetings with him on North Korea.
Mr. Cheney’s office and other conservatives have argued that Mr. Hill’s proposed deal would amount to a huge concession. In return for a minimal declaration from North Korea — an accounting of how much plutonium it has produced — it would be removed from the terrorism list and would no longer be subject to economic sanctions under the Trading With the Enemy Act. [….]
It is not clear what has changed, apart from the politics of the moment. Mr. Hill’s boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has not voiced strong support for Mr. Hill’s effort to coax the North Koreans along, granting them rewards for steps along the way to compliance with a deal that calls, ultimately, for the country to give up its weapons.
Ms. Rice has been a strong critic of the 1994 agreement between North Korea and the Clinton administration, complaining that it was “front loaded” with rewards for the North. [….]
“He’s feeling pretty abandoned by Rice and Bush,” one of his colleagues said Wednesday. Mr. Hill did not respond to messages. [NY Times]
There are in fact rumors that he will resign, although I’m in no position at all to substantiate them. Stay or go, Hill’s precarious situation probably means that the Singapore Surrender is a non-starter, one that would go into the same legislative dustbin as Dubai Ports World, Harriet Miers, Comprehensive Immigration Reform … and the FTA with Korea.
Kathleen Stephens’s nomination seems less certain now. There’s a Senate hold on her nomination, and her close association with Hill may harm her chances that State will push hard to have it lifted.
The doves may have finally overplayed their hand this time.
South Korean human rights groups said Thursday they will block the Olympic torch relay in protest at China’s alleged human rights violations against Tibetans and North Korean defectors. The torch for the 2008 Beijing Olympics is scheduled to reach South Korea on April 27 and be passed on to North Korea on the following day. It will arrive in Beijing in early May. “We urge China, as a host of the Olympic Games, to abide by the common values of humankind and respect the human rights of the weak,” said Christian Accountability for Society, Save North Korea and Helping Hands Korea in a joint press conference held in front of the World Peace Gate at Seoul’s Olympic Park. “China must stop its forceful repatriation of North Korean refugees and its violent crackdown on Tibetan protestors. [Yonhap]
SPEAKING OF THE CHICOMS SHOOTING THEMSELVES IN THE FEET, I’d say that stories like this aren’t going to do good things for the tourist trade this summer. Not only does it look like a bad time to be a white person in China, it seems to be an especially bad time to be there if you’re French or want to catch a taxi. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that Olympic protests have given the ChiCom regime propaganda fuel, which is true. But what a gift this regime has for hitting itself when it swings blunt instruments. The result of the regime’s self-serving incitement is stories like these, which could crush foreign attendance at the Olympics to an ever greater degree than the protests themselves. Now watch how quickly the regime cracks down on the new Boxers it has incited.
ANOTHER WAY TO VIEW THIS: watch how much smarter Hu Jintao still is than Roh Moo Hyun, whose own brand of incitement, usually through surrogates within his own party, earned Korea more enduring ill will than his successor will easily overcome.
EXPECT TO HEAR MORE REPORTS of North Korean spy arrests in South Korea. Unfortunately, Yonhap’s report is too badly translated for us to know if that will mean better enforcement or just better publicity.
PYONGYANG SOJU IS ARRIVING in the United States, in spite of the reported arrest of the importer. This is the thin end of the wedge in the State Department’s plan to respond to North Korea’s behavior, no matter how reprehensible and uncooperative, with cash.
Fourteen Republican senators have signed a letter to President Bush opposing his agreement to let the North Koreans off the hook on full disclosure, disarmament, money laundering, terror sponsorship, concentration camps, abductions — you name it – before we lift sanctions. An excerpt:
We are … concerned about the present course of action on North Korea’s nuclear program being pursued by representatives of your Administration. It cannot be said that North Korea has complied with its commitments. From all appearances, Kim Jong Il believes that the United States will take whatever deal we can get, allowing him to dictate the time, place, manner, and content of the fulfillment of his promises.
Bipartisan concern that the State Department has essentially defied the unanimous will of Congress and blocked the North Korean Human Rights Act, resulting in this new bill in the House.
I’ll be interested in hearing how the presidential candidates react.
Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are both reporting that State is about to give Congress that briefing that it’s long been demanding about what exactly the Israelis bombed in Syria last September.
A senior congressional aide and a former Bush administration North Korea specialist said they believed the briefings were designed to persuade members of Congress that removing those sanctions was justified.
Latest word, by the way, is that when State publishes its new list of state sponsors of terror, North Korea will still be on it, although you can be sure that the report will be about as heavily doctored as Stalin’s biography in a Soviet encylopedia.
Congressional sources said the briefings would be for members of the House of Representatives and Senate committees that deal with armed services, foreign affairs and intelligence. Spokesmen for the White House and for the office of the Director of National Intelligence declined comment.
“The administration routinely keeps appropriate members of Congress informed of national security and intelligence matters, but I’m going to decline to comment on any specific briefings,” said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
Asked why the briefings were happening now, the senior congressional aide said, “Because they are about to lift sanctions … and they want to convince members that we have enough clarity from what the North Koreans have acknowledged to us, and what we have learned through our own methods, to proceed with confidence.” [Reuters, Mohammed Arshad]
The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon reports that the targeted facility was to be a plutonium-based nuclear reactor, something that had been reported by the press before but has never been confirmed by U.S. officials on the record. Still uncertain are a number of conflicting reports that North Korea also transferred nuclear “material” to Syria, as well of reports of nuclear technology transfers to Iran.
The argument, then, would go like this: one listed state sponsor of terrorism has proliferated nuclear technology and perhaps “materials” of some kind to an especially active state sponsor of terrorism, one that’s actively supporting the people who are killing Americans in Iraq today. Now that we’ve told you that, we faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats are asking you, the elected representatives, to de-list the proliferating party, which, by the way, is sticking with an incredible blanket denial of the entire transaction, has not confessed to its recent terror sponsorship or retail terrorism, and is promising to neither end nor renounce its terrorism or support thereof. They admit nothing, they regret nothing, and if you do this, you will have proved that terrorism works.
Oh, and this will probably trash our relations with Japan. Meanwhile, U.S. permanent resident Kim Dong Shik’s North Korean kidnapper still sits in a South Korean jail. I wonder what he knows.
The Administration has handled congressional relations on this rather badly. After months of extraordinary secrecy and failing to brief the key committees of Congress, State offended some in Congress by giving the North Koreans a detailed briefing first, leaving not just Congress at the back of the line, but also South Korea and Japan, which went to the Israelis to learn what we presumably wouldn’t tell them.
Unfortunately, because the North Koreans are still refusing to tell us the whole story about Syria — and because we’re now saying we’ll let the North Koreans off the hook and write their declaration for them based on what we do know – the briefing may only serve to accentuate North Korea’s bad faith in dealing with us and our own stupidity for going along with it. And obviously, given the reactor’s remote location and surrounding secrecy – along with the checkered history of both parties here — there’s reason to assume that the purposes were not entirely peaceful.
Then there’s the fact that North Korea’s declaration, the part we’re still asking them to make, will still be materially false. North Korea is saying it will declare 30 kilograms of plutonium, which is 20-30 kilograms less than U.S. intelligence estimates. This leaves the questions of uranium enrichment and North Korea’s existing warheads unresolved, although the low-ball plutonium estimate suggests that the North Koreans will probably deny having any more completed warheads.
Honest.
Also unresolved is the issue of verification in the world’s most opaque and controlled society. Getting a North Korean concession on verification is the nominal purpose of Sung Kim’s visit to Pyongyang this week, although North Korea’s positions on the declaration — and the growing congressional resistance those positions are creating – will almost certainly come up.
All of which makes you wonder just how safe this deal will make everyone feel when it’s all said and done.
Bush has come under withering fire over all of this, most of it from people who voted for him and who questioned Clinton’s Agreed Framework (which, frankly speaking, was less bad that this one). Bush’s own position on all of this has been exceedingly difficult to pin down. After a White House spokesperson intially said the White House has accepted the Singapore Surrender, Bush later said this:
“You know, there’s all kinds of rumors about what is happening and what’s not happening,” Bush said at a news joint conference with Lee. “Obviously I’m not going to accept a deal that doesn’t advance the interests of the region.” [….]
“So we’ll wait and see what he says, and then we’ll make a decision about our obligations, depending upon whether or not we’re convinced that there is a solid and full declaration,” Bush said. [Reuters]
Which some interpreted as Bush backing away from this putrid deal. Bush also suggested that the North Koreans might be trying to stall through the end of his term (d’ya think?) For his part, President Lee said that he and Bush were ”still waiting for North Korea to declare their full program” and that Kim Jong Il “should not get away with this temporary measure.” This quote from Lee was especially interesting:
“I believe if North Korea’s declaration is not satisfactory or if the verification is not satisfactory, we could probably have a temporary achievement, but in the long term that will cause a lot more serious problems,” Lee said.
“The United States is not dealing with North Korea alone,” he said. “There are other parties to these six-party talks and they must all agree to this declaration.” [AFP]
Another hint, it seems, that Lee isn’t fond of one-party talks.
Later, however, Bush asked us to all just hush and give peace a chance:
“Why don’t we just wait and see what they say before people go out there and start giving their opinions about whether this is a good deal or a bad deal?” Bush said. [Washington Post]
It may be the fact that their acceptance would be our worst case scenario. Some in the media have long sought to portray this as a false choice of appeasement or war, and it does seem that our government doesn’t think it has other options. But of course, it does.
