Archive for October, 2008
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 30, 2008 at 7:16 am · Filed under Terrorism (NK), Censorship, Democracy
Never mind North Korea’s sponsorship of terrorism. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: any government that delivers messages like these should be listed as a specially designated terrorist group:
“We clarify our stand that should the South Korean puppet authorities continue scattering leaflets and conducting a smear campaign with sheer fabrications, our army will take a resolute practical action as we have already warned,” the official KCNA news agency quoted the military spokesman as saying.
At a rare round of military talks on Monday, North Korea complained about the leaflets while South Korean activists sent a new batch of 100,000, despite warnings from Seoul not to do so.
“The puppet authorities had better bear in mind that the advanced pre-emptive strike of our own style will reduce everything opposed to the nation and reunification to debris, not just setting them on fire,” the spokesman said.
South Korean groups have been sending the leaflets into the North for years. Analysts said the recent wave appeared to have touched a nerve because they mentioned a taboo subject in the North — the health of leader Kim Jong-il. [Reuters, Jack Kim]
This is how North Korea responds to mere words. In the wake of America’s extorted de-listing of North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism, Let’s compare this, or any of those “sea of fire” threats the North regularly levies at Seoul or Tokyo, to how the laws of the United States define “international terrorism:”
As used in this chapter - (1) the term “international terrorism” means activities that … (B) appear to be intended - (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum. [United States Code, Title 18, Section 2331(1)]
Someone tell me how I’m off base here. And if any doubt remains that terrorism works, ironically, it’s South Korean President Lee Myung Bak who’s helping to remove it, and he does so to adhere to a predecessor’s agreement to censor speech that “defames” the North. South Korean officials now suggest that this agreement, which is reasonably interpreted to apply to actions by the respective states, will now be interpreted broadly enough to censor private expression:
The South Korean government announced today regarding the sending of anti-Kim Jong Il leaflets into North Korea by non-governmental organizations that it will take “measures according to the law and principles (of inter-Korean agreements).” North Korea repeatedly brought up the issue during South-North military working-level talks yesterday. [….]
In the Inter-Korean Basic Agreement of 1991, the South and the North agreed not to slander or defame each other, and during the summit talks of 2004 both the South and the North agreed to halt all propaganda activities such as anti-regime broadcasting, placing defamatory placards or dropping leaflets near the DMZ from the 15th June that year.
As spokesperson Kim put it, “According to the laws and principles of the agreements, necessary measures will be taken against these organizations in the private sector, after requesting that they cooperate”. The government has twice requested the private sector to control itself, but this is the first time the term “necessary measures” has been used. [Daily NK]
But Lee is doing the “practical” thing, of course. And in Lee’s case, practicality has never been restrained by any great love of free expression. Just as I condemned Lee for censoring the expression of ideas I despised, I condemn his imminent censorship of ideas and methods I emphatically endorse. A society where both cannot coexist isn’t really free.
But the “practical” argument always goes this way: why must mature adults tease the armed whooping loonies with the [circle one: leaflets, cartoons of their prophet, uncensored newspapers]? There’s no denying the practicality of an argument that defers the threat of violence, and so the practical argument is that we should accede to the violent threats of thugs to censor what we say today — or to enforce the unnatural containment of free expression within our own borders — until the next terrorist threat comes tomorrow.
It’s not hard to see how a society that listens to such “practical” advice eventually enslaves itself. I doubt that it’s mere coincidence that in Canada, the state had no visible interest in the preemptive censorship of some of its most prominent publications and writers before international terrorists began operating inside Canada. If this is not Canada’s surrender to terrorism in a direct sense, there certainly is a strong temporal correlation between 9/11 and Canada’s new-found sensitivity to words and ideas that offend radical Muslims.
We have also seen that the North’s proxies — often assisted by a leftist government that mixed easily with them — are willing to censor ideas within South Korea itself; to list a few examples, the selective taxation and governmental agitation used against opposition media, the threats against Radio Free North Korea, the blocking of a U.S. Ambassador from attending a media interview, attacks on non-violent human rights activists and publishers, and the alleged attempt to shut down “Yoduk Story.”
In some of these cases, it wasn’t clear what, if any, connection the thugs had to the South Korean government. The identity of the actors is ancillary to the point. The point here is that North Korea respects no borders but its own, and that there is no political or military boundary at which North Korea will cease to demand the enforcement of its own rules of censorship except the limits of what it thinks it can get away with. But what else should we expect of a regime that calls the very idea of free expression “nonsense?“
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 29, 2008 at 11:59 am · Filed under Kim Jong Il
[Update: C’est pas vrais, says le docteur.]
Every day seems to bring a new rumor about Kim Jong Il’s health, which is in itself a good thing if you consider the effect this must have on the cohesion between ambitious generals, party apparatchiks, and disgruntled young officers in a hungry year. We know the rumors are circulating in North Korea, and it’s safe to assume that they’re just as contradictory inside North Korea as they are on Earth. The difference is that in such a controlled society, people are just as inclined to believe rumors as what they hear in their “news,” depending on what they’re predisposed to believe.
Today’s report, via the South Korean intelligence leak ticker, is that His Porcine Majesty has suffered “a serious setback” in his recovery from a stroke. Previous statements from Japanese and South Korean officials had suggested that Kim was partially disabled by the stroke but — thank goodness — still every bit the absolute, iron-fisted despot and Sun of the Nation. (This squares with the rumors I’m hearing unofficially, that the stroke left Kim paralyzed on his left side. I emphasize that I have no source or authentication for this information.)
The news of this “setback” displaces the most recent gossip, via a reader (thank you):
New doubts over the health of North Korea’s “Dear Leader” have arisen after Kim Jong Il’s eldest son was filmed in Paris apparently soliciting the services …
Please, please, let the next words be “of Divine Brown in an alley behind an adult bookstore.”
… of a top brain surgeon.
Oh.
The footage, shot by the Japanese Fuji Television, has rekindled conjecture that Mr Kim is gravely ill and has possibly had a stroke. Speculation over the enigmatic dictator’s health has been rife, with some North Korean defectors suggesting that Mr Kim is at death’s door.
That speculation has led some intelligence experts to suggest that Pyongyang may, behind the scenes, be in the grip of a struggle for supremacy by opposing factions eager to take over when the 66-year-old dictator finally loses his stranglehold on power. [Times of London]
It should tell you something that the news changes faster than I have time to post about it.
You can see previous video of Kim Jong Nam being stalked by a reporter in Macau here.
Last month, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak publicly castigated his own officials and his nation’s press for leaks and speculation about Kim Jong Il’s health. This appears not to have had the desired effect.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 28, 2008 at 1:36 pm · Filed under Uncategorized, Anju Links
ANOTHER STALINIST WHO’S PISSED AT LEE MYUNG BAK: Noam Chomsky, over an alleged ban on his works. I’m not sure whether Chomsky’s screeds circulate freely in Pyongyang, but the answer is probably useful to prove a point regardless of what it is. I don’t support banning even a yutz like Chomsky, whose work is all over the internet anyway. But if Chomsky is — to use Yonhap’s barren description of him — no more than a “linguist,” then Goebbels was no more than a “community activist.”SOMEHOW, I DON’T THINK THAT WILL DETER THEM:
A group of South Korean businesses on Sunday pleaded with activists to stop sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets into North Korea, saying the practice was straining already frosty inter-Korean relations.
The request came a day before campaigners were due to float another 100,000 leaflets over the border.
Pyongyang has threatened to cut all inter-Korean exchanges and has warned of a possible inter-Korean military clash in an angry protest over the leaflets, which denounce the North’s leader Kim Jong-Il as a dictator.
“The leaflets are worsening inter-Korean relations,” the group of businesses operating at Kaesong, an industrial complex just north of the border, said in a statement carried by Yonhap news agency.
“If the complex shuts down, it will further dampen the hopes of both your organisations and our nation,” the statement added, describing the site as the only remaining “reconciliation channel.” [AFP]
“Reconciliation” in this case means things that should not be forgiven, and wouldn’t be if the perpetrators were Japanese — the exploitation of slave laborers who aren’t even allowed to carry on conversations with their supervisors. These paragons of business ethics would have us believe that slavery for profit is leading us to liberation (which translates to “arbeit macht frei” in the original German). If you’d like to help support more balloon launches, send your tax deductible contribution to the North Korean Freedom Coalition.
MONGOLIA HELPING N.K. REFUGEES? “Former health minister and parliamentarian Lamjav Gundalai told a news outlet in Seoul that on average, 700 North Koreans who have fled the communist country arrive in Mongolia every year.” That would be news to me.
DON’T MISS THIS EXCELLENT GI KOREA POST on a new RAND study on North Korea, South Korea, and China after Kim Jong Il.
HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE ‘DEFECTOR GIRL BOXER?’
[A] girl whose family fled North Korea is breathing just a hint of new life into the sport by winning a world championship at age 17. In a soccer-crazed country, her hardscrabble tale has generated some headlines. [NYT, Choe Sang Hun]
IS ROH MOO HYUN about to do the perp walk? Really, how many ex-South Korean presidents aren’t convicts?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 28, 2008 at 6:51 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Diplomacy
Does it ever seem that U.S. policy toward North Korea is intentionally designed to clash with those of Japan and South Korea? No matter how necessary a coordinated approach may be to the success of any policy, and even when Japan and Korea are newly aligned toward the same strategy we’d been pursuing until February 2007, our State Department seems to delight in creating diplomatic chaos at the first sign that order might break out. Ironically, it’s now America that undermines the hopes of disarming and changing North Korea though the coordinated denial of easy money.
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso still stands despite his inaugural kick in the teeth by President Bush. Aso will refuse to give any aid to North Korea absent an accounting for Japanese citizens abducted by the North. North Korea’s reaction is to restate its demand to expel Japan from the six-party talks.
Meanwhile, Lee Myung Bak’s government is doing what we should have done from the beginning — linking economic aid to tangible progress on disarmament:
South Korea will prioritise implementing the inter-Korean projects agreed in last year’s summit once North Korea makes further progress in denuclearising its nuclear programmes, Seoul’s unification minister Kim Ha-joong said yesterday (Oct 23).
The remark came in a bid to reaffirm Seoul’s commitment to the October 4 declaration, which the North has accused the Lee Myung-bak government of denying.
“If the disablement of the North’s nuclear facilities are completed and the denuclearisation process makes more progress, the Seoul government would actively take measures aimed at expanding economic cooperation between South and North Korea,” Kim said during an annual parliamentary audit on his ministry.
“The measures will be based on the government’s Vision 3000 plan, but we will preferentially consider the projects included in the October 4 declaration.” [Korea Herald, via Asia News Network]
Lee’s government might start by taking a closer look at how North Korea is spending those Mt. Kumgang tour subsidies:
Former president of Hyundai Asan Corp Yoon Man Jun attended the meeting as a witness and verified that “All money sent to North Korea vis a vis Mt. Geumgang tourism has been deposited to accounts in either Europe or Southeast Asia.” Assemblywoman Song pointed out that “North Korea’s accounts in foreign countries belong to the “royal court economy” under Kim Jong Il, which means all funds eventually go to Kim Jong Il’s own pockets.”
When Assemblywoman Song asked Yoon whether Hyundai Asan sent money to accounts held by the Kim private economy or for use in the civilian economy, he answered that it was not possible to know what type of accounts they were because the money was only sent to designated accounts.
Assemblywoman Song stated that “Banks related to the civilian economy deal with North Korean Won alone, and do not have any branches abroad. Exchanging to Dollars or Euros abroad signifies that the money is going to Kim Jong Il’s personal royal court economy.” [Daily NK]
Ms. Song says that the Kumgang subsidy has paid for North Korea’s nuclear programs. If this is true — and it’s consistent with other reports I’ve read — then the Kumgang subsidy would violate U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, which requires member states to “ensure” that funds they provide North Korea do not fund its weapons development. I’m not exactly caught up on whether these tours are even still operating, but any tourist who would go there is a candidate for a Darwin Award.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 26, 2008 at 1:59 pm · Filed under Famine & Food Aid
Recently, I was arguing with an influential supporter of a soft-line approach to North Korea about food aid. Generally, we both supported the provision of food aid, and both of us acknowledged that the regime would use every means at its disposal to divert that aid to loyalists, high-ranking cadres, and the military. We agreed that Kim Jong Il doesn’t see the lives of all North Koreans as having equal value.
We diverged when it came to what U.S. policy should be in the face of such challenges. I acknowledge that the Americans who negotiated the terms of this year’s modest aid program went in with eyes wide open and the best of intentions, but I believe that the measures we secured to prevent diversion are inadequate. To me, nothing short of full transparency, anytime inspections, and nutritional surveys of the recipients (to actually confirm that they’ve been eating the food aid we’ve given them) is enough. Unless we have full confidence that our aid is feeding the hungry, we should not provide any aid.
Only when the elites get hungry enough will their interests will align with those of the people in the provinces.
I do not acknowledge that Kim Jong Il has any legitimate reason whatsoever to deny humanitarian workers full access to the starving people we’re trying to feed. A tyrant’s sovereign right to secrecy ends when he accepts, and is justifiably suspected of stealing, international aid. For example, according to this 2006 survey (pdf) of more than 1,300 North Korean refugees in China, 96% denied having ever received any international food aid. Remarkably enough, there is even video and photographic evidence of the North Korean military caught in the act of stealing and receiving diverted food aid, and of that aid subsequently being sold in the markets.
Each of the various entities with the ability to ameliorate this unfolding catastrophe has a plan not to.
The North Korean Plan: Squander the national treasury on everything but food.
There are plenty of illegitimate reasons for the regime’s determined secrecy. They could include outright diversion, a discriminatory selection of recipients, or the concealment of much greater hunger among concealed populations (concentration camp prisoners, for example). We also know that the regime has previously responded to the arrival of international food aid by cutting back on commercial purchases of food and diverting its limited funds for such priorities as “fighter jets from the Kazakh air force and centrifuges from Pakistan,” or this week’s example:
The United States has imposed sanctions on 13 companies accused of aiding the weapons programmes of North Korea, Iran or Syria, the State Department said Friday. The companies include firms based in Russia, South Korea, China, Sudan, Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in the three targeted countries.
The United States had “credible information” that the companies made sales that could “make a material contribution to weapons of mass destruction or cruise or ballistic missile systems,” State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said in a statement. The companies include: Russia’s Rosoboronexport; South Korea’s Yolin/Yullin Tech; Chinese firms Xinshidai Company, China Shipbuilding and Offshore International Corporation and Huazhong CNC; Venezuelan Military Industries Company; and United Arab Emirates firm R and M International FZCO. [Earth Times]
In addition to the South Korean firm, two North Korean firms were sanctioned — Korea Mining Development Corp., a/k/a KOMID, and Korea Taesong Trading Co. KOMID was already sanctioned, and the reports don’t suggest that any funds were blocked, so this will probably have almost no practical effect. Two other examples of things that clearly mean more to Kim Jong Il than starving North Koreans: long-range missile development and ugly skyscraper hotels he’ll never fill.
Other recent reports also suggest that the regime continues to squeeze the people to feed its military:
The North Korean authorities recently ordered each collective farm to store food provisions in the “No. 2 Storage (rice reserve for the military for wartime emergencies)” as the first priority to support the People’s Army. Consequently, there has been concern that the remainder of the food allocated to farmers will only last three to four months this year.
An affiliate of the food policy office in a county of Pyongyang said via a Daily NK source, “The decree has been given that by the end of November when the fall harvest is completed, the No. 2 Storage will be first and foremost filled and that food be provided to the military as prescribed.”
The No. 2 Storage, a wartime reserve created for emergency times to feed civilians and the army in each city and county, is gathered under the pretext of preparing for wartime emergencies and is gathered under the direction of food policy offices and collective farms in each region.
North Korea, after undergoing a serious food crisis this year, executed the order around May allowing rice reserved in the No. 2 storage to be used if it means it will prevent starvation deaths. During the drought the city and county party organizations and Administrative Committee provided food to special provision recipients and the People’s army through the No. 2 storage, but since April, in the aftermath of the drought period, the reserve has been exhausted. [Daily NK]
This, naturally, means less for everyone else.
“Central party officials, after receiving this year’s harvest reports from the Agricultural Ministry, were told that the lower-than-expected amount of harvest would not allow them to meet the quota for military stockpiles,'’ Buddhist aid group Good Friends, which obtains information through contacts within North Korea, said in its newsletter today. [Bloomberg, Heejin Koo]
Interestingly, the Daily NK quotes the regime’s Rural Management Committee as estimating this year’s annual harvest at around 5.5 million tons. Of course, the North Korean system is notoriously bad at generating accurate statistics, but that figure would be much higher than last year’s harvest, and would align with some of the highest North Korean harvest figures in recent years, and would be much higher than WFP and FAO estimates. I question its veracity for one important reason, which is the effect of pre-harvesting by the hungry this year. If there’s any truth to it, it would mean that overall, North Korea has enough food to feed its own people, notwithstanding numerous reports that North Koreans continue to starve by the dozens in certain areas.
The South Korean Plan: Deny that there is a problem.
So is there a food crisis in North Korea at all? I’ve been convinced since the spring that there is, and the overwhelming weight of available evidence suggests that North Koreans are starving by the dozens, but not by the thousands. Yet last week, South Korea actually said there is no food crisis. How can that be?
Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said that North Korea’s harvest this year is not bad, citing South Korean civic officials who recently visited the country.
“We believe that the North’s food condition is not in a serious crisis situation,” Kim told reporters, adding that the weather has been good and there were no heavy rains like the ones that devastated the North last year. [AP, Kwang-Tae Kim]
The U.N. Plan: Exacerbate the problem with misdirected compassion.
Not so, says the U.N.:
His comments came a day after the U.N. food agency said millions of North Koreans face a food crisis and called on donor countries, including South Korea, to provide urgent food aid.
“Some areas of the northeastern provinces in the country … have become extremely vulnerable, facing a situation of a humanitarian emergency,” Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the WFP’s country director for North Korea, said Thursday at a forum.
Around 2.7 million people on North Korea’s west coast will run out of food in October, the WFP said in a report released Tuesday.
Food shortages have forced many North Koreans to go to hills to collect wild food to complement their daily rations and reduce the number of meals per day to two, de Margerie said. [AP, Kwang-Tae Kim]
More on the U.N.’s latest bleak assessment here. Take careful note of Margerie’s suggestion that the food situation is worst in the northeast. Why should that be so? This year’s shortages are blamed largely on floods that struck most of North Korea in August of 2007. Guess which part of North Korea, though filled with North Korea’s least-favored citizens, was the furthest from those directly affected by those floods? You guessed it:
This map, courtesy of Good Friends, shows that the flood affected the southern half of North Korea, while the provinces we’re now told are the hungriest are the provinces way up in the northeast corner — North Hamgyeong and Ryanngang, places of exile with barren soil and several of North Korea’s worst concentration camps. That squares with the pattern I first observed in the spring, and which is also consistent with the pattern of “triage” Andrew Natsios observed during the Great Famine of the 1990’s. Then, the regime summarily cut off the food supply to North Hamgyeong province, causing 300,000 deaths in just a few months. That’s what the regime tends to do when things get hard: it cuts off the supply of outside food to the relatively expendable people of the northeast.
Whether the regime has deliberately chosen to starve certain areas or not, a strong correlation simply does not exist between this year’s food crisis and its alleged causes. Nor do the U.N.’s harvest figures square with what either the North Korean or South Korean governments seem to believe. Finally, Marcus Noland has recently concluded that previous U.N. estimates have overstated North Korea’s annual food needs.
Consider: what if neither the U.N. nor the South Koreans are wrong, strictly speaking? Based on the available evidence, it’s as good a theory as any that there’s enough food for everyone … yet many people are starving anyway. You don’t have to guess why:
[U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea Vitit] Muntarbhorn cited the “great disparity” in the access to food by the country’s elite and the rest of the population, nonexistent political participation, rigid control over the media and those professing religious beliefs, and the persecution of dissidents. [AP, Elizabeth Lederer]
You can read a more detailed interview with Muntarbhorn here. North Korea still won’t let him in, and I’ve yet to hear of any influential American tells the North Koreans that they should.
The U.S. Plan: Aid and Abet
And today, we have come to the point at which North Korea asks the U.S. government to set up a special food aid program exclusively for its most favored people — its nuclear scientists — and we’re about to agree:
North Korea, in exchange for dropping its nuclear projects, is seeking foreign aid for farmers who supply food to workers at atomic facilities, a Japanese newspaper said Thursday.
The communist regime has asked the U.S. to provide help for a total of 10,000 people, including the farmers and nuclear engineers who would need to change jobs, the Yomiuri Shimbun said in its evening edition.
The newspaper, quoting unnamed sources in a dispatch from Washington, said the U.S. government has tentatively agreed to offer job assistance for the engineers, fearing they could go to work for Iran, Syria or other countries.
The chief U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill has told the North Koreans that Washington was prepared to offer aid similar to packages for former Soviet nuclear engineers, the Yomiuri said.
Pyongyang has repeatedly told U.S. officials the closure of its nuclear facilities would also mean job losses for area farmers, the newspaper said. [AFP]
Meanwhile, we all eagerly await Christopher Hill’s proposal of a special food aid program for the children of Camp 22.
Just when you thought the behavior of our State Department could not sink further beneath contempt, it does. To accept the North Korean regime’s diversion as cost of “doing business” is to willfully help it to use food as a weapon and prolong the wholesale misery of the North Korean people. That misery won’t end until the regime allows completely transparent distribution, or until the elites feel pain to the same extent as everyone else and decide that the regime must go.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 25, 2008 at 11:42 am · Filed under Defectors, Regime Change
We may now know why North Korean diplomats were told to stand by for an important announcement on Monday:
The United States declined Thursday to confirm or deny a report that a senior North Korean diplomat has defected and seeks shelter in the United States.
“We have no information on that,” said Melanie Higgins, spokesperson for the State Department’s East Asian Affairs Bureau.
Reports said that the defection of a senior North Korean diplomat led the Pyongyang regime to order North Korean diplomats abroad to stay closer to their missions.
Earlier reports had it that North Korean diplomats were kept at their missions apparently due to an imminent important announcement by Pyongyang on the North Korean leadership. [Asia Pulse]
What is it they say about rats and sinking ships? See also.
Hat tip: James.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 24, 2008 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Inside NK, Famine & Food Aid, Human Rights, Regime Change
[Updated below]
A few weeks ago, the Chosun Ilbo, quoting NGO’s that in turn cite interviews with recent defectors, reported that North Korea carried out 901 public executions in 2007. This figure, of course, does not include summary executions or those carried out in secrecy, or the ordinary toll of starvation, disease, and torture in the North Korea’s vast concentration camp system.When a society is as opaque as North Korea’s, I originally thought it strained to suggest, as some newspapers subsequently did, that this represented an increase over past years. With North Korea’s control over its northern border well into a protracted dystrophy, it could also be that we’re more likely to hear of such things when they do happen.
New reports from the Daily NK have since added much to the totality of the available information, and suggest the North Korean regime has indeed stepped up the use of mass executions over previous years. The purpose for this is to keep the population in terror. The regime doesn’t want latent discontent over the worsening food situation to break out in the open, and it’s especially anxious to suppress rumors of Kim Jong Il’s ill health or death, rumors that might not have circulated widely in the North ten years ago but are spreading like wildfire now. The regime has responded with a terror campaign against its own people:
An inside source from North Hamkyung Province relayed in a phone conversation with the Daily NK on the 17th, “The public executions in Hoiryeong resulted from the recent decree from the General (Kim Jong Il) regarding the state of domestic affairs. The decree was relayed at a meeting of the directors of the People’s Safety Agency from each province urgently mobilized in Pyongyang around September 22nd.” [….]
The goal of the decree was first and foremost to strengthen national regulations coping with the current situation and a measure to battle anti-socialist elements and hard-core criminals. In particular, the decree is supposed to emphasize the strong punishment of drug offenses, human trafficking, smuggling, illicit sales, religion, and other superstitious acts.
The source said, “The decree contained the General’s comments such as, ‘We need the sound of gunfire,’ and ‘we need to make an example of those trying to destroy our system of law and order and show what will happen to them.’” The decree is the backdrop for the recent public executions that took place in Shinuiju and Hoiryeong.
The source also relayed, “In addition, the decree also toughened inspections of all kinds of digital equipment like cameras, mobile phones, recorders and others in order to root out secrets and, using close contact with civilian management and legal organizations, to punish the sources of gossip.”
In particular, regarding the punishment for the spreading of gossip, the decree apparently stressed, “Report those who start questionable rumors and reveal the circumstances under which one heard the rumor. The decree and the executions seem to be nothing more than a ploy to prevent the spread of rumors related to the General’s health.” [Daily NK]
Some significance is attributed to the use of the Peoples’ Safety Agency, rather than the rival National Security Agency, to lead this purge.
Examples were duly made:
After publicly executing four people on the 29th of September, five women were executed in Hoiryeong, North Hamkyung Province on the 7th. Executions are also expected to take place in Musan and Onsung, raising speculations that the North is attempting to regulate its citizens.
An inside source in North Hamkyung Province said in a phone conversation with the Daily NK on the 9th, “In Hoiryeong’s Public Stadium at 3 in the afternoon on the 7th, each organization, enterprise office, and those in the People’s Units were mobilized and after a public trial, five women were shot.” [Daily NK]
If I’m reading the Daily NK’s translation correctly, the official charge was apparently prostitution, which is now the tag the regime applies to what we’d call “helping other people escape from North Korea.” I guess it’s become customary to add the ultimate insult to the ultimate injury. In the past, this had been punishable by 3-5 years in the gulag, which can’t be much better than a slower way to die, given the food situation nationwide.
The Daily NK reports that after video of public executions was smuggled out of Hoeryong in 2005, the use of public executions fell into temporary disfavor because of the international criticism it attracted. But with the United States determined to appease Kim Jong Il and remain silent about his atrocities foreign and domestic, stadiums across North Korea are again safe places for the sound of gunfine.
The regime still prefers quieter methods in Pyongyang, where mass expulsions of least-favored citizens to countryside continue. This month’s selectees have (or had, anyway) relatives in concentration camps.
[T]he recent forced relocation, which seems to have been carried out as a measure to control civilians rather than to salvage Pyongyang’s image or for political or religious reasons, has been observed as highly unusual.
The source anticipated that the next round of relocations could affect thousands of households, “The citizens are extremely tense because of rumors that even the family members of those who have been caught stealing, watching prohibited media, or those already released from reeducation camps will also be forcibly relocated.”
He said, “At least in Pyongyang, there are provisions and it is easier to live, but in the countryside, people have to live the life of a farmer for no pay. They still have to think about the future of their children, so to be forcibly relocated from Pyongyang all of sudden can only elicit bitter feelings.” [Daily NK]
Previous reports from Good Friends had associated these expulsions with the regime’s inability to feed the entire population of the capital. That means that the privations are reaching the privileged. With food supplies almost non-existent in so many parts of North Korea, banishment to the countryside can be a death sentence, particularly for people unaccustomed to lean diets and hard labor.
Amid all this, regime officials wonder why they see so few spontaneous expressions of concern for His Porcine Majesty:
He added that, “I drank with agents of the People’s Safety Agency a few days ago. They worry about this societal trend that nobody feels concern for the General’s condition. When the Supreme Leader (Kim Il Sung) died, everybody wept loudly. Next time, I am not sure if there will be anyone to cry for him.” [Daily NK]
There’s grisly comfort in knowing that the metastastis of the North Korean system is now so advanced that its terminal phase can only be delayed, almost regardless of what the next American president does. Things cannot go on like this forever. If the regime can’t or won’t reform, what other possibilities exist?
Update 10/25: In a rare exception to the usual trend, big market media and even the U.N. — an almost unfailingly worthless institution — appear to take notice:
North Korea is using public executions to intimidate its citizens and has imposed restrictions on long distance calls to block the spread of news about rising shortages, the U.N. investigator on human rights in the reclusive nation said Thursday.
Vitit Muntarbhorn told the General Assembly’s human rights committee that North Korea has also imposed more severe sanctions on people seeking to leave the country and those forcibly returned, and still detains “very large numbers” of people in camps.
“The human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea remains grave in a number of key areas,” Muntarbhorn said. “Particularly disconcerting is the use of public executions to intimidate the public. … This is despite various law reforms in 2004 and 2005, which claim to have improved the criminal law framework and related sanctions.” [AP, Edith Lederer]
North Korea’s descent into an even deeper layer of hell follows efforts by the U.S. State Department to airbrush away the gravity of the slaughter in the North, to exclude it from the agenda of our talks with the North, and to remove it as a barrier even to the establishment of diplomatic relations with the North Korean regime. Defenders of this approach would no doubt offer up the self-serving justification that it’s really all about coaxing the regime out of its shell rather than isolating it with pressure. The defense is so predictable because we’ve spent the last decade watching North Korea’s behavior prove this to be a disingenuous falsehood.
To the extent the advocates of appeasing this regime really give their own facile arguments a moment’s reconsideration, I pose this question to them: Is North Korea less brutal, or more brutal, to its people when we choose to be silent about it?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 24, 2008 at 6:22 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
It’s hardly worth discussing anyway; after all, with North Korea, there’s little point in expecting what’s agreed today to stay agreed tomorrow. We’ve already abandoned the goal of disarmament, there is always another demand, it is always followed by another concession, and someone always wants us to think that this time, it’s really the last one.
Still, the State Department justifies its de-listing of North Korea as a terror sponsor by claiming that it has reached a verification protocol with North Korea. It’s worth exploring the truth of that assertion.
If you read all twelve terse sentences in the ”agreement,” you soon realize that (a) it’s not really an agreement, but a description of one, (b) that only four of those sentences even refer to verification, and (c) other than the sweeping and mendacious assertion that we will insist on verifying whatever it is State still expects North Korea to do, there’s absolutely no detail about what we’re verifying. Curiously, there’s also a separate “fact sheet” on “understandings” about the protocol, which makes you wonder whose “understandings” those really are if they had to be split off from the “agreement.” The following graf, which contains all of its language of substance, is about half of the total statement. Text in [brackets] is mine:
Based upon these discussions, U.S. and North Korean negotiators agreed on a number of important verification measures, including:
- Agreement that experts from all Six Parties may participate in verification activities, including experts from non-nuclear states; [So eventually, we’ll be relying on the Chinese to perform the inspections, then? Not that I expect the North Koreans will actually let the Japanese participate.]
- Agreement that the IAEA will have an important consultative and support role in verification; [Sounds like the North Koreans didn’t agree to let them in.]
- Agreement that experts will have access to all declared facilities and, based on mutual consent, to undeclared sites; [And that’s the kicker, isn’t it? No inspections unless the North Koreans have time to hide their stuff first.]
- Agreement on the use of scientific procedures, including sampling and forensic activities; and [But no detail whatsoever on what those procedures would be; after all, we don’t want to put out prime fisking material for Henry Sokolski, Caroline Leddy, or Robert Joseph.]
- Agreement that all measures contained in the Verification Protocol will apply to the plutonium-based program and any uranium enrichment and proliferation activities. [Note the strategic word “any,” meaning the North Koreans are still denying it, incredibly enough.] In addition, the Monitoring Mechanism already agreed by the Six Parties to monitor compliance with Six-Party documents applies to proliferation and uranium enrichment activities.
It gets even worse. Further down, you read that this is really only the skeleton for a “verification protocol” still “to be finalized,” meaning that Bush lifted the terror sponsor designation despite the absence of an agreed final protocol. State has been busy suggesting otherwise, and that’s just plain deceptive. Not that any of us ought to be surprised at that by now, considering the source.
Even more disturbing: this skeletal crypto-protocol was written without input from the people whose job it is to know to verify disarmament. North Korea’s terms, to which we acceded, generally force our verifiers to look at North Korea’s nuclear program through a soda straw with its aim fixed at the one part of their nuclear programs we already know the most about.
The U.S. had vowed not to remove North Korea from the terror blacklist until Kim’s government had agreed to a “strong verification regime.” But then North Korea started calling the U.S. bluff — most recently on Thursday, when it told the inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to start packing their bags — and the U.S. caved.
No verification regime is 100% certain — and searching for nuclear materials in North Korea, which has a history of lying and cheating, poses special challenges for even the most rigorous inspections. But our sources tell us the U.S. has the technical expertise to get up to 98% accuracy — providing it can do snap, on-demand inspections anywhere in the country. Instead, Pyongyang will permit the verifiers to have unfettered access only to its declared nuclear sites — all of which the IAEA has already combed over again and again.
Access to any other location will be by “mutual consent.” Inspectors will be welcome to search the Yongbyon complex and a few other known nuclear sites, such as at universities. If they want to inspect anywhere else, they’ll need Kim’s assent. If they request access, and Pyongyang agrees, it’s a sure bet the offending materials will be long gone before the inspectors arrive. This is trust but pretend to verify.
Meanwhile, the State Department didn’t trust its own verification experts to take part in the disarmament process. Late Thursday, less than two days before the agreement was announced, we asked Paula DeSutter, head of the Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation, what she knew about the pending deal: “I have no clue,” she said. “I know zero, zip, nada, nothing. . . . That’s on the record. Zero, zip, nada, nothing.”
Ms. DeSutter says that no one from her bureau accompanied State Department negotiator Christopher Hill on his trip to Pyongyang two weeks ago. Nor did anyone from her bureau take part in the interagency process that evaluated the deal. “I was not consulted,” she said. The fact that the verification bureau was left out of the loop is further cause to suspect that Mr. Hill and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cared above all about declaring a diplomatic “success.” [Wall Street Journal]
Sam Dealey at U.S. News focuses most of his reaction on the politicization and cheapening of the terror sponsor list, but also points to the fatal flaws of the verification protocol:
About the only thing the U.S. gained was North Korea’s word to behave and a promise to permit snap inspections of a reactor site that holds few secrets. Meanwhile, the North’s peddling of conventional weapons systems and nuclear know-how across South Asia and the Middle East and demands that international inspectors have unfettered access to suspected nuclear worksites were taken off the table. Indeed, the deal itself was born of terrorism: North Korea pledged to continue down the road of nuclear development unless the U.S. government removed it from the list. [Sam Dealey, U.S. News]
Naturally, my favorite critique comes from the IKK’s own Andy Jackson:
So, in one swoop, Bush’s North Korea team has given the impression that the United States will appease extortion, undercut America’s allies in Northeast Asia and de-legitimized American law. And what did they get in return? In theory, North Korea has finally agreed to a verification protocol for its nuclear programs. The protocol will be formally agreed to in the next round of the Six Party talks. However, the protocol is unlikely to contain provisions for short notice inspections of suspected sites. Such provisions are standard for International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear proliferation investigations and are called for in North Korea’s case by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718. Instead, inspections will be based on “mutual agreement,” which is tantamount to giving Pyongyang a veto on when and where inspections can take place. [Andy Jackson, Korea Times]
One mild criticism: one can never assume that North Korea will “formally” or otherwise agree to anything at some future date. Hell, you can hardly pin down what they agreed yesterday, and that’s especially so when Chris Hill is writing the contract.
I also tend to agree with Jackson that Obama’s North Korea policy could hardly be worse than Bush’s, but I also expect the Obama policy will also be a progression of the Bush-Rice-Hill policy, meaning Obama would continue to ignore the North’s WMD programs and proliferation, and make only the necessary token references to its human rights atrocities. Obama will likely try to open trade relations with the North and eventually, full diplomatic relations. Expect this to be just as great a raging success at transforming North Korea as South Korea’s ten-year experiment called the Sunshine Policy. Maybe we could call it the “we never learn” policy.
Related: And yet peace is still not at hand. Naturally, North Korea always demands at least 25% more than the latest deal. Now they’re demanding that Japan be expelled from the six-party talks. To the extend the six-party talks still mean anything at all, I don’t doubt that they’ll soon cease to exist as even a pretense.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 20, 2008 at 10:45 pm · Filed under Kim Jong Il, Kremlinology
If there really was a special announcement played for the diplomats and shadowy “trading company” officials at North Korea’s embassies and consulates yesterday, it may have been about sign-ups for intramural softball or the results of the fantasy football pool. We did learn that the Great General offered this on-the-spot guidance, which, for once, I wholly endorse: “get a haircut, hippie!“ Like so many recent reports from North Korea of late, however, the latest ones fall sadly short of our expectations.
For whatever reason, October 20th came and went, and Gotterdammerung was not declared. You may have been hoping that North Korea’s best-marbled slab of meat had cooled to 40 degrees at last, but if that’s so, we are still denied the pleasure of knowing it.
South Korea’s ministry responsible for ties with the North said on Monday no unusual activity was observed in North Korea on the day media said Pyongyang might make an important announcement.
A source based in Beijing with access to North Korean officials rejected speculation about the health of leader Kim Jong Il, thought to have suffered a stroke in August, saying he was firmly in control of the reclusive state.
[….]
“We have nothing to confirm regarding chairman Kim Jong-il’s health,” Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told a news briefing.
“All of the North’s domestic broadcasts, its international events and domestic events are being conducted normally.” [Reuters]
The AP reports that there’s still nothing out of the ordinary at any of North Korea’s time portals to Earth. So what passes for normal life in North Korea goes on, except for those for whom it does not.
All those people dying in North Korea and this oxygen thief can’t be just one of them.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 19, 2008 at 9:32 pm · Filed under Geopolitics, Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Asia, Diplomacy, U.S. Politics
If tomorrow’s Big Announcement from North Korea isn’t that the Great Leader has gone to the Great Meat Locker, it may well be that the North, having met with such stunning success at blackmailing the United States, will throw some new tantrum at South Korea. I would not credit the North with diplomatic genius for its success at isolating and blackmailing its enemies one at a time. The trick isn’t new. It seems more fair to credit us for the crashing stupidity of letting them.
The loss of South Korean aid, which added up to billions of dollars, must have been painful for the regime, and thus far, nothing the United States has given them has made up for that loss. That may soon change.
1. The regime gets bailed out again.
Two years ago, our Treasury Department nearly strangled Kim Jong Il’s palace economy. Today, in exchange for an incomplete freeze, partial disclosure, and no disarmament at all, we’ve thrown away our best economic leverage.
The State Department, incidentally, wants you to believe that the North still remains under a variety of U.S. sanctions and lists a myriad of bilateral sanctions, most of which have no real effect. De-listing the North as a terror sponsor opens the way for a massive inflow of international loan money in the form of IMF, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank loans (executive orders 12,938 and 13,382 apply to individually designated North Korean entities — various mining and trading companies – not the regime as a whole). Given the North’s past history, we can be certain that not one chon of that will ever be repaid, and if the loans don’t flow soon, it’s just a matter of time before the North reverts to what always works and resorts to extortion.
In other words, de-listing has incalculable significance where it matters — the palace economy. Just imagine all of the centrifuges, barbed wire, cognac, and sarin they can buy now.
2. We lose influence in Japan and upset the entire regional security framework.
The Washington Post also describes the bitterness Bush’s decision has caused in Japan:
“I think it is an act of betrayal,” said Teruaki Masumoto, a brother of one of the eight Japanese who were stolen away by North Korean agents in the 1970s and ’80s and who the Japanese government says are still alive in North Korea. Masumoto is secretary general of the Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea.
“Why did the United States remove North Korea from the list when it is clear to anyone’s eyes that the North is a terrorism-assisting country?” asked Sakie Yokota, 72, whose daughter, Megumi Yokota, was 13 when she was kidnapped nearly 31 years ago and is by far the most famous of the abductees.
Struggling to explain the emotional resonance of the abductee issue for the Japanese people, a Foreign Ministry official in Tokyo earlier this year compared Megumi Yokota to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist who made the world aware of the network of Soviet prisons known as the gulag.
In Washington on Saturday, Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa told reporters that the U.S. decision was “extremely regrettable.” He said that “abductions amount to terrorist acts. [Washington Post]
It’s already clear enough that meaningfully disarming North Korea will not be a part of President Bush’s legacy, but this move will badly damage relations with out most important ally in the Pacific and could begin a long decline in U.S. influence in that region. The message received by everyone in Japan is that the United States can’t be relied on, and they will feel greater pressure to build a defense that doesn’t rely on us, either. Our decision makers have placed their own egos over statesmanship, our national interest, and the interests of our friends.
Nothing kindles an arms race quite like tossing aside the security interests of nations that has counted on you to play regional peacekeeper. Granted, I question the returns on the cost was pay to fill that role, and I welcome the rearmament of Japan and South Korea, so long as they don’t shoot at each other. The inevitable result of dependence on America, beyond expense to us, is that either we keep our commitments or we won’t. Damned if we do and we get ourselves embroiled in Korean War II. Damned if we don’t, and you can already see the seeds being sown for Taiwan to go the way of one country/two systems, which gradually becomes Beijing’s system.
Don’t you remember where power comes from, silly?
3. Nothing is solved, but feel-good diplomacy triumphs.
You can’t help but think that it serves Bush right that Colin Powell, who stayed Bush’s hand against North Korea for the duration of his first term, has turned around and kicked Bush in the teeth by endorsing Obama. Then again, if you’re watching closely enough, Obama can seem more like a continuation of the Bush administration than Bush’s co-partisan. It tells you something about what’s in store for us that McCain opposed Bush’s decision and Obama supported it. Not long ago, Obama said he’d oppose de-listing without a strong verification mechanism. So how strong does this sound?
Officials acknowledged that they do not have permission to visit the site of North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test or any military facilities possibly involved in the nuclear program. Experts will have access to facilities at the Yongbyon reactor site and some academic institutions; visits to additional sites will be subject to negotiations. Officials said it will be months, if not years, before questions about North Korea’s nuclear program are answered.
“This is going to be a bumpy road,” said Assistant Secretary of State Paula A. DeSutter, the chief of the verification bureau. “However, we are building a road.”
In a sign of internal tensions, DeSutter, whose office was barred from knowing the details of the deal until Friday morning, declined to dismiss complaints about it from John R. Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations and her former boss as undersecretary for arms control in Bush’s first term. “John is the epitome of a skeptical policymaker, and that’s appropriate,” she said.
Although Bolton is a well-known hawk on North Korea, other experts also have expressed concerns.
“There is a real danger that Pyongyang will pull a bait and switch now that sanctions have been lifted,” said Michael J. Green, Bush’s former top aide for Asia policy. “The credibility of this agreement really hangs on what happens next, including how we repair the damage done with Tokyo.” [Washington Post]
We — and our allies – can expect much more of this silky, self-gratifying cotton candy diplomacy in the future, but it’s not as if the Republicans have exactly earned the nation’s continued confidence on this issue. It may take an Obama presidency for the Republicans to learn to stand for something again.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 19, 2008 at 12:22 am · Filed under Kim Jong Il, Kremlinology
OK, You have my undivided attention.
Quoting unidentified sources at Japan’s defense ministry, the Sankei [Shinmun] said Tokyo had information that “there will be an important announcement on (Oct.) 20th.”
The Sankei said there was speculation within the Japanese government that the North’s announcement could be about Kim’s death or a government change induced by a coup.
North Korea will also ban foreigners from entering the country starting Monday, it said, without giving further details. [AP]
Admittedly, the Sankei has a reputation for being a far-right rag, but its North Korea reporting has generally been good. The Yomiuri Shimbun has also reported that North Korean diplomats have been told to stay inside the embassy. The first I saw of this was in a question at the end of this daily press briefing at the State Department. At the time, I was too busy and too sick to blog it, but if there really is something to those health rumors about Kim Jong Il — or if those rumors are cover for him being ousted — this is the way I’d expect to hear it.
Here’s hoping that Obama-Kim “without preconditions” summit will have to be held in a mausoleum. Still, we can assume that no one managed to get into a position to replace Kim Jong Il by being enlightened, magnanimous, or reform-minded. Kim Jong Il’s death would not be the end of our problems with North Korea, but it could very well be the beginning of the end.
Update: One place you won’t see much talk of this story, oddly enough, is in the South Korea papers. The South Korean government is downplaying the reports and saying it has seen “nothing unusual,” which would suggests that the men who control the tanks either weren’t been taken by surprise, are powerless to do anything about it, or ran out of gas.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 10, 2008 at 7:19 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
I heard the rumor yesterday afternoon, but now I see the AP is reporting it. According to the Financial Times, the only thing holding up the announcement is notifying / strong-arming the Japanese, and perhaps the South Koreans. You can see Condi and her mouthpiece not answer questions about this below the fold, if you’re interested.
There’s nothing quite like giving right in to extortion. Somewhere on the troposphere of Kim Jong Il’s clot-riddled, misshapen, hideously coiffed cranium, a drooly grin probably needs wiping.
Of course, we know nil about what verification terms North Korea presented us with in the ultimatum we’re about to accept. Safe to say, no verification regime the North Koreans would offer, even under the best of circumstances, is going to give us any real assurance that we’ve disarmed them of anything. That would seem to be doubly so when the North Koreans think they’re holding all the cards, and when we’re unwilling to consider other options that would put actual pressure on them. I have to wonder what John McCain and Barack have to say about this, since they’d both previously gone on record opposing de-listing the North without a strong verification mechanism, something it’s safe to say Chris Hill didn’t get by kowtowing in Pyongyang.
Try not to clench down there. It will only hurt more.
All I want to know is this: what “gains” is Condi so desperate to salvage? More succinctly: in what way is North Korea even arguably disarming? North Korea isn’t giving up its existing nukes, its fissile material, its uranium program, or even its most threatening plutonium reactor, the big new 50-MW model recently reported to be near completion. Recent information from credible sources tells us that the North is still developing long range missiles and still working hard on nuclear warheads to put on them, both in flagrant violation of U.N. resolutions 1695 and 1718. As far as we know, they’re still proliferating nuclear technology, since we opted to overlook that back in April. North Korea just evicted the monitors from Yongbyon yesterday, and to the extent it matters, it’s begun putting its older, smaller 5-MW reactor and fuel fabrication plant back together. It tells anyone who bothers to ask — including Condi Rice herself – that it’s keeping its nuclear weapons, period.
Will someone please explain what on earth we actually gain in exchange for throwing away what’s left of our leverage here?
The irony is that George W. Bush has now made a far worse deal than the original Agreed Framework he rightly abandoned and denounced. And oddly enough, nearly all of the Republicans who protested against Clinton’s bad deal don’t have much to say about George W. Bush’s much worse deal. Not to worry, though. They’ll all become stalwart opponents of appeasement soon enough when Obama sends “Kim Jong Bill” Richardson back to Pyongyang with a big check in his hand.
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Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 9, 2008 at 12:06 pm · Filed under China & Korea
Claudia Rosett goes to the increasingly porous border between China and North Korea — for those with money, anyway. This has to be one of the few places where one could see the Chinese side as a land of relative freedom, but that wouldn’t be true if China didn’t prop up so many exceedingly noxious satellite regimes.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 9, 2008 at 6:53 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, WMD, Diplomacy, NK Military, U.S. & Korea, Proliferation
You might have thought that an agreement whose nominal objective is nuclear disarmament ought to be reasonably clear about dismantling, disabling, or dissing those arms in some specific way. If so, you thought wrong, and here are the consequences of that. In fact, Chris Hill’s February 2007 disarmament deal was intentionally vague about North Korea’s existing nuclear arsenal. Until this summer, State had insisted that the North’s nuclear weapons were covered by the phrase “all nuclear programs,” although North Korea’s differences with that interpretation revealed that Hill’s deal was really no agreement at all. Later, State dropped the demand for the North to list its existing nukes on its woefully inadequate “declaration,” signaling to Kim Jong Il that the Americans were prepared to give in and let the North keep them. But as always with North Korea, inches become miles. Now we learn that North Korea is still hard at work on new nuclear warheads that can fit on its substantial arsenal of missiles, helpfully summarized here. This information comes to us from the South Korean government, which is making its displeasure with Washington’s soft line increasingly apparent with leaks that undermine the risible suggestion that our State Department is really disarming the North:
“I understand that North Korea is working to develop a small nuclear warhead which can be loaded into a missile,” Gen Kim Tae-Young was quoted by South Korean media as saying.
“As I said earlier, it is certain that North Korea possess plutonium. It is certain the North has enough plutonium to make six to seven nuclear weapons, but it is not clear whether it has produced nuclear weapons,” he said. [BBC]
Although North Korea continues to develop a long-range missile capable of hitting the United States, those efforts so far have not been successful. The North’s short and medium-range missiles are another matter. They are reliable, increasingly accurate, and capable of hitting virtually all of South Korea and Japan, respectively. If the North were able to miniaturize a nuclear weapon such that it could be carried by a missile, it would have a major strategic impact in Northeast Asia. If, as I predict, the North decides to start up its larger, nearly complete 50-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, it will be within easy reach of becoming a major nuclear power. Within an indeterminate period of time, it will have enough nukes to bully the neighbors and sell off the surplus production.
The North is expected to test more short-range missiles this week. State (see below) doesn’t think this violates either of the same two U.N. Security Council resolutions that the North’s ongoing long-range missile program clearly does violate, but about which neither the U.N. nor the U.S. government does anything.
The other story here is the degree to which the Bush administration’s relations with Lee Myung Bak’s government are clearly worsening. The State Department press briefing transcript attached below the fold indicates that Secretary Rice’s most recent meeting with her South Korean counterpart was “painful.” So far, however, the ROK government has generally had enough class to keep its disagreements with the outgoing administration private, which is how diplomacy between nominal allies is supposed to work.
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Posted by Joshua Stanton on October 8, 2008 at 11:10 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy, NK Military, Anju Links
You’d think that if Chris Hill and the North Koreans had made up, the North Koreans wouldn’t be launching missiles again. The new launches appear to have been short-range missiles launched from the island naval base at Cho-Do, which you can see in full Google Earth color here. One thing this illustrates is why North Korea always seeks to narrow the focus of talks: while they sell temporary concessions on plutonium, they pursue a uranium program at full speed; then, they sell temporary concessions on nukes generally while they pursue missile development at full speed. Negotiating the containment of North Korea turn out to be a lot like the containment of water in your cupped hands.
Some Anju Links:
TIME HAS A DETAILED STORY about the worsening food situation in North Korea. Money quote:
The regime’s leadership “would rather have a proportion of their population starve to death” than pursue reform, says Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Pyongyang believes market reform “would risk ideological and cultural infiltration, which is how they see the Soviet system going down.”
KATHLEEN STEPHENS, the Chris Hill crony about whose nomination I had such misgivings, has presented her credentials to Lee Myung Bak.
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