Archive for December, 2008
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 18, 2008 at 12:10 pm · Filed under NK Economics
When North Korea first started ejecting South Koreans from Kaesong, I noted that the Kaesong project was already economically marginal and falling well short of its ambitious goals. I also predicted that the North Korean move would be fatal to the project’s efforts to coax cowardly capital into a potential war zone controlled by the world’s most opaque, least capital-friendly regime. That prediction has already come true. The leftist Hankyoreh is reporting that South Korean companies are fleeing for the exits:
According to a report, seven companies have canceled their contracts to build facilities at Gaeseong complex since October. Three of the seven bought space at a site reserved for machinery and metal cooperatives in June, and were in the process of constructing or designing factories. The report was submitted to Rep. Chun Jung-bae of the main opposition Democratic Party by the division supporting the Gaeseong Industrial Complex at the Ministry of Unification.
Two companies are in situations unrelated to the breakdown in inter-Korean relations, one had a fire last summer and another is suffering from losses incurred as a result of investment in KIKO, “knock-in knock-out” currency options trading.
The remaining five companies were believed to have abandoned their plans because of the deterioration in inter-Korean relations. An official at one of the five companies, which canceled its investment contract in December, said, “Although the economic crisis was one of the reasons why we canceled the contract, the main reason was that business prospects have darkened due to strained inter-Korean ties. Other companies that moved to (the Gaeseong complex) at the same time also decided to cancel their contracts for the same reason.” [The Hankyoreh]
The companies canceling their contracts have forfeited substantial initial investments to cut their losses. The Hanky also reports that seven more companies canceled their Kaesong contracts last year, before the North’s most recent tantrum.
Lesson learned? Not exactly. Foreign investment in North Korea is an endlessly revolving door of suckers and scoundrels, each of whom eventually leaves a fortune behind in the Worker’s Paradise: Yang Bin, David Chang and Robert Torricelli, Chung Mong-Hun, Nigel Cowie, the Emperor Casino, and Kumgang/Hyundai Asan. An even more significant example, if confirmed, would be China’s massive investment in the Rajin port. Small businesses, like tour companies, can persist as long as they serve the regime’s interests and have little impact on society, but big investments seem to have almost a perfect failure rate.
That’s why I’m confident that Egypt’s Orascom will eventually meet the same fate. Consider, after all, the ostensible reasons why Orascom is investing in North Korea — to build a hotel that can’t be filled and with a rumored erectile dysfunction problem, and a cell phone network that hardly anyone will be allowed to use. To put it mildly, there are some serious limitations on both potential markets, and it’s reasonable to assume that tensions between North Korea and Earth are unlikely to ease soon, meaning that policymakers may start to rethink financial sanctions. More troubling, however, is the news that Orascom will open up a bank in North Korea, whose cash flow has been restricted ever since that unpleasantness with Banco Delta Asia. It’s hard to imagine how one can run a bank in North Korea with enough transparency to stay out of the way of U.S. money laundering laws, chiefly 18 U.S.C. 1956 and 1957, and U.N. Resolutions 1695 and 1718, but there seems to be a limitless supply of people willing to gamble on tepid enforcement of those provisions.
My advice to Orascom would be to invest in some state-of-the-art counterfeit detection machines and get some good advice about “due diligence.”
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 18, 2008 at 7:16 am · Filed under Washington Views
Jack and Wolmae point to a statement by Chris Hill that Obama’s people have not invited him to stick around. On balance, I agree they probably won’t, but I’m not sure I agree that this article answers the question. First, parse Hill’s words. When asked if Obama’s people asked him to stay, he said, “I haven’t talked to anybody about my future.” Even for Hill, that statement contains a lot of loopholes. Second, consider the credibility of the source. I’ll wait for something a little more definitive before I celebrate Hill’s departure. The more important question is whether Hill’s replacement would be just as bad as Hill. That’s almost certainly the case, but he/she will probably be terrible for slightly different reasons — probably more honest and earnest than Hill, but less conniving and more naive, I’d guess.
The choice of Hillary Clinton for State greatly complicates the question of who will run our Korea policy. Before Clinton’s selection, you could say that V.P.-Elect Biden’s people — after all, Biden is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — would have played a dominant role. The selection of Clinton opens up the candidacy of a lot of holdovers from her husband’s administration. And while Clinton herself is viewed as a moderate-to-hawkish choice, many of Clinton’s minions are significantly to the left of Biden’s. If, for example, Biden’s people end up dominating the NSC while Clinton’s dominate at Foggy Bottom, it could even presage the same kind of factional battles that paralyzed the Bush Administration’s policies for so many years.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 17, 2008 at 8:20 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
In the summary of its December 15th press briefing following the collapse of the Not-Quite-Agreed Framework, the State Department admitted that the talks are at an impasse and declared that the “[b]all is in North Korea’s court.” Interestingly, the Chosun Ilbo, summarizing a Rodong Sinmun editorial calling on North Koreans to unite around “the strength of comradeship,” headlines with the opposite conclusion: “Ball Is in America’s Court, N.Korea Warns.”
Here, I must register rare agreement with our State Department. Our diplomats must know with complete certainty that there are absolutely no balls whatsoever in their courts (must be the new slang those kids are using today), and I am quite willing to accept the truth of their words. Maybe if the North Koreans aren’t, Assistant Secretary Hill could offer to sign some sort of protocol to add whatever proof is still needed in the interests of peace. There might even be a book deal in it.
Related: The Wall Street Journal editorializes on “Condi’s Korean Failure.” Another hat tip to James.
Also Related: Chris Hill tells the North Koreans that Obama won’t give them a better deal. Thanks, Chris, but my money is on the North Koreans. I have a pretty good track record for predicting diplomatic outcomes because I’ve learned how hard it is to underestimate American diplomacy. I’m confident the North Koreans learned this long before I did.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 16, 2008 at 11:34 am · Filed under Refugees, Europe, U.S. Politics
Ask your average near-bright intellectual and he’ll agree with the statement that President Bush had “made a big deal of” human rights in North Korea. Yet while Bush’s administration has managed to admit about 50 North Korean refugees, Europe has let in 1,400.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 16, 2008 at 8:06 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Media Criticism, Appeasement, Human Rights
I submit that any man so morally retarded that he would utter the statement quoted below is not qualified to represent the values or interests of the United States abroad.
And South Korea isn’t alone in tuning out the horrors. The United States is more concerned with containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The State Department’s stunning lack of urgency was captured in a recent statement from its assistant secretary for Asia, Christopher R. Hill: “Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record.” Japan is focused on Japanese citizens abducted forcibly to North Korea. China doesn’t want instability across its border. [Washington Post Editorial]
Is it any wonder why Hill and Lorin Maazel hit it off so well? The the mendacious Christopher Hill, we now know, is a man who will say anything at any given moment to advance his personal ambitions. To that end, Hill has excised the discussion of North Korea’s atrocities from his talks with the North Koreans, and his minions have tried to airbrush it out of State Department reports. How ironic that the Washington Post, whose correspondent Glenn Kessler has studiously avoided discussion of the human rights story and missed no chance to give Hill a tongue bath (see update), now picks him up and shakes him like a chew toy. One can only hope that this further dims Hill’s chances of joining the Obama Administration. Certainly his record of diplomatic accomplishment isn’t much of a qualification.
Mr. Hill’s larger point is that the United States should be practical in relations with the north and not simply denounce abuses so that America can feel good about itself. We support his efforts to negotiate with the regime. It’s worth noting, though, that last week the north yet again backtracked on a nuclear-related agreement it had made and Mr. Hill had vouched for. It will continue to honor such agreements, or not, based on a reading of its own interests, not on whether its negotiating partners do or don’t speak honestly. We think there’s an inverse relationship between a regime’s trustworthiness on any subject and its propensity to abuse its own people. We also believe that it should not be left to the lone escapee from North Korea’s gulag to speak out about its horror.
High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.
Maybe the Post is equally mindful that one day, its readers will wonder why it almost never covered this story, even though dozens of camp survivors and witnesses now live in Seoul, where the Post has a correspondent. Nearly all of their stories are more readily corroborated than Shin Dong Hyuk’s. More than any other major American newspaper, the Post has viewed the North Korea story through a soda straw that points only to Yongbyon. (By contrast, the L.A. Times and the British press in general have covered the story far better). One day, the Post may cite this token editorial as slender shield of absolution against the charge that for so many years, it ignored the bigger story of North Korea, thus depriving its coverage of the essential context to which it now awakens.
More of those “far clearer satellite images” here and here.
Ht and my thanks to James.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 15, 2008 at 8:20 am · Filed under NK Economics, Deprogramming
So, I was wondering, just how popular is the Workers’ Paradise among its hand-picked proletariat, that is, those able to pass the best family history, background, and loyalty screening the government of North Korea can manage? Not very, evidently:
A North Korean defector who escaped from an inter-Korean industrial complex in the border city of Kaesong where she was employed remains in a third country, a South Korean activist here said Wednesday.
The 27-year-old woman, whose identity was withheld for her safety, fled Kaesong in late September and has since asked for help to travel to South Korea, according to Kim Yong-hwa, who leads a Seoul-based civic group advocating for the human rights of North Korean defectors. [Yonhap]
Don’t worry. It’s just a matter of time before the National Intelligence Service leaks her name, address, and a list of her relatives to the Dong-A Ilbo.
If confirmed, it would be the first known defection from the industrial complex, where about 36,000 North Koreans are employed by dozens of South Korean factories operating under the tight control of authorities from Pyongyang. [….]
Exactly what motivated the woman to defect is not known, but Kim said she was apparently forced to choose between her marriage and her job, which earned her a relatively good salary in the impoverished nation.
The communist North bans female workers at Kaesong plants from getting married, a violation of their rights, Kim added. “(The young woman) is said to have gotten a warning once from the authorities over the matter,” he said. [emphasis mine]
I’ve been waiting to find out just how much of that much-touted $60 a month salary the workers at Kaesong actually get. Assuming the activists base the following on a debriefing of this woman, the answer is …
Kim says North Korea exploits its workers at Kaesong by giving them only US$2 out of their monthly wage of about US$60 paid by South Korean firms.
Not even the North Koreans can stop those winds of change when they’re a-blowin’. Yet somehow, I don’t think this is the sort of transformation that either Kim Jong Il, Roh Moo Hyun, or Comrade Chung had in mind when they set up this corporate gulag. The last kind of change they must have wanted was the kind that leads to people actually yearning for freedom, a living wage, and the rest of that “pursuit of happiness” crap. (Chung, of course, would have bundled her off to Camp 22 before the press ever got wind of this.)
This incident does not bode well for North Korean officialdom’s view of Kaesong. As an experiment, Kaesong is a lot like testing land mines with a pogo stick: confirmation of its success necessarily leads to its catastrophic destruction.
Ht: GI Korea
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 15, 2008 at 7:47 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
Taking a page, no doubt, from Richard Nixon’s Christmas bombing of Hanoi, President Bush has decided that Pyongyang must face stern measures for reneging on its most recent agreement to verifiably disarm: No more fuel oil for you!
The humanity! Well, all I can say is, thank God he didn’t disinvite the Pyongyang State Symphony. How many more days until this cowboy diplomacy madness ends?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 14, 2008 at 5:11 pm · Filed under Appeasement, Human Rights, Refugees, Diplomacy
Although I recall hearing someone say recently that human rights would be an important part of the State Department’s negotiations with North Korea, I have yet to see any recent evidence that State’s masters of cerebellingus have applied their techniques to the task of lifting North Korea to a shallower level of hell. Somone had better tell Glyn Davies that a few more adjectives will have to be sacrificed for the cause:
North Korea has imposed stiffer punishments on those caught trying to flee the destitute state with the new measures coming into effect after reports surfaced that leader Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke, relief groups said.
The tougher penalties implemented in the past few months were designed to show the central government was well in control as questions were raised about leadership in Asia’s only communist dynasty in response to Kim’s suspected illness, they said.
“The penalties are getting stronger and they have increased after Kim Jong-il’s stroke,” said Tim Peters, the founder and director of Helping Hands Korea, a Christian aid group that helps North Koreans seek asylum.
The U.S. State Department said in a report earlier this year that North Korea controlled its population by shutting them off from the outside world, keeping them in fear through arbitrary and unlawful killings and running a network of political prisons to stamp out dissent. [….]
Another activist said his sources inside the state told him the stricter punishments went into full force in October, at about the same time the North stepped up its campaign to show that its “Dear Leader” was alive and fully in control.
“Now repatriated defectors are said to be facing immediate public trials while crowds, sometimes including family members, watch the scene,” said Kim Dae-sung of Free North Korea Radio.
“They get sentences of more than a year, a much longer term compared to the previous six-month sentence on average.” [Reuters, Jon Herskovitz and Kim Junghyun]
This report is actually relatively mild compared to recent reports that North Korea has expanded the use of public executions. Two groups, of 15 and 22 persons, respectively, were shot on the spot for crossing the border in the spring.
Anyone over 35 probably remembers when Reagan coined the term “constructive engagement” to oppose sanctions against South Africa, and how liberals recast that very term into a vile euphemism for enabling racism and oppression. Having lived in South Africa during the very time that apartheid was abolished one discriminatory law at a time, I would still posit that the worst quarters of Soweto were an earthly paradise compared to Hamhung, Chongjin, or Yodok.
Governments have been engaging North Korea in earnest for nearly a dozen years now, yet nothing constructive ever seems to come of it. As the lights go out in Kumgang and Kaesong, many in South Korea have arrived at a grim acknowledgement of that much, though “enlightenment” is probably still too strong a word. I question whether most of the diplomatic class in Washington is capable of learning it at all.
It may come closer to the truth to say that nothing we say will ever influence North Korea’s behavior. North Korea will only change when it has no other alternative, and to deny the regime alternatives we need the the means (which we have) and the will (which we don’t) to attach severe economic consequences to the regime’s deviations from civilization’s basic standards.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 14, 2008 at 11:08 am · Filed under Refugees
If you haven’t seen “On the Border,” the Chosun Ilbo has re-posted the accounts of the refugees featured in the documentary:
- Young-Hwa, a 19 year-old girl crossing China and Laos with her family.
- Kim Soon-Ok, the young mother of a handicapped child, forced to leave him behind in China to earn money for his medical treatment and passage to South Korea.
- Mun Yun-Hee, a 26 year-old woman who allowed herself to be sold to escape starvation in her homeland.
- Kim Man-Soo, the almost indescribably tough logger who escaped from a camp in Siberia and spent the next ten years making his way though the wilderness.
- Choi Sung-Ryung, an 8 year-old orphan boy who found himself alone in Thailand and at the mercy of South Korean bureaucrats.
- The correspondents’ story of how Chinese guides are now conducting “human safaris” along the North Korean border.
I hope one day the Chosun Ilbo will tell us what ever happened to all these people. There are also video links at the end of each story. I presume they’re all in Korean, but they didn’t work for me. A segment of the BBC version is available here.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 12, 2008 at 10:24 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Media Criticism, Appeasement, Diplomacy
In several ways, it would be a mistake to make too much of the New York Times’s declaration of the “collapse” of Agreed Framework 2.0, a/k/a the Not Quite Agreed Framework. The Times’s coverage of this story has never been particularly good, and its editorials have been ridiculously inconsistent. Clearly, The Times’s loathing of Bush did not dwell easily with its approval of Bush’s new willingness to excuse North Korea from every standard of human civilization. The Times saying so doesn’t make it so; to any careful observer, it was undeniably so last summer when the North reneged on dismantling its nuclear weapons, handing over its fissile material, or disclosing its uranium enrichment or proliferation activities. It had already signaled that it would renege on verification. All that has changed since then is that an election is now safely behind us.
North Korea has gained some very significant concessions in exchange for almost no material disarmament and a series of broken promises. North Korea has permitted the partial disablement of one small, aging, used-up reactor. Next to this 5-MW reactor sits a 50-MW reactor that may be nearly ready for start-up, and which the State Department’s much-vaunted “disablement” has neither touched nor inspected. In exchange, North Korea has broken the back of two tough U.N. anti-proliferation resolutions — it now routinely and flagrantly violates both without a murmur from the Security Council — marginalized Japan and split it from the United States, broke crippling U.S. sanctions over its counterfeiting and money laundering, and with its de-listing as a terror sponsor, made itself eligible for large international loans.
In six weeks, President Bush could leave office with no deal, no legacy worth boasting about, and no reduction of the threat. Worse, he will have left his successor almost no negotiating leverage:
Michael J. Green, a former National Security Council adviser under President Bush who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the administration had erred in removing North Korea from the list without extracting a more concrete step on verification.
“The United States expended its carrots, including delisting North Korea from the terrorist list, in exchange for a verbal promise that Pyongyang would sign on to these verifications,” he said. “We now know the North Koreans tricked us.” [NY Times, Steven Lee Myers]
To anyone who reviews a concise history of the Bush Administration’s North Korea policy, this should have been obvious years ago. The State Department, however, seems constitutionally unable to draw obvious conclusions. It still insists that the North will get to keep the concessions it has extracted from us despite its calculated breach of so many agreements:
A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said the administration would not restore North Korea to the list because the decision to remove it had been made “based on the law and the facts.”
Below the fold, State’s spokesman obfuscates vigorously, insisting that the process goes on, as though North Korea’s cooperation isn’t a prerequisite to any of this. Don’t expect journalists to describe this as a “state of denial,” but reading the transcript will leave you thinking as much. The tone at the White House was slightly different. It contained a vague hint that it would “rethink” its North Korea strategy.
But to what end, given the time that remains? It’s common, after all, for commenters to insist that America has no real options for pressuring North Korea. That is false, of course. Several of the options I’ve written about here need not be imposed for long to do incalculable damage to the regime’s finances. Re-adding North Korea to the terror-sponsor list should be the least of these. Trade sanctions, which were lifted in exchange for a long-broken missile moratorium, should have been reimposed in 2006. Finally, and most importantly, Bush can and should declare the entire government of North Korea to be an entity of special concern for money laundering under Section 311 the PATRIOT Act. Certainly North Korea has not quit its counterfeiting, drug smuggling, or money laundering rackets, and this measure would exert dramatic pressure on the regime for years to come, even if imposed only briefly … say, long enough for Obama’s new appointees to get confirmed, take their seats, and conduct a policy review.
By that time, some really tough sanctions might even contribute to the only condition likely to verifiably disarm that regime — its extinction.
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Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 12, 2008 at 8:22 am · Filed under Kim Jong Il
This appears to be the most reliable confirmation we’ve seen yet, albeit coming from a man who’d previously denied all knowledge.
This kind of situation calls for an amendment to the Hippocratic Oath — something along the lines of, “Do not heal those who would do harm to millions.”
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 11, 2008 at 7:55 pm · Filed under NK Crime
How likely a story does this sound to you?
The accident took place in April 2005 when, it is claimed, a helicopter owned by Air Koryo, the North Korean state airline, was dispatched from Pyongyang, the capital, to collect a woman who was in labour with triplets from a remote island. On the return flight it crashed into a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, causing a fire that destroyed a large amount of humanitarian relief goods. [Times of London]
It didn’t sound very likely to a consortium of reinsurers, including Lloyds of London, either. Suspecting fraud, they refused to pay, so the North Koreans sued in a British court. There have been previous reports that North Korea has engaged in fraud and staged accidents to collect reinsurance payments. This particular case resulted in years of expensive litigation.
Today, the Moonie rag Segye Ilbo is reporting that North Korea has won the case, for 39 million Euros (linked story is in Korean).
So what can we all learn from this? For one thing, if you are going to do business with some of the world’s most notorious international criminals, at least read the contact carefully before signing it:
According to the contract, disputes were to be settled under North Korean law and last month a court in Pyongyang ordered the reinsurers to pay the North Korean company the €44 million. They refuse to do so. [….]
The contract also states that claims in North Korean won will be converted at a rate of 160 won to the euro, close to the Government’s exchange rate. But the black market rate, which is used for all practical purposes in North Korea, is closer to 2,000 won to the euro. If this were applied it would reduce the reinsurers’ bill from €44 million to €3.5 million.
More background here. An interesting question this raises is how the insurers will be able to pay that sum to the North Koreans without violating UNSCR 1718, which would require them to “ensure” that the North won’t spend the whole sum — or any of it — on uranium centrifuges and large-bore aluminum tubing. Of course, there are some who take a less skeptical approach:
“All this business about spending the money on their nuclear programme is complete tosh,” a source close to the North Korean side said. “They just don’t like the contract they wrote and they regret it bitterly.”
Right. What could I possibly have been thinking?
Update: Noted North Korea authority Aidan Foster-Carter notes that North Korea obtained a settlement, not a judgment. That’s consistent with what I’ve heard more recently. He also notes that the largest payor was Allianz, not Lloyds. I will defer to Mr. Foster-Carter on that point. By all means, read what he has to say about this subject.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 11, 2008 at 10:34 am · Filed under Famine & Food Aid
Not surprisingly, the North reneged on the agreements it made with USAID to get food aid. Its interest is in feeding its elite, our interest is in feeding those in greatest need, and there’s little overlap between those two groups. It’s more surprising to see Americans with the courage to hold North Koreans to their commitments. We are now learning that things broke down last August, and that most of the food aid was never delivered.
A much-heralded U.S. program to restart food aid to North Korea has run into difficulty as Washington and Pyongyang haggle over the terms of access, according to U.S. and overseas officials. The previously undisclosed problems come amid estimates of growing hunger in the isolated communist country.
A report released Monday by the U.N. World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization said that despite a better-than-usual harvest, more than a third of North Korea’s population will need food aid in the coming year. The agencies’ estimate of the number of hungry has jumped from 6.2 million to 8.7 million.
U.S. officials noted that food aid delivered via nongovernmental organizations continues but acknowledged that the main effort — through the World Food Program — has stalled. They said they are trying to resolve the problems, which concern disputes over the number of U.S. personnel in Pyongyang and Korean-speaking U.N. employees around the country.
“The United States seeks to fully implement the terms of the food aid agreement with the DPRK, which included agreed-upon improvements in monitoring and access conditions that are necessary to effectively ensure food is reaching those most in need,” State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said, referring to North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. [WaPo, Glenn Kessler]
Kessler, who can’t even find fault with North Korea for starving its own people, uses words such as “haggle” to suggest that both sides are equally to blame. I wish his article provided fewer rhetorical flourishes and more specificity about what the actual disputes were. Instead, Kessler goes on to quote U.N. official Tony Banbury’s predictions about how bad things may well get in North Korea if food aid is not delivered. But isn’t all that beyond the point if our aid won’t reach the people who need it?
You won’t read it in the Post’s story, but I’m told that the hero of this story is USAID official John Brouse. Since the North Koreans first asked us for food last spring, Brouse has credibly threatened to walk away if the North Koreans did not allow significant improvement in monitoring. The North did make some concessions, but started to go back on them within just a few weeks. And in a rare demonstration of spine, we stood our ground and refused to deliver aid we knew would be doled out according to political pedigree or used as a weapon.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 11, 2008 at 9:02 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Appeasement, Diplomacy
Chris Hill’s words to the press speak well enough for themselves, but the testiness of his tone tells us just as much. He has no one but himself to blame for his own humiliation, of course. It’s just unfortunate that his personal ambition created such risk and suffering for so many others.
Christopher R. Hill ,Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
China World Hotel
Beijing, China
December 11, 2008
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Good morning. Obviously we would like to see progress made on this verification protocol, but so far we have not seen it. So you can draw your own conclusions.
QUESTION: Ambassador, is it possible that North Korea will be included back into the list of state sponsor of terrorism?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I am not speculating on anything. We’re trying to get through a verification protocol here.
QUESTION: Ambassador, on today’s discussion, are you ready to give some compromise, or are you going to stick to the points that you made yesterday?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Are we planning to compromise today? Look, we’ve laid out our views on the verification protocol. Our views have been pretty clear for weeks - even months - on end, so it is not for us to be bargaining with ourselves. It is up to the North Koreans to do what they said they were going to do.
QUESTION: KCNA was excited to be included among the nuclear powers. Do you think that designation will last?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: KCNA gets excited by a lot of things, but neither we nor any of the other civilized countries accepts North Korea as a nuclear power.
QUESTION: But they were citing a U.S. Defence Department report.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I don’t know what you’re talking about, frankly. We don’t recognize them as a nuclear power. Even KCNA knows that.
QUESTION: What do you expect to happen today?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I’ll tell you after today. I don’t know. I think we have a meeting right now with the Chinese. We’ll see what happens.
QUESTION: Do the Chinese appear to be in recess and waiting, or not?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: No, but I’m sure we’ll have a discussion about what to do this morning.
QUESTION: The South Korean envoy just said that he had come down to say goodbye. Are you also saying that?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Oh, he said goodbye? Well, as soon as the Chinese decide what to do, I’ll let you know. And if goodbyes are appropriate, then that’s what I’ll do.
QUESTION: And do you expect the four will want to meet? Or bilateral meetings? Do you have any idea?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I don’t know. I understand that the Chinese want to meet with us, so presumably it will be another head of delegation meeting. I just don’t know. I’ll know shortly.
QUESTION: Ambassador, the understanding that you’ve been talking about with the North Koreans - the understanding that the U.S. has with the North Koreans - what is the status of that?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Well, it’s the same old problem. The North Koreans don’t want to put into writing what they are willing to put into words.
QUESTION: But the understanding itself is still remaining?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Yes. But we can’t go forward on a verification protocol without something written down. Okay?
QUESTION: Heads of delegation meeting at nine?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I’m not sure, are you telling me or asking me?
QUESTION: Asking you.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I don’t know. I’ll find out.
QUESTION: Before or after the meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I really don’t know, but we’ve been told to go out to Diaoyutai, and I better do that right now.
Okay? All right, see you all later.
Update: More below the fold.
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Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 9, 2008 at 5:10 pm · Filed under Korean Politics, Korean Society, Korean Education
There are two entries in this merry vigil:
- Roh’s brother ordered jailed over a bribery scandal.
- A left-wing agitprop history textbook heads off for the ash-heap of …. Still, the counter-revisionism is going a tad too far when episodes like Kwangju are flat-out written out of history. The idea is to put historical events into their proper context. Kwangju no more defines South Korean history or its modern reality than the Pullman Strike defines American history or its modern reality. And as I’ve pointed out, the North Korean famine often killed as as many people as Kwangju in a single day for six-plus years, has immense significance to one’s understanding of modern North Korea, and — I’ll go out on a limb here — probably draws little or no mention in these lefty texts. That doesn’t mean Kwangju isn’t a significant historical event; it means that if your entire view of history is built around the Japanese occupation, No Gun Ri, Kwangju, and a bought summit with Kim Jong Il, you’re not being educated about history, you’re just being indoctrinated with it. And ultimately, isn’t that what many Koreans are complaining about with regard to Japanese textbooks?
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