like a bedouin needs a grand piano.
This must be more of the “economic justice” and “collective spirit” that Christine Ahn was hectoring us about. In a world that’s at least more just than Ahn’s ideal, people like her would be caged and poked with sharp sticks.
First, a note of congratulations to Mr. Noland on being named Deputy Director of the Peterson Institute. Noland also has a paper out on the prospects for disarming North Korea though sanctions. Here’s a teaser, and I’ll let you read the rest on your own:
Given the extremely high priority the North Korean regime places on its military capacity, it is unlikely that the pressure the world can bring to bear on North Korea will be sufficient to induce the country to surrender its nuclear weapons. The promise of lifting existing sanctions may provide one incentive for a successor government to reassess the country’s military and diplomatic positions, but sanctions alone are unlikely to have a strong effect in the short run. Yet the United States and other countries can still exercise some leverage if they aggressively pursue North Korea’s international financial intermediaries as they have done at times in the past. [Marcus Noland, Peterson Institute Working Paper]
What Noland says makes sense to me. While most other states would eventually decide that the loss of international trade and prosperity for their people had made the cost of nukes prohibitive by now, Kim Jong Il is no ordinary dictator. To him, the loss of nukes makes the cost of feeding the people prohibitive, and plenty of North Koreans who can testify to that without speaking a word. As I argued myself in my latest New Ledger piece, sanctions won’t make Kim Jong Il negotiate his nukes away, but if they’re pursued in a way that cuts off the flow of foreign currency on which Kim Jong Il’s rule depends, we might eventually get the chance to negotiate with someone more reasonable.
Will sanctions just drive North Korea into the arms of the Chinese? Yes, to a large extent, but the total capital inflow will still decrease if sanctions are pursued effectively. I think we also tend to miss the emotional and political complexity of the relationship between China and North Korea. North Korea’s extreme nationalism creates a fear of that very dependency and shows in North Korea’s frequent exasperation of Chinese investors (speaking of which, whatever happened with China’s massive investment in the Rajin port? Is it still going the way of Kaesong, or for that matter, of every other major foreign investment in North Korea?). China can and will ignore U.N. sanctions as much as it get away with doing so, despite a few words and displays which I suspect are meant to placate us and throw the dogs off while business as more-or-less usual continues. I suspect that the recent vanadium seizure is such a case, and may have been motivated by domestic economic motives in any event. What would convince me that China isn’t double-dealing us? An end of stories like this, this, this, and this.
But there are limits to how much China can help North Korea dodge sanctions when Chinese companies aren’t willing to expose their assets for the sake of risky investments in the North and risk their own access to the international financial system. Even if U.N. sanctions don’t influence them, Treasury’s efforts to cut off the flow of cash to the North probably still can:
Chinese investment company developing a copper mine in North Korea with a North Korean company sanctioned by the UN Security Council has reportedly called an abrupt halt to the project.
An industry source in China said the investment firm sent a letter to NHI Shenyang Mining Machinery, the company it had commissioned to build facilities for the mine in Hyesan, North Korea, telling it to stop construction. An estimated 400,000 tons of copper are deposited there.
The Chinese firm had signed an agreement with (North) Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation to develop the mine in November 2006. But the North Korean partner was blacklisted by the UN Security Council after North Korea carried out its latest nuclear test. [Chosun Ilbo]
I hope there’s at least some truth to this report. It originally claimed that the project was a bronze mine — it’s since been corrected — not an easy thing to take seriously given the miracle of metallurgy that would require. And that’s not even the most incredible part of the story:
The industry source said, “When Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping visited Pyongyang in June last year, he pledged full support for the development of the Hyesan copper mine so that it could become a model for investment by Chinese business in North Korea. This prompted NHI to hurry construction so that production could start in September this year.”
But he added the Chinese government apparently persuaded the investment firm to stop the project as Beijing takes part in the UN sanctions. “Otherwise, it’s unusual for a project to be stopped at this late stage,” he said. The investment firm reportedly gave NHI no reason for the cancellation.
When pandas fly. A more likely story is that Treasury told the Chinese government that its mining investments in North Korea were on the target list for sanctions under Executive Order 13,382 if they didn’t divest themselves:
Ambassador Philip Goldberg, U.S. coordinator for implementation of U.N. sanctions against North Korea, told reporters that U.N. member states have voiced “a unity of view, a singleness of purpose in implementing these (sanctions) resolutions.”
“That’s the case, certainly, with our Chinese partners,” he said after addressing a closed-door meeting of the Security Council’s sanctions committee on North Korea. “There have been some results, some of those have been reported in the press.” [Reuters]
Yes, that’s just how I’d expect him to put it, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that Goldberg made an issue of investments like this one. Mining investment has long been a major part of China’s economic support for the North and its wealthiest military officers. The North Korean mining industry has long been suspected of involvement in WMD proliferation and has been a frequent target for sanctions. Just today, it was reported that Treasury has announced new sanctions — probably under 13,382 — against Korea Hyoksin Trading Company, a subsidiary of the long-blacklisted Chosun Ryongbon General Corporation. North Korea’s mining industry has also been infamous for its terrible safety record and its use of slave labor.
Last night the Facebook page for Laura Ling and Euna Lee posted an an Agence France-Presse article stating that U.N. head Ban Ki-moon has “launched an initiative to secure the release of two US journalists detained in North Korea but would not disclose details.”
Call me cynical, but if he can actually free these two reporters, it will somewhat restore my lost faith in the ability of Ban - and the U.N. for that matter.
Although I must admit, crazier things have surfaced.
Sounds like the boat, which carried a crew of four, strayed across the NLL when its GPS system malfunctioned:
The fishing boat, skippered by a man only identified by his last name, Park, departed from the port of Geojin on the eastern coast at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday and sailed past the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto inter-Korean maritime border, as far as 20 miles off the port of Jejin, he said.
Geojin is about 150km northeast of Seoul and 15km south of the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Koreas, which remain technically at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, without a formal peace treaty.
“We are pushing for its release,” the official said, adding South Korean authorities have sent a message calling on North Korea to immediately return the ship “for humanitarian reasons.”North Korea has yet to respond, the official said. [Yonhap]
South Korea has asked for the release of the crew, but so far, the North Koreans haven’t said anything other than saying they’d look into the matter. According to Yonhap, this is the third time in four years that North Korea has seized a South Korean fishing boats. The other boats were all released within three to eighteen days of being seized.
Update: So, I guess the North Koreans do read the Chosun Ilbo. You’d think that by now, people would know better than to make that kind of prediction, especially about North Korea.
No one in the Obama Administration sounds terribly interested in North Korea’s offer of a bilateral dialogue about what concessions America is prepared to grant North Korea this year, but at the Christian Science Monitor, Professor Zhiqun Zhu of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (you remember it from the matchbook covers, right?) calls North Korea’s statement “a rare opportunity” and writes one of the most scary-stupid things I’ve read all year:
Frankly, it is unrealistic for the US to ask North Korea to give up its nuclear technology. The reason is simple: The nuclear card is the only one North Korea has; it will not easily give it away. The ostrich policy of refusing to accept North Korea as a nuclear state has to be ditched. A solution to the North Korea conundrum must begin with recognizing the fact that North Korea has the ability to produce nuclear weapons and will remain nuclear-capable. [link]
So North Korea will never bargain away its nuclear weapons, meaning the United States must bargain anyway! Reading Zhu’s argument is like watching an animal give live birth and eat its own young. When he’s done refuting any U.S. incentive to bargain with North Korea over nukes that it won’t give up, we’re left to infer that our only incentive is to agree on the price of extortion, which is an endlessly renewable expense that America is expected to shoulder:
The impoverished North needs the nuclear program as a bargaining chip. It is also in dire need of energy, which nuclear technology can provide. It is highly unlikely that Pyongyang will actually use nuclear weapons against its neighbors or the US – the Communist leaders are fully aware that it would be suicidal.
And yet they seem to feel that proliferating nuclear weapons extremist Middle Eastern dictatorships isn’t quite so suicidal. Somehow, I doubt the Professor Zhu would be so prosaic if North Korean technicians were spotted at a suspicious and remote construction site in Taiwan, or secretly meeting with East Turkestan separatists.
Zhu goes on to advocate the recognition of North Korea as a nuclear power and the establishment of full diplomatic relations, because after all, why would North Korea want to hurt anyone? I’ll assume nothing from the romanization of Professor Zhu’s name about his connections to the Chinese government, although Zhu’s views on North Korea’s nukes are indistinguishable from those of the very state-sanctioned Shen Dingli. Instead, let’s give Zhu the benefit of the doubt and assume he really is that ill-informed about the North Korean regime’s complete disregard for / malevolent breaking of human life and liberty — of its own citizens’ and other nations’ — and that he really believes that it’s just as safely left in the possession of nuclear weapons as France or India.
Acquiring nuclear technology does not make North Korea more dangerous; it is how the regime uses this technology that matters. Since North Korea is already nuclear-capable, the US should keep this traditional enemy close by signing a nuclear cooperation deal with it and co-managing its nuclear program. Both South Korea and China are also supportive of a less confrontational approach to North Korea.
So what editor gave space to an the article riddled with such gross factual errors as glossing over North Korea’s recent provocations and having a completely outdated understanding of South Korean policy? Zhu also extends the unsupported hope of economic reform, without mentioning that all of the current evidence is strongly to the contrary. It’s as though Zhu either did all of his research on Sina.com, or he submitted this thing in 2006 at the latest, and the piece was completely overcome by events while it sat on an editor’s desk. At least they had the courtesy to edit out “Bush” and replace it with “Obama.”
Here’s an interesting report on North Korea’s black market in videotapes, and the regime’s efforts to deny the people what Kim Jong Il collects.
Miss Kim is the very young woman I wrote about the other day who single-handedly obtained a presidential proclamation thanking Korean War vets for their service and honoring the sacrifices of those who died in the war. The picture accompanying the Chosun’s article confirms that the creator of the proclamation is the same woman I briefly met at a function in Washington about a year ago (also the only time I’ve met Jodi in person).
Kim established a group called Remember July 27 to help Americans recognize the significance of the Korean War and to remember the sacrifices of American soldiers who fought in it. The group has been promoting the cause in the U.S. administration and the Congress for the last year. Kim persuaded White House officials using her connections from her days in the U.S. Peace Corps Headquarters and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Along with Remember July 27, she visited the offices of all 435 congressmen to ask for their support for the act. [Chosun Ilbo]
That’s more than an impressive accomplishment; it’s a demonstration of physical courage.
“It’s important because additional measures have been announced to recognize the sacrifices of Korean War veterans, although it has been 56 years since the ceasefire,” she says.
Moving to the U.S. as a six-year old, Kim graduated from high school in California and earned a degree from Seoul National University. During her time in Korea, she was able to understand the significance of the Korean War and realized the need to treat war veterans with respect, she says.
Among other things Miss Kim teaches us is to guard against our own preconceptions — in person, Miss Kim appears to be in her early 20’s, has a demure yet quietly determined manner, and looks like she walked out of a photo shoot for a magazine cover … and I don’t mean behind the camera. Gorgeous young girls don’t just take up lobbying Congress and the White House out of a sense of personal mission, do they? Apparently, they do! And while it’s superficial and more than a little unfair to make an issue of appearance, I’d bet that politicians and staffers who are too often beleaguered by pesky wild-eyed guys like me are less likely to deploy their shields when the lobbyist looks as disarming as Miss Kim does.
I suspect there are more than a few issues on which Miss Kim and I would not agree politically, but this isn’t one of them, and clearly, here is a young woman with a great future. Congratulations to Miss Kim.
Sorry about yesterday. Sometimes, work just doesn’t leave enough time for me to post, but I did manage to edit a few of this week’s post into something with a (hopefully!) coherent theme. Enjoy.
Several of you e-mailed me about the story of the luxury yachts that North Korea had attempted to purchase from the Italian manufacturer Azimuth-Benetti. I started a post and didn’t finish it, partially because that post became something long-winded, disjointed, and unpublishable. Meanwhile, a few more details have trickled in about the boats and the purchase. Contrary to doubts expressed in earlier reports, Italian authorities have concluded that the boats were indeed for His Withering Majesty, although you have to wonder why he’d need two, and frankly, why he’d even need one given the state he’s in now. Maybe he should have asked to have one of them equipped with a mausoleum, given his condition these days. More likely, they were to be gifts for high-ranking generals.
The boats themselves are a thing to behold, as is Azimut-Benetti’s web site. Oh, and the North Koreans were using a Chinese company as an intermediary. So much for our expectations that China is finally ready to implement U.N. sanctions in good faith:
Italian financial police said the Chinese company paid a Hong Kong business to take delivery of the vessels, valued at nearly €13 million ($18.5 million).
An investigation determined that the yachts ultimately were bound for the reclusive communist nation in violation of international sanctions barring sale of luxury goods to North Korea, the ministry said.
Col. Antonio Leone, the financial-police commander in Lucca, said “it is an irrefutable fact” that Mr. Kim was the intended final recipient, according to Reuters. “There has been a thorough investigation, partly in Austria, backed up by confessions and investigative breakthroughs,” he said.
A person answering the phone at the North Korean Embassy in Rome said no one was available to comment.
The yachts were initially confiscated by Italy’s Economic Development Ministry but have since been returned to the boatyard, which has been allowed to keep the deposit. Azimut-Benetti isn’t accused of wrongdoing and has cooperated fully in the investigation, police said. [Wall Street Journal]
Austria is now investigating the involvement of one of its businessmen and one North Korean in the transactions.
Sure, you say, it’s a promiscuous squandering of money that could be better spent on sarin precursors and aluminum tubes, but it’s is no more worthless than a hideous collossus of a hotel that can’t be filled, or a fleet of Mercedez sedans that were recently gifted to North Korea’s generals. So what important lesson must we take from an incident like this one? Most importantly, that we mustn’t stereotye North Korea as a land plunged into hunger by an “evil dictator.” Or so said Christine Ahn just a month ago:
Nevertheless we persist in attributing the cause of North Korea’s famine to an “evil dictator” who must be dislodged before the country can get back on its feet. But this is far from the truth according to Theodor Friedrich, Senior Agriculturalist for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In Pyongyang, in 2004, one of us asked him if an “evil dictator” was the cause of the famine. He responded that, to the contrary, what he observed was that because of North Korea’s exceptional centralized food distribution system and collective spirit, a great many lives were saved. [Christine Ahn, Z Net]
Note the absence of intentional parody when Ms. Ahn uses the words “collective spirit,” or this part, where she bitterly denounces Barack Hus-same Obama for being a closet neocon:
When Barack Obama was elected President, Korean Americans, Koreans on the peninsula, and all advocates for the reunification and economic justice on the Korean peninsula dared to dream that decades of enmity between the U.S. and the North Koreans would end. Sadly, the Obama administration is, so far, at least as bad as the one it replaced.
No doubt, John Feffer is already writing a dissertation on how these sanctions are starving North Korean babies. Whereas Feffer specializes in half-truths, Ahn is just a reckless liar who claims that North Korea’s food situation has stablized, that North Korea really wants to reform and engage with us, and who blames U.S. sanctions for hunger when in fact U.S. sanctions against North Korea make every possible effort to avoid hurting its food supply (caviar and lobsters excluded, of course). The World Food Program will tell you that the food situation has become less secure in recent years, and the North Korean regime itself recently refused all food aid from the United States, historically North Korea’s largest donor. There is abundant evidence that the North is trying to stamp out markets, and no recent evidence supports Ahn’s assertions about economic reform.
And yet, despite those legions of fact-checkers, some buffoon at CNN put this mendacious Kim Jong Il apologist on the air. Is it any wonder that people turn to Fox out of sheer disgust?
I’ve given long and careful thought to how a civil society ought to deal with views as offensive as real-time holocaust denial like Ahn’s and Feffer’s, and I’m sure you will agree with me that they should be caged and poked with sharp sticks.
Update: More on this.
About a year ago, a young Korean-American woman, Hannah Kim, set out to have Congress and the President to recognize Korean War vets in time for this year’s anniversary of the Korean War armistice. I’m happy to report that Ms. Kim, having spearheaded a bill through Congress, has now obtained this presidential proclamation. What a nice thing of her to do.
Minced beef with bread is now available in Pyongyang, leading North Korea watchers everywhere to whether full nuclear disarmament and freedom of the press can be far behind.
Seriously … why is this news?
Update: Here’s a more practical response to the protein shortage in the North Korean diet. Why, they say it tastes exactly like beef! So do you want fries with your burger?
In our second great WTF moment of this week, the Republican Party just called me asking for money to buy ad space to condemn Barack Obama’s weak Jimmy Carter-style foreign policy.
Set aside the fact that the major premise of the pitch just doesn’t square with the truth. How the hell can anyone make that claim with a straight face in light of George W. Bush’s North Korea legacy? Did these people, in the name of a strong foreign policy, just seriously ask me to help them turn the keys to our foreign policy back over to … Colin Powell and Condi Rice? And for that matter, who can name a major political party that isn’t sure to install Chris Hill to “manage” some spectacularly dangerous foreign policy crisis by feeding whatever beast growls at us, slipping the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a rufie, and sodomizing its entire membership live and unpixelated on C-Span 2?
Fuck these people.
Is it any wonder that the Republicans are a minority? There are precious few politicians in either party worthy of our support today, and I can easily count them on my digits — Brownback, Royce, Lieberman, Bayh sometimes, Ros-Lehtinen, Frank Wolf, McCain, and … and that’s about it. That leaves 14 more digits to count with, including the finger I’m holding up now.
The accuser, Im Chun-Yong, escaped from North Korea with several comrades in his unit a decade ago. That alone should tell you something about the state of morale in North Korea’s most elite forces even then. Im claims that he kept this story to himself until now:
“If you are born mentally or physically deficient, says Im, the government says your best contribution to society… is as a guinea pig for biological and chemical weapons testing.” [….]
The former military captain says it was in the early 1990s, that he watched his then commander wrestle with giving up his 12-year-old daughter who was mentally ill. The commander, he says, initially resisted, but after mounting pressure from his military superiors, he gave in. Im watched as the girl was taken away. She was never seen again.
One of Im’s own men later gave him an eyewitness account of human-testing. Asked to guard a secret facility on an island off North Korea’s west coast, Im says the soldier saw a number of people forced into a glass chamber.
“Poisonous gas was injected in,” Im says. “He watched doctors time how long it took for them to die.” [Al Jazeera]
Words fail me when I read things like this. There’s nothing I can add to the horror of it, and yet I have no way of drawing a firm conclusion about its accuracy. For one thing, this isn’t coming from the most reputable news service. For another, I’ve caught enough inconsistencies in at least one similar report that I can’t conclude that it’s true without some corroboration. Yet there have been multiple reports of this kind, and there is evidence and corroboration to support the regime’s commission of equal and greater evils. It’s within the radius of what the North Korean regime is capable of, but then, what isn’t?
There’s little question that this regime is capable of this sort of depraved cruelty, but I can’t presume that this report is accurate because the regime reaps the advantage of the reasonable doubts it creates through exceptional secrecy. All I can do is wring my hands and say, “demands further investigation,” even knowing that the complicit Ban Ki Moon and our complicit State Department certainly won’t demand it.
There’s less reason to question reports that North Korea is embarked on an anti-Christian jihad, publicly executing those who would put other gods before His Withering Majesty. We’ve heard recent reports of hundreds (if not thousands) of public executions in North Korea, we’ve seen smuggled video of at least one such execution, and there is plenty of evidence that North Korea imprisons, tortures, and executes people for believing in or propogating Christianity. The regime is correct that Christianity represents an existential threat to the system. Christianity is the only ideology with the potential to spread, inspire loyalty, collect intelligence, and ultimately, to become the essential ideological foundation without which a resistance movement cannot establish itself.
Sadly, the civilized world has lost its sense of this very hard fact — there are some problems that no drum circle can solve. Can there be any question that if North Korea is to become a less barbaric place, that the regime must be overthrown violently?
Recalling that the Korean war of aggression ignited by the U.S. imperialists 59 years ago was the most brutal and brigandish war in the history of world wars, the statement continued [….]
Should the U.S. imperialists ignite another war, oblivious of the lesson drawn from their past defeat, the heroic Korean People’s Army will fully display its invincible might of the powerful revolutionary army of Mt. Paektu which has grown under the care of the great Songun commander and bury the aggressors in this land to the last man, the statement warned. [KCNA]
Let us resolve to drink together when we hear this word that our spell checkers do not know.
You remember what diplomacy was like in the days before it was smart, right? When diplomats let slip undiplomatic truths about Kim Jong Il being a “tyrannical dictator” who subjected his people to a “hellish nightmare?” When Presidents “loathed” their adversaries instead of sitting down and sharing a bong with them? Thank goodness change has come!
It says a lot about the North Koreans that they can’t just rise above this and hold the high ground.
So does this mean the North Koreans might just be assholes even after Bush isn’t President anymore?
When you campaign on a platform of “smart diplomacy,” the clear implications are that (a) your predecessors weren’t smart, and (b) that you will be. We should have doubted that the minute that this campaign hired Joe Biden for his diplomatic suavity, and made its Secretary of State someone who had to fib about getting shot at in Bosnia to demonstrate any foreign policy cred. Clinton has made gaffe after gaffe since coming into office, and the White House needs a full time spokesman just to explain Joe Biden (no, he didn’t really mean to sow public panic; no, he did not green-light Israeli air strikes on Iran; no he wasn’t really drooling on the nubile Ukrainian hotties, for whom he has immense respect). Clinton’s performance probably isn’t unrelated to her reported loss of influence in the power struggle between State and NSC. Not that sidelining the State Department is necessarily a bad thing.
Look, I’ve been fairly supportive of Barack Obama’s North Korea policy, and would add that so far, it’s been far “smarter” than Bush’s. In fact, it might just be too good to last. But let’s not make the common Washington error of conflating policy with diplomacy. That error is never greater than in the peculiar case of North Korea, which is seldom influenced by what diplomats say, but which knows that it’s vulnerable to what bankers do. Diplomacy, of course, was the skill that most of the Democratic candidates stressed, and which Obama’s diplomats have done with obvious ineptitude.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has insulted through inadvertence as ably as John Bolton ever did by design. Please don’t take this as an objection to the idea of insulting the North Korean dictator and system if there’s a design behind that. If and when it finally occurs to the administration that there’s no way to negotiate Kim Jong Il out of his nukes, we might decide, as a matter of policy, that it’s in our interests to discredit Kim Jong Il in the eyes of his subjects. One way to do that might be to challenge his aura of invincibility by making a global laughingstock of him. In these times, increasing numbers of North Koreans would find out, and there are plenty of underfunded broadcasting services in Seoul who could help us get a churlish message through. Having met Ambassador Bolton for a discussion of North Korea policy while he was U.N. Ambassador, I believe that his remarks were by design, but it was also very clear to me that the Bush Administration didn’t share that design. If, as is now rumored, Hillary Clinton is about to offer the North Koreans a massive new package of incentives — Agreed Framework III — there’s nothing smart about either the policy or the diplomacy.
Update: I see GI Korea had similar thoughts.