The scandal-plagued U.N. Development Program, just shy of two years from a report that found massive irregularities in its finances and operations in North Korea, is planning to return to North Korea.
You will recall that among other items, the U.N. found $3,500 in counterfeit currency in a safe in New York. The cash may have come from the North Korean state bank that the U.N.D.P. was required to use while operating out of Pyongyang.
Not content with enslaving its women, torturing its refugees, and vacuuming out North Korea’s natural resources, China is now turning North Korea into its industrial waste dumping ground (ht):
North Korean organizations in charge of raising foreign currency are bringing in and burying industrial waste from China for money, a report released yesterday said. The report also said North Korean scientists who complained that their country is turning into China’s industrial waste site have been purged in North Korea.
Daily NK, a media outlet on North Korean affairs, quoted a source in the North’s South Hamkyong Province as saying, “The soil survey research center at Hamhung Institute of Technology released a research paper on its study of land pollution resulting from burial of industrial waste from China and a letter urging countermeasures to the Central Committee of the (North Korean) Workers’ Party. The institute was dismantled and senior officials and researchers were all purged.”
“The research paper details how China’s industrial waste is sent to North Korea and dumped,” the source said, adding, “It also strongly warns against the practice of North Korean factories lacking sewage treatment facilities and freely dumping sewage into rivers freely.”
One North Korean scientist said, “Our country in effect is turning into China’s industrial waste site,” adding, “Even tap water in Pyongyang has become so polluted that it is no longer potable.”
In China’s partial defense here, I’m not sure North Korean scientists can gather the kind of data needed to prove China’s responsibility for the bad water in Pyongyang. At Chongjin in particular, satellite photos hint at what an environmental disaster area North Korea is becoming, presumably without China’s help:
For China, this may be about removing a potential source of political instability. It also reverses a trend in which China had been an importer of so-called “e-waste” from wealthier nations.
Will a reunified Korea eventually ask China to help clean up these messes?
AN INTERNATIONAL GROUP OF LAWMAKERS has called for better treatment for North Korean refugees:
The lawmakers issued a joint statement calling on Pyongyang to end its gross human rights violations, including political detentions, torture, and public executions. The statement was signed by lawmakers from eight Asian nations: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Also signing the statement were African lawmakers from Djibouti, Ivory Coast, and Senegal and one lawmaker from Croatia. They statement demanded China stop arresting and repatriating North Koreans and instead offer them protections as refugees.
Bangkok was an interesting choice of venue. It’s also the destination of choice for many North Koreans on the underground railroad, though Thailand seems ambivalent at best about welcoming North Korean refugees.
CHRIS HILL UPDATE: As Iraq confronts Syria over the latter allowing terrorists to pass through its territory on the way to Iraq, Iraq is also complaining that American diplomats aren’t pressuring Syria to end that sponsorship. But I thought our embassy in Baghdad was in the hands of one of our smartest, most proven diplomats (well, the word “proven” wouldn’t be inaccurate here, I suppose).
THE MYTH OF LIBERAL EUROPE: You know, I can think of plenty of appropriate reactions to the excesses of extreme Islam in Europe, but a new Swiss “constitutional ban” on minarets hearkens back to Europe pushing Jews into ghettos and the Pale of Settlement. Surely a place as benighted as Europe imagines itself to be can find some less intolerant way to oppose intolerance.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown in votes between the French-, Italian-, and German-speaking cantons.
As if to affirm on cue what I’d written here, former North Korean battalion commander Kim Joo-Il explains why North Korea’s official military strength figures aren’t a very good indicator of its actual military strength:
“Officially the North Korea armed forces number 1.2 million - these are the official numbers,” Mr Kim said. “But they do not include the secret military service, so I do not know the exact figure of military personnel.
“About 100,000 people are conscripted annually and they serve for 10 years,” he added.
But Mr Kim says that the severe famine of the 1990s, in which huge numbers of people died, and the Asian economic crisis in the same decade have taken their toll on the military.
“Previously discipline in the military was strong, but after the economic crisis in North Korea they could not control the armed forces,” he said.
“Because the economy was very bad many soldiers deserted. And the famine was also a problem, so discipline in the military has weakened.” [BBC]
There’s video at that link as well.
If your question is how strong North Korea’s military is, I’d speculate that the answer depends entirely on the type of conflict. The NKPA would probably do well at gunning down food rioters or protesters. Elite units would probably quell a regular army mutiny with ruthless efficiency. Special forces units could probably kill a lot of people in commando attacks in the South. And a U.S., Chinese, South Korean, or space alien invasion — those are events of approximately equal likelihood — would no doubt galvanize segments of the North Korean military into fanatical nationalism. And while many non-elite units may welcome such an event and decline to die facing the enemy, the units that would stand and fight would make the human cost prohibitive. Ironically, the North Korean military seems least likely to succeed at the one mission that most Americans worry about — a conventional invasion of the South.
As an active member of Justice for North Korea, maybe I’m a bit biased, but I highly recommend this one.
John Glionna of the Los Angeles Times has the story behind the 9 refugees who successfully received asylum in the Danish Embassy in Hanoi in late September and now are safely in South Korea. There also is a bit of an update on the 5 refugees who were caught by the Chinese government at the border.
Here’s the link: Aiding North Korea defectors: A high-stakes spy mission.
It’s a fine line between extortion and aggressive panhandling.
Inexplicably, extortion and outright terrorism have failed to produce a financial harvest (until now, a perennial success) to make up for the agricultural kind (since 1993, a perennial failure). Suddenly, a slightly more obsequious North Korea is … begging for South Korea to resume those Kumgang Tours and for the U.N. to keep its commitments on the delivery of food aid. If there’s one word in the North Korean vocabulary more amusing than “brigandish,” it’s “commitment.”
South Korea, according to a somewhat impeachable source, isn’t going for the Kumgang reboot. Park Wang-Ja was not available for comment.
Leave aside the obvious questions about why North Korea can’t just buy some food with the money in the yacht fund, the booze fund, the Mercedez fund, or the empty skyscraper fund: why won’t they at least accept food aid from the World Food Program’s single largest donor?
Corruption is now so entrenched in North Korea that military officers will even give away information on nuclear test sites, according to an elite defector.
This, according to high-level defector Kim Su Jong (an alias), who is in Washington this week, speaking to congressional staff and reporters.
Rampant corruption, collapse of the state-controlled ration distribution system, the opening of local markets, the breaking of laws to obtain food, and the under-funding of the military and local government units has led to bribe-taking at all levels, he said.
This is occurring even among sentries charged with guarding North Korea’s long border with China and its nuclear sites, this defector and others have reported.
I can’t imagine that morale is particularly good in units that get by this way:
“Soldiers have nothing but rations distributed by the government,” he said.
“To earn some dollars, they sell military food supplies outside their bases, but then get caught and reprimanded for corruption. I think they’ve come to realize that rather than selling military supplies, they’re better off keeping their heads down and selling military secrets…” [Radio Free Asia]
It’s often emphasized the North Korea has an army of 1.2 million. I wonder how large that figure would still be if you stripped away the militias and various units that aren’t combat ready for lack of training, equipment, and physical fitness; and those that are actually in the business of selling cars, coal, or tungsten for a living. I don’t doubt that in the exceedingly unlikely event that someone invaded North Korea, the army and the people would be galvanized by nationalism to a considerable extent, but then, North Korea’s army today is probably more designed to suppress internal dissent than to launch or repel an invasion.
The Daily NK has an interesting two-parter on the history and decline of North Korea’s front organization in Japan, here and here. Once a major source of income for Kim Il Sung’s regime, its decline under Kim Jong Il’s rule can all be attributed to (surprise!) North Korea’s nastiness and mismanagement.
I suppose China’s behavior immediately after the president’s departure is all the evidence you really need.
An activist who was investigating the role shoddy school construction played in the deaths of more than 5,000 children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake was given a three-year prison sentence Monday on charges of possessing state secrets. Huang Qi, 46, a veteran activist and blogger, is the most prominent of more than a dozen people who were arrested for demanding investigations into construction standards after the magnitude 7.9 temblor. Others included prominent artists, former teachers and parents who lost their only children in the earthquake. [L.A. Times]
Gone, at least for now, are the days in which the visit of an American president would be welcomed as at least a temporary respite from the oppression and would seed the soil with the promise of the same individual liberties we love, guard, take for granted, and consider a birthright (is it that Chinese love their children less, or are they simply not capable of self-government?).
Well, maybe the president held his tongue so that China would cease its support for Iran or North Korea as they flout U.N. resolutions, proliferate at will, and terrorize at home and abroad:
Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie is in North Korea in the first visit by a Chinese defense chief since April 2006. “No force on earth can break the unity of the armies and peoples of the two countries and it will last forever,” Liang was quoted by the official KCNA news agency as saying Sunday.
He was speaking at a reception hosted by North Korea’s Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces. “I personally experienced the bilateral friendship sealed in blood when I was in Korea about 50 years ago as a member of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army,” fighting in the Korean War on the North Korean side. His North Korean counterpart Kim Yong-chun said, “It is the firm stand of our Army and people to develop the Korea-China friendship, which has withstood all trials of history.” [Chosun Ilbo]
The emerging consensus is that President Obama’s trip to Asia was a fiasco because he had no plan, no concrete objectives that his presence could accomplish, and insisted on no fora where he use his sublime eloquence to advance our national interest. It is not enough that German intellectuals prefer Obama to Bush by 11 to 1; after all, when is the last time a brigade of German intellectuals volunteered to fight for intellectual freedom, tolerance, or diversity in Afghanistan? Obama’s prostrations actually lowered our status in Asia. If he could do nothing else, couldn’t the world’s most charming politician direct his magnificent oratory toward the peoples of Asia in some way reasonably calculated to advance our national interest?
It is suggested by some that we are in no position to demand anything of China because of China’s holdings of our debt, but this is a misapprehension on several levels. First, the economies of China and the United States remain interdependent: China knows it can’t begin to sell off dollars without reducing the value of what holdings it retains, China needs America to keep its markets open to its exports to keep its population employed, and China has much more at stake politically and socially if America doesn’t help bring the global economy out of a recession. A most underappreciated point is that all economies are cyclical. If this recession is deeper, it may be because the government delayed the natural cyclical contraction of our economy through excessive intervention in the housing market. The same can be said for Japan’s excessive intervention in its manufacturing and export economy in the 80’s — and I’m old enough to remember the days when everyone thought Japan’s boom would last forever. But booms never last forever, and only a fool can believe that China, the most interventionist state of the aforementioned, is an exception to this rule.
Furthermore, our reduced economic leverage — a legitimate, if often overstated concern — certainly does not mean that our political and diplomatic leverage is suddenly extinguished, as some would suggest. Above all, it does not mean that we are more likely to secure our interests by prostrating ourselves. This misapprehends the nature of authoritarian regimes, which by their very nature pursue their ends through the coercive power of the state to impose their will by fiat. The diplomacy of compromise and consensus works well between democracies in which leaders learn to compromise with opposition parties, or factions within parties, or popular opposition. It works badly with with dictatorships, which deal with opposing views with purges, arrests, night sticks, and tear gas. The people who rise in systems like those view negotiations as zero-sum games, in which obsequiousness signals weakness. It only encourages them to demand more and deliver less (and isn’t Chris Hill’s failure a fine illustration of that?).
Such systems also tend to promote nationalism as a substitute for individual worth, which also promotes a zero-sum approach to negotiations. All negotiations with authoritarian regimes are about imposing your will. No doubt, some will find this idea deeply distasteful, but that doesn’t make it less true. When negotiating with an authoritarian regime, the only way to achieve your objectives is to negotiate from strength and show a merciless approach to verification and enforcement of the terms.
In some ways, our new president has shown himself to be a quick study. Let’s hope, for our country’s sake, that President Obama grasps this difference soon.
In an attempt to regain some measure of economic independence, defector “Kim Su Jong” (an alias) claims that North Korea is trying to curtail the degree of Chinese direct investment in, and exploitation of its mines. Foreign analysts see the barriers to North Korea getting those mines working on its own as insurmountable.
Related posts here, here, and here.
South Korea voted for and was one of 53 co-sponsors. The vote was 96 for, 19 against, with 65 abstentions:
The resolution goes on to list torture, the absence of due process in law, use of the death penalty, collective punishment, strict restrictions on freedom of movement, thought, conscience, religion, opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association, the right to privacy and equal access to information, the treatment of returned refugees, violations of economic, social and cultural rights, human rights and fundamental freedoms of women, children and the disabled among others as areas of serious concern, before also criticizing the North Korean government’s ongoing refusal to accept the mandate of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the North Korean human rights situation or to solve issues related to abductions. [Daily NK, Chris Green]
“Inhuman conditions of detention” are also mentioned. And at long last, China finally comes in for some well-deserved criticism, at least implicitly:
The article related to the treatment of refugees is notable for its criticism of China, in addition to North Korea itself. Expressing its concern that the “situation of refugees and asylum-seekers expelled or returned to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and sanctions imposed on citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea who have been repatriated from abroad” is very serious, “leading to punishments of internment, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or the death penalty,” the resolution calls on North Korea’s neighbors to “treat those who seek refuge humanely” and urges compliance with 1951 and 1967 UN documents relating to the status of refugees, something which China has hitherto failed to do.
The pdf of the actual resolution a friend sent to me won’t open. I’ll be interested in seeing whether China is mentioned by name. I’ve posted a summary of the floor debate below the fold. North Korea will also come up for periodic review before the U.N. Human Rights Council, something that promises to be equally inconsequential.
I noted Kim Ok’s disturbing resemblance to Yonsama when reports first emerged back in 2006 that Kim Jong Il had married his long-time secretary.
According to this report from the Joongang Ilbo, however, Ms. Kim has moved on in life and remarried:
Sources told the JoongAng Ilbo that they have received tips that Kim Ok has married an official from the ruling Workers’ Party.
“We’re analyzing intelligence that Kim Ok, who had been Kim Jong-il’s personal secretary, has tied the knot with a Workers’ Party member,” a source said. “We believe Kim Ok has quit her job in the secretariat.”
In North Korea, women working in the ruling party leave their posts after getting married, on the grounds that they may be too distracted at work.
Um, what?
It would be technically inaccurate to describe a flagrant policy of employment discrimination against married women as a “glass ceiling.” Still, for those of you who would be tempted to infer from this that North Korea has failed to achieve full gender equality, Christine Ahn helpfully points out that at least North Korean women don’t have to look at “ads featuring scantily clad women selling alcohol, fashion or cars,” and may instead gaze upon “beautifully painted political posters … to inspire their collective spirits and drive to work harder for the nation.” See? It’s all a matter of how you define it!
Kim Ok, thought to be 45, majored in piano at Pyongyang University of Music and Dance. She is believed to have been Kim Jong-il’s secretary since the late 1980s and to have been the Dear Leader’s fourth domestic partner following the death of Ko Yong-hui in 2004. Kim Ok has accompanied Kim Jong-il abroad, including during the leader’s visit to China in January 2006.
The South Korean intelligence has kept a closer eye on Kim Ok since Kim Jong-il reportedly suffered a stroke in August of last year. But intelligence sources here said Kim Ok has become less visible since the Supreme People’s Assembly held a session in April.
You have to respect anyone who survives a breakup with Kim Jong Il and lives to never breathe a word about it. By some accounts, Kim Ok had even been a bit player in the much-ballyhooed succession drama in North Korea, as to which I still await the emergence of any real evidence that (a) it’s actually taking place or (b) third son Kim Jong Un would hold any real power. And for some North Koreans, those doubts may be reason enough to get out of bed, go to yet another criticism session, and live for another dreary day. According to RFA, via the Chosun Ilbo, some malcontents have apparently expressed their dread of the Kim Jong Un era. The sentiment is understandable and logical, but like nearly all stories about public opinion in North Korea, it’s more anecdotal than scientific.
The Senate confirmed King on a voice vote:
Speaking at a Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month, he defined North Korea as “one of the worst abusers of human rights in the world.” He pledged to protect the human rights of the North Koreans, pay attention to South Korean prisoners of war in the North and Japanese abducted to the North, and address China’s deportation of North Korean defectors. [Chosun Ilbo]
More here. It’s good that King will be a full-timer, unlike Jay Lefkowitz. It’s less good that King brings little North Korea-specific expertise, experience, or cred to the job, and that it took the Obama Administration and the Senate ten months to get this done. The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea endorsed him, but by then, Jared Genser and David Hawk were both out of the running.
Here’s a pdf of King’s statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
This is one of the best finds I’ve seen in a long time — prolific, funny, and full of information I hadn’t heard anywhere else. That’s all the more impressive given that blogger Michael Madden was ambitious enough to choose subject matter that most would consider droll, stultifying, opaque, and impervious to verifiable empirical analysis. Not just anyone could begin with material like that and come up with posts like, “Habemus Successor? Or Thaek it to the Limit?.”
Not a day goes by that I don’t rue all of the commerce we’re missing out on by not having diplomatic relations with North Korea:
Swedish police have arrested two North Korean diplomats on suspicion of smuggling 230,000 cigarettes into the Nordic country, the Swedish Customs Office said Friday. The pair, a man and a woman who have diplomatic status in Russia, were stopped by Swedish customs officers Wednesday morning as they drove off a ferry from Helsinki, the Finnish capital. Customs officials discovered Russian cigarettes in the car driven by the couple, Swedish Customs spokeswoman Monica Magnusson told Reuters. [Reuters]
They always travel in pairs, you know. Lucky for them, they had an almost completely flawless back-up plan:
The two North Koreans claimed diplomatic immunity.
“They were accredited as diplomats in Russia, but had no accreditation in Sweden,” she said. “They were arrested on suspicion of smuggling.”
Magnusson added that the pair were still being held by Swedish police and that she was not aware of them having any contact with North Korean officials since their arrest. Sweden’s Foreign Ministry said it had been informed of the arrests but would not comment directly on the matter, saying it was a criminal case and was being handled by the police.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Cecilia Julin said foreign diplomats are only immune from criminal prosecution in countries where they have been accredited with the authorities. “If you come to Sweden and commit a crime, you’re just like any other foreign national,” she said.
What? You mean someone is proposing to apply the same standards to North Korea that they apply to other countries? Such brigandish hooliganism cannot stand!
Sweden is one of only seven countries to have an embassy in North Korea, treated by much of the world as a rogue state due to human rights abuses and its possession of nuclear weapons despite opposition by the international community.
North Korea is believed to derive a substantial amount of its foreign exchange from tobacco smuggling, although estimates of the amounts vary widely. Cigarettes are one of the milder commodities in which North Korean diplomats routinely traffic. They’ve also been caught smuggling dope, cash, gold, and just about every foul substance you can imagine:
Authorities in numerous countries have stopped North Korean diplomats from smuggling vehicles, alcohol, fake antiques, electronic goods, weapons, and more. Other reports deeply implicate officials in the endangered-species trade. Since 1996, at least six North Korean diplomats have been forced to leave Africa after attempts to smuggle elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns. Such efforts seem partly driven by the dismal funding of North Korea’s embassies. Lacking cash, North Korea closed at least 14 embassies last year and reportedly told those remaining to become “self-sufficient.” Still other diplomatic smuggling incidents involve cigarettes, allegedly sold tax free on the black market, and pirated CDs. Two diplomats crossing into Romania from Bulgaria last year were found to have crammed 12,000 bootleg CDs in the trunk of their car. [U.S. News, Feb. 7, 1999]
This 2007 Congressional Research Service report states that at that time, there had been 50 documented incidents in which North Korean diplomats were caught smuggling illegal drugs in 20 different countries. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
It’s enough to make you wonder what else they’ve carried without getting caught.