Mr. Lee, Tear Down This (Imaginary) Wall!
Happy New Year, from me and from the North Koreans.
Archive for December, 2009
Man-Portable Surface-to-Air Missiles Found in Seized Bangkok Shipment
Brian McCartan, a freelance journalist based in Bangkok, has written an exceptionally detailed account of what is know and not known about the North Korean weapons seized in Bangkok. All of the many details McCartan relates are consistent with the better reporting I’ve read in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, but there is one thing in this article that I hadn’t read anywhere else:
A search of the plane’s cargo after a tip-off from US intelligence sources found 35 tonnes of crated weapons inside the fuselage, according to Thai authorities. The haul included large numbers of rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), man-portable surface-to-air missiles, and two mobile multiple-rocket launchers, either M-1985 or M-1991’s, capable of firing 240mm rockets. The weapons were removed by the Thai military to Takhili Air Force base in central Nakhon Sawan, north of Bangkok. Thai authorities estimated the value of the cargo at around US$18 million. The crew, who are likely to be telling the truth, said they believed they were carrying heavy equipment for oil operations.
The next step is for the weapons to be inventoried and reported to the UN’s North Korea Sanctions Committee, which is mandated to investigate violations of the sanctions. Under UN resolutions, the weapons should then be destroyed, although there is some debate in Thailand about whether the weapons will be kept for its armed forces. [Brian McCartan, Asia Times]
I’d urge you to read McCartan’s piece for yourself. It seems well-sourced and carefully written. If that fact is true, the implications ought to be collossal. After all, the most likely destination for the shipment continues to be Iran, and the most likely end-users continue to be Iran’s terrorist clients — Hamas, Hezbollah, and radical militias in Iraq.
The report doesn’t specify what kind of missiles these were. The one I’ve pictured here is a Soviet-designed SA-7, an older type but still capable of bringing down an airliner not equipped with countermeasure flares (as only Israeli airliners tend to be).
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.
What Would Be a Good Crank Call for the North Korean U.N. Mission?
ReACH, the Japanese abductee advocacy group, sends:
Call North Korea at UN in New York, USA 1-212-972-3105
Call North Korea at UN in Geneva, Switzerland 41-22-735-4370
Send fax to North Korea at UN in New York, USA 1-212-972-3154
Send fax to North Korea at UN in Geneva, Switzerland 41-22-786-0662
Don’t forget to copy and paste Kim Jong-Il’ s photo, (example) and write “Important Message to Chairman Kim Jong-Il”, so that they cannot throw it away and have to report it to Kim Jong-Il.
Personally, I’m always up for some harmless fourth-grade mischief, and while I doubt this would have much impact on North Korean policies, let no one question the potential for fun and publicity.
Like so many of the rotten and stupid things the North Koreans seem to do out of sheer malice, you have ask yourself whether even Kim Jong Il thinks abducting people off of Japan’s streets and beaches was really worth all of the trouble it brought down on him.
Update: Commenter “spengbab” sets the standard with this priceless entry:
Great Confiscation Updates: Regime Turns Attention to Foreign Currency
The North Korean People’s Safety Agency has declared a “complete prohibition of foreign currency usage.” The decree was issued on December 26th and went into effect on Monday 28th. A source inside North Hamkyung Province reported, “A People’s Safety Agency declaration on banning the use of U.S. dollars, Yuan and the Euro was publicized on the 26th. The declaration was posted in public places and in every workplace starting this morning.”
The title of the declaration is, “On punishing severely those who use foreign currencies within our Republic.” Surprisingly, the targets of the declaration are said to include foreigners visiting North Korea.
A source from Yangkang Province also reported, “From December 28, no foreign currencies can be used. The foreign currencies the declaration meant were dollars, Yuan and the euro.” According to the source, this new regulation was a Cabinet decision, and the People’s Safety Agency is responsible for its implementation. The declaration stipulates, “Not for any reason may individuals or organizations possess any foreign currency, with the exception of banks.”[Daily NK]
The directive from North Korea’s Ministry of People’s Security seen at one of Pyongyang’s commercial markets said that from January 1, residents will not be allowed to directly pay with dollars, euros or other foreign currencies for food, goods and other retail items, Xinhua news agency reported. “Foreigners with foreign currency will also have to exchange it for North Korea’s own currency to use it,” the report added, citing the announcement. [Reuters, Chris Buckley and Jon Herskovitz]
There will be almost no exceptions to this new rule except North Korean banks holding foreign currency after international transactions. For everyone else, we can assume that examples will be duly set:
“The relevant authorities will adopt measures to establish strict order for the circulation of the national currency,” the directive said, according to Xinhua. [….] It also warned that businesses breaking the new restrictions would be shut down and their property confiscated, and illicit foreign exchange deals would be “harshly dealt with.” [Reuters]
The North Hamkyung Province source also cautioned, “Upon the release of this declaration, there will inevitably be someone sent to a prison camp or sentenced to an extreme penalty as a model case. These days, if you are unlucky, you may become the model case for bringing in Yuan or dollars.” [Daily NK]
North Koreans’ holdings in foreign currency are very different from their savings in North Korean currency in two ways: first, the regime can print all the dollars we’re willing to let it get away with printing, but it still lacks the unilateral power to cancel dollars, which will always have intrinsic value on the black market. People — especially people with the means to pay extortion money and buy their way out of a prison camp — are still going to hoard them, especially after the regime has given them so much reason to distrust the North Korean currency. The new currency’s value is already plunging, even as the regime struggles to re-set wages and prices.
The second and more important difference is who holds foreign currency in North Korea — aside from foreigners, of course: the elite. Now, having seen the ferocious anger the Great Confiscation provoked among the proles, the regime is still willing to confiscate the savings of inner and outer party members. That is a real risk, because the military and security forces — the people who carry guns — come from these classes. Apparently, at least one person in the South Korean government agrees with me. Who can imagine any South Korean official saying this while Roh was President?
“It is difficult to estimate the threat to us that will arise in the aftermath of the currency reform and from the regime instabilities as leader Kim Jong-Il goes ahead with a hereditary power handover,” the minister said in a New Year message to the South’s 655,000-member military. [….]
“North Korea is continuing to expand its armaments despite a lack of food and serious economic challenges,” minister Kim said, calling on the military to stay alert to the potential threat. [AFP, Park Chan Kyong]
Make that two people in South Korea. It’s rare that I find myself agreeing at all with anyone from a place with a hippie pinko name like the “Hankyoreh Peace Institute:”
Kim Yeon-Chul, director of the independent Hankyoreh Peace Institute, said the ban on using foreign exchange was aimed at stabilising the value of the new won against overseas currencies. “In the end, all will depend on whether the North will be able to curb inflation, especially whether it can rein in rampant food prices through a stable supply of food rations,” he told AFP.
On that account, it’s already looking bleak. The North Korean regime appears to be buying up every bag of rice it can find across the Chinese border — to the point where it’s getting hard for the Chinese to buy any. If the regime (as opposed to food smugglers) is in fact behind this shopping spree, it’s a welcome development — it’s a rare case of the North Korean regime apparently spending foreign exchange money on food instead of goodies like centrifuges, Italian yachts, and Omega Watches. For the regime to shift its priorities in such an unprecedented way — even as the palace economy’s income from weapons sales is being pinched — suggests just how dangerous the men in the palace think the situation on the streets must be.
(Interestingly, Open Radio is claiming that possible successor Kim Jong Eun is being set up as the fall guy architect of this Great Confiscation.)
Yet unless the regime has enough foreign exchange to meet the caloric needs of the people in-kind, the value of new currency will collapse, the state’s wages will become worthless, and discontent will rise again in the spring. And this time, it won’t just be the proles in the countryside who will be discontented. Yet thus far, the regime’s preferred strategy has been to hand out stacks of the new currency while continuing to crack down on markets. This means more cash that’s less trusted than ever is chasing less food than ever, which fuels hyperinflation and disincentives farmers and food smugglers from selling food to markets where people can buy it.
Yet another source of uncertainty here is the regime’s historic tendency to turn a blind eye, eventually, toward enforcing diktats that the majority of people violate of necessity. It may well be that a year from now, the yuan will be North Korea’s de facto currency for large transactions. The Daily NK seems to agree:
The reason for this measure is that there is no confidence in the North Korean currency, so the public preference is for foreign currency holdings, which the authorities cannot regulate easily. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that people will willingly pay their own foreign currency to the state, irrespective of this requirement, while it is likely to end up stoking inflation. The source explained, “For the time being it will be difficult to use foreign currency, but after a while, it may be possible to use it again. Since faith in our money has already dropped, no matter how hard the authorities regulate it, demand for foreign currency will increase.”
For each year since 1994, North Korea’s economy has been slipping progressively out of the regime’s control. So far, the regime has managed to hold onto its control through a combination of arbitrary terror and mutual isolation. Each year, a few more straws are added to the camel’s burden. I believe that popular disgust with the regime is both deep and wide, to a much greater extent than it was in the past, even if that disgust is still unfocused. The big unknown is how many more straws the camel’s back can hold.
North Korea Loots KEDO Site (Updated)
North Korea has been stealing trucks, cranes and other equipment from the site of a nuclear power plant where an American-led consortium stopped construction four years ago in a dispute over the North’s nuclear weapons development, the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo reported Wednesday. [N.Y. Times]
It gets better:
“There is even suspicion that the North Koreans used the equipment when they conducted a nuclear test in October 2006 and in May,” the paper quoted a source as saying.
North Korea may have used some of the more than 200 pieces of heavy equipment taken from the site in the country’s northeast to stage a nuclear test in May, South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper said, quoting government officials.
“The removal of equipment without taking steps to settle financial issues is a clear violation of the agreement and can be construed as theft,” one official was quoted as saying. [….]
Equipment left behind at the site is valued at 45.5 billion won ($39 million), including cranes and bulldozers and nearly 200 trucks and other vehicles, the JoongAng Ilbo said. [Reuters, Jack Kim]
It’s really hard for me to work up too much outrage over this. Rather, it seems like a case of our own gullibility leading to predictable results. I wonder how much of KEDO’s equipment and materiel was shipped in after we already knew that the North Koreans were cheating on Agreed Framework I.
As a practical matter, KEDO was a dead letter by 2002, when President Bush called the North Koreans on their cheating. In 2004, the North Koreans “nationalized” most of the construction equipment at the site. In 2005, the Bush Administration terminated the contract of KEDO’s executive director, Charles Kartman (no relation to Eric). Then, in 2007, KEDO presented the North Koreans with a bill for $1.9 billion, which the North Koreans don’t seem to have even bothered to laugh off.
You can peruse some of the stacks of materials left behind in these satellite images, taken on March 19, 2004. Click for full size:
Update:
According to the Unification Ministry and other sources, North Korea has taken 190 vehicles from the site in Kumho, South Hamgyong Province, and 93 pieces of heavy equipment, including cranes and excavators, and is likely using them for military purposes. [….]
In December 2005, North Korea asked KEDO workers to leave the country and said they would not be allowed to repatriate equipment and construction materials.
At the time, KEDO and North Korea had agreed to leave materials at the site. Most belonged to South Korean subcontractors, and they had planned to sell off some of it to make up for financial losses stemming from the halted work.
In 2003, after the KEDO first suspended construction, the North said it would not allow the transfer of equipment unless it received compensation. A government official here said, “The North moved the equipment before we could even address the compensation issue, and that’s clearly in violation of our agreement. It can even be regarded as stealing.”
In January 2006, the Roh Moo-hyun administration in Seoul said the North had pledged to store the materials and that it expected the North to honor its word. Despite suspicions that the North had used some of the equipment in preparation for their second nuclear test this year, the current Lee Myung-bak administration has also remained silent.
But intelligence sources tell a different story.
They said the North started using equipment almost immediately after KEDO’s withdrawal and that the North Korean military was involved.
“North Korea is trying to keep South Koreans or KEDO officials from going near the construction base,” one source said. “Recent satellite photos of the site show that hundreds of the black covers that were used to conceal materials are mostly gone.”
Sources estimate equipment and materials are worth about 46 billion won ($39 million). South Korea, one of the founding members of the KEDO, spent $1.1 billion on the construction project. [Joongang Ilbo]
Iran’s History May Be Decided This Friday
I continue to be astonished by the numbers, persistence, and courage of the Iranian people in coming out into the streets to protest the corrupt theocracy, even as that theocracy lowers itself to new depths of brutality to suppress their hopes. The other day, I framed the question that is key to Iran’s fate this way: “I wonder if the security forces can maintain their cohesion as long as the protesters can maintain their courage.” The stakes are rising. There is much evidence that the regime is prepared to escalate the use of deadly force against the people — watch the videos here of police intentionally running over demonstrators with trucks, and firing warning shots. The regime’s worst thugs are hinting of even darker things to come, of a Tienanmen in Tehran:
“In dealing with previous protests, police showed leniency. But given that these opponents are seeking to topple (the ruling system), there will be no mercy,” Moghaddam said, according to the official news agency IRNA. “We will take severe action. The era of tolerance is over. Anyone attending such rallies will be crushed.” [AP, Ali Akbar Dareini]
They mean this literally. The Revolutionary Guards and Basij Militia have recently taken to bashing protestors over the head with nightsticks, sending scores of them to the hospital with serious injuries.
The Tienanmen massacre worked because of the mendacity of the term “Peoples’ Army;” when called upon, the Chinese Army was willing to murder its people by the thousands to protect an oligarchy from the peoples’ will. The same may not be true of Iran. For the first time, there are signs that some elements of the security forces are losing their will to take part in this:
In the middle of a loud, violent brawl in Tehran, Iran, anti-government protesters manage to corner a handful of riot police who were sent to combat them. As the crowd pushes the police against a wall — with screams coming from all directions — a protester points his finger at them. “Why are you doing this?” he yells.
One of the police — the only one whose helmet is off, his face apparently bloody — responds. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” The other police stand still, trapped by the crowd’s grasp. Then the protester says something else, in one of the most telling signs of the historic anti-government rebellion sweeping through the streets of Iran. He demands that the police call Ayatollah Khamenei — the supreme leader of the nation’s hardline Islamic government — a “bastard.” [CNN]
In some parts of Tehran, protesters pushed the police back, hurling rocks and capturing several police cars and motorcycles, which they set on fire. Videos posted to the Internet showed scenes of mayhem, with trash bins burning and groups of protesters attacking Basij militia volunteers amid a din of screams.
One video showed a group of protesters setting an entire police station aflame in Tehran. Another showed people carrying off the body of a protester, chanting, “I’ll kill, I’ll kill the one who killed my brother.”
By late afternoon, coils of black smoke rose over central Tehran from dozens of street fires, and smaller groups of protesters continued to skirmish with police and Basij militia members. In the evening, loudspeakers in Imam Hussein Square, where most of the clashes took place, announced that gatherings of more than three people were banned, witnesses said.
There were scattered reports of police officers surrendering, or refusing to fight. Several videos posted online show officers holding up their helmets and walking away from the melee, as protesters pat them on the back in appreciation. In one photograph, a police officer can be seen holding his arms up and wearing a bright green headband, the signature color of the opposition movement. [N.Y. Times]
Some of the shift of momentum away from the regime arises from a combination of luck and missteps by the regime. The death of 87 year-old ex-Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri is what revived the recent protests. The mourning for Montazeri, once designated as a successor to Ayatollah Khomeini and an opponent of the current regime, came just before the Shiite holiday of Ashura. The always insightful Michael Totten explains the religious significance of the regime’s decision to launch a violent crackdown on this, of all days.
For that reason, the old tricks that worked before aren’t working now — arresting or limiting the movement of opposition leaders, or accusing western nations of stirring the protests. And in a sign that the White House perceives that the momentum has shifted, President Obama has moved further than ever in the direction of supporting the protest movement:
Speaking in Hawaii, Mr. Obama for the first time publicly demanded Iran’s release of “unjustly” detained political opponents. He joined with European leaders in calling for Iran’s leaders to abide by international conventions on the treatment of political activists.
The Iranian people wish for “justice and a better life for themselves,” Mr. Obama said, adding that “the decision of Iran’s leaders to govern through fear and tyranny will not succeed in making those aspirations go away.” [WSJ]
Protesters have been met “with the iron first of brutality,” Obama said yesterday in Hawaii, where he is vacationing with his family. “The United States stands with those who seek their universal rights.” [Bloomberg]
Below the fold, I give you an extended quote from Robin Wright, a long-time observer of Iran of whom I’m not necessarily fond. Wright has long advocated a soft-line policy toward Iran that accommodates the theocracy. But this very view gives more credibility to Wright’s suggestion that the opposition is now likely to prevail. Imagine Jack Pritchard or Mike Chinoy predicting regime change in North Korea and you get the idea.
Review: Nothing to Envy — Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick
December 30, 2009: I’ve been looking forward to this one. It arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon, and I’ll be nibbling away at this a few pages at a time during my commutes, posting short updates as I hit interesting passages (this way, I don’t labor under the guilt of having written nothing about it for weeks if work or family obligations prevent me from finishing it).
Having flipped through a few pages, I see a work that sits on the divide between fiction and non-fiction, and which advances steadily in the latter direction. There are some chapters that are largely non-fiction for background, while others are fictionalized accounts of the lives of North Korean refugees, presumably people Demick met and interviewed during her years living in Seoul while reporting for the Los Angeles Times. In that capacity, Ms. Demick was one of those rare reporters who made a serious effort to write about North Korea from the perspective of its people and to chronicle the tragedies they endured, or couldn’t. For this reason, I’ve felt a particular obligation to defend her from allegations by conservative bloggers (based on their misreading of this article) that she had minimized the very suffering she’s done so much good work to inform us about.
Safe to say, I yield to no one in my condemnation of the North Korean regime (I advocate its violent overthrow, after all). And while I share many elements of the hard-line perspective of some of Demick’s critics, I’d note that more than a few of them lost all interest this subject when George W. Bush sold out the North Korean people for a diplomatic house of cards called “Agreed Framework II.”
The criticism is partially understandable in one sense. For years, there was far too little coverage of North Korea as a human rights story, and a willful blindness by many reporters to the diplomatic implications of North Korea’s obsession with secrecy and complete disregard for human life. Most of the reporting on North Korea still tends to focus on the quixotic pursuit of diplomatic windmills by men whose gifts of linguistic manipulation suggest that they ought to have known better. This sets some readers on edge and causes them to seek out — and sometimes find — biases, even when they aren’t there. I agree with the sweeping generalization that most reporters skew left, but there certainly are better objects for such criticism than Demick. It is also true that the arrival of better reporters — and the absence of any realistic prospect for a negotiated disarmament of North Korea — means that on balance, the worst reporters are losing interest in this story and the coverage is getting better.
Many thanks to Ms. Demick and Random House for sending a review copy. Click the image if you want to buy your own.
Update: Here’s a very interesting review by Scott Martelle, who has actually finished the book.
January 7, 2010: I am now about one-third of the way through “Nothing to Envy,” having only a few minutes a day to read it, but I and can safely pronounce it essential reading for anyone who wants to understand North Korea. It is one of the most gripping, inspiring, insightful things I’ve read in decades, and a very difficult book to put down.
Let me correct one misstatement I made above: the only fiction in “Nothing to Envy” is in the pseudonyms of the real people it describes. Demick’s subjects all lived in and around Chongjin beginning in the years immediately before the Great Famine. She tells their stories in a prose as raw and unadorned as their own spartan lives, interweaving it in places with Demick’s own narration of the contemporary history for background. Otherwise, Demick makes herself an unobtrusive presence in the book and becomes a vehicle for her subjects to tell their own stories.
I did not understand, until I began to read this book, the extent to which I had needed “Nothing to Envy” to give context, believability, and life to the supernatural things we’ve all read about North Korea, or to the works of the best scholars who’ve studied it. Jasper Becker’s “Rogue Regime,” one of the very best books about North Korea, was certainly a necessary correction to the distortions of Bruce Cumings, but it had the disadvantage of focusing on North Korea’s most bizarre, other-worldly aspects. Your conscious mind and the other facts you knew might persuade you that it was at least mostly true on a rational level, but it could not possibly seem real.” The Great North Korean Famine” explained how the regime’s reckless and ruthless decisions killed 2.5 million North Koreans — a disproportionate number of them in Chongjin — but I did not really understand how those victims died until I read “Nothing to Envy.” Noland and Haggard’s “Famine in North Korea” explained the mechanics of how North Korea’s planned economy faded away and markets replaced it; “Nothing to Envy” showed me what the Public Distribution System and the markets really looked like as one supplanted the other. Andrei Lankov’s “North of the DMZ” answered questions about dozens of my curiosities and taught me many facts I did not even suspect could be true; “Nothing to Envy” makes those oddities seem understandable and believable. Brian Myers explains the pathology of the state’s propaganda — I understand that Myers is about to publish his own book — but “Nothing to Envy” will give you a nuanced understanding of the faith, doubts, and reservations that secretly divide husbands from wives, mothers from daughters. The closest comparison may be Bradley Martin’s exhaustive, scholarly “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader,” and while Martin’s thick volume is filled with valuable points of data that focus more on higher-level defectors, “Nothing to Envy” is a vivid portrait of life in three dimensions of the people in the real North Korea, far from the potemkin utopia of Pyongyang.
It is that third dimension that makes “Nothing to Envy” must-reading, and what will give life, context, and understanding to everything else you’ve learned about North Korea. The greatest contribution of “Nothing to Envy” is that it will allow you to believe the unbelievable truth.
Update, 8 Jan 2010: Two more reviews, here and here. Click that second link and you’ll see some comments from our friend Aliou Niane.
9 January 2010e: Well, I couldn’t put it down last night, and ended up reading until 2 a.m. I ended up finishing the book this morning, unable to stand not knowing what happened to the people whose stories Demick told, especially the two characters whose love story was at the center of the book. Some of you will weep, and others will come closer to weeping than you’ll want to admit later. But even completely unsentimental readers will see most of what they know about North Korea sewn together by the time this book ends, and most likely, they’ll have learned much more. I probably put at least a dozen bookmarks in my copy of “Nothing to Envy,” noting passages I’ll want to index so that I can refer to them later as source material about such topics as the advent of songbun system, the absolute blackness of North Korea at night, the diversion of food aid, and the different ways people reacted to Kim Il Sung’s death (some wept with sincere grief, some faked it, and one said, “Now we’re really fucked.”).
For this, but especially for the human context Demick gives to the story of the North Korean people before, during, and since the “Arduous March,” Demick has written the single best book about North Korea I’ve read yet. That’s not to take anything away from the other excellent books out there, but this one makes sense of all the rest of them. If you don’t read a single book about North Korea, read this one. I’d gladly recommend Noland’s, Lankov’s, and Martin’s books to the readers of this site, but “Nothing to Envy” is the book I bought my mother.
Update 2, 9 Jan 2010: More reviews here and here, in the L.A. Times. The latter review contains some spoilers, so I’d steer clear of it for now, but it’s favorable. Curtis also points to a CBC podcast with Demick discussing her book (http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/dispatches_20100107_25412.mp3).
LiNK Needs Your Help to Rescue One Hundred North Korean Refugees
I’m always glad to post updates on LiNK fund-raisers; they’re one of the most dedicated, effective, smart-thinking activist groups working on North Korea issues. This season, they’re launching the One Hundred campaign:
Up to 300,000 North Koreans are hiding in the underground today. Most are looking for an opportunity to escape but cannot fund their own journey. This is where we can help. LiNK will start with the rescue of 100 refugees. To launch TheHundred program in 2010, our goal is to raise $50,000 by December 31st. But we can’t do this alone, and you don’t have to either. 500 people who give $100 each can collectively raise $50,000. See how you can raise $100 here, or give it all yourself here.
THIS HOLIDAY SEASON… GIVE $100 TO RESCUE 100.
Their goal is to raise $50,000 by the end of the year, and they’ve already raised almost $35,000, which will go far to help plenty of desperate people.
Don Kirk’s Korea Betrayed is changing the way I think about Kim Dae Jung
And unless you already believe that DJ was a closet commie, Korea Betrayed might change the way you think, too.
Kirk, whose research of his subject is extensive, describes in detail how in his early life, DJ flirted with a number of leftist political organizations and unions, some of which were also linked to North Korea, but none of those associations necessarily linked DJ to the North Koreans. After all, North Korean troops almost shot DJ in 1950, and only the Incheon landings saved DJ from the firing squad.
Later on, however, Kirk tells of DJ’s friendship, in much later years, with a man who was almost certainly a North Korean spy:
His old friend Jung Tae Muk had gone to North Korea on a North Korean vessel in 1965, five years after his release from jail for pro-Communist activities, had undergone some training and returned to promote the election of Yun [Po Sun] as well as DJ. Jung met DJ in Mokpo and offered election advice but spurned DJ’s request to assist in his campaign. [Page 29]
I’d like to know more about just what “promotion” Jung was willing to offer, but what “assistance” he wasn’t. But this is far from the most damning thing Kirk writes about Kim Dae Jung. In the next chapter, I found an astonishing passage that discusses the founding of DJ’s overseas political organization, Hanmintong, after his effective exile to Japan in 1972, citing a 2002 report in the conservative and anti-DJ Monthly Chosun:
Returning to Japan, he opened the Hanmintong office there with the financial and moral support of the pro-North residents’ federation…. Pro-Pyongyang elements joined Hanmintong with strong support from pro-North residents in Japan. Their priority, driven by Pyongyang, was socialist revolution. Through the pro-North federation DJ and members of the group received regular infusions of funds covering hotel, living, and trevaling expense, including those incurred in the United States. Those who provided DJ with the money “were all spies from North Korea,” the Monthly Chosun wrote of the investigation.
Wondering whether Kirk was indeed referring to North Korea’s notorious Japanese front organization Chongryon, a/k/a Chosen Soren, I e-mailed Kirk for confirmation, which he provided. Kirk goes on:
Kim Dae Jung claimed to have been receiving donations from relatives and in-laws, including members of his wife’s extended family, business people, and one anonymous donor who contacted him through a mutual friend, and he said he had a complete accounting of how the money was spent. Kim Dae Jung’s pro-North contacts had assured him at the opening of the Hanmintong in Tokyo’s sumptuous Keio Plaza Hotel on July 13, 1973, that “many wealthy people” would “be willing to support” the group.
The Hanmintong organizers were referred to as “Viet Cong factions,” although it’s not clear whether this was in jest, whether this was how they referred to themselves, or how others referred to them. These events immediately preceded the South Korean government’s kidnapping and attempted murder of DJ, thus elevating him from the fringe to a living martyr. And whatever you may say about DJ and his associations — knowing even this — DJ continued his political activities in the face of more persecution.
The association with Chosen Soren, however, ought to be a legacy-killer. The most charitable characterization of Chosen Soren is that it is a cross between an organized crime syndicate and cult. Chongryon used to funnel millions of dollars in remittances, drug money, and pachinko revenues to North Korea each year. It encouraged thousands of ethnic Koreans to emigrate to North Korea, where they were effectively robbed of their assets and put under exceptionally close surveillance by the regime. Japan tolerated this for years, but Chosen Soren’s suspected involvement in the kidnappings of Japanese citizens to train North Korean spies finally provoked the Japanese government to bring down the hammer and strip Chosen Soren of its tax-exempt status. But even all of this disregards Chosen Soren’s role in the financing the slavery of millions more, slavery that Kim Dae Jung conspicuously failed to denounce and did much to perpetuate with South Korean taxpayer funds, some of them transferred illegally.
Say what you will about DJ — the man repaid his debts.
Chosen Soren today is a pale shadow of what it was in the 1970’s and 1980’s when it played a major role in boosting Kim Dae Jung to the presidency of South Korea. But the idea that DJ allowed himself to accumulate a political and financial debt to such a repellent organization is a scandal — not just because DJ could be elected President in spite of this, but because those associations were mentioned in almost none of the reporting of Kim Dae Jung or his legacy.
I should note that I’m not even halfway through Kirk’s book yet, mostly because of competing demands on my time. By the way, if you live in the Washington, DC area, Kirk will appear at the Center for Strategic and International Studies to discuss his book on January 5th, at 2:00.
29 December 2009: South Korea Channels N. Korea Aid Through the U.N., Blackouts, and Chinese Colonialism
A WELCOME CHANGE: President Lee is giving $22 million to W.H.O. and UNICEF aid projects in North Korea so that at least a few more kids will outlive the Kim Dynasty. That is a vast improvement over how things used to be under Roh Moo Hyun, whose “Unification” Ministry used to give unmonitored cash and food aid directly to Kim Jong Il and his minions, with predictable results. This time, South Korea’s donations are flowing through the U.N., which at least attempts to give humanitarian aid in-kind and monitor its distribution, meaning there will still be some discrimination and diversion, but at least there will be less of it. I’m aware of North Korea’s past success at scamming the U.N., and of the imperfections in its monitoring, but it for South Korea to give its aid through the U.N. still represents a vast improvement in getting its humanitarian aid to those North Koreans who need it most.
NORTH KOREA’S ELECTRICITY SUPPLY is running even lower than usual, with long blackouts reported in a number of cities, including Sinuiju.
IS CHINA DELIBERATELY KEEPING NORTH KOREA POOR? Open Radio is understandably cryptic about its sources for this conclusion, and I’m understandably skeptical about them. On the one hand, it’s hard to see how China could do a better job of driving away foreign investment than the North Korean regime itself. On the other hand, China’s arrest of Yang Bin does lend support to the theory that China wants direct control over foreign investment in its North Korean “sphere of influence.”
Below the fold, ranting fulminations. Click if ye dare!
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North Korea Says It Has Robert Park (Updated; Another Statement by Park)
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a brief dispatch Tuesday that the American was detained and under investigation after illegally entering through the North Korea-China border last Thursday. [AP]
I suppose this comes as no surprise. The North Koreans don’t identify Robert Park by name, but I think we can assume it’s him.
You don’t have to agree with Park’s methods to pity him now. There are two theories here: one, that North Korea will want to use Park as a bargaining chip and will keep him in what passes for a gilded cage in North Korea. That was the theory I’d inclined to when I gave this interview, but Tim Peters — Tim is one of those rare people I consider a hero — added a point that chills me:
Tim Peters, an activist in Seoul who knows Mr Park, tried to persuade him against the plan, which he characterised as “reckless”. “I found out about Robert’s plan three days before he left for China,” he said in an interview. “By that time, however, he already turned off his cellphone and was not responding to e-mails any longer.
“I completely acknowledge that Robert Park’s heart was very much in the right place, which I have to make very clear. But I personally disagree whether that will necessarily be an effective way.”
With Mr Park in custody, observers said, North Korean authorities will want to extract any information he may have about missionaries in China and others who work underground helping North Korean refugees. “He knows activists in China and throughout north-east Asia,” Mr Peters said.
Clearly Robert Park is a man with his heart in the right place, but who has lost possession of his mind. As indefensibly foolish as his move was, I’m not sure he’s in a state to bear full mental responsibility for it. I don’t think anyone can deny that these are the actions of a troubled person, and that a man of equal devotion and greater judgment would have simply gone to work for the underground railroad, or gone into the business of smuggling in food, radios, bibles, or even guns — for what North Korea needs more than anything else is the capacity to do what people must “when government becomes destructive of these ends.” I fear for Robert Park as I feared for Laura Ling and Euna Lee, but as then, my greater fear now is what he’ll tell his captors.
And as always, Claudia Rosett’s take is worth reading, especially her kind words for this site.
Update, 29 Dec 09:
My co-blogger Dan Bielefeld has a little more about Robert Park’s activism before he crossed into North Korea. Park seems to have been the driving force behind this group, which was one of the groups that participated on this march to Seoul Station and organized some of the events at the station thereafter. I’m not going to relate all of the details now; Dan is busy with other things now but I want to give him the chance to tell the whole story himself when he concludes that other business.
When I look at the pictures of those demonstrations, I’m struck by how few Korean faces there are in those crowds, but also by the obvious sincerity of all those in attendance of all nationalities. Robert Park might have done a lot more good if he’d stayed in Seoul and helped launch balloons, or recruited a few cells of people to expand smuggling routes across the Chicom-North Korean border.
Update 2, 29 Dec 09:
A reader forwards another purported statement by Park. I don’t have reason to doubt it, but can’t confirm it. Read the rest of this entry »
28 December 2009: Another Nuke Test, Proliferation Updates, Hard Times for N. Korean Workers Abroad
BRING IT ON: There’s speculation that North Korea may test yet another nuke, to which I say, that’s one less it can sell.
MORE ON THE LOGISTICAL CHAIN behind the Bangkok weapons seizure, at the Wall Street Journal. Still no finality on the final destination for the weapons, however, though I’m sticking with my educated guess that it was Iran, in part because the shipment contained parts for long-range missiles.
IF YOU CAN’T TRUST A FELLOW MARXIST OLIGARCH, WHO CAN YOU TRUST? Here’s proof, if more were needed, that North Korea would sell weapons to anyone. According to this report, North Korea has been selling weapons to Congolese rebels — probably in addition to the government forces whose soldiers it had trained. I’m ambivalent about some of the Congolese rebels, who are ethnic Tutsis originally mobilized by Rwanda and Burundi to fight against the genocide of their people by the Hutus — a classic case of people taking up arms to stop a genocide that the U.N. wouldn’t. There aren’t any heroes in that terrible war, but the worst villains are the Mai-Mai militias the Tutsi rebels are fighting. The Congolese government, by the way, has the armed backing of the armies of Angola and North Korean ally Zimbabwe. The lesson? Not even Robert Mugabe can trust Kim Jong Il.
NORTH KOREAN WORKERS IN DUBAI are feeling the effects of its recession. As always, that “voluntary” wage withholding is an added burden.
MEANWHILE, IN RUSSIA, a group of North Korean loggers has defected. Those workers probably labor under worse conditions than most prisoners.
MORE ON THE SPREAD OF CELL PHONES in North Korea.
SF GATE REVIEWS BARBARA DEMICK’S “Nothing to Envy,” which I’ll soon get to read, thanks to Ms. Demick reaching out to me and offering me a review copy. I’ve been looking forward to this one (hat tip to a reader).
Iran Rises Again
I confess that I’d written off the Iranian protest movement for this year, but I was wrong: the movement actually appears to be spreading to new places and attracting support beyond its traditional base among the students.
Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the country’s pious heartland.
Demonstrations took place in Esfahan, a provincial capital and Iran’s cultural center, and nearby Najafabad, the birthplace and hometown of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose death Saturday triggered the latest round of confrontations between the opposition movement and the government.
The central region is considered by some as the conservative power base of the hard-liners in power.
Iranian authorities are clearly alarmed by the spread of the protests. Mojtaba Zolnour, a mid-ranking cleric serving as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the elite and powerful Revolutionary Guard, acknowledged widespread unrest around the country.
“There were many [acts of] sedition after the Islamic Revolution,” he said, according to the website of the right-wing newspaper Resala. “But none of them spread the seeds of doubt and hesitation among various social layers as much as the recent one.” [L.A. Times, Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi]
The regime’s latest move, the arrest of opposition activists, strikes me as the act of a regime in panic. It seems like something that would inflame, rather than suppress, protest.
Sunday’s violence erupted when security forces fired on stone-throwing protesters in the center of Tehran. Opposition Web sites and witnesses said five people were killed, but Iran’s state-run Press TV, quoting the Supreme National Security Council, said the death toll was eight. It gave no further details. The dead included a nephew of Mousavi, according to Mousavi’s Web site, Kaleme.ir. Police denied using firearms. [AP, Ali Akbar Dareini]
Every death means another political funeral for another political martyr.
When I watch events in Iran, I scour the usual news sources, of course, but I also watch Pejman Yousefzadah’s blog — Pejman is originally from Iran — and of course, some of the YouTube channels that show us what traditional media can’t anymore:
Crowds as large and as energetic as these suggest a movement that won’t be suppressed easily. I wonder if the security forces can maintain their cohesion as long as the protesters can maintain their courage.
The North Korean connection? Substantial, of course. Iran is probably the largest single customer of North Korean weapons, and the financier of what North Korea sells to Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other places. The fall of the Iranian regime would shatter the Axis of Evil. It would be a devastating blow to the North Korean regime’s finances and expose more North Korean proliferation efforts in Iran, where numerous North Korean scientists currently reside doing God-knows-what. It would open the way for a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear program, allowing a greater focus on containing North Korea. It would help to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would reinvigorate the advance of representative government in the Middle East. It would strip Hezbollah, Syria, and Iraqi Shiite militias of a source of weapons and funding, also shifting more of our diplomatic attention to North Korea.
Thirty Years Ago Today, Afghanistan’s Nightmare Began
Too many of us have forgotten the horrors that the Soviet Union wreaked on Afghanistan, as I write at The New Ledger, and it is a rare occurrence of historic justice that Afghanistan catalyzed the extinction of the Soviet Union itself.
Great Confiscation Updates
The Washington Post’s Blaine Harden writes today that popular discontent over the Great Confiscation isn’t going away:
It was an unexplained decision — the kind of command that for more than six decades has been obeyed without question in North Korea. But this time, in a highly unusual challenge to Kim’s near-absolute authority, the markets and the people who depend on them pushed back. Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. Exchange limits have been eased, allowing individuals to possess more cash.
The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim’s power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world’s most repressive state. The change is driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country’s 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them.
The currency episode seems far from over, and there have been indications that Kim still has the stomach for using deadly force. There have been public executions and reinforcements have been dispatched to the Chinese border to stop possible mass defections, according to reports in Seoul-based newspapers and aid groups with informants in the North.
Still, analysts say there has also been evidence of unexpected shifts in the limits of Kim’s authority. “The private markets have created a new power elite,” said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “They pay bribes to bureaucrats in Kim’s government, and they are a threat that is not going away.”
On balance, however, the signs I’ve seen are these: (a) the regime’s partial reversal of the confiscation has reduced public anger; (b) in the near term, the rage has given way to acceptance, and the odds of a broader wave of public protest are diminished in the short-term; however (c) the Pandora’s box of public dissent has opened, and will prove very difficult to close in the medium to long term. That’s especially so now that the people have forced the regime to change a major economic policy. Furthermore, the measures the regime is taking to appease the people in the short-term, such as cash payments to workers and farmers, may not be sustainable in the long term, particularly as a new bout of hyperinflation eats away at the value of the new currency and makes it impossible to save for leaner times. In North Korea, food supplies typically run shortest in the spring, after winter reserves run out and before the first harvests come in. Finally, the misery that the Great Confiscation has already caused will linger for years.
One positive aspect of this is that cash the regime spends on buying domestic stability can’t be spent on enriching high-ranking cadres, the military, and WMD development.
I don’t conceal my view that North Korea won’t change barring the overthrow of this regime, which can’t happen peacefully, and that expressions of discontent are signs that the North Korean people are prepared to support a clandestine opposition movement, should one arise. No such movement has arisen yet; such a movement still lacks a nationwide galvanizing ideology around which a clandestine organization can coalesce and build. But I suspect that if such an ideology were propagated to North Koreans via Radio Free North Korea or Open Radio, leaders would emerge locally to support it.