Posted by Joshua on October 31, 2010 at 9:43 am · Filed under Sanctions
Canada and Singapore have both imposed sanctions on North Korea:
Singapore Customs said in a statement Friday that exports or transit of any nuclear equipment or missile materials to North Korea will be banned as of Nov. 1. Trading with North Korea of luxury goods such as cigars, plasma televisions and motorboats also will be banned. It said items no longer traded to Iran will include low-enriched uranium and military hardware such as tanks, artillery and warships. [AP]
You know, I just have to wonder: does this mean that until now, Singapore Customs was waving shipments of low-enriched uranium right on through? In the case of Singapore, there are also new sanctions against Iran. That makes perfect sense, as Singapore is ideally located to be a transshipment point for cargo moving between Nampo and Bandar Abbas.
A Singapore Customs statement said the Southeast Asian city-state wouldn’t allow companies to trade in a host of military-related items with Tehran and Pyongyang, as part of its “continuous commitment to international obligations.” Singapore will also halt trade in perfumes, luxury cars, watches with precious metals, art and jewelry to North Korea, the statement read. [….]
Singapore’s announcement comes hours after Canada announced it was cutting ties with North Korea over the sinking of a South Korean ship earlier this year. Ottawa is also drafting additional sanctions against North Korea that would prohibit all imports and exports, new investments by Canadians, transfers of technology, and the provision of financial services to North Korea, Agence France-Presse reported. [Dow Jones Newswire]
In the case of Canada, the sanctions are also diplomatic.
[Canadian] Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon will reveal details of the sanctions, which come on top of controls unveiled earlier this year by Canada. There will be reduced trade and investment with North Korea, and Canada’s already fragile diplomatic relations with the country — there is no Canadian ambassador in the country — will be downgraded further. [Canada.com]
As I noted the other day, North Korea has announced its traditional million-ton food production shortfall for this year. True to form, its government has found a uniquely obnoxious way to address this that has nothing to do with increasing domestic food production or diverting foreign exchange toward the purchase of food:
North Korea demanded massive food aid from South Korea in return for concessions over a reunion programme for separated families, a Seoul official said.
The demand for 500,000 tonnes of rice and 300,000 tonnes of fertiliser was made when the two sides met in the North’s city of Kaesong to discuss reunions, media pool reports from Kaesong quoted the official as saying. [AFP]
Yes, I believe there isa word for this. At the other end of the hormonal spectrum, Ban Ki Moon pleads with us to think of the children:
The Secretary-General wrote that reports from inside the country indicate that North Koreans continue to suffer from chronic food security, high malnutrition and severe economic problems.
While serious concerns remain about political and civil rights in the insular nation, “I urge the international community not to constrain humanitarian aid on the basis of political and security concerns,” Ban wrote. [The Canadian Press]
You know, I’m long past believing that international food aid is ever going to make a damn bit of difference for North Korea’s children, for reasons that Ban unwittingly trips right over:
He also urged nations to “encourage improvements in the human rights situation” inside North Korea.
The Secretary-General said the North Korean government also had the responsibility “to take immediate steps to ensure the enjoyment of the right to food, water, sanitation and health, and to allocate greater budgetary resources to that end.”
“Such persistent problems as widespread food shortages, a health care system in decline, lack of access to safe drinking water and deterioration in the quality of education are seriously hampering the fulfilment of basic human rights,” Ban wrote.
Ban said broad restrictions on civil and political rights, such as freedom of thought, religion, and expression continue to be imposed by the North Korean government on its citizens. “The government’s control over the flow of information is strict and pervasive,” his report said.
But with North Korea, there are always fresh reminders of why there is donor fatigue. Coincident with its demand that other nations feed its people, North Korea is on a palace-building spree. There is so much theft, corruption, and diversion, and so little monitoring and accountability, that markets have become a more efficient and equitable way of feeding the North Korean people, as opposed to the few who keep everyone else hungry and ignorant. Which is why I appreciate that Josette Sheeran is at least expressing the problem accurately:
The World Food Programme estimates North Korea has one million metric tons of food less than it needs to feed its population this year.
Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the Rome-based UN food agency, told reporters in Japan on Tuesday that she will travel to the North to urge Pyongyang to provide enough food and nutrition for its hunger-stricken people.
Adding that up to 50-percent of children in North Korea are malnourished, she said that the WFP will provide food to some 600,000 young children and pregnant women there. [Chosun Ilbo]
I look forward to Ban Ki-Moon joining the call for food aid donations … from Kim Jong Il.
“Two shots were fired from a North Korean military guard post (GP) toward our GP around 5:26 p.m., and we immediately returned fire with three shots as under the rules of engagement,” the official said. “There was no damage from the North Korean shots.”
The GPs are 1.3 kilometers away from each other. The official said after returning fire, South Korea twice issued warnings that the North had breached the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War. [Yonhap]
Right. Because they wouldn’t have known that otherwise.
“It hasn’t been confirmed whether the North Korean military took an aimed shot,” the official said. “The United Nations Command (UNC) will send a special investigation team to determine whether North Korea had violated terms of the armistice.”
It doesn’t look like there were any casualties, at least on the southern side. The South Koreans forces have gone on alert, just in time to ruin a lot of weekend leaves (sorry, guys). The North Koreans, no doubt, are already at the range for extra marksmanship training. Not that most North Korean soldiers tend to have big weekend plans anyway, given that their main off-post entertainment option is pillaging nearby farms. And hopefully stealing enough corn to trade for some meth.
Oh, wait — that’s not it. It was North Korea that actually leased two islands to China to build (what else?) casinos. Yes, casinos. File that one under “stuff Chinese people like.” It might also go under “stuff that North Korean money launderers like.”
The difference being, the islands of Hwan Geum Pyong and Ui Hwa Do actually consist of arable farmland. Not that North has any shortage of that, of course.
I eagerly await the Hankyoreh’s reaction and the impact on North Korea’s impeccable nationalist credentials.
Correction: The Global Times, a not-all-that-well-loved ChiCom broadsheet, citing the Hankook Ilbo, says the islands will be the site of a “free trade zone.” Hat tip, Chris.
Posted by Joshua on October 27, 2010 at 7:38 am · Filed under Resistance
Open News is reporting that discontent with the “feudal” succession of Kim Jong-Eun is so great that people are even expressing their dissent publicly, with the presumed exceptions of the anjeonbu and bowibu. These agencies are now so concerned about the spread of dissent that they’re adopting an unusual method to reveal the heretics:
“After the meeting of party representatives, public sentiment of North Korean citizens is low. The National Security Agency and party institutions have even ordered companies, village offices and the People’s Committee to hold public-opinion polls in order to capture impure elements and to find out citizens’ tendencies towards the succession,” delivered the source from Jagang-do frontier, North Korea, on October 4th. [Open News]
Yes, I know, we can’t verify any of this, but we’ve seen plenty of other reports of similar substance now.
Posted by Joshua on October 22, 2010 at 6:59 am · Filed under Anju Links
The admiral in charge of Pacific Command calls on North Korea not to test another nuke. Personally, I hope the North Koreans test one. It’s one less they can use in an actual weapon, and it’s great for my traffic. Bonus points if the test a uranium bomb, since that will make plenty of the right people look really stupid.
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Selig Harrison call your office: Reuters has published a devastating chronology of all of the retrograde, statist, anti-reform confiscations and despotisms that coincided with the rise of “reformer” Jang Song-Taek’s rise to Vice-Chairman of the National Defense Commission. The source is the Peterson Institute, the home of Marcus Noland.
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“North Korea’s autumn harvest officially began on September 20th. As a result, North Korean cooperative farms are in the midst of the annual war with food thieves. Among the rice paddies and farms owned by the North Korean state and private civilian farmers, one can see not only workers busily gathering the crops manually in the absence of agricultural machinery, but also guards charged with protecting the harvest from thieves.” [Daily NK]
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Ban Ki Moon says that North Korea is — amazingly — headed for yet another food crisis and decries cuts in international aid, but again fails to call on Kim Jong Il to kick in anything from the funds he has allocated for parades and shiny new missiles.
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“But if I’m simply applying the weirdness filter, then nothing I’ve seen anywhere I’ve ever been - I mean nothing - compares to what I saw in and around Kim Il Sung square last week.” [Jim Axelrod, CBS News; hat tip to Theresa D]
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Mere days after the Reaper beat them to it, a third North Korean agent has been arrested for trying to assassinate Hwang Jang Yop.
The man accused of seeking to kill Mr Hwang, Ri Dong-sam, was described as an agent with North Korea’s premier intelligence organisation, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, who had begun five years of espionage training in 1998. [The Age]
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, to reward it for its complete, verifiable, irreversible nuclear disarmament, and President Obama has seen absolutely no reason whatsoever to revisit that decision.
Nothing to Envy? Kids from North Korea’s ruling class are so desirous of the lifestyle they see in South Korean soap operas that they’ve been imitating South Korean accents.
“Farmers who read the material laughed at it, saying if it was true Kim Jong-un could solve the North’s food shortage simply by stepping on all the farms in the country, so all they’d have to worry about is how to dispose of the excess amount of food next year,” the source said.
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The good news: A new poll finds that most South Koreans believe that North Korea really did sink the Cheonan. The bad news: the minority that doesn’t may well be comparable to the percentage of Chinese who think Lee Myung Bak did it. What is reported about the methodology and sampling of both polls leaves plenty of room for skepticism, so I’ll withhold judgment on the governability of South Korea for a while longer.
Posted by Joshua on October 20, 2010 at 6:13 am · Filed under Anju Links
Why does Marxist criticism seem to apply so much better to North Korea than to, you know, capitalist societies? To the Gypsy Scholar’s observation, I’d like to add this example: Wovon Lebt Der Mensch. It plays during the opening credits of The Threepenny Opera, a blunt instrument of 1920’s German Communist propaganda whose Brecht-Weill score still contained some good gritty, gripping songs that have outlasted the film.
It is next to impossible for ordinary North Koreans to get close to military installations, the gulag or Kim Jong Eun. So the reporters have decided to focus on day-to-day life in North Korea, especially starvation, the growing market economy and corruption. They have produced more than 100 hours of video on these subjects. Among the tapes I viewed were ones that showed bags of rice labeled “WFP”—for the United Nations World Food Program—being sold in a marketplace, and soldiers using a military truck as a bus service for paying customers.
I hope this means we’ll hear and see more from them soon.
Hmmm. “South Korea’s military plans to construct refugee camps should internal turmoil in North Korea result in a massive influx of North Koreans here, a lawmaker revealed Tuesday.”
For someone who judged the evidence of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program so skeptically, Selig Harrison sure doesn’t set a very high bar to perceive evidence of “reform” in North Korea. But Harrison’s latest op-ed in the Boston Globe is in equal parts breathless and baseless, and might just extend his dismal predictive record into the next decade. In his desperation to find some sign that North Korea’s new Inner Party is a hothouse of reforms, Harrison pounds the square peg of deiocratic totalitarianism into the round hole of post-Brezhnev perestroika. In doing so, he selectively disregards layers of nepotism, brutal statism, and octogenarian homogeneity, and seizes on points that are open to interpretation at best, and quite possibly inventions at worst.
Harrison first tries to base his hopes on the elevation of Kang Sok Ju to Deputy Prime Minister. Harrison credits Kang as the “architect” of the 1994 Agreed Framework (Robert Gallucci was not available for comment). But whatever Kang’s role in the AF 1.0 was, this is a dubious basis for optimism. The agreement was a spectacular failure at checking North Korea’s nuclear ambitions — North Korea was probably cheating from almost the moment it signed AF 1.0 — but AF 1.0 won North Korea valuable time, aid, and diplomatic concessions. All the while, North Korea’s domestic propaganda machine harrumphed that it had cheated and bullied the Yankees into recognizing it as a nuclear power. Today, North Korea is back to admitting that it’s enriching uranium, the Obama Administration has long since acknowledged it, and even David Albright warns that North Korea’s uranium enrichment program has “progressed at a rapid pace and reached a very alarming level.” In the intervening years, of course, North Korea has reneged on a whole new Agreed Framework.
Harrison also claims, again, without any of the detail that a skeptical reader might demand, that Jang Song Thaek was once purged for leading what Harrison characterizes as a “reformist” youth league in North Korea. Of course, it’s impossible to confirm that Jang was ever purged at all, although this is the majority view among practitioners of this black art. I can’t really say that Jang wasn’t purged for reformist tendencies any more than Harrison can say he was, but Harrison’s theory is a novel one among North Korea watchers. According to Michael Madden of North Korea Leadership watch, Jang was purged for an excess of ambition during North Korea’s palace intrigues:
One account has Mr. Jang facing a formal charge for factionalization, which is to say that his influence (power base) among KWP cadres threatened to eclipse Kim Jong il’s influence, thus undermining the power of the Suryong. In this account, Mr. Jang is alleged to have disputed Kim Jong il’s dying wife, Ko Yong Hee, over matters of succession with Ms. Ko favoring one of her sons (with the support of OGD Vice Directors Ri Jeh Gang and Ri Ja Il) to succeed General Kim, and Mr. Jang supporting Kim Jong Nam. There is also a story, which seems highly unlikely, that Mr. Jang’s wife Kim Kyong Hui was disowned by her brother, and the possible target of an assassination-by-auto-accident. In the second account of Mr. Jang’s sabbatical, Mr. Jang was found to be residing in a newly constructed palatial home (on par with those of the Suryongs), and that he was removed from office because the grandiosity of the house made him appear to have equal standing with General Kim. Under either scenario, Mr. Jang seems to have been punished for the North Korean version of the sin of pride.
The Washington Post’s Chico Harlan also notes the prevailing speculation, that Jang’s temporary disappearance was a function of his ambition. But whatever the reason, a less selective examination of Jang’s history suggests that he is no more a reformer than Heinrich Himmler or Lavrenti Beria:
For the bulk of his career, Jang was the head of North Korea’s internal security — a de facto enforcer. As senior deputy director for the Organization and Guidance Department, he oversaw not just public safety but also surveillance. He sentenced top-ranking officials to prison camps, experts said. [Chico Harlan, Washington Post]
The same positions would also have given him oversight over North Korea’s political prison camps, and under Jang, the capacity and ferocity of the camps expanded greatly at the county and local levels as the system became a means for anjeonbu and bowibu officers to shake down anyone with something to extort.
If Harrison means to cabin his optimism only with respect to economic reform, the evidence is equally unpersuasive. First, no one in the leadership of the North Korean regime deserves credit for the marketization of the North Korean economy. As Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard have explained in exhaustive detail, marketization came from below as people developed their own strategies to survive the Great Famine. The regime simply found it impossible to enforce rules against trading in those times, and the people have been dependent on the markets ever since. The regime’s most determined effort to reverse marketization came in 2009, as Jang approached the peak of his influence and was frequently mentioned as the second- or third-most most powerful man in North Korea. That year, the regime systematically shut down markets, banned many foreign goods, and eventually launched the Great Confiscation, a retrograde measure that caused immense hardship for the North Korean people. If this is what passes for reformist in Harrison’s eyes, I’d like to know what good he thinks will ever come of it.
Why does so much of the American reporting from North Korea make me wince? Because so often, the reporters are content to describe the facade without a peek behind the curtain. Take the case of CNN’s Alina Cho, who, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, tells the Huffington Post how ebullient, well-fed, and prosperous Pyongyang is now that Kim Jong-Eun is ascending daddy’s throne:
Even with these constraints, Cho said she noticed seemingly small changes during her four days in Pyongyang that, to her, felt like dramatic ones in comparison to her 2008 trip. For one thing, there were traffic lights on the streets. Two years ago, female traffic attendants had managed what cars there were on the roads.
More shocking than that, though, were the number of people she saw talking on cell phones.
“It simply was jaw-dropping to see this,” she said, though she stressed that people were only allowed to make domestic calls.
Cho also visited an amusement park that opened recently, and was further surprised to see regular North Koreans on rides, eating hot dogs and french fries and enjoying themselves. She said it reminded her that complexities are present in any country, even one as maligned as North Korea.
“We talk so much about [this being a] sad society, and in many ways it is,” she said. “But what struck me was the laughter that I saw and the dancing in the streets that I saw. I don’t think you can fake the smiles.”
Cho certainly seems to have gotten into the spirit: “I can’t explain to you what it was like as a journalist to actually see [Kim Jong-Il] in person.” Was Cho really that awestruck by the fat kid kid new dictator of the starving nation, or is she as easily impressed by fat kids in P.C. bangs in Seoul? Or is there some other reason that makes her want to portray North Korea favorably?
“These are people who look somewhat like me… [and yet] they can’t leave the country,” she said. “But the heartening part was that I saw a lot of laughter and happiness. I saw families enjoying themselves and I really thought to myself that what these North Korean families want for their children is what I want for my friends and family. We all want the same things.”
Meanwhile, the Economist’s correspondent appears to have visited another city called “Pyongyang” in an alternative universe:
After the troops, tanks and missiles had thundered past, the audience waved and cheered with seeming enthusiasm when Kim Jong Il waved at them from the balcony. But at the fireworks and dancing display that evening at the same venue—Kim Il Sung Square—the response was less rousing. A few of the thousands of performers wept (as had a couple of female paratroopers as they passed the balcony during the earlier parade). But little fervour was otherwise in evidence.
Some of these are simply subjective observations that we’re left to consider for what they’re worth. Others, however, are simply different selections of facts being reported to us:
There is no sign of the “radical improvement” in North Korean living standards that officials once talked of achieving this year. Neon lights blazed in a few places during the journalists’ visit, but foreign residents say that the city is normally dark at night. Power is so intermittent that policewomen (invariably young and pretty) still direct traffic at intersections with traffic lights, which are a very recent innovation in Pyongyang.
An unsupervised visit to a department store (a rare treat for normally chaperoned foreign journalists) revealed Pyongyang’s dearth of consumer culture. In half an hour, your correspondent saw only a trickle of customers and just four items being sold: a pencil, a wind-up plastic frog, a quilt and a golden statuette of a soldier. On the fourth floor a member of staff adjusted a red curtain at a marble shrine to Kim Il Sung. Others watched television, amid swathes of unused floor space.
At a nearby shop, several people milled around a counter selling DVDs—a hint that DVD players are becoming household items. Foreign residents say DVDs from South Korea are helping to spread knowledge of the South’s far greater affluence. Several people also sported mobile telephones. Pyongyang is said to have gained some 200,000 subscribers since the mobile service was introduced a couple of years ago. Most are permitted only to call other North Koreans, not people abroad or even foreign residents.
The city seems to have largely recovered from last November’s revaluation of the won, which permitted only limited amounts of old bills to be exchanged for new ones. From January until mid-February, when the authorities relented and re-allowed transactions in hard currency, commerce almost ground to a halt. It became nearly impossible to buy food except at great expense on the black market. Inflation soared. “When in Rome, do as the Romanians do,” one official assigned to mind foreign journalists kept telling them, oddly. The Kims, mindful of the grisly end of Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, will try to ensure that disgruntled North Koreans do no such thing.
Hat tip to James. I can’t help wondering if that guide’s malapropism was intentional. I dread to think that somewhere in Pyongyang, he’s probably explaining it to Bowibu.
Media navel-gazers have become fond of decrying “the corporate media that bought and sold the case for war in Iraq” — you’ve heard that one a dozen times in the last month alone, right? Oddly, I have noted none of the same pangs of conscience about some reporters willfully selling us the North Korean government’s fake reform, fake happiness, or fake prosperity, or soft-pedaling its selective famine and outright mass murder. I see little compunction or skepticism when they print and quote propagandists like Selig Harrison, notwithstanding the fact that Selig Harrison has an almost perfect record of getting North Korea wrong. Ah, but those lies serve the cause of peace. You don’t hate peace, do you?
Related, perhaps: I’ve linked Kernbeisser’s photoblog before, but his latest additions (hat tip to Jason Bastrop) are a must-see. After the sensory deprivation of Pyongyang, a stray image of Seoul nearly damaged my retinas, and I loved the old pictures of Harbin as well, especially the old churches and synagogues. While stationed in Japan many years before he met my mother, my father dated a stunning half-Russian, half-Chinese girl from Harbin and had told me about the large Russian emigre population there. I can’t help wondering what happened to them after Stalin’s tanks rushed in during the closing days of World War II.
While most of the media are fixed on the movement of stage props on reviewing stands in Pyongyang, mine remains in North Korea’s outer provinces, markets, and ratlines across the Yalu. These, after all, are the things that will drive real change in North Korea. A new report from the Korea Times suggests that increasingly, money smuggling has become an engine of regeneration for North Korea’s free markets:
It is common for North Korean defectors here to send money to their poverty-stricken family remaining in the communist regime. The widespread, but little-known practice should be legalized, a civic group and a lawmaker of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) said Monday.
“Of some 20,000 North Koreans who have defected to South Korea, nearly all of the economically-active ones send money home,” Shin Mi-nyeo, head of the Organization for One Korea (TOOK), told The Korea Times. TOOK is a civic group dedicated to supporting new defectors since 1988. She claimed that many of those with even little income, such as elderly women, also regularly send money to their family and relatives that they left behind in the North, even if they have to borrow money from others.
“They can’t help but send money home as they know how bad the economic situation is there and the sufferings the ones they left have to go through,” Shin said.
Shockingly, I agree with Democratic Party lawmaker Won Hye-Young, who wants to legalize this practice, but the agreement ends at that basic point. Predictably for a party that acts more like a North Korean front each year, Won wants to do this in a way that will ensure that 100% of the proceeds are diverted from the defectors’ starving families and into Kim Jong Eun’s ChocoPie fund:
“The United Nations and other international bodies should address the issue and help North Korean defectors remit money to their family in the North through legal channels,” Won said.
How typical. Won really means to send the money through official North Korean channels, along the lines of the remittances from Japanese-Koreans via Chosen Soren. But this would guarantee that the intended recipients would never see won one. What the regime didn’t confiscate out of greed, it would confiscate out of spite. The returned Japanese-Koreans who received remittances from Japan have been objects of envy and suspicion, to be sure, but to the North Korean deiocracy, defectors to South Korea are capital criminals and their families are accessories to heresy. The last thing it’s going to do is send them money and incentivize more defections. The delivery of money though smugglers may be exploitive, but it doesn’t raise those concerns to nearly the same extent. If money smugglers demand a 30-50% cut — understandable given the obvious risks they’re taking — that’s still 50-70% better than what the families would get through “legal channels.” And over time, as defectors learn which smugglers they can trust, the market will reduce those transaction costs and risks.
I depart here from my usual default position of keeping foreign money out of North Korea, but the objective of that position was never to keep ordinary North Koreans poor, hungry, and ignorant. Rather, the objective is to damage the regime’s capacity to keep ordinary North Koreans poor, hungry, and ignorant. Our policy objective for North Korea should be to break down the isolation and dependency of its people, even as we constrict the regime and strain its capacity to oppress. Recently, I’ve given much thought to how we can catalyze this process. Because the market is still the only alternative institution that can challenge the North Korean regime, and because markets can’t exist without a medium of exchange, my thoughts always return to money as the solution. Without it, there is famine, dependency, and ignorance. With it, there is what passes for freedom in North Korea — a full belly, a warm coat, and a radio. More than anywhere else in the world today, lack of money is the root of all evil in North Korea. The regime must agree with me, or it would not have launched its Great Confiscation. But the Great Confiscation failed. Yes, there is still hunger and starvation as a result, but the markets are back, the people are more embittered than ever, and North Koreans don’t even want to hold their own country’s currency anymore.
With North Korea’s rife corruption, there is little that can’t be bought for enough money, and although the present priority has to be using that money to draw food and medicine into the country, a well-developed free market will eventually supply the basic needs of the people, break their dependency on the state, and supply the basic tools that an underground will need to challenge the state directly. Without the development and coordination of some sort of North Korean underground, the people can only resist the regime with sporadic and futile outbursts. As they have before, the North Korean people are showing us the next step in this Hegelian process — though the smuggling of currency from South Korea’s 20,000-strong refugee population back to their North Korean relatives.
I can see no better way to subvert the regime than to replace dependency on the state with dependency on economically independent rejectionists in South Korea. If the medium is foreign currency, so much the better. To the extent it operates beyond the reach of the kleptocratic state’s diversion, money smuggling may also be a more efficient way to feed North Koreans than international aid.
I want to begin this post by congratulating the Nobel Committee for awarding the Peace Prize, for once, to a person who has actually made sacrifices to improve the lives of others in a way that is likely to frustrate a belligerent state and prevent war. More precisely, by selecting someone who is not a terrorist, an unaccomplished politician, or a proven failure at making peace, Nobel may have extended its residual relevance a while longer. Better, it has returned some attention away from the malice of the Chinese government toward foreign nations, and back to its malice toward its own people. But then, these topics are more interrelated than many of us tend to acknowledge. One of the topics where they intersect seamlessly is the subject of North Korean refugees in China.
Ethan Epstein, who is now also blogging at The New Ledger, incidentally, has just returned from a visit to Seoul the Chinese border with North Korea. He writes (this time, at Slate) that a joint Chinese-North Korean crackdown on refugees has been a grim success at closing off the flow of refugees. So thanks to our friends the ChiComs, North Koreans must now die in place. There is a special zone in hell for these people, but justice would be better served if they were sent to Camp 12, where so many of their victims have perished. It bears repeating that those victims are guilty of no greater crime than wanting to live.
In spite of the success of China’s cleansing campaign, the number of North Korean refugees in South Korea is about to hit the 20,000 mark. What’s not mentioned in CNN’s report is how many of those people are recent defectors from North Korea, and how many are fleeing China after hiding out there for years.
China, realizing that it has revealed too much of its arrogance and malice since the Cheonan attack, now wants us (and the South Koreans) to think that its sponsorship of North Korea’s terrorizing of its neighbors is simply misunderstood. It doesn’t bother trying to explain its sponsorship of, and active participation in, North Korea’s terrorizing of its own people. How could it? You simply can’t defend sending women and kids to die in gulags and before firing squads. Those things are evil — crimes against humanity — in any honest person’s lexicon.
How can the behavior of the thugs who run China be reconciled with the natural aspirations of people not to be slaves? What evidence suggests that it’s amenable to moral suasion? That it’s amenable anything but coercion of variable subtlety? One more subtle form of coercion would be to make it clear to China that its commercial access to post-unification Korea will depend of the amount of hostility it earns from the Korean people now (strictly for the safety of Chinese investors and for the preservation of public order, mind you). Another would be to raise the idea of “odious debt,” suggesting that China’s investments in North Korea will not be honored by any post-Kim government.
But if you were a North Korean refugee in China now, all of this would probably sound much too subtle. When would you finally decide that fighting back was your only real option? And would such an eventuality be a greater tragedy than the status quo?
Posted by Joshua on October 11, 2010 at 12:55 pm · Filed under Defectors
Hwang Jang Yop survived multiple purges and power struggles, a defection, at least one assassination attempt, and 87 years in some especially cruel places and times. I was ambivalent about Hwang, who became Kim Jong Il’s strongest critic, but who still defended the juche ideology as misunderstood and misinterpreted by its more recent oracles. We can appreciate what Hwang did to expose the system’s ruthlessness, even as we must recognize that he probably stepped on plenty of skulls to ascend to its higher ranks.
When my wife told me that Hwang had died, the first thing I wondered was whether it was of natural causes. Officially, the answer is “yes,” and I see no reason to question that, given Hwang’s advanced age. Still, South Koreans love a good conspiracy theory, or even a bad one. The fact that two officers of the Reconnaissance Bureau of the North Korean Workers’ Party pled guilty to charges of trying to give Hwang the Trotsky treatment just months ago would be as good a basis for a conspiracy theory as, say, any of the completely baseless ones that have caught fire on Naver recently. But because a conspiracy theory’s traction is a function of ideology, rather than plausibility, I’d bet that any conspiracy theories about Hwang won’t likely involve any North Korean agents bearing ice-axes.
In the beginning of September Tim Peters chaired a panel and other OFK favorites (e.g., Chuck Downs) spoke at a conference at the Marine Corps University in Virginia. Tim’s website linked to C-SPAN footage of the event — there’s a neat feature there that (sort of) lets you see just the video segments for the speaker you’re interested in.
In late July Angelina Jolie came to Seoul to promote a new movie (HT to Yuna). At the time I wrote up 2/3rds of a post about the UNHCR’s goodwill ambassador and her comments about the North Korean situation. Since I spent a lot of time looking for the actual video, I might as well at least pass the URL along. The question in Korean is at 10:43 followed by the English translation, then Jolie’s answer is 11:44 - 13:02.
And last, but certainly not least, my new employer, NKnet (officially known in English as the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, whew), is holding a conference together with NED and the Sejong Institute on Thursday, October 21st, at NED headquarters in D.C. Robert King, Andrei Lankov, Kang Cheol Hwan, Marcus Noland, Roberta Cohen, Chuck Downs, and many others! RSVP by October 18th, mind you. All the details are here.
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As a post script, I leave you with some photos I took on September 28th in Daehangno, Seoul, of a press conference against the 3rd generation of the Kim clan getting power. It was held by three NK refugee/defector college students groups. Look for ‘Lil Kim getting his crown and his first nuke from dad.
Posted by Joshua on October 6, 2010 at 5:24 am · Filed under Kim Jong Eun
At The New Ledger, I offer my thoughts on Kim Jong-Eun as the genetic vessel for the perpetuation of a deiocracy. I would like to pause here to thank Dr. Atkins, without whom I could not have made all of those cheap fat jokes. Please take no offense unless you gorged yourself while others starved around you.
At National Review, Mario Loyola takes up many of the themes I wrote about in my Capitalist Manifesto, and concludes that North Korea’s collapse is accelerating. I think a few of us have noticed that trend for an uncomfortably long time, but until the last two or three years, I couldn’t quite understand how those trends could continue this long without the termination of the regime.
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Open News has two interesting reports on one of the most important and most overlooked trends in North Korea — food smuggling. I posit that this represents a loss of the regime’s control over the food supply, the borders, and even discipline over its security services. If harnessed properly, mass smuggling will sow the seeds for the regime’s undoing.
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If South Korea keeps talking like this, it might actually acquire some influence over North Korea’s behavior:
South Korea will launch a full-scale propaganda war against North Korea in response to any fresh cross-border provocation, Defence Minister Kim Tae Young said on Tuesday. Mr Kim on Monday had warned of possible provocations by the North as it puts a leadership succession plan in place and in the run-up to the G-20 summit in Seoul in November. The South’s military printed hundreds of thousands of leaflets and installed loudspeakers in border areas as part of reprisals following the sinking of a warship in March. [….]
Mr Kim told parliament preparations were under way to float the leaflets and small radios by balloon across the tense and heavily fortified border. His ministry would also consider installing electric message boards and more loudspeakers. ‘We will immediately switch loudspeakers on and launch leaflets’ if there was a fresh cross-border provocation, or if a political decision was made on the need to apply pressure on North Korea, Mr Kim said. [AFP]
Greek authorities search a North Korean shipment, bound for Syria, for banned weapons or dual-use cargo.
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Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You: Chris Hill ought to be forced into early retirement over this — despite the gauzy promises of Agreed Framework and all of the valuable leverage we threw away for empty concessions, North Korea has now resumed construction at Yongbyon. On a side note, isn’t David Albright’s change of tone since Obama’s inauguration a remarkable thing to observe? Not that I’m a strong critic of Obama’s policy myself.
Oh, wait — that’s not it. It was 
