Posted by Joshua on January 31, 2011 at 11:50 pm · Filed under Regime Change
So in response to some questions I’ve received via e-mail and this, no, what’s happening in Egypt can’t happen in North Korea, at least not in the foreseeable future. The two systems are not remotely comparable.
Few of Mubarak’s soldiers would kill civilians if ordered to do so. The Egyptian people know this, which means he’s doomed. Mubarak is a dictator, but he’s merely an authoritarian dictator, not a totalitarian on the model of the leaders of Burma, North Korea, China, or Saudi Arabia. His control of ideas in his society has been largely ineffective since the invention of the internet. There is an organized opposition, although it lacked the capacity to challenge the regime until recently.
North Korean soldiers would kill civilians by the thousands if ordered. The North Korean people know this, which is why few challenge the state openly. It’s also why the system can only be overthrown by force of arms. Kim Jong Il is the most totalitarian of dictators in the wide spectrum of dictatorship. His control of ideas, though weakening, remains effective enough to slow their spread and isolate the people from each other. There is no internet as we know it, and there is no significant organized opposition. The only group with the capacity to challenge the state is a hypothetical cabal of military mutineers.
The best outcome we can hope for in Egypt would be the speedy appointment of a provisional government backed by the army, the departure of Mubarak immediately thereafter, and a fixed timetable for elections. That timetable ought to be long enough to give a liberal democratic opposition enough time to campaign, gather strength, and make its case against the Muslim Brotherhood turning Egypt into a Sunni Arab Iran. But as time passes, there will be more violence and the opposition will radicalize. The only way I see to stop this cycle would be to change the subject and take the momentum out of the demonstrations, and the only way I see to do this an announcement that Mubarak will cede power on a prompt and certain date.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s eldest son says the North should abandon the “Songun” or military first doctrine and pursue reforms and open up. Kim Jong-nam (39), who was passed over for the succession in favor of his 20-something brother, made the remarks in an interview with the Tokyo Shimbun.
He also commented on the North Korean artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island, referring to the waters surrounding the South Korean island as a “battle zone,” and said there are “forces” in the North Korean regime who are trying to use the attack to justify the Songun doctrine and nuclear weapons.
My first reaction: watch your back. My second reaction: he’s positioning himself to take power in a post-Kim Jong Il era, perhaps as a Chinese-backed Pu Yi figure.
Kim Jong-nam said the currency reform in late 2009 was a “failure.” “I do not believe people’s lives are improving,” he said, adding it is time for North Korea to start reforms and open up.
Posted by Joshua on January 30, 2011 at 5:54 pm · Filed under Anju Links
So when I read last week that according to an anonymous “senior South Korean official,” a North Korean admission that it sank the Cheonan and an apology for shelling of Yeonpyeong Island would not be “a precondition to the resumption of the six-party nuclear disarmament talks,” I decided to wait for the clarification before concluding that the Lee Administration had been neutered. Those clarifications haven’t really cleared much up. One one hand, there’s the newly hard-line Unification Minstry:
Unification Minister Hyun In-taek on Thursday told KTV, “Substantive six-party talks will resume only if the North takes responsible steps” over the provocations and shows it is sincere about denuclearization. Chun Young-woo, the senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and national security, said an apology from the North cannot solve all inter-Korean problems. “The relationship can improve only if the North both dismantles its nuclear program and changes its attitude” over the attacks.
“The government has not changed its stance that it could [engage] in talks, including six-party talks, with the North even if the North does not apologize for the sinking of the Cheonan,” said the source yesterday. “Although the Cheonan sinking and the Yeonpyeong Island shelling are both issues close to our hearts, denuclearization is a much more important issue at hand here,” the source said.
But this defies logic. How can talks about hidden nuclear programs possibly lead in a productive direction if North Korea isn’t ready to make a clean break with its mendacity and its belligerence about even the things that are open and obvious? And even if you’re one of the few who still believes that the six-party talks have some non-cosmetic function, you have to concede that North Korea sees them as a vehicle for extorting aid. Hence, a willingness to return to talks without extracting an admission of North Korea’s guilt or attaching serious consequences for its aggression only invites more aggression.
There’s a battle brewing at the U.N. over North Korea’s uranium enrichment program — the one that Selig Harrison hasn’t commented on recently. The L.A. Times reports that the United States will ask the Security Council to condemn North Korea’s program, and Don Kirk reports that the U.S. has already pushed China into breathing the word “uranium,” which some may consider progress.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has a new paper on holding members of the North Korean regime accountable for their atrocities.
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I’ve hardly been President Obama’s harshest critic on foreign policy, but it completely escapes me how the White House could have been so incompetent as to allow an anti-American propaganda song to slip into the playlist for the state dinner that Hu Jintao should never have been given in the first place. The malicious delight of the low characters of Chinese cyberspace should leave little doubt that the ChiCom propagandists knew exactly what they were doing. Now that the thing is done, I suppose the White House can’t really admit that it was pwned without exacerbating the catastrophe, but let’s not kid ourselves. China sees itself as our enemy; therefore, China — or rather, the dictatorship that temporarily rules it — is our enemy, and we need to craft our foreign and defense policies accordingly.
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A leading international expert at one of China’s top universities predicts that North Korea will not improve relations with South Korea while Lee Myung-bak is still president of the south. Yan Xuetong says that’s because of Lee’s abandonment of the “Sunshine policy” of economic engagement with the isolationist Communist state and his tough approach to Pyongyang.
Yan, who is dean of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University, said this means North Korean officials will be “very patient” and will wait to engage with South Korea’s next president in two years when Lee’s term ends. [AP]
That’s funny, because I was just thinking that U.S.-China relations won’t improve much as long as China is ruled by an unaccountable, thuggish Mandarin class whose premier scholars are impervious to obvious facts and simple logic, and that the United States should wait patiently for the overthrow of its dictatorship before any great improvement in relations can be possible.
Posted by Joshua on January 27, 2011 at 6:40 am · Filed under Anju Links
I cringed when I saw that someone at The Washington Post let Glenn Kessler fact-check President Obama’s SOTU mention of North Korea, given how many corrections Kessler still owes his readers:
President Obama: “Because of a diplomatic effort to insist that Iran meet its obligations, the Iranian government now faces tougher and tighter sanctions than ever before. And on the Korean peninsula, we stand with our ally South Korea, and insist that North Korea keeps its commitment to abandon nuclear weapons.”
Glenn Kessler: Despite the president’s tough words, neither policy is doing very well at the moment. [….]
North Korea also has continued along a belligerent path. For much of the Obama administration, officials have practiced what they call “strategic patience.” But that appears to have only inspired North Korea to take increasingly risky steps. The administration inherited a bad hand on North Korea from the Bush administration, but the passage of two years has not brought any improvement.
Leave aside Kessler’s unrealistic diplomatic expectations for a regime that makes war on its neighbors and lies pathologically. Kessler, whose coverage of North Korea became a broadsheet for Hillary Clinton and other defenders of her husband’s failed North Korea legacy, neglects to mention the bad hand that President Bush also inherited. Throughout the Bush Administration, Kessler’s reporting selectively amplified now-discredited views questioning North Korea’s pursuit of a uranium enrichment program, despite a growing consensus in the intelligence community that North Korea was indeed pursuing one in during the 1990’s, in 2002, and probably ever since. Kessler even devoted a story to North Korea’s own ill-fated effort to refute the very charge it had admitted in 2002, and has since revealed. His (mis)characterization of the intelligence community’s consistently high confidence that North Korea had tried to assemble a uranium program prompted the intelligence community to issue this statement (quoted here by Bruce Klingner) to correct the record:
“There has been considerable misinterpretation of the IC’s view of NK’s efforts to pursue a uranium enrichment capability. The intelligence was high quality information that made possible a high confidence judgment about NK’s efforts to acquire a uranium enrichment capability. The IC had then, and continues to have, high confidence in its assessment that NK has pursued that capability. We have continued to assess efforts by NK since 2002. All IC agencies have at least moderate confidence that NK’s past efforts [snip] continue today.”
In 2002, the Bush Administration raised those long-standing concerns with the North Koreans, correctly accused them of cheating on Agreed Framework I, and withheld the aid that was traded for disarmament. That was a sufficient excuse for North Korea to abandon Agreed Framework I, although Kessler’s reporting obscures this sequence of events to blame Bush for Kim Jong Il’s possession of nuclear weapons. Here’s how Kessler editorialized — sorry, reported — about this before:
The accusation about the alleged uranium program backfired, sparking a series of events that ultimately led to North Korea’s first nuclear test — using another material, plutonium — nearly five months ago.
A belated acknowledgment from Kessler that Bush was right about North Korea’s cheating — and that Bush also drew a bad hand — is compelled by fairness, if not shame. Which why it’s so hard to comprehend, especially in retrospect, why Bush signed Agreed Framework II in spite of all of this. Here, Kessler editorializes again, but this time, the charge sticks. Yet when the Bush Administration made this breathtakingly illogical shift, and even as it rushed to a woefully predictable failure (yes, I actually did predict it) Kessler’s coverage of Chris Hill was a journalistic tongue bath. Kessler writes his memoir of Rice’s failed diplomacy as a story of redemption, using Rice as a foil for his own criticism of the George W. Bush who got North Korea right the first time. That’s enough material to keep a fact checker busy for years.
I certainly don’t endorse all aspects of President Obama’s North Korea policy, but he’s taken a creditably tough-minded approach under difficult circumstances to break the cycle of extortion we’ve been trapped in for the last two decades. It’s not hard to divine that Kessler thinks we’d be better off right back where Bill Clinton stuck us in 1994.
Posted by Joshua on January 26, 2011 at 2:15 pm · Filed under Inside NK
In a worrisome new sign of catastrophic climate change, a record cold winter in North Korea suggests that the mere presence of two Current TV reporters may be enough to invoke The Gore Effect:
Citing data from the North’s meteorological research unit, the KCNA reported that between Dec. 24 and Jan. 19, the average daytime high temperature had been minus 4.9 degrees Celsius while the morning low averaged minus 15.6 degrees. Both figures, it said, were 3.2 degrees lower than usual. “This is the first time since 1945 that the maximum daytime temperature has remained below zero for nearly a month,” the KCNA quoted an official as saying. On Jan. 16, the mercury dropped to 18.2 degrees below zero in Pyongyang and other parts of the country, a mark some 5 to 10 degrees colder than in normal winters, it said.
And at the same time, North Korea is suffering from an acute shortage of coal:
A source in Hyaesan, Yanggang Province reports on January 20th that “The New Year has seen a dramatic worsening in the area’s electricity supplies. Power has been out for twenty days straight. Nationwide the situation is similar, even in Pyongyang, where although there is some supply regular people are getting no more than one or two hours a day.” Because of this North Koreans are not merely undergoing the usual daily hardships but are beginning to wonder if the country is on its last legs.
“Power stations,” the source went on, “have insufficient coal supplies and so electricity production is out of the question. There’s an acute energy crisis.” In a stymying vicious circle, the lack of electric power necessary to drive the motors which rid the mine of stagnant water means the shaft can’t be entered in order to dig the coal necessary to produce the electricity the country needs. And because of the recent cessation in distribution to the miners of their daily 800 grams of rations, workers have downed tools and left the mine. [Open News]
Not only that, but North Korea’s untimely success at reducing greenhouse gas emissions will assuredly make things even worse.
Several weeks ago, a Korean source told me that the electricity shortage had brought industrial facilities to a halt but had at least left plenty for homes. Apparently, the situation has been deteriorating.
The general power supply situation is not as problematic in the summer when the heavy rainfall North Korea receives enables it to produce hydroelectric power. In the winter, a reduction in hydroelectric power has usually led to a worsening of the supply situation. But the situation this winter is considerably worse than usual. Amidst this power crisis, an official declared, “The railways are the arteries of North Korea and when they come to a standstill the country’s heart stops beating.” Factories and economic production has been killed off and all power redirected to the railways, the official added. Most factories and businesses having ceased production, the people have gone to farming villages to help plow and labor in the fields.
North Koreans know better than anyone that their country has been on its last legs for years, and why the system still persists. From within, it’s in an advanced state of decay (on the other hand, no coal means no cell phones, and no reading at night, and even less time and energy to think about politics). But just as fresh paint can conceal rotten wood for years, the state’s system of control maintains the appearance of stability. The people still lack the political consciousness, cohesion, organization, and firepower to challenge the state, but they’ve now reached the point where a well-funded and resourceful underground could take root and spread quickly, thanks in part to the extent of official corruption and disillusionment. This would still take years to shake the rotten structure. Of course, a military mutiny is always a possibility, but one has to wonder what kind of system it would install.
Posted by Joshua on January 26, 2011 at 8:44 am · Filed under Anju Links
Among reporters who aren’t terribly experienced as North Korea watchers, there’s been much recent excitement about the prospect of North Korea and South Korea talking again. I see little harm and some good in working-level talks between generals, but I think the exuberance of these cub reporters is misplaced. Look more closely, and all of the obstacles to Agreed Framework III are still in place. South Korea is still demanding that North Korea apologize for sinking the Cheonan and shelling Yeonpyeong Island, which North Korea will never do. The United States is still saying that “progress in South-North Korea relations is a precondition to resuming the stalled six-party talks.” It’s right that we should stick to this position, and it also guarantees that we’ll never even get to the six-party talks. That’s just as well, since any “breakthrough” there would be just as illusory as the last ones.
In fact, this isn’t the worst state of affairs we could find ourselves in. The least capable reporters covering North Korea are fooled, people who know better aren’t, and the allies — for once — are behaving like allies instead of dancing to Kim Jong Il’s tune.
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Did North Korea Cheat? It’s always surprising to me that people are still surprised by North Korea’s progress toward a uranium enrichment capability, and I don’t think you have to be a nuclear scientist to make reasonable inferences about that:
“These are P-2 centrifuges whereas in Iran, because of international inspectors, they only have been able to make (less sophisticated) P-1 centrifuges,” Hecker said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency. “My analysis is, if what they (North Koreans) told me is correct, they have a very sophisticated second generation centrifuge at Yongbyon.” [….]
“There also is concern that if that’s what they have, then they must have been doing this for a very long time,” he said.
In February 2005, Selig Harrison alleged “that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data” about North Korea’s uranium enrichment program to scuttle the first Agreed Framework. Harrison has not retracted this charge; however, in August 2009, Harrison was told the Associated Press that, “Everything I’ve ever said about North Korea since 1972 has seemed at the time like screaming into the wilderness, and everything I’ve ever advocated has come to pass.”
The nation’s human rights commission Friday called for the introduction of legislation on North Korean human rights and an independent archive to investigate, collect and record human rights violations in the reclusive North.
Hyun Byung-chul, president of the National Human Rights Commission, expressed regret for the commission’s minimal attention to the issue in the past.
“Nothing has been done by the commission to actually improve North Korean human rights, which is very shameful,” Hyun said in a conference held to unveil the commission’s roadmap to help improve North Korean rights. “We will take the first step this year to gradually change human rights conditions in the North.”
Claudia Rosett, journalist in residence for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, testified against the UNDP at the hearing entitled “The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action.” “You had North Korean employees handling the checkbook and the accounts. In Pyongyang, you had transfers on behalf of other agencies via an entity tied to North Korean proliferation,” Rosett told the panel. “You had the import of dual use items into North Korea,” she said.
But UNDP spokesman Stephane Dujarric said both a Senate panel and an investigatory panel of non-UN officials documented “that UNDP accounted for funds used in its programs in North Korea.” The panels established “that they were used for the limited purposes for which they were intended,” mainly relating to farm production, Dujarric said in a statement.
North Korea seems to damage and corrupt every institution it touches.
OFK gets results! “Production at an inter-Korean industrial park dropped 15 percent in November last year when the North bombarded a South Korean island, raising bilateral tensions to the highest level in years, the Unification Ministry said Sunday.” Curtis has much, much more on Kaesong. I’d say someone wants us to believe that Kaesong’s future is bleak.
“For a long time, I honestly believed Kim was a great leader and that my country was better off than others,” Song said in an interview in his workroom, which was little more than a cubicle inside a tiny run-down shopping mall on the outskirts of Seoul.
Click, laugh.
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So now that journalists have tracked down the Chinese animators behind that subversive rabbits-versus-tigers cartoon, the creators naturally say they were just venting and didn’t mean any political message to be taken. Well, what would you say if you’d just said something brave and subversive in China, and if you figured the police would soon be on their way? I have to wonder how the journalists tracked these animators down, and whether, as a matter of journalistic ethics, they should have.
Posted by Joshua on January 25, 2011 at 10:07 am · Filed under NK Military
The last 12 months have been unusual, even for North Korea, on several levels. There has been the rise in aggression against the South, the accelerating loss of economic control by the regime, an unusually cold winter, unusually severe electricity shortages, and now, an apparent erosion of control over the military. I’ve read a lot of stories about this being a hard year for North Korean soldiers, and for the most part, this is something new. In the past, the regime has successfully preserved a system of priorities that channeled most of the food supply — particularly international food aid — to the military, at the expense of the civilian population. Thanks to the Great Confiscation, this has been a hard year for civilians, too. But the decline in international food aid means that the army is going hungry along with everyone else.
With North Korea, you have to view every report skeptically, but I think we’ve seen enough reports to provide reasonable support for a very general conclusion. The conclusion I draw is that North Korea is having trouble feeding and supplying its soldiers, and that this is having a severe effect on morale and discipline.
Recall also that a few years back, the Daily NK published guerrilla video of a starving soldier who was discharged and sent home to die. We’ve seen few reports like that in the intervening years, until now. Experts will caution you that even in the North Korean military, some animals are more equal than others. That’s why the hunger among the Special Forces would be so significant, if true. You have to think that when North Korea can’t feed the army anymore, anything is possible.
Posted by Joshua on January 24, 2011 at 6:08 pm · Filed under Anju Links
Open News has published a whole series of articles about the conditions at Camp 12, Chongo-Ri, based in part on interviews with a newly escaped female prisoner:
I believe these are images of Camp 12, although the lack of a perimeter fence surprises me, and it’s remarkable to think that 3,000 prisoners could be packed into such a tiny compound.
So North Korea circumvents South Korean trade sanctions by transshipping its products through China. Yes, and they also circumvent a number of U.N. Security Council resolutions the very same way. In fact, one of North Korea’s most important markets for its counterfeit cigarettes is the United States itself. This is why I say sanction the entire North Korean government under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act. In the end, these people can hardly think non-criminally. They take pleasure in flaunting every law and standard of civilized humanity.
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Is anyone else skeptical about a New York Times reporter’s assurance that Hu Jintao’s request to hear “a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War” at the White House “clearly was unintentional” rather than a deliberate insult contrived for uber-nationalist Chinese netizens? Me neither. After all, to believe that, you’d have to believe that the rank amateurs at the Epoch Times know something about the pathology of the Chinese regime that the finest journalistic minds at the New York Times can’t grasp.
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And yet some of the peasants continue to harbor incorrect thoughts:
Of course, sarcastic animations and other web jokes about these incidents are common. What is not common is the end of the video, which depicts a rabbit rebellion where masses of rabbits storm the castle of the tigers and eat them alive. For viewers who have already gathered that in this picture, rabbits represent ordinary Chinese people and the tigers represent the government/the powerful, this is a revolutionary–literally–statement. The clip ends with what seems almost like a call to arms for the new year, with Kuang Kuang saying it will be a meaningful (有意义, could also be translated as “important”) year and then the end title reading: “The year of the rabbit has come. Even rabbits bite when they’re pushed.”
This isn’t the bullshit so-called “inciting to subvert state power” that Liu Xiaobo was given eleven years for. This video is actually inciting people to subvert state power. [China Geeks blog, emphasis in original]
Unlike the author of this post, I happen to think that the fear of losing their necks is the only thing that will drive the Mandarins to moderate China’s oppressive and corrupt character. The Mandarins won’t fear for their necks unless someone steps up to challenge the state, and the state has closed off all avenues for anyone to challenge it peacefully. Other than rising up, what’s really left? The best thing we can hope for now is that the uprisings will be big enough to force change, yet small enough not to throw the entire society into war and chaos. Hat tip to a reader.
Posted by Joshua on January 24, 2011 at 5:17 pm · Filed under Human Rights
Some 500 people in North Korea attended a public execution of a man and a woman caught reading South Korean propaganda, an activist claimed Sunday citing sources in the North. Choi Sung-yong, the head of Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea said security services rounded up some 500 people including 50 family members of South Korean prisoners of war and abduction victims and made them watch the execution.
The victims were a 45-year-old woman accused of reading a South Korean propaganda leaflet and failing to notify authorities and a high-ranking regional military officer charged with pocketing the dollar bills that were sent along with the leaflets. [Chosun Ilbo]
Naturally, their families were sent off to prison camps afterward.
North Korean defectors said anyone who picks up an anti-communist leaflet must notify the authorities on pain of severe punishment. They said North Koreans are taught from a young age that eating South Korean-made cookies causes gut rot while picking up pens or lighters made in the South will make the hands decay.
Also, the cookies contain food coloring made from the blood of racially pure Korean children. And not the “bad” children left to die in front of railroad stations all over North Korea, either.
The point man for the Obama administration’s financial wars on Iran, North Korea and al Qaeda, Stuart Levey, has decided to leave his senior U.S. Treasury Department post at what is turning out to be a particularly critical time.
Someone wake me up now, dammit!
Senior Obama administration officials disclosed Mr. Levey’s departure, after nearly a decade in government service, but stressed that it doesn’t signal a shift in U.S. policy or a slackening of Washington’s financial campaigns against Tehran, Pyongyang and international terrorist groups.
They said the White House is set to nominate David Cohen, Mr. Levey’s deputy at Treasury and longtime confidante, to succeed him as the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. Mr. Levey, a Republican, was one of the few senior members of President George W. Bush’s national security team to stay on under Mr. Obama.
“When Stuart came [into the Obama administration], he agreed to stay for six months, and it’s been two years. There’s no perfect time for these things. But this is as good a time as any” to make the change, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said. “It will have no effect on policy, or on our ability to execute the President’s policy.”
Messrs. Levey and Cohen, in a joint interview at the Treasury last week, said they believed U.S. strategy wouldn’t be slowed because the two men had closely coordinated in implementing sanctions policy over the past two years. [WSJ, Jay Solomon]
That may be, but a visit from Stuart Levey or an alert from his department intimidated the Chinese and the North Koreans more than three aircraft carrier battle groups, and his diplomacy was almost effective enough to make up for all of the damage done by the State Department during his tenure. Through two administrations, he was the only consistently effective official at his level. Stuart Levey was Mr. Plan B. People with that kind of expertise, creativity, and talent aren’t fungible. And if we’re about to see a softer Obama policy toward North Korea during the second half of his term, this is about when you’d expect to see Levey go.
The man to watch closely now, if you ask me, is Daniel Glaser. Glaser is a Democrat, but he’s equally committed to enforcing the law against North Korea. He doesn’t see North Korea’s money laundering and proliferation in partisan terms, and has the respect of members of both parties on the Hill. If Glaser leaves, no amount of Washington “wishes to spend more time with his family” doubletalk will console me. Levey isn’t the first of the sanctions hawks to leave the Obama Administration. Just over a year ago, Phillip Goldberg quit as sanctions coordinator.
Goldberg’s departure may not have been about policy. Since he left, we’ve seen the administration roll out potentially effective sanctions in the form of Executive Order 13,551, but we’ve seen no signs yet that it’s prepared to sanction the Chinese state-owned entities that are propping up Kim Jong Il and simultaneously grabbing up North Korean resources and (arguably) territory. Without that critical step, sanctions will fail. It worries me that men like Goldberg and Levey might have grown frustrated with this inaction. And it worries me that without effective sanctions, we’ll have lost our last real non-violent option. That means we’re down to finding some form of military action that we have a reasonable chance of containing once we unleash it.
Posted by Joshua on January 21, 2011 at 7:17 am · Filed under Anju Links
“In the order, the party stressed that soldiers standing guard over the border are surviving on canned cornmeal porridge and threatened to assess the amount of donations by individual entity,” the RFA said, adding the North failed to attain its goal of securing 1.6 million tons in provisions for the military last year.” [Yonhap]
Whoever can smuggle food into North Korea now can trade it for information, the use of a truck, weapons, or ammunition. Just use your imagination.
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The Japan Times reports that the Japanese government believes that another Japanese abductee, whom the North Koreans claimed was dead, was seen in Pyongyang recently with some South Korean abductees:
Provided by informed North Korean sources, the account said Taguchi was living in an apartment complex on Changgwang street in Pyongyang’s Mangyongdae district and was seen spending time with two South Korean abductees, the sources said. One of the South Koreans was Ko Sang Mun, a former high school teacher who disappeared from Norway in 1978, and the other is possibly married to Taguchi, they said. Taguchi was abducted to the North in 1978, and Pyongyang has claimed she married Tadaaki Hara, another Japanese abductee, and died in a traffic accident in 1986.
North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.
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I’ve been fascinated by the story of the Stuxnet virus, and I’d like to believe, as this story reports, that it was also designed to hinder North Korea’s uranium enrichment program in the same way it hindered Iran’s.
In February 2005, Selig Harrison alleged “that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data” to falsely accuse North Korea of running a secret uranium enrichment program. Harrison has still not retracted that article. In an August 2009 interview with the Associated Press, Harrison was quoted as saying, “Everything I’ve ever said about North Korea since 1972 has seemed at the time like screaming into the wilderness, and everything I’ve ever advocated has come to pass.” Discuss among yourselves.
So notwithstanding its recent boorishness, China does see the downside of all of this adverse publicity it’s attracting in America, or it wouldn’t be investing in an expensive PR campaign here. The problem with this is that Americans are inherently suspicious of propaganda, and that’s particularly true of propaganda sponsored by a foreign dictatorship that uses censorship and propaganda to managed public opinion at home. And because China thinks that the Chinese people believe its propaganda at home, it may not grasp the skepticism with which its message will be received here.
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I agree with Dana Rohrabacher that China’s recent behavior doesn’t merit the kind of lavish welcome President Obama gave to Hu Jintao: “Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher condemned Obama for welcoming Hu ‘as if he had the same stature and acceptability here as a democratic leader’ and said the United States should build bridges to China’s people directly. ‘Those are our allies. What do we do to them when we welcome their oppressor, their murderer, the one who’s murdering their children, here to the United States with such respect?’”
On this day, way back in 2004, I published the first OFK post. Had you asked me then what I’d be blogging about now, I’d have have said that I wouldn’t be. Then, I might have suggested reconstruction efforts, or possibly a low-intensity conflict between Chinese “advisors” and North Korean insurgents. Seven billion dollars in South Korean aid, Chinese money, and unsteady American policies have prolonged the inevitable, but it still looks inevitable, if different.
Then, I imagined that a broad-based popular uprising would eventually bring this horrible episode to an end. Today, I see little possibility of this anytime soon. Time has changed my idea of regime collapse to a more gradual concept in which regions, markets, constituencies, and units slowly drift away from central control, in which chaos arises from totalitarian order, and in which the regime will be forced to choose between extorting its neighbors and controlling its subjects. It could take years for that process to play out, depending on how long Kim Jong Il lives, and there will be much more needless misery and more crises before it does. But at least it can’t go on forever.
China’s plans for the economic colonization of Rason in North Korea have set off a great deal of fretting in South Korea about China grabbing up North Korean resources. In my experience, those who fret about this are usually setting up an argument for South Korean investment in the North. But we know how that’s always ended. Instead of pouring more money into this bottomless pit, South Korea ought to let it be known that after reunification, Korea will invoke the doctrine of odious debt and nullify those contracts.
There are multiple reason for South Korea to be concerned about Chinese investment in North Korea, including the stripping of resources, the danger of creeping colonization setting the stage for future boundary disputes, and most immediately, China’s tendency to perpetuate and reward North Korean aggression against the South. Those issues are fundamental to Korea’s nationhood.
And yet it’s hard to take South Korean concerns about China’s plans for Rason seriously when South Korea’s trade at Kaesong continues, inexplicably, to grow. South Korea is trying to mask this colossus of a contradiction by closing down massage parlors there — as Robert would say, “The humanity!” — and investigating firms that trade with North Korea without going through Kaesong.
But this is mostly cosmetic. I have stronger views about the right of North Korean workers to organize unions than I do about access to hand jobs there, but since when does anyone really believe that Kaesong is going to be a harbinger of political change in North Korea? And if the original justifications for Kaesong are now nullities, can any honest person reconcile this unconditional and unaccountable subsidy to Kim Jong Il’s regime with the financial accountability provisions of UNSCR 1874? South Korea can hardly criticize China for bailing out Kim Jong Il while it’s paying for the shells that land on its towns and the torpedoes that sink its ships. And why should the United States spend its diplomatic and financial capital to protect South Korea as long as that’s the case?
Posted by Joshua on January 19, 2011 at 8:26 pm · Filed under Anju Links
Did North Korea cheat, you ask?
North Korea has been developing a uranium enrichment programme — a potential second way to make nuclear bombs — since the late 1990s, a senior defector was Wednesday quoted as saying. The defector, quoted by South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper, said centrifuges for the programme are being made at the city of Heechon, 57 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon. [AFP]
More here. Selig Harrison was unavailable for comment.
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John Bolton and Christian Whiton call for tightening sanctions, increasing radio broadcasts, and augmenting U.S. forces in Northeast Asia. There is also a call for the redeployment of tactical nukes.
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No meat soup for you: North Korea moves the goalposts on its predictions of prosperity by 2012. More here.
