Even as President Lee’s government stokes fears of another North Korean attack, we’re seeing a steady stream of reporting that he may drop his demand that North Korea apologize for the attacks of 2010 before there would be any direct bilateral talks. So far, Lee has thrown cold water on those reports, all of them anonymous and all of them seemingly indicative of some internal debate in the ROK government. Here’s the latest such report.
That this should be a matter of debate is hard for me to fathom — and I hope you’ll forgive the choice of that word. If the premeditated murders of 46 South Korean sailors, four of its civilians, and a village don’t even rate a simple apology, it’s hard to see why any young South Korean would put his life on the line to be the next sacrifice. Yes, soldiers implicitly accept the risk of the sacrifice of their lives, but that is not a forfeiture of their honor, or the value of their humanity. And for all the talk about his supposed hard-line positions, one precondition President Lee has never quite attached to Kim Jong Il’s money supply is the return of several hundred South Korean POW’s the North has been holding since 1953. In some ways, much too little has changed since the shameful days of Roh Moo Hyun.
All of this sends a powerful, if indirect, message about the value South Korea attaches to the lives of the young men who defend it. It might just be that a few of those young men have gotten that message:
In a sign that the country might be failing to instill patriotism into the minds of young people, about 44%, or 892 students, said they would “flee the country” if a war with North Korea broke out. Only 15% said they would “join the war or help the country in other ways.”
Funny, their World Cup cheering section sure sounded brave.
Perhaps I’m making this more complicated than it really is. Maybe 44% of young Koreans are just cowards, typical shallow kids, or — God forbid — hippies. I doubt that many of them have given the matter serious thought. I suppose it’s ultimately up to the people of South Korea to elect a government worth dying to defend, and then deciding to put their lives on the line to defend it. Most of this is a matter for the Korean people to settle for themselves, but then you wonder: if they could run, where do you suppose they would run? And why do young South Koreans assume they would be able to run? Who do they assume will be guarding their backs as they board the planes they assume will fly, from airports they assume won’t be under fire? Do they assume that their inalienable right to spend “their” war guess-where will be defended by other Koreans of lower class and status? Or is the assumption that the Americans will bear this burden? Does it serve America’s interests, or South Korea’s, that so many Koreans harbor such false hopes and assumptions, and fail to understand that it is they who must preserve what distinguishes their lives from the wretchedness of Chongjin? My standing to object to these assumptions begins when the Second Infantry Division fights to hold Munsan while the flower of Korea’s youth flees to Irvine. As a practical matter, of course, that isn’t going to happen, but it’s worth asking why so many young Koreans expect it to.
The problem I continue to see with too many young South Koreans is that they’ve built dependency on America into their calculations about national and personal survival. Perhaps some know that one infantry brigade isn’t enough to stop the North Korean army, and that large-scale reinforcements are by no means assured in this political climate, but I doubt it. I suspect that the very visibility of our military presence in Korea reinforces Korea’s sense of dependency more than it reinforces South Korea’s defense. For all of the nationalism Korea has exhibited in recent years, it still suffers from an insufficiency of self-confident independence (in fact, I doubt that these things are unrelated). To change this attitude, South Korea will have to invest in a modern, professional army in which its people can invest their sense of security and their national pride. But the temptation to appease North Korea remains an impediment to this, because at the core of a professional army is a culture of respect for every young man and woman who serves in its ranks. In a professional army, the life of every young soldier must be considered priceless, and the taking of each life is a potential casus belli.
Posted by Joshua on June 29, 2011 at 3:14 pm · Filed under Anju Links
Reports in South Korea indicated that the government in Pyongyang on Monday ordered all universities to cancel classes until April of next year. The only exemptions are for students who will be graduating in the next few months and foreign students. The reports suggested that the students will be put to work on construction projects in major cities while there are also indications that repair work may be needed in agricultural regions that were affected by a major typhoon recently.
Analysts in Japan claim there may be other reasons behind the decision to disperse the students across the country. [Daily Telegraph, hat tip to James]
The expression that comes to mind is “don’t eat your seed corn,” but then, maybe this is an implicit recognition that society can function just fine after depriving a generation of 10 more months of juche ideology.
While I agree that this signals some sort of desperation, in North Korea, long mass mobilizations are certainly not unprecedented. In 2009, the regime ordered a 250-day mass mobilization that send thousands of city dwellers out to work in the fields. I’ve speculated that the main point of this was really to keep people too exhausted to oppose the regime, but dispersal makes sense, too, and the explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. The last mass mobilization was extremely unpopular, and no doubt, this one will be, too.
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So how thoroughly have South Korean DVD’s penetrated the North Korean market? According to the Chosun Ilbo, North Korean dramas can no longer compete in their own domestic market.
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Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch publishes this thoughtful essay on food aid for North Korea, which falls just short of persuading me that we should donate. What adds to my skepticism? The fact that two weeks ago, the World Food Program agreed to answer a detailed set of interview questions by e-mail — most of them about distribution and monitoring — and I’ve yet to hear back from them.
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Remember that report of North Korea purchasing riot gear to prepare for the possibility of demonstrations? The Daily NK doubts it, raising the same question I did and saying that “even if a riot were to break out, the state would simply break it up with live ammunition.” That sounds right to me.
More demonstrations in Chinese-occupied Mongolia. You know what this reminds me of? The demonstrations that broke out in Russian-occupied Kazakhstan back in the 1980’s.
North Korea’s coach blamed his side’s 2-0 loss to the United States on his players getting struck by lightning in the build up to the Women’s World Cup. Kwang Min Kim claimed that some of them were hospitalised with electrocution after a training match on 8 June.
Maybe their treating physician had one of those special transmitters, too. This probably calls for some kind of criticism session, though if Lloyd’s were still issuing insurance policies in North Korea, I’m sure they’d charge a higher premium against criticism sessions than lightning strikes.
By the way, wasn’t their 2008 World Cup coach named Kim Jong Hun, or has he been airbrushed out of the team yearbooks?
“When we stayed in Pyongyang during training our players were hit by lightning, and more than five of them were hospitalised,” said coach Kim, without naming the affected players specifically.
“Some stayed in hospital and then came to Germany later than the rest of us. The goalkeeper and the four defenders were most affected, and some midfielders as well. The physicians said the players were not capable of participating in the tournament.
“But World Cup football is the most important and significant event for a footballer, so they don’t want to think about anything but football.
“The fact that they played could be called abnormal, the result of very strong will.”
Yes, something certainly is abnormal here — starting with the patent hypocrisy of welcoming North Korean teams to international sporting events, yet ostracizing South African teams from them for the expressly political purpose of pressuring the South African government to change its repellent and racist political system. Excluding racism from polite society is perfectly fine with me, but let’s be morally consistent about it. As offensive and oppressive as apartheid was, was it really more oppressive, offensive, and racist than this?
Update: The discrepancy in the coaches’ names might be explained by the fact that this is the women’s team we’re talking about today.
This comes to us via the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. There’s no embed link, but you can watch it here. It’s consistent with other recent reports from North Korea, some of which suggest that even elite units are underfed. Note that when the soldiers get hungry, they head straight for the markets to expropriate food from the traders. This helps explain why the regime tolerates markets, and it also adds to our suspicion that whatever food aid we distribute will be expropriated in the same way.
I’ll warn you that the sight of the starving, filthy kkotjaebi (homeless orphaned children) may haunt you.
Treasury moves to cut Kaesong out of American markets:
The Executive Order and by extension the new regulations contain the troublingly vague prohibition on “the importation into the United States, directly or indirectly, of any goods, services, or technology from North Korea” (emphasis supplied). Obviously the “directly or indirectly” language is going to cause the most heartburn to U.S. companies. That suggests that products from South Korea or China that contain components or parts from North Korea would be subject to the import ban. These new Nork sanctions contain no rules of origin or anything else to clarify the scope of the language covering “indirect” imports.
An employee of the Congressional Research Service, speaking a few days ago before a forum hosted by the Korea Economic Institute, said that the “indirect’ language was designed to target such parts and components. [Export Law Blog]
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Great moments in South Korean journalism: So, we’re supposed to pity a cute little animated penguin, but forget that in the real world, this production is financing and perpetuating a regime that kills real-live cute little kids in places like Camp 22?
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Good question, Professor Steinberg — why don’t we have comprehensive economic sanctions against North Korea? It seems to me that the sanctions we’ve imposed thus far, while falling far short of their true potential, have placed the regime under great economic strain and probably contributed to the disastrous currency “reform” I call The Great Confiscation.
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China’s brilliant statecraft continues to win friends and influence people. Its most recent and remarkable diplomatic achievement was to bully Vietnam into the arms of the United States; this week, it has re-invigorated our decayed alliance with the Philippines:
The United States said it was ready to provide hardware to modernize the military of the Philippines, which vowed to “stand up to any aggressive action” amid rising tension at sea with China.
Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario, on a visit to Washington, said the Philippines hoped to lease equipment to upgrade its aged fleet and called for the allies to revamp their relationship in light of the friction with China.
“We are determined and committed to supporting the defense of the Philippines,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a joint news conference when asked about the hardware wish-list from the Philippines.
Clinton said the two nations were working “to determine what are the additional assets that the Philippines needs and how we can best provide those.” She said del Rosario would meet Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other Pentagon officials. [AFP]
Add Vietnam and the Philippines to a potentially potent alliance with the United States, Japan, South Korea, and of course, Taiwan. In due course, Thailand and Singapore may also eventually express interest, though it’s India that would be the real strategic prize. Despite the present alignment of interests, Vietnam should be denied full membership until its human rights record improves.
Posted by Joshua on June 23, 2011 at 5:46 am · Filed under Resistance
So now that the Syrian army is invading town after town from Dara’a in the south to its restive border with Turkey, can we call it a civil war yet? Worse things could happen there, and absent this wave of unrest, probably would have. If Syria isn’t likely to become a democracy within the next year, a destabilized Syria is probably the next best thing. If Bashar Asad is preoccupied fighting to survive, he’ll be impeded in his capacity to build up his WMD capabilities, bully Lebanon, and support proxy terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah. He may be more likely to throw his Palestinian cannon-fodder against Israel as a diversion, but he’s less likely to do anything serious enough to intensify sanctions or start a full-scale war (and I hope, but sometimes question, that the Israelis are smart enough not to throw Assad a lifeline by fighting him now). We can also thank this unrest for the clarification it has given us. It has liberated even Hillary Clinton from the illusion that Bashar Assad was a reformer who might have been talked out of his alliance with Iran and seeking a lasting regional peace, when in fact, those things are contrary to Assad’s pathology and fundamental interests. Finally, Syria and Libya were both good customers for North Korean weapons. The collapse of these regimes might reset those relationships and deprive North Korea of some key sources of revenue.
But the significance of Libya and Syria to North Korea extend far beyond finance in this, the post-Sunshine, post-engagement, post-Agreed Framework age we’ve entered, when the foreign policy establishment is struggling in vain for a plausible solution to the growing North Korea crisis. Libya and Syria are also showing us a way by showing us how quickly even ruthless totalitarian regimes can become unstable in the face of popular resistance. Significantly, neither Syria nor Libya had broad-based resistance or dissident movements at this time last year. In both cases, those movements coalesced spontaneously, largely from the thin, dry air. There are some obvious differences, of course. Even in Syria, news is more difficult to suppress than in North Korea. The other X Factor is the likelihood that foreign forces, most likely Chinese, will intervene, and that South Korea would quietly equip North Korean insurgents with the weapons and supplies to resist them.
Still, I posit that the United States and South Korea should be thinking through and planning for the eventuality of internal unrest in North Korea, and preparing to support opposition to the Kim Dynasty. I offer these arguments in support of such a policy:
First, a North Korea that’s wracked by civil war might still be a safer place for the North Korean people and the world than one where North Korea’s centrifuges, reactors, and its killing fields run at a full and unimpeded capacity, and while the state has little incentive to win over those segments of its population that it has chosen not to feed.
Second, a destabilized North Korea is no greater a proliferation threat than the regime as it is now — selling missiles by the boatload, selling nuclear technology to Iran and Burma, selling a nuclear reactor to Syria, in short, selling pretty much anything to any purchaser with the money. The sooner the present regime is shocked into a dramatic change of management, the sooner Office 99 goes out of business.
Third, a destabilized North Korea is no greater a threat to South Korea than the current regime. In 2010, we probably saw North Korea approach the limit of its willingness to risk a large-scale war with the South, backed by the United States. As long the regime is stable, it can afford a limited war with the South, and probably gains some benefits from one by galvanizing domestic support and writing new myths about Kim Jong-Eun’s military prowess. Kim Jong Il can’t afford that if he’s simultaneously fighting a rebel army based in Chongjin or Hamheung, or if he’s fighting a cross-border insurgency at the foot of Mt. Paektu. To do so would further tempt the South and the United States to break from their inevitable ambivalence about supporting the rebels.
Fourth, a destabilized North Korea is more likely to negotiate in good faith, because we’ll have leverage over it that we lack now. If North Korea’s leaders grasp that their regime is doomed but that we can offer them a way to save their necks, they may choose to give up as much of their WMD programs as they think they can’t hide from us, and from the factions opposed to them.
Fifth, a destabilized North Korea could induce China to negotiate in good faith. China clearly isn’t doing that now, in part because China prizes the stability of its puppet above keeping its negotiated commitments to the United States, its word as memorialized in U.N. resolutions, and even (as the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents show) regional peace. But a destabilized North Korea brings unrest, weapons, chaos, and more refugees and drugs than ever to China’s border. If that happens, China’s incentive shifts to finding the quickest and cheapest way to restore order along its border. A new proxy regime without reunification won’t restore order for long, and even China must know that occupying any part of North Korea would come with high diplomatic (and perhaps military) costs. The best prospect for restoring stability to North Korea would be a negotiated reunification with the South, with China securing the right to keep its lucrative investments in the North and keep U.S. forces south of the current DMZ. And of course, leaving South Korea — with whatever financial Japan and the United States are in a position to offer — with the messy task of reconstructing North Korea.
This is not to say that supporting forces opposed to Kim Jong Il would be an alternative to diplomacy. Far from it — undermining the regime might be the only realistic prospect for diplomacy to succeed, and may be the alternative that resolves this crisis at the lowest cost in human life.
Posted by Joshua on June 22, 2011 at 6:23 am · Filed under Anju Links
Apparently, no other candidates were willing to sign all-important that “I bequeath my eternal soul” clause, so it was the kind of election that not even Ban Ki Moon could lose:
Ban has been criticized for his lack of charisma and his failure to decry human rights abuses in countries like China and Russia. But he has won praise for taking on climate change and nuclear disarmament and backing intervention in Ivory Coast and Libya.
I don’t know how this could have happened! I mean, I don’t know anyone who voted for him!
I guess this will be great news to two kinds of people — the kind of people who’d like to see the U.N. decline into irrelevance, and the kind of people who are confident they can control Ban Ki Moon.
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I really don’t understand how North Korea gets away with breaking the basic rules of behavior, such as disclosing negotiations and then expecting people to keep right on negotiating. But then, it expropriates investments and people keep right on investing, and it breaks agreements and people line up to make new ones.
The North Korean regime’s ambitious project to build 100,000 homes in Pyongyang, which started in 2009, has been drastically downsized due to a lack of money and building materials. The regime has now cut the target to about 20,000.
Thankfully, the state found a way to meet the peoples’ more urgent needs:
Another project to re-pave and landscape the road to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where regime founder Kim Il-sung’s pickled body lies, was completed between January to April. Since last month, the regime has also been repairing the 23 m-tall Kim Il-sung statue.
For propaganda purposes, there is also a plan to build a 77-story apartment building for the privileged class in the newly designated Mansudae district which the statue overlooks, the government source said. The district combines the former Mansudae and Changjon junction areas.
So where do you suppose Jimmy will see the human rights violation?
North Korea has created a special police squad and bought large amounts of riot gear from China in apparent preparation for any disturbances similar to those in the Middle East, a report said Tuesday.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said the North had bought tear gas, helmets and shields through merchants in China’s northeastern city of Shenyang in recent months.
The development indicates concern at a possible popular uprising similar to the ones sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, the agency quoted a source as saying in a dispatch from Beijing.
The North has also created a special nationwide police anti-riot force, Yonhap said.
You mean to tell me that North Korea’s idea of riot gear no longer consists of ball ammo and sarin canisters? You could almost call that progress!
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Hey, Adam, you left out the best part of that KCNA piece you linked:
Despite its oft-repeated ‘freedom of the Internet’, it has 13 mother servers of the Internet under its control. All other countries have demanded on several occasions the transfer of the U.S. control of the mother servers to the United Nations and other international institutions so as to ensure the practical freedom and security of the Internet. The U.S., however, has so far denied it.
Posted by Joshua on June 20, 2011 at 11:53 am · Filed under Anju Links
Are you kidding me? Wendy Sherman? The same Wendy Sherman who pushed the policy that made North Korea a nuclear power? The same discredited policy that not even the Obama Administration can bring itself to defend today? You know how Oscar non-winners tend to say that it’s an honor just to be nominated? For all of my qualified support for the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy, it’s discrediting to serious thinkers to even consider Wendy Sherman for a post this important, even if she’s only being picked to be a Clinton loyalist.
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If you believe the Donga Ilbo, the State Department is leaning toward North Korea’s food crisis not being one of aggregate supply, but of distribution:
The U.S. has tentatively concluded that North Korea is not suffering from a food crisis though certain areas in the Stalinist country do have food shortages. This conclusion is based on the visit by a U.S. assessment team for food assistance to the North led by Robert King, U.S. special envoy on North Korean human rights, said a South Korea diplomatic source Sunday. “Though the U.S. has yet to release an official report on the visit, it made a preliminary judgment based on the results of the assessment team’s trip that the North has no comprehensive food crisis,” the source said.
The other, more important reason for the conclusion goes unstated: no matter which party is in power in the United States, and no matter which party is in power in South Korea, South Korea always gets a veto on key U.S. policy decisions. Here, we are likely seeing the effect of strong South Korean opposition to the provision of food aid. I wish our government would have the spine to provide food anyway if North Korea met internationally accepted standards for transparency in distribution, but luckily for us all, that entire agonizing debate remains completely hypothetical.
Look for the State Department to deny this at its daily press brief.
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I read a few days ago that Ambassador Kathy Stephens had joined in South Korea’s foreboding that some kind of North Korean provocation is in the works, and said that the result would be more isolation and more sanctions (but nothing more). Today, I see that the Commanding General, USFK, is also expressing concern and hinting at responses:
“While the Kim (Jong-Il) regime has proven a willingness to escalate in order to obtain what it wants, I am convinced that the ROK (South Korea)-US alliance is prepared,” General Walter Sharp told a forum.
“Our counter-provocation planning and combined exercises are stronger than ever…. In the past year, we have worked hard to develop a hostile counter-provocation plan that more adequately addresses the full spectrum of conflict.”
This sort of contingency planning couldn’t have happened when Roh was in power. You can say that it wouldn’t have been necessary, either, but this ignores all of the North Korean commando raids and maritime provocations during the DJ and Roh years. North Korea appears to have identified a strategic goal of restricting air and naval commerce through the West Sea to do economic harm to the South. Some on the South Korean left have expressed an openness to re-drawing the Northern Limit Line or sharing control over the Yellow Sea border area, which is about as smart as putting the robber’s knife to your own throat.
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A Modest Proposal: I’ve often cited reports of cannibalism by starving people in North Korea, most commonly of homeless street children. Now, Yonhap is reporting that a North Korean police document, secretly copied and smuggled out of the North, corroborates the reports (see also). Obviously, I’m in no position to authenticate the report.
An alleged North Korean police document reported a case of cannibalism, a South Korean missionary group said Monday, a development, if confirmed, that could support what has long been rumored in the North. [….]
The North’s police released a 791-page report in 2009 to give guidance on how to deal with criminals, and its preface said the report was based on previous events and possible circumstances. The report, later obtained by South Korea’s Caleb Mission, provided a rare look into the alleged cannibalism and other crimes, but it did not say whether cannibalism has become a widespread practice.
In one account, a male guard who could not bear his hunger killed his colleague using an ax, ate some of the human flesh and sold the remainder in the market by disguising it as mutton, the report said, without giving any further details such as when the alleged crime occurred.
Let’s start with the claim, that North Korean spymaster Ryu Kyong recruited the mysterious guide who led Laura Ling and Euna Lee to that remote place along the Tumen River, then across to North Korea where guards were waiting. Subsequent reports fill in the rest — that Ling and Lee heard a commotion, ran back across the river into Chinese territory, and that the North Koreans pursued them across the river and dragged them back across and into captivity in North Korea:
Ryu, who served as the deputy director of North Korea’s State Security Department, obtained intelligence that Laura Ling and Euna Lee, journalists working for Current TV, were planning to visit the North Korean border as part of their report on defectors.
He then used his overseas operatives to bribe an ethnic Korean guide in China to lead the two women into the hands of their abductors. The guide took Ling and Lee to a point on the banks of the Duman (or Tumen) River, where they were dragged across the border into North Korea.
The abduction, which occurred just after U.S. President Barack Obama took office, prompted the White House to dispatch former U.S. President Bill Clinton to Pyongyang in August of that year. It also served as a propaganda coup for Pyongyang, which boasted that a former U.S. leader had to “bow before General Kim Jong-il and beg for forgiveness.” [Chosun Ilbo]
A big hat tip here to Paul Song, a long-time advocate for human rights in North Korea and the husband of Laura Ling’s sister, Lisa.
I’m tempted to gloat and savor the sweet vindication of my own pet conspiracy theory, one that I’ve inclined to from the very beginning, and which other media reports have since supported. But even if the theory is plausible — it fits well within the range of North Korea’s past behavior — the Chosun Ilbo doesn’t offer one scintilla of detail on its source for the story or why we should consider it credible. It’s interesting, however, to turn our wayback machine to what Laura Ling said about crossing the border:
When we set out, we had no intention of leaving China, but when our guide beckoned for us to follow him beyond the middle of the river, we did, eventually arriving at the riverbank on the North Korean side. He pointed out a small village in the distance where he told us that North Koreans waited in safe houses to be smuggled into China via a well-established network that has escorted tens of thousands across the porous border.
Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. Midway across the ice, we heard yelling. We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran.
We were firmly back inside China when the soldiers apprehended us. Producer Mitch Koss and our guide were both able to outrun the border guards. We were not. We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no match for the determined soldiers. They violently dragged us back across the ice to North Korea and marched us to a nearby army base, where we were detained. [L.A. Times]
In retrospect, you can still stand on your criticism that Laura and Euna shouldn’t have followed, although you can begin to understand their decision if you imagine yourself alone in a remote spot between two hostile states. All I can say is, it’s plausible that this was a lure/ambush. It always was. What I can’t say is that this report goes far to prove it. The fact that Paul forwards the story suggests that Ling believes it (doesn’t it?).
In the days before our capture, our guide had seemed cautious and responsible; he was as concerned as we were about protecting our interview subjects and not taking unnecessary risks. That is in part why we made the decision to follow him across the river.
We didn’t spend more than a minute on North Korean soil before turning back, but it is a minute we deeply regret. To this day, we still don’t know if we were lured into a trap. In retrospect, the guide behaved oddly, changing our starting point on the river at the last moment and donning a Chinese police overcoat for the crossing, measures we assumed were security precautions. But it was ultimately our decision to follow him, and we continue to pay for that decision today with dark memories of our captivity.
It would be nice to get at least that much eyewitness confirmation, and there are a lot of questions I’d like to be able to ask about that. The one person who isn’t ever going to sort all of this out for us is Ryu, who was later sent to the firing squad, possibly for unrelated reasons.
Incidentally — and stop me if you’ve heard this somewhere — North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 for its tremendous strides toward complete, verifiable, irreversible nuclear disarmament, and quite possibly also some promises to never engage in the state sponsorship of terrorism again. Discuss among yourselves.
In somewhat related news, North Koreans continue to stream out of their homeland by any means necessary. ITN provides this video report on the rising flow of North Korean refugees into Thailand, and as you’ve no doubt heard by now, nine more North Koreans made it to the South by sea last week. When groups of North Koreans cross over to the South by boat, we often tend to hear later that some of them want to return, but not this time.
Posted by Joshua on June 18, 2011 at 10:09 am · Filed under Anju Links
Today, the signs from South Korea shifted from ominous to jumpy:
South Korean marines fired rifles at a civilian jetliner as it was descending to land after mistaking it for a North Korean military aircraft, the airline said Saturday. The Asiana Airlines flight carrying 119 people from the Chinese city of Chengdu was undamaged in the incident around dawn Friday, the airline said. No one on board was hurt or aware of the shooting, and the South Korean Marine Corps informed the airline of it later in the day, it said.
[….]
“The Marine Corps did fire, but they misidentified the plane,” Asiana spokesman Jason Kim said. “The plane did not suffer any damage and it landed safely.”
I don’t know whether to be gratified or worried about the marksmanship of the Marines. OK, yes I do.
“The possibility of a surprise provocation (by North Korea) with various means and methods is steadily increasing while pressurizing us with rhetorical threats,” Kim told lawmakers at a parliamentary session. “North Korea is also continuing its activities to maintain its status for a nuclear test and a missile launch.”
In his comments on the current debate about giving food aid to North Korea, Marcus Noland has voiced the suspicion that North Korea wants food aid now to help it prepare for the economic consequences of some provocation it’s now planning. I wonder if the members of Congress currently pushing an amendment to block food aid for North Korea also give credence to that theory.
For his part, President Lee is doing what he should be doing — sending a strong message of deterrence to the North Koreans, here, while inaugurating a new military command responsible for protecting the area around this vital air and sea corridor, one that controls access to the airport and seaport and Incheon, and by extension, Seoul:
“Our military exists to prevent war and defend peace, but it must strongly and thoroughly retaliate in case of attacks,” said Lee, who was not present at the ceremony at Hwaseong City, some 20 km (12.5 miles) south of Seoul. [….]
Lee said the North had continuously engaged in provocative acts since the Korean War ended in 1953, but these two deadly attacks [on the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong Island] had taught the South’s military costly lessons.
“Our military failed to react swiftly and efficiently to the North’s asymmetric military forces and provocations in limited areas,” he said, adding its different branches also failed to coordinate.
Lee’s government has also leaked word that he has deployed missiles to the border region that could hit Pyongyang. I’ve said before that it would be wiser for South Korea to limit the military component of its response and amplify its economic and subversive components. That ought to start with the closure of Kaesong, something that’s wise in any event if the South Koreans think a North Korean provocation could become a major hostage crisis.
I’m on record as saying that a limited war is exactly what Kim Jong Il needs to legitimize his son as another great general, which is why we should try to destabilize the regime without getting into one. Still, if Lee thinks a military response is necessary, he should at least consider the political impact by striking at Kim Jong Il’s palaces, which are symbols what makes Kim Jong Il so reviled both inside North Korea and elsewhere. North Korea couldn’t make a propaganda spectacle of their destruction without focusing attention on Kim Jong Il’s own profligate lifestyle, inviting a contrast with the squalor and hunger in which most North Koreans somehow live.
Posted by Joshua on June 17, 2011 at 7:45 am · Filed under China
For the record, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did not say this:
The United States has named China, Iran, Libya, North Korea and 10 other nations that it wants the U.N. to hold accountable for alleged human rights violations. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council said Wednesday “too many governments repress dissent with impunity.”
[….] She said the U.S. opposes China’s “growing number of arrests and detentions of lawyers, activists, bloggers, artists, religious believers, and their families.”
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did say this, however:
“Taiwan inspires all victims of Beijing’s totalitarian oppression that they need not be faint of heart. It is for this very reason, this shining example of liberty, that the cynical old men who still rule in Beijing are so fearful of Taiwan. It is for this very reason that they strive to eliminate this beacon of democracy. And it is for this very reason that Congress, through the Taiwan Relations Act, must strive to help preserve a Taiwan that reflects the aspirations of its people.
Video of her full statement here. Taiwan’s government occasionally makes itself look silly. By contrast, Beijing’s government frequently makes itself look brutal, thuggish, and far too arrogant to concern itself with such trivialities as the consent of the governed. What legitimacy does the Chinese government have to rule, and on what basis can it be said that the Chinese people want that rule to endure? I can see that these are questions that some people would rather not ask or answer, but they’re dispositive to the destiny of China, and consequently, all of Asia.
Today, the grievances against Beijing are widespread, yet fragmentary and isolated:
Who supposes that a government with no legitimacy can suppress those grievances forever, or prevent the fateful day when they coalesce, probably with the assistance of new technologies that the government won’t be able to suppress?
Some cynics will say that the growing hostility of both political parties toward China means that it’s now election season. Other cynics will say that the absence of visible hostility until recently could only mean that it wasn’t election season, though the chairmanship of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has clearly has an outsized effect on our national debate about China. The greater truth is that both trends reflect the deep suspicion and hostility most Americans feel for the Chinese government, trends that Beijing’s recent behavior has amplified, and not just in the United States. My suspicion is that the 2008 Olympics and the Olympic torch relay in particular were a turning point in global perceptions, and there is some evidence that the games coincided with a downturn in global perceptions about China.
There are several ways, none of them very precise or useful, to define the perjorative “neoncon,” but if you define it to mean someone who believes that democratic, representative government is superior to all other forms of government and destined by some Hegelian process to supplant them, your definition includes the entire American political mainstream, and for that matter, probably includes most of the developed world.
I believe that history will eventually record this little-noticed policy decision as the game-changer in America’s half-century standoff with North Korea. No one can predict when we’ll see the result, but for all their imperfections of vision and execution, the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Clinton in particular deserve tremendous credit for this.
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe. [NYT]
Needless to say, this will have vast implications around the world. The effects may well catalyze significant political change in China before they reach North Korea, but when they do reach North Korea, they’ll hit like a shock wave for the very reason that North Korea’s extraordinary isolation has created such a powerful pent-up demand to speak freely, to trade freely, to love freely. Clandestine journalism has already had a tremendous impact our understanding of North Korea is the last two years. It may soon have an even more revolutionary impact on North Koreans’ understanding of us.
[T]he latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.
Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.
Here, I want to credit a reader and friend I won’t name, but who read this small post and began to proselytize the idea it raised at multiple layers within the U.S. and South Korean governments. No doubt, he wasn’t the only one talking about the potential impact of so many ideas like this that are only now congealing in the minds of right-brain policy-makers who are usually at least a generation behind this new, left-brain technological revolution. It is to the immense credit of those policy-makers that, despite those limitations, they’re capable of seizing on ideas like recycling old cell phones, increasingly inexpensive satellite phones, portable DIY base stations, and mesh networking, which is particularly interesting for its potential for North Korea:
The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.
Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.
Until now, all that these ideas lacked was a modest amount of seed money for testing and evaluation, and enough political will for governments to pursue them. Markets — both commercial and political — will assuredly be much faster to seize on these concepts once they’re proven and ready for use. And once North Koreans can speak, trade, and organize without fear of detection or interference by the regime, the regime is doomed.
In an incident reminiscent of the Kang Nam I incident, a U.S. Navy ship has forced another suspected North Korean arms ship to turn around at sea, rather than face the risk of being searched in port. David Sanger of the New York Times reports:
The most recent episode began after American officials tracked a North Korean cargo ship, the M/V Light, that was believed to have been involved in previous illegal shipments. Suspecting that it was carrying missile components, they dispatched a Navy vessel, the destroyer McCampbell, to track it.
“This case had an interesting wrinkle: the ship was North Korean, but it was flagged in Belize,” one American official said, meaning it was registered in that Central American nation, perhaps to throw off investigators.
But Belize is a member of the Proliferation Security Initiative, an effort begun by President George W. Bush’s administration to sign up countries around the world to interdict suspected unconventional weapons. It is an effort that, like the military and C.I.A. drone programs, Mr. Obama has adopted, and one of the rare areas where he has praised his predecessor.
According to American officials, the authorities in Belize gave permission to the United States to inspect the ship.
On May 26, somewhere south of Shanghai, the McCampbell caught up with the cargo ship and hailed it, asking to board the vessel under the authority given by Belize. Four times, the North Koreans refused.
As in the 2009 case, which involved the North Korean vessel the Kong Nam 1, the White House was unwilling to forcibly board the ship in international waters, fearing a possible firefight and, in the words of one official, a spark “that could ignite the Korean peninsula.” Moreover, the Americans did not have definitive proof of what was in the containers — and a mistake would have been embarrassing.
Wait till you read what happened when the White House confronted the Burmese with the evidence.
Various nations have now intercepted multiple North Korean arms shipments since the passage of U.N. Security Council 1874, which prohibits North Korea from selling weapons. In some cases, the cargo was seized; in other cases, because of a loophole in the resolution that prevents the boarding of the ships on the high seas, the shipments were merely turned around and forced to return to North Korea.
- June 2009: In the first test of UNSCR 1874’s interdiction provisions, the U.S.S. John S. McCain, Jr. shadows the North Korean Kang Nam I, suspected of carrying arms from North Korea to Burma. The North Korean ship eventually turns around and heads home, reportedly after the Burmese authorities accede to U.S. demands to “search” the ship in port.
- August 2009: In an incident that’s never fully explained, Indian authorities search a North Korean ship in their territorial waters after ferry passengers point to the ship’s suspicious behavior. No word on what was found on the ship.
- August 2009: The UAE searches several containers aboard a Bahamian-flagged ship that are headed from North Korea to Iran. They containers are filled with rocket-propelled grenades of the same kind that Iran manufactures, but which are perfect for terrorist use in a less traceable form. And as I’m sure most of you have heard, North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss.
- October 2009: South Korea seizes four North Korean containers; no word on what’s inside.
- December 2009: An Soviet-built Il-76 cargo plane makes an emergency landing in Bangkok. Authorities search the plane and find it filled with weapons bound for Iran, including ballistic missile parts and man-portable surface-to-air missiles.
- February 2010: South Africa seizes containers filled with tank parts, shipped under a false bill of lading, for one of the warring parties in the civil war in D.R. Congo.
To an extent, North Korea has been able to evade the effect of sanctions by shipping its cargo through China, which turns a blind eye to North Korea’s proliferation whenever it can get away with it. That previously included occasions when suspicious North Korean planes were sitting on the tarmac at Beijing, while Condi Rice was cabling the Chinese government.
For all of the criticism from the Bush Administration’s adventurism, its record of enforcement against the North Koreans was flaccid. Recall that Bush himself allowed the So San to deliver its cargo of missiles to Yemen, even after Spanish marines forcibly boarded it. For all the hyperventilations from future Obama voters about Bush’s supposed unilateralism, he decided to let the shipment go (a) to appease the Yemeni government, which probably was worth something to us, but also (b) because he didn’t have a U.N. resolution authorizing the boarding. The latter defense can’t be offered for his 2007 decision to green-light a shipment of tank parts to Ethiopia, just months after John Bolton pushed through UNSCR 1718. But at least Bolton’s legacy has found new life — ironically, during the Barack Obama Administration. Who’d have guessed?
In the short-term it may yield diplomatic agreements, but in the longterm it only makes the country’s political and military leaders increasingly arrogant, determined to be even more provocative so that they can extort still-larger concessions from their adversaries abroad and portray themselves at home as giant-killers.
The above statement, in rough outline, would now draw agreement from the majority of serious North Korea watchers — including quite a few of us who used to caution that it was important to give negotiations a reasonable chance before turning to a hawkish solution. The country’s current series of provocations is a textbook illustration that the leadership wants and needs expanding confrontation and is not likely to decide on its own to reverse its militaristic thrust.
Martin goes on to advocate info ops against North Korea, and I agree. I also think we need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that North Korea will react violently, perhaps by shelling a balloon launch. As the events of last year teach us, more North Korean aggression is probably an inevitable consequence one way or another, as the regime becomes unstable and vulnerable under the weight of its own internal contradictions and blames outsiders for not paying enough tribute, and for the hunger of its subjects for knowledge about life on Earth.
When this comes to pass, the usual suspects will assuredly blame the victims first, including those who were driven from their homeland by Kim Jong Il’s oppression and refuse to be victims anymore. One lesson of the Muslim cartoon controversy was that too many of us would sacrifice our own freedom to appease the intolerant. For some, it is just too tempting to make the easy choice to become proxy censors for foreign tyrants, but that only sends them out in search of the next excuse to take offense. What we need instead is a swift and effective deterrent that will do serious harm to something Kim Jong Il values (his palaces?) with the lowest possible risk of escalation.
“North Korean soldiers have developed a way to determine whether the food that got carried over to North Korea along with propaganda leaflets from South Korea is poisoned by digging the ground a little bit, putting the food there, and waiting to see whether ants congregate around the food or not,” the source said.
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The Washington Post remembers Jaehoon Ahn, a North Korean defector who ended up founding Radio Free Asia’s Korean-language service. Ahn, a perfect gentleman whom I met on a number of occasions, passed away last week at age 70.
One Korean-Chinese man engaged in business in Pyongan and Hwanghae Provinces told The Daily NK on June 11th, “They’re cracking down hard on products from the Kaesong Industrial Complex in the jangmadang, and are reacting more strongly than before to South Korean products, too. There are no South Korean goods on sale openly.”
Sources say that in many cases this means that traders are being told to remove tags indicating South Korean origin.
The same trader explained, “Community watch guards come to the jangmadang and tell us to remove tags written in Chosun then sell them. They are thoroughly cracking down on things saying ‘Made in Korea’. Even though the clothes are of good quality, and therefore clearly South Korean, if there is no tag, then they are not prohibited.”
So the tags from Kaesong still say “Made in Korea?” Great. And to make matters worse, they’re also putting “Made in China” tags on garments made in North Korea from Chinese fabric. In other words, the whole region’s garment industry is steeped in country-of-origin fraud.
China is still blocking that U.N. report that implicates China in allowing North Korean missile technology to pass through its territory on its way to Iran.
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Strategy Page has a roundup of rumors about the goings-on inside North Korea. Among the rumors is one that holds that China is exerting more pressure on the North. Believe that if you must; to me, it’s just so much Chinese disinformation. I don’t doubt that China puts pressure on North Korea, but I’d bet good money that the pressure is only designed to secure Chinese economic interests or promote people who are beholden to China. I strongly doubt that the objectives of Chinese pressure coincide with U.S. political or diplomatic interests.
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From The Onion: “Pakistani Intelligence Announces Its Full Cooperation With U.S. Forces During Upcoming Top Secret June 12 Drone Strike On Al-Qaeda At 5:23 A.M. Near Small Town Of Razmani In North Waziristan.”
It has become almost impossible to imagine a positive outcome to the long-festering problems that center on North Korea as long as the Kim dynasty reigns, enforcing the disastrously failed policies of the late “Great Leader,” President Kim Il Sung. [….]
So why not just come out and say it?
Not only would perennially hungry North Korea benefit from the removal of the founder’s son and heir Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader.” But so would most of, if not all, the other countries with major interests in the region (perhaps even China). One could say the same about Kim Jong Il’s own son and heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, who has shown no inclination to jettison the policies he’s likely to inherit.
Why not acknowledge, also, as Washington seems to have done in the case of Osama bin Laden, that there are reasons why removing them dead might be better than removing them alive?
If you’re a North Korea watcher, it will probably surprise you to see who wrote those words, particularly if you’ve read his book. Pointing out that contrast isn’t meant as criticism; I have only respect for those who bow to the facts and acknowledge that this regime can’t be “engaged” into anything but a better-funded version of itself. That said, I will offer another criticism: knocking off Kim Jong Il would be unduly risky and more difficult that the author imagines, and by itself, might not even solve the bigger problem if other generals or puppets of the Chinese feel they can step right in and take his place. I’m afraid we’ll have to kill more than just one man to kill this regime. We’ll also have to kill its delusion of internal invincibility.
What I’d like to learn from this event is whether the conventional wisdom continues to migrate toward the view that North Korea is incorrigible and too big a proliferation risk to leave be. I don’t think the conventional wisdom is capable of reaching the conclusion that naturally follows, which is that we ought to be catalyzing a revolution in North Korea. It’s easy to pronounce this impossible, especially if your analysis of North Korea is still stuck in the 1980’s and hasn’t caught up with how much hunger, black markets, smuggling, trade, and information have changed North Korea, especially since the Great Confiscation. But then, even a year ago, most of the conventional wisdom would have pronounced the revolutions in Libya and Syria impossible, too. My fear is that when it does happen in North Korea, we’ll be caught flat-footed, paralyzed by indecision, and unprepared to move swiftly enough to influence events.
“We urge transparency, extreme caution and vigilance in any business dealings with North Korea,” said Mark Toner, a spokesman for the State Department, in response to the reports.
Remember the days when liberals all agreed that the only way to change North Korea was to strengthen its trade links with Earth? Me neither.
Toner said the U.S. urges “all United Nations member states to fully implement” Security Council resolutions that “target North Korea’s continued involvement in proliferation, nuclear weapons development and luxury goods procurement.”
Also on the topic of engagement, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard are out with a new paper concluding that it doesn’t work:
As an empirical matter, there is little evidence that sanctions had effect, or did so only in conjunction with inducements. However, inducements did not yield significant results either, in part because of severe credibility and sequencing problems in the negotiations.
But on the subject of sanctions, that’s not exactly the position that Noland has taken in the past. He has consistently said that he found no evidence that U.N. sanctions had much of an effect, but Noland has previously argued that Treasury sanctions against Banco Delta Asia worked:
Other measures have also worked in the past. In 2005, for example, the US Treasury Department acted against a small Macau bank holding North Korean assets, including profits from missile and gold sales and possibly even including Kim’s personal political slush fund. This one measure tanked the black-market value of North Korea’s currency, disrupted legitimate commerce, and reportedly necessitated a scaling back of festivities associated with the Dear Leader’s birthday. And Pyongyang got the message: It soon made concessions, such as shutting down the Yongbyon nuclear facilities and permitting the return of international inspectors.
See also. I hope Marcus doesn’t bristle at this too much, but there can be not-too-subtle differences in what he writes on his own, versus what he co-authors with Haggard. Co-authorship, I suppose, inherently involves compromises.
