Does anyone else find this sort of rhetoric eerily similar to what the Nazi press said about Britain and France in the 30’s?
China’s humiliations at the hands of Western powers in the past centuries “left the Chinese people with the deep pain of having seas they could not defend, helplessly eating the bitter fruit of being beaten for being backward,” said a front-page editorial in the paper.
All of this nationalist rage will probably have a terrible ending, and the potential damage to humanity is even greater than it was in 1939.
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Open News has a whole series on the country’s growing drug problem:
- Some background on the origins, history, and scope of the problem: “Especially in this extremely difficult situation, drugs have become a way to cope for those who harbor strong discontent and a sense of loss.”
- The North Korean government’s involvement in manufacturing and selling illicit drugs.
- The authorities are now trying to regain control of their borders, as customs inspectors take bribes to allow drug shipments through.
- Today, elementary school kids are become drug addicts because they’re using meth as a replacement for medicine that isn’t available (Margaret Chan was unavailable for comment).
- All of this is hurting the Chinese people, too, but the concerns of local authorities won’t matter much. Beijing is more interested in using Kim Jong Il to keep Korea divided and cause security problems for America.
So, for those who can still make it on short notice, there will be a rally at noon tomorrow on the West Lawn of the Capitol, followed by congressional office visits at 2:30.
On Friday at 7 PM, there will be a free concert. You can get more details here.
If current trends continue, however, and subversive information continues to pour across North Korea’s borders, Kim Jong Il’s approval rating could decline into the high nineties by the time of the next election. And in related news, North Korea’s borders are also a two-way street. Yonhap reports on how information is smuggled out of North Korea, and I don’t mean by the Democratic Labor Party, either.
I’m waiting for some conspiracy theorist to allege that China’s increasingly predatory foreign policy is a plot by the military-industrial complex to drive every small Asian nation into the arms of the Pentagon and sell them weapons. That certainly seems to be the effect it’s having. The more I see, the more convinced I become that Asia needs its own equivalent to NATO as an alliance against Chinese aggression. In some form or another, that alliance needs to include Taiwan.
Just days after the AP fell victim to a photo hoax by KCNA, the official North Korean “news” agency it partnered up with, the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Jean H. Lee, seems not to have taken to heart that “journalist” does not mean in North Korea what it means in other places:
But this year, David and I have been granted unprecedented access as part of AP’s efforts to expand its coverage of North Korea. We traveled into the countryside, accompanied by North Korean journalists, not government minders. We had a cell phone, Internet access and a van with a driver who took us to Kaesong to the south, Mount Myohyang to the north and Nampho to the west. During our wanderings, we got a glimpse of daily life in one of the most hidden nations in the world and found a country on the cusp of change. [AP, Jean H. Lee]
I can’t believe that any sensible reader with enough interest to read this story would really believe that those North Korean “journalists” did not also have the duty to carefully mind Ms. Lee and David Guttenfelder, the photographer accompanying her, while ferrying them to the cusp of change. The cusp of change, as it happens, lies just within the brink of famine, somewhere between “Kaesong to the south, Mount Myohyang to the north and Nampho to the west,” which means the same tired circuit of propaganda spectacles, far from North Korea’s gulags and WMD facilities, and far from where the food crisis is always worst. Good for Lee for at least conceding that the itinerary her minders fellow journalists chose was “calculated to show the bright side.” If there is one, Guttenfelder’s strikingly bleak pictures don’t show it.
So what evidence of change did Lee see? Well, there’s glass on the Ryugyong Hotel, for one thing. Unasked: How does a nation justify that cost during an acute food crisis? Also, some people had consumer goods. Unasked: Don’t those goods come from the same black market this regime is trying to stamp out, and if so, what kind of change does that suggest? Also, Lee discovers North Koreans like to drink, eat kimchi, and sing Arirang. Amazingly, just like other Koreans! Bob Carlin turns out to be a safe sole source for Lee’s “neutral” expert analysis. Why, he’s been to North Korea almost as many times as Selig Harrison!
I realize that reporting from North Korea requires compromises that other places don’t, and that among journalists, there’s at least a perception that the access you get in North Korea is inversely proportional to the critical content in your coverage. As a news consumer, I think that raises an important question of journalistic ethics. I allow that different journalists might grapple with it differently, but the photo hoax story presented it with binary clarity. Had this happened anywhere else, the AP and the rest of the industry would have been outraged, and rightfully so. Instead, the AP quietly sent out a kill notice, said little if anything else about the matter, and went right on providing some exceptionally gullible reporting — here, of a North Korean-style press conference:
And, in an astonishing turn of events, we are invited to a briefing at the grand People’s Cultural Palace, making us the first American reporters to cover a North Korean press conference, we’re told. Journalists from the North Korean press corps snap open Compaq laptops and set up Sony video cameras, and portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il serve as the backdrop.
Ten North Koreans repatriated after their fishing boat strayed into South Korean waters file into the room, the men in suits and the women in traditional Korean dresses. Tearful, emotional, they accuse the South Koreans of mistreatment.
A question-and-answer session follows: The Pyongyang Times wants to know what happened to the four North Koreans, including the boat’s captain, who stayed behind in the South. A query from the state broadcaster prompts all 10 to rise to sing an ode to Kim Jong Il
Unasked: well, pretty much any of the obvious questions that would get a North Korean “journalist” sent here. They certainly wouldn’t dream of asking the South Koreans’ side of the story, but what’s Lee’s excuse? Does she really take this charade at face value? She seems to.
In journalism, skepticism may be the ultimate virtue. But someone who doesn’t understand that might think that North Korea’s journalists are just as qualified as the AP’s.
Posted by Joshua on July 23, 2011 at 8:56 am · Filed under Anju Links
The Chosun Ilbo, citing an unnamed diplomatic source, says that China is holding two South Korean National Intelligence Service officers:
According to a diplomatic source familiar with China, two senior NIS agents were arrested in August last year while operating in Shenyang, Liaoning Province after hiring local operatives to gather intelligence on North Korea. In accordance with diplomatic protocol, the government demanded their deportation, but China demurred and put them on trial. [….]
A source familiar with North Korea said the NIS clashed with Chinese security in June 2009 while aiding the defection to South Korea by Sul Jung-shik, the first secretary of the Youth League in North Korea’s Ryanggang Province. [Chosun Ilbo]
“Totally untrue,” says the NIS, officially, but unofficially, the story describes some pretty rough play between the South Korean spies and their Chinese adversaries.
This being Chinese territory, not even I would deny the ChiComs the right to police their own soil, at least until some more legitimate system of government supplants them. The problem is that China is also allowing North Korean spies to use Chinese territory to subvert the South Korean government and political system. There’s a fresh report by the North Korea Strategic Information Service, a new service whose reputation I can’t assess yet, that North Korea is now readying its plots to influence the 2013 presidential election. No doubt, it will seize on the misrepresentation of some isolated incident (the 2002 accident) or scientific fallacy (mad cow and beef). I don’t know whether the North Korean agents responsible for executing this plan will operate from Chinese soil, although that would be consistent with past practice. The Chinese can’t deny they know about all of the Reconnaissance Bureau activity on their soil with all they work they do rounding up defectors, along with the occasional American journalist or activist.
A spy operates on foreign soil at his own risk. I get that. But when China facilitates the subversion of the South Korean government, it’s fair game for the South Koreans to do the same against the North, and to treat China like the enemy it makes of itself.
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The L.A. Times reports on the extravagances of the North Korean elite amidst warnings of a possible famine, following a similar report in the Daily NK, which I noted yesterday. While I don’t think any open-source statistics can possibly capture the true scale of North Korea’s illicit economy, I think the most telling statistic is that North Korea’s known purchases of prohibited luxury goods last year were $10 million. By contrast, the EU just donated $14.5 million in food aid to North Korea.
That’s nice, but since it’s questionable that the aid will get to those who really need it, it would do more good for North Korea if EU member states — particularly Germany and Switzerland — took seriously their obligations under UNSCR 1874 to stop selling Kim Jong Il all those fancy cars and watches. It’s a telling bit of hypocrisy for a continent that ostensibly places such a high value on the U.N. as a global law-giver.
Posted by Joshua on July 21, 2011 at 5:55 am · Filed under Anju Links
So I guess North Korea isn’t constitutionally incapable of importing food after all. The Daily NK pulled up some stats compiled by the South Korean government and Chinese customs (what, they publish those?) and broke it all down. In addition to importing $46 million worth of food last year, a whopping 4% of the total value of its imports, they bought a few other things:
In comparison, around 10 million dollars were used to purchase high quality liquor, cigarettes and others for privileged classes. The amount of cigarette imports, such as Marlboro, Mild Seven and others, is 7.5 million dollars. 2.4 million dollars were used to buy Cognac or whisky like Chivas Regal, Hennessy X.O. and other kinds of alcohol. [….]
It was reported that other items, such as international designer brands clothes, watches, and other items and electronic goods from SONY and Samsung were also imported.
Presumably, North Korea also bought plenty of other things that don’t appear in any foreign government’s official statistics. And Chris, if you’re reading this, can we find out a little more about the basis for the statement that “North Korean authorities sold wheat it had received from the international community to other countries?” It would also be interesting to know what the food was, since importing corn or even rice has different implications than, say, this:
Some ruling elites also enjoyed McDonald’s hamburgers delivered from China via Air Koryo, North Korea’s flagship airline, the official said, without elaborating.
In 2006 and 2010, China voted for U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1718 and 1874, which prohibit the import of luxury goods into North Korea. North Korea is currently appealing for international food aid. Discuss among yourselves.
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Not for the first time, it’s reported that North Korean border guards have shoot-to-kill orders. It’s not difficult for me to believe that someone issued orders of that kind. What’s difficult for me to believe is Open News has sources that can reliably trace those orders to Kim Jong Eun. First, I have trouble believing that anything coming from a “high-level” source in North Korea isn’t really disinformation or gossip. Second, I doubt that Kim Jong Eun is giving orders of this significance on his own.
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As North Korean markets recover from the Great Confiscation, merchants seek to replace lost capital by turning to loan sharks, many of them government officials.
It’s hard to take at face value the public ostracizing of Rupert Murdoch as a cancer within journalism even as the world’s two foremost wire services have just associated themselves with the world’s most fraudulent news organization. I refer to the AP’s announcement late last month that it had made a deal with Kim Jong Il’s own Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) to open a bureau in Pyongyang, and the more recent announcement by Reuters that it had “expanded” its “relationship” with KCNA to deliver official North Korean content to readers everywhere.
Great — that’s just what we all needed. As to why the AP and Reuters think this arrangement should not harm their journalistic reputations, I can only guess that KCNA’s official status gives it some sort of credibility, however perverse. Meanwhile, Murdoch is under attack for the closeness of his association with the British government, and vice versa. You don’t have to be a fan of Murdoch or some (any?) of his publications to see a double standard at work here.
The reflexive reaction of some observers to any North Korean arrangement with any non-North Korean entity is to portray it as a sign that North Korea is opening itself to the outside world. The problem with this view is that it’s mostly wishful thinking. The story never quite ends as those observers want it to. North Korea allows plenty of foreigners into Pyongyang. They’re easy to keep an eye on there. These foreign visitors then write overly dramatized news stories, blog posts, and “zines” about their “adventures,” as if they’re Edward R. Murrow reporting from the Blitz. In fact, the only thing stopping most foreigners from visiting Pyongyang is having a better place to go. It’s hardly an adventure, and given the degree of stage-management all around them, a visit to Pyongyang probably isn’t even very enlightening about North Korea.
I didn’t have much of a reaction to these initial announcements. I figured I’d wait a few months and see how many stories the AP was allowed to file from bylines other than Pyongyang, or without the intervention of minders before reacting to this “news.” On reflection, it was hasty of me to keep an open mind. It didn’t even take the AP a month to swallow a spoon-fed fraud:
North Korea’s KCNA news agency stands accused of digitally altering a photo distributed last Saturday to exaggerate flood damage in the Stalinist country following record summer rains. “The content of this image has been digitally altered and does not accurately reflect the scene,” the Associated Press said in a correction distancing itself from the picture.
Under a memorandum of understanding of June 29, AP will become the first western news agency to open a bureau in Pyongyang.
The photo in question was allegedly taken by KCNA last Friday and supplied to AP the following day. It shows seven people apparently wading along a flooded road near the Taedong River. [Chosun Ilbo]
You can see the actual photograph at that last link, or at this Joongang Ilbo story, which helpfully circles the suspicious regions.
Look, ma! Dry pants!
Meanwhile, the AP’s web site has plenty of Murdoch coverage, but nothing about whether the KCNA photograph it published was in fact doctored. However, the AP did quietly send this “Photo Kill” message out to editors and subscribers, acknowledging that it was taken in by KCNA’s hoax.
A photo that shows Pyongyang residents suffering from heavy rain has been digitally altered, the Associated Press said in a letter to editors and other subscribers. The news agency asked them to immediately eliminate the photo from their system and archives. “The content of this image has been digitally altered and does not accurately reflect the scene,” the news agency said in a statement titled “Photo Kill”.
The fact that North Korea would alter at least one image in this way is telling about its motives and modus operandi. Clearly, its motive was to give foreign readers a false and exaggerated view of the extent of damage caused by recent floods, and it had no compunction about using the foreign press as an instrument for its apparent deception. North Korea seems to be setting up a case to defraud foreign taxpayers, exploiting their sympathy to get aid, even as it’s reported to have squandered its resources on a “shopping spree for Armani, Gucci and other luxury goods for its ruling elites,” “Rolex and Omega watches,” and Hennessy Cognac.
Earlier reports about typhoon Meari, which hit North Korea on June 25-27, still reflected the traditional style. The Choson Sinbo, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Japan, on July 4 claimed the typhoon “died down” without affecting the North seriously, and damage was “not as severe as expected.”
The U-turn came on July 12, in a report about typhoon damage by the state-run KCNA news agency. “Casualties occurred in various regions. Some 160 homes were destroyed and about 21,000 farms were inundated, washed away, or buried in mudslides,” it claimed. [Chosun Ilbo]
This should serve as more warning to potential foreign donors to be suspicious of North Korean appeals for aid, and to insist on strict monitoring when we do decide to give any. Should, but won’t.
I can’t resist closing with a few words about the lovely Mrs. Murdoch, who can smack a hippie as skillfully as any of Richard J. Daley’s finest. Just watch it. BAM!
I sure am glad I’m not Johnny Marbles today. He has to live with the ineradicable stigma of attacking an 80 year-old man, and then losing the fight to a little Chinese lady in a pink jacket. It’s bad enough that he’ll have to explain that to his friends. He’ll also need years of therapy to sort out his strange-yet-haunting feelings of arousal. So have we all learned our lesson about stereotypes today?
You may remember that several years ago, a liquor distributor in the United States tried to introduce North Korean soju into the U.S. market. That effort failed long before President Obama reimposed trade sanctions on North Korea, partially because of the importer’s legal troubles, but probably also because the stuff supposedly tasted awful.
Apparently, North Korean consumers share that assessment, because the same brand of South Korean soju that once kept me fully occupied as a prosecutor and defense counsel is a hit on the North Korean black market:
A source in Onsong reported July 6th that the South Korean Cham-isul (trans: True Dew) brand of soju has appeared in North Korean markets and has been an instant hit with local consumers. Reports of South Korean made noodles or choco pies on sale in North Korean markets are well established but this is the first news that South Korean soju has also become available. Cham-isul soju has been sold there since May.
“North Koreans have a tremendous curiosity about South Korean soju,” the source went on, “and everyone wants to get hold of a bottle and give it a try. It’s on sale for 3,000\. That’s around ten times the cost of North Korean soju.” At an exchange rate of 1SK\ to 3NK\, each bottle is the equivalent of 1,000SK\. [….]
“The Cham-isul soju available in the markets has been brought across the border by traders and smugglers. North Korean consumers are getting more and more used to South Korean goods, from electrical goods to food products,” concluded the source. [Open News]
Anyone who has ever been to Korea knows that soju is powerful stuff. Authoritative historical archives tell us that as recently as 1959, sailors were known to swill it until they hallucinated winking, doe-eyed island beauties and ran their ships aground:
Maybe I’m making too much of trivialities like soju, ramyon noodles, and ChocoPies, but I like the way our two soju stories illustrate the right way and the wrong way to “engage” with North Korea. When engagement is negotiated by diplomats, Kim Jong Il dictates the terms so that he earns hard currency to buy God-only-knows-what, and keep all but a few hand-picked, loyal North Koreans shielded from the outside world. It’s enough to make you think the North Koreans have better diplomats than we do. This story shows us a much more effective way — using the market to reach North Korea’s people instead of trying to negotiate our way through its government.
Also pictured: Soju
Take engagement away from the diplomats and leave it to the marketplace — which really means the North Korean people themselves — and wondrous things happen. Not only do people drink better liquor, but people, goods, services, money, and culture cross borders; state-imposed isolation melts away; the truth enters forbidden places; and repressed societies and economies start to awaken. You can even detect a people’s latent and subversive yearning for reunification expressed, something that Kim Jong Il seems desperate to extinguish:
One such North Hamkyung Province source reported on the 13th, “National Security Agency people responsible for the jangmadang [markets] and members of the Worker’s and Peasant’s Red Guard appear every day to examine all goods such as clothes and daily necessities one by one, insisting that they are ‘rooting out capitalist elements.’ All the products labeled ‘South Korea’ are confiscated without compensation.” “Even (fake South Korean) products made in China are taken away if they have South Chosun words on them,” the source went on. “Shampoo, toothpaste and other daily necessities are all targets.”
Since the start of the 2000s, South Korean products have been entering North Korea thanks to smugglers and traders, and have sold well in the jangmadang at above average prices thanks in large part to their high quality. Smugglers also prefer South Korean products to those made in China because they are more profitable, making them willing to risk punishment to bring such products in. [….]
The North Korean authorities have tended to call this a ‘capitalist wind’ and often range their official crackdowns against it, but this has hitherto only drawn interest toward the forbidden fruit. What is more, the security service agents and soldiers who are supposed to be cracking down on it are prepared to accept bribes to turn a blind eye, and in many cases have shown sympathy for the activities of traders and smugglers.[Daily NK]
In the markets, the hungry can find all sorts of nourishment, including the physical kind. Markets were probably a major factor in ending the Great Famine as North Koreans learned new ways to get food that the state would not provide. They showed such potential to ameliorate North Korea’s perennial food crisis that today, up to 80% of North Koreans depend on them for their food supply. It’s telling that North Korea managed to survive the regime’s 2005 closure of most of the World Food Program’s operations there without mass famine, but has suffered a more significant deterioration in its food crisis since the regime began trying to shut down the country’s markets in mid-2009. This peaked with the Great Confiscation in December, which devastated the rising market economy that was bringing food and other goods from outside the country. North Korea’s domestic food production last year wasn’t worse than in previous years, but the markets — and the traders who fill them — have recovered unevenly from this regime-made disaster, with markets in the border regions recovering faster than those in the interior. The regime hasn’t quit trying to crack down, but can’t fill the void in the food supply, so every time its crackdowns cause hunger and discontent, it’s forced to back off.
Those whose position is most fragile complain the most, the source went on, saying that such people point out, “The state cannot produce and it cannot give the people distribution, so why are they even stopping us from surviving? Some people have even said wryly, ‘So, this is the strong and prosperous state’.”
According to the Yangkang Province source, “One woman selling bathroom goods started having many people looking for South Chosun products around, and then immediately an NSA agent confiscated everything. Passing traders got pretty angry when they saw that, saying, ‘It’s not a case of waiting for the strong and prosperous state, it is a case of waiting for the day when those guys will die.’” [Daily NK]
If the regime can fill the void, it cracks down on markets. One relief group — which purports to feed the North Korean people without going through the regime — even suggests that’s why the regime is asking for aid now. That’s another argument against giving food aid unless we’re sure we can keep the regime from stealing it. At times, I have to wonder if the regime is constitutionally opposed to just buying food, even when doing so would seem to be in its interest (though so might keeping people hungry). Although it’s not clear that this rising people’s economy is closely linked to the official economy, the official economy has suffered, too, though probably for different reasons. One observer recently calculated that it has contracted by a stunning 18% since 2007. Part of this is probably due to the loss of South Korean aid money, but sanctions probably also played some role.
In short, markets can change North Korea in ways that state-to-state engagement policies like Sunshine couldn’t. They’re not changing North Korea because the state is willing to accept reform or openness, but because the state has largely lost its capacity to control it. If so, then the way to change North Korea isn’t to provide its regime economic support, it’s to do whatever we can to sap its capacity to control its borders. One way to do this is to facilitate cross-border trade by assisting, training, and equipping journalists, defectors, dissidents, and plain-old smugglers, but another way runs completely against the failed conventional wisdom about engagement. If the regime is desperate to close its borders and crack down on markets, then it follows that the more limited the regime’s resources, the more difficulty it will have cracking down on markets and the faster North Korean society will change. So if targeted sanctions deprive the regime of money to spend on border guards, police, customs officers, and cell phone trackers, they could be a greater agent of social change and economic development than economic cooperation with Kim Jong Il’s regime. That’s admittedly an unconventional view of engagement, but for all the time, money and lives that have been sacrificed for this conventional approach, where is the evidence that it has changed North Korea for the better?
On a radio broadcast on July 4, a North Korean official said, “Our farming laborers will, with rifle in one hand and a scythe in the other like in the war for independence, make a decisive change this in year in agricultural production and serve to send more rice for our military, which will strike open the head of the traitor and enemy, Lee Myung-bak.”
The same quote citing the same official made it on to North Korean TV and its state-run news agency later in the day. But the part about sending more rice to the military and striking open Mr. Lee’s head was deleted.
Of course, the way North Korea rationalizes its diversion shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s paying attention, but it’s a pretty unsatisfying thing to advocate against giving food aid when the people of North Korea probably really are very, very hungry. While I don’t see the evidence for mass famine, I don’t doubt that plenty of people (especially kids and the elderly) are dying as the state and individual families lose the means (or the will) to keep feeding them. Refugees from the mining town of Musan, near the Chinese border, report that people are starving to death, and that others are supplementing their diets with … manure.
No doubt, you could feed every one of them for the cost of a new Maybach or a centrifuge. But you can’t feed them at all if the regime is determined to go so such extraordinary lengths as this to divert it. In that case, better to let the army suffer with everyone else, at least until the regime comes under enough pressure that it agrees to truly effective monitoring. There’s some reason to hope that might eventually happen. After all, the people who survive the lean years best are those who know how to trade, and that’s where soldiers and officials may find themselves disadvantaged for once.
Meanwhile, North Korea has teamed up with China, a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council, to round up the starving North Koreans who are fleeing to China to get food:
A source in the North Korean security agency reported July 10th that on June 30th at least 90 defectors were transferred into the North via Sinuiju and Hyesan. And on July 11th a further 16 were repatriated in signs that the Chinese are cooperating to more stringently suppress the defection phenomenon.
“At the end of last June,” said the source, “over 60 defectors were brought into holding centers in Sinuiju and at least thirty into centers in Hyesan. In the past the Chinese authorities would catch and repatriate the defectors to maintain internal order. This latest surge in arrest activity is the result of a request made for help from the North Korean security agencies.” [….]
“Because of this,’ said the source, “even those who have married in China and have children and a Chinese identity card are being reported as North Korean and detained.” The phones of Chinese Korean relatives are being tapped as the ratcheted up levels of surveillance extend to Chinese citizens as well. Defectors must be careful not just when they call North Korea but when they make internal calls to Chinese relative, too.
“Recently,” finished the source, “the issue of defectors has become more urgent to the security agents than the issue of feeding themselves. Arrested defectors are going to be more severely punished than before.” [Open News]
If the U.N. had existed in 1942, it would have made Dr. Mengele head of the W.H.O.
Along with this, Bolton criticizes President Obama for his public silence on North Korea. But as we learned from George W. Bush, strident rhetoric is no substitute for a not-half-bad policy. This isn’t to say that Obama’s policy is more than half good. It’s far below its true potential, but it’s certainly a vast improvement over Bush’s — and I know first-hand that Bolton was isolated and sidelined within the Bush Administration, whose North Korea policy was actually very soft-line when you peeled away the empty talk. If the talk isn’t backed with a tough policy, all it does is stir up controversy and expend political capital that would be better spent on an executive order. And as Bolton acknowledges, doing nothing beats the hell out of Agreed Framework III.
Where Bolton’s criticism rings true is that President Obama — like his predecessor — has failed to apply sufficient pressure on China to implement U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1718 (Bolton’s own) and 1874 (its Obama-era progeny, which Susan Rice probably found on Bolton’s old computer, marked “first draft”). If no American president has the spine to flood the border region between North Korea and China with free internet and cheap guns, or even to threaten as much, then a more subtle pressure point is Taiwan. I can see principled reasons not to formally link the two issues; after all, Taiwan’s is a legitimate, elected government with an inherent right to defend itself. But if that’s not reason enough for us to help the Taiwanese build their anti-missile defenses, build ballistic missiles of their own, and nuke up, then isn’t gaining negotiating leverage over China just as good a reason?
A delegation of Japanese officials and activists urged the Obama administration on Thursday redesignate North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism over its failure to resolve cases of missing Japanese nationals abducted by North Korean agents decades ago and taken to the Stalinist state.
Eight members of Japan’s parliament and three Japanese human rights activists spoke to reporters at the National Press Club to denounce North Korea for what they said was a 30-year record of kidnapping and illegally holding Japanese citizens in violation of international human rights norms. The group also called for halting food aid to North Korea and reimposing economic sanctions.
That’s all good, except that I wouldn’t condition food aid on anything except North Korea’s agreement to the same degree of monitoring that the WFP gets in Sudan, Zimbabwe, or anywhere else. Otherwise, the food is better send to places where it can help those who really need it.
“On this argument, we could not get a clear response from the State Department,” Mr. Matsubara said. “Senior officials told us North Korea is a difficult actor to deal with.”
Do tell! Even when you accede to their demands, they’re still difficult to deal with! Perhaps even more so, judging by recent events.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is supporting the Japanese. She said in a statement: “We cannot overlook the heinous North Korean practice of abducting Japanese and South Korean citizens, and citizens of other countries.” “It must be made clear to Pyongyang that its actions will not be without consequences. I believe that the U.S. must hold Pyongyang accountable,” Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said. “It’s time for U.S. to ratchet up its pressure on the regime in response to its growing laundry list of abuses.”
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 to reward it for its progress toward complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament. Discuss among yourselves.
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They’re not wages if the workers can’t spend them: So North Korea has the chutzpah to demand that South Korea pay 5% more for labor costs at Kaesong just months after the shelling of Yeonpyeong, and without having so much as admitted to murdering all these South Korean sailors. Frankly, the fact that Kaesong is still running at all is an outrage and an insult to the families of the dead.
I also have a problem with the dishonesty of reporting that calls these payments “wages,” when our best information is that the workers only receive a tiny fraction of this — less than one-seventh of it, according to Barbara Demick, and that’s before you account for exchange rates (you didn’t think North Korea paid those workers in South Korean won, did you?). Most of that money is actually just bulk cash payments to Kim Jong Il, which would probably violate at least two U.N. Security Council Resolutions.
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Someone tell Margaret Chan! Obesity is Coming to North Korea! One commenter recently asked for my reaction to this report that Coke and KFC were going to start operations in North Korea. Well, from a business and a corporate image perspective, I think that would be disastrous, which means it’s probably exceedingly unlikely. But if, for whatever reason, it does happen, then I’ll be sure to drop a line to all of those packs of lawyers who are currently hunting for North Korean assets to attach and garnish.
Everyone knows that North Korea does a lot of things that we can’t explain without resorting to mostly groundless speculation about its internal power politics. This goes beyond cultural differences. I don’t know any South Koreans who can explain things like the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents, which imposed real (if insufficient) financial and diplomatic costs on the regime. In our conversations, not even Kim Kwang Jin claimed to understand for certain why Kim Jong Il does things that appear to harm his own interests.
Most of the speculative explanations about North Korea’s power politics also have flaws. For example, there ought to be ways that are less politically costly to elevate the reputation of Kim Jong-Eun than ways that only increase the hardships and discontent of the very people they’re supposed to be meant to influence. At some point, you have to admit that North Korea’s bigger decisions certainly look irrational. That’s the theory Andrei Lankov has inclined to for at least a year, and according to this report, North Koreans are starting to agree:
Rumors that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is suffering from dementia are spreading quickly across the isolated country. Reports say the leader is increasingly incoherent during his so-called on-the-spot guidance trips.
When Kim watched the 1960s propaganda play “Sanwoolim (Echo)” during an inspection of a military base in Kangwon Province recently, he reportedly described it as “a masterpiece that is bound to lead the revolution in the future.” Party cadres were dumbfounded to hear him praise the old show as if he had never seen it before. [Chosun Ilbo]
The report itself sounds apocryphal, but it jibes with recent events.
Our next report suggests that Sohn Hak-Kyu might have trouble finding North Koreans to help him plan his Olympic village:
North Korea has reportedly purged 30 officials who participated in inter-Korean talks or supervised bilateral dialogue via execution by firing squad or staged traffic accidents. A South Korean government source said Thursday, “Thirty people have been confirmed to have died or gone missing until recently. About 10 partners of inter-Korean talks with the South were executed by firing and about 20 others were said to have died in traffic accidents.”
“As of now, the North has no partners to talk with the South. There will likely be major change in inter-Korean relations.”
Seoul said all Pyongyang officials who attended secret inter-Korean contacts are being purged, which clearly demonstrates that the internal organization of the North`s communist regime is extremely unstable and fragile. The power struggle in Pyongyang is intensifying in the course of the power succession of heir apparent Kim Jong Un, and hardliners are accordingly gaining ground while those in support of dialogue are losing ground, analysts say. [Donga Ilbo]
I can believe that the North Korean regime has plenty of closet dissidents, plenty of factions, and plenty of purges, but I’ve never put much credence in any theory that holds that there are factions of hard- and soft-liners plotting against one another within the North Korean regime. Of course, no one outside of Pyongyang knows the real truth, but I’d guess that the factions fight over more practical things, like turf and money. And until recently, South Korea was North Korea’s automatic teller. To a hopeful outside observer, an interest in hauling in South Korean money might be mistaken for an ideological interest in improving inter-Korean relations, even reform. I just don’t see the evidence for it.
It also has the whiff of disinformation. Selig Harrison has been peddling a particularly fantastic variation of this hard-line/soft-line stuff for years to try to persuade American diplomats that we should give North Korea more concessions to help the soft-line faction — concessions that never seem to win us any lasting security benefits or visibly alter the regime’s character. I incline toward the view that Harrison and others are picking up on North Korean disinformation designed to extract concessions from us. But of course, this news doesn’t come from Selig Harrison, so it isn’t necessarily false.
By now, it seems clear that South Korea, Japan, and the United States will all refuse to contribute food aid to the World Food Program. Contributions from the EU, Sweden, and even China are minuscule in comparison to the WFP’s appeal, and to the amounts that the United States was providing during the Clinton and Bush Administrations, before North Korea itself rejected further aid out of apparent spite. Republicans who dominate the House again are dead-set against giving aid this year, and the Obama Administration sounds dissatisfied with North Korea’s concessions to the World Food Program on monitoring.
I was inclined to agree with the latter assessment until a WFP spokesman responded to some interview questions I sent him. The responses moved me beyond mere inclination and convinced me that the WFP’s assessment and monitoring, despite some useful safeguards, are inadequate. I acknowledge how difficult these questions are, and I respect plenty of people who disagree with my view here. Advocates of food aid paint a picture of terrible suffering in North Korea. They’re not wrong about that, but they still can’t convince me that international aid would help them. And when you read things like this, you can see why donors nations think their money is better spent on people they know they can help:
A high level Pyongyang source reported June 29th, “The Mercedes Benz limousine used by Kim Jong-il during his recent China visit in May was a different model to the ones he used in his visits last year in May and August.” The new car was photographed by Yonhap news when Kim Jong-il arrived at his Jangchun hotel.
The source said that Kim Jong-il used to be conveyed to his destinations in the Maybach model of limousine but in 2009 the Benz S-600 Pullman Guard came out of production and onto the market. This new model was $100,000 more expensive than the Maybach. Given that customarily when leaders are transported there are at least two cars required to simultaneously convey protection units, at least $200,000 must have been spent on the vehicles.
Asked whether the new cars might have been provided by the Chinese authorities, the source said, “A photo confirms otherwise but also the Beijing plates that the car is carrying are just a matter of custom that the Chinese authorities usually apply in the immigration process to cars that were transported by air. It’s certain that the car was brought in from North Korea.”
Meanwhile according to figures The Korea Trade Association has derived from China-North Korea trade statistics, North Korea imported $3,100,000 of European manufactured cars through China last year. Given that a ton of corn costs about $250 dollars, Kim Jong-il splurged a quantity of money that could have bought 13,000 tons of corn for his hungry people. [Open News]
This obscene trade violates U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874’s prohibition on the sale of “luxury goods” to North Korea, and again calls into question the seriousness of China (naturally), but also of the German and Swiss governments to enforce compliance with the resolution.
From January through May, North Korea imported 229 Swiss-made watches worth $45,000 (48.43 million won) and 9 watch components, the American network Radio Free Asia reported on the 8th. Among the Swiss watches imported by North Korea were 174 spring-wound watches and 55 battery-operated watches, worth an average of $198 each.
During the same period last year North Korea had not imported any watches at all. North Korea imported 284 Swiss watches in 2007, 449 in 2008, and 662 in 2009, an increase each year, but that fell to 339 last year. [Nathan Schwartzmann, via RFA]
Oh, and let’s not forget that nukemoney paid to the Pakistani Army. Critics will note that this isn’t a revelation of recent activity, of course. It’s a revelation of activity at the very height the Great Famine, as a million or two North Koreans were starving to death, and as the American taxpayers’ generosity toward the people of North Korea reached its peak.
Not only are donors suspicious, but plenty of North Koreans probably are, too. Stephan Haggard points us to the remarkable results of a survey by NKnet of North Korean refugees in South Korea. Haggard, who advocates giving food aid despite acknowledging its limitations, boils the data down to confirm that North Koreans — at least, those North Koreans whose opinions we can access — share (and perhaps confirm) our worst suspicions:
# Some of the more interesting responses have to do with assessments of the causes of the crisis. Respondents were allowed to pick two responses, meaning that all responses total to 200%. 27% cited lack of agricultural inputs. But the vast majority of responses target the regime itself: excessive military expenditure (88%); irresponsibility and incompetence of the leadership (26%); agricultural policy (14%). Only 7% cited natural disasters. This comports with our findings that the regime’s narratives may be getting less traction than in the past (if they ever really did).
# 94% of respondents believed that the way to “fundamentally solve the food problem” was for North Korea to reform and open up; only 1.4% cited large-scale aid as a solution.
# A stunning set of responses had to do with food aid itself. 78% said that they had never received food aid, which as we note in Witness may or may not be true. But 27% said that they gave some of the food that they received from the PDS back to the government. NKNET claims that this occurred in areas where monitoring was going on. In short, food distribution was a classic Potemkin village set up, with aid distributed for the monitors and then taken back. In fairness, though, while 98 percent of the respondents said that they had never seen foreign monitors, 30 percent claimed that monitoring had at least some effect.
# With respect to who got food aid, respondents were allowed to check as many categories as they chose. The findings provide a nice weighting of the power structure:
* Military, 73%; party cadres, 69%; administrative organs, 49%, privileged classes 39%
* Children in vulnerable classes, 4%; general people, 0.2% adults in vulnerable classes, 0; pregnant women, 0. [Stephan Haggard, Witness to Transformation blog]
The latter groups being the ones that are supposed to be the WFP’s recipients. The ultimate result? Fully three-quarters of those North Korean respondents opposed the idea of South Korea giving food aid to their own homeland, where many of their loved ones are still trying to scrape by. Of course, these refugees aren’t counting on the U.N. to feed their hungry families; they’re using smugglers to send them money, which their loved ones are using to buy food in the markets, which draws food into the country and undercuts the corrupt and discriminatory food distribution system that’s to blame for this perennial crisis. Markets almost certainly feed more hungry North Koreans than the WFP can, and what’s more, they’re doing more to develop North Korea’s economy and alleviate its long-term food crisis.
This is the part where you can insert your own disclaimer about selection bias among a refugee population. Or maybe these North Koreans arrived at their views only after escaping and reading news reports in the South, but I tend to doubt that. There are now more than 20,000 North Koreans who were both willing and able to go through hell to get to South Korea, which suggests that the overwhelming consensus among this rapidly growing population represents a significant constituency at its source. The real story here isn’t that the North Korean regime is starving the people — we’ve known that for years. The real story is that the North Korean people know who’s starving them.
Posted by Joshua on July 15, 2011 at 6:02 am · Filed under Sports
It seems that I was not alone in my reaction to Sohn Hak-Kyu’s addle-brained suggestion of sharing the 2018 Winter Olympics with North Korea. The idea has since been rejected by the Chairman of the International Olympic Commission, the government of South Korea, and 73.3% of South Koreans. So that would seem to be that. Or so we can hope.
Here, by the way, is what caused me to suspect that Sohn only proposed the idea to appease his hard-left base as he enters the presidential nomination contest.
But the comparison of North Korea’s treatment with South Africa’s is a constant source of delectable irony. Whereas the IOC enforced a boycott of South Africa, the IOC insists that Japan grant North Korea free access to Olympic events there despite North Korea’s abduction and imprisonment of Japanese citizens.
So is North Korea’s regime really less racist than South Africa’s was?
Why did I shudder when I heard that South Korea had won the winter Olympics? Because I knew it was just a matter of time before some imbecile had an idea like this one:
Rep. Sohn Hak-kyu, chairman of the opposition Democratic Party, said Monday the party would push for “some events at the 2018 Winter Olympics to be staged in North Korea.”
He said he would also bring up the issue of forming a unified team with the North in future talks with the ruling Grand National Party and the government.
“We are seriously reviewing ways of involving the North in the hosting of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics,” Sohn said during a party supreme council meeting.
“We will make the PyeongChang Olympics the turning point in Korea’s divided history.” [Korea Times]
I cannot believe this man actually believes what he just said. I can believe he believes that some of his potential voters believe what he just said, which saddens me. It certainly didn’t take long for North Korea to endorse this idea. They’re all about sponging off the neighbors they periodically attack.
If you take Sohn at his word, he’s still chasing the lost dream of bribing North Korea into being nice, making up, and joining hands, which seemed to be all the South Korean left stood for during the decade it held in power in South Korea. But it’s one thing for them to want to finance Kim Jong Il as part of a novel experiment, as long as they could still theorize plausibly that financing North Korea’s regime would moderate, reform, and transform it. It’s another thing for them to want to finance North Korea’s regime after events have conclusively refuted that theory, and after Kim Jong Il opened a low-intensity conflict that killed dozens of South Koreans, terrorized thousands more, and depopulated a small but highly strategic piece of South Korean territory. The Commander of U.S. Forces in Korea doesn’t think we’ve seen the last of North Korea’s escalated provocations. Meanwhile, we’re still seeing constant reminders of the Sunshine Policy’s costly and failed legacy:
Hyundai Asan is suffering snowballing losses after tours to Mt. Kumgang in North Korea were halted in the wake of fatal shooting of a South Korean tourist in the resort. Park Wang-ja was shot dead by a North Korean soldier on July 11, 2008 and Hyundai Asan’s sales losses have accumulated to W390 billion (US$1=W1,058) over the three years, with staff dwindling from about 1,000 to just over 300, a spokesman said on Sunday. [Chosun Ilbo]
The idea behind Sunshine was to leverage South Korea’s financial advantage to buy influence in the North and thus transform its political system, but something like the opposite is closer to the truth. Plenty of South Korean money poured into the black hole of North Korea, but some South Koreans were so desperate to see results justifying that cost that North Korea ended up gaining more political influence in the South than vice versa. North Korea’s determination not to reform itself meant that even attempts to use sporting events to bridge political and cultural differences often widened them, and sometimes ended horribly for the North Koreans involved. We even saw North Koreans begin to impose their censorship on political expression on South Korean territory. North Korea’s own approach to sports has been, like everything else in North Korea, relentlessly political and defiant of the ways in which other human beings are expected to behave (possibly to include its doping rules). When it loses matches, North Korean coaches revert to unsportsmanlike excuses that their athletes were struck by lightning or poisoned by their hosts. After a decade of the Sunshine Policy, there’s more evidence that it changed South Korea’s political system than evidence that it changed the North’s.
And we can look forward to five years of that if Sohn Hak-Kyu becomes of the President of South Korea.
So how is Sohn’s theory still plausible to any thinking person? I can’t imagine that many of its supporters are attracted to it for logical reasons. Most people, regardless of intelligence, arrive at their conclusions for emotional reasons that resist evidence and logic. Their intelligence is mostly squandered on elaborate justifications for what they’ve already decided to believe. Plenty of intelligent people still do support Sunshine-like policies because they can’t see any better ideas and feel compelled to advocate for something, if only so that they appear to have answers. But on what basis can they still argue that it might work? What has North Korea done to deserve a piece of this action in any sense at all? And once again, why is North Korea allowed into the Olympics in any capacity whatsoever? After all, for years, the IOC didn’t let South Africa in, and as racist a place as South Africa was, at least they didn’t kill babies for being racially impure there. And we ought to remember that we object to racism because the basic presumption of equality is just one of many human rights. If the IOC has made the decision to stand for one such basic right, how can it justify holding an Olympic event in a place that does this to people?
The pendulum effect being what it is, I have a terrible feeling that someone like Sohn could actually win the next presidential election in South Korea. If so, I’ll probably regain my sense of urgency about getting American troops the hell out of South Korea. I suppose Sohn could be proposing this to appease the far left wing of his party. Sohn is a defector from the more conservative Grand National Party. He recently defeated the loser of the 2008 presidential election, Chung Dong-Young, as leader of the left-wing Democratic Party. Sohn isn’t from the Cheolla provinces, the DP’s base. It’s doubtful that he’ll be the DP’s presidential nominee without a challenge from within his own party, or from another left-wing party. In South Korean election years, the only thing you can rely on is that there will be frequent and dramatic shifts of party affiliation, nomenclature, and loyalty.
In the meantime, North Korea is changing — not because of any officially sanctioned cultural exchanges, joint ventures, or feel-good sports spectacles, but in 23 million small ways, and despite the regime’s desperation to stop that change. North Korea is changing anyway because even among the world’s most downtrodden people, there is an emerging market for the basic needs that the state refuses to provide, and also for knowledge, news, and entertainment from the greater world. Because of this, the metastasis of its political system is now probably too advanced for the Olympics to save:
A Chongjin source reported from North Hamgyeong province on June 26th, “People are copying and renting out South Korean dramas in Chongjin.” The source said that there are so many interested in the dramas that where previously they might gather in secret to watch them, now people are trading them as a business. The transaction method is comparable with video rental Stores in the South.
“Those trading in the CDs can’t do so legitimately and always have to be on the lookout for the authorities. But they are getting repeat customers from those who are addicted to the products,” said the source.
The CDs are produced in China and smuggled into North Korea in large quantities. In order to assure the success of the operation, it is essential for the traders to establish sound corrupt relationships with the security agencies. [Open News]
Even if the regime manages to forestall events like those in Syria and Libya for many more years, the next generation of propagandists and enforcers won’t believe in the system, and the inhibitions of the common people about hiding that disbelief are eroding steadily. There’s reason to hope that by 2018, North Korea will have undergone some dramatic change of government, or be in a state of such disarray that reality will hush this misbegotten idea.
Why did I shudder when I heard that South Korea had won the winter Olympics? Because I knew it was just a matter of time before some imbecile had an idea like this one: