Posted by Dan Bielefeld on December 29, 2011 at 10:35 am · Filed under WTF?, Kim Jong Il, Propaganda
Source: KCNA via NK Leadership Watch
Well if this doesn’t take the cake! I suspected it, but then thought twice about it — surely even the North Korean higher-ups wouldn’t go against their own propaganda for an event to be watched into perpetuity by every one of their subjects. Yet commenter Thomas was the first here to come out and say it, and now ABC News Radio says it’s true:
…But a curious detail was that the boxy black hearse that crept through the light snow was a vintage Lincoln Continental.
The choice of a U.S.-made luxury car seems odd for a country that preached a belligerent self reliance, reviled America and was put on President George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil list.
Experts at Edmunds.com put the year of the Lincoln at 1976, making the 35-year-old vehicle older than North Korea’s 28-year-old new leader Kim Jong-Un.
Ford, the parent company of Lincoln, did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.
The choice of an American luxury car for his final ride is consistent with Kim’s tastes, despite his regime’s propaganda depicting the U.S. as evil, dangerous and violent, and his history of antagonizing numerous American administrations with threats of war and nuclear weapons. [Joshua Cohan, ABC News Radio]
I don’t know about you, but this fact would seem to be ripe to float into North Korea by balloon — say, for the new dictator’s birthday on January 8th.
Update:
Car Buzz also says it was a 1976 Lincoln Continental and has some nice photos and says something that would make Korean car makers smile.
I wonder what cars were used for Kim Il Sung’s funeral?
Update 2:
For the answer to that and more, see this NY Times article.
“The Lincoln Continental in the old Asia was considered to be a solid, robust, powerful car,” said Kongdan Oh, a senior researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses who has written on daily life in North Korea, where her parents were born. “They are a time capsule. North Koreans are living still the 1970s life.”
She said the cars were probably chosen because they were previously used in the funeral of Kim Il-sung, who was Kim Jong-il’s father and the founding president of North Korea and who died in 1994. “Whatever they did in the past, they are very comfortable repeating that, especially this Kim family dynasty,” she said of the North Korean leadership. “They probably didn’t even think twice about using this car. For them, it’s a very natural choice.”
Very interesting. I wonder if the average North Korean would know about this old belief in this American car, and what they think about it being used in the state funeral.
Posted by Joshua on December 23, 2011 at 11:32 am · Filed under Kim Jong Eun
At the Daily NK, two of the more sober and best-informed analysts offer some fairly scary prognostications (Klingner here, Lankov here). I tend to agree with the idea that we’re going to see more instability there. I’ve been saying that for a long time, but I also expect things to accelerate soon. No one could have imagined that Libya and Syria would become unstable a year ago, and just look at those places now. The more repressive the regime, the more suddenly and violently discontent erupts, seemingly from nowhere. Of course, anything that’s hidden from the Associated Press always seems to come from nowhere.
Posted by Joshua on December 23, 2011 at 7:30 am · Filed under Useful Idiocy
We’re still waiting to see who’s willing to print Selig Harrison’s requiem for Kim Jong Il, but in the meantime, there are plenty of tools out there who say that Kim Jong Il was really just misunderstood. First up is pretty much what you’d expect from the British left:
But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing. [Simon Winchester, whoever that is, via WSJ Ideas Market Blog]
My favorite, however, is this Daily Kos post:
We have to realize that much of what is written about North Korea is for popular digestion regarding potential invasion. Let’s face it, North Korea is ripe for capitalism, there are millions of potential workers who will work for near nothing. The hope is that the regime will crumble like the Soviet Union and give way to massive investment opportunities. [….]
While North Korea may behave in a strange fashion at times, its political history is no less responsible toward its own citizens than the history of the South, especially the recent history that was dominated in the 1960s to 1980s by dictatorial regimes that practiced torture and mass arrest. While we hear of starvation and torture in North Korea, these are far less well documented than the recent history of the South. As for the nuclear weapons issue, we should also recall that the USA has been the only country to use nuclear weapons, and we used them on civilians. If the world is to be afraid of the use of these weapons by a renegade nation, one should look at the definition of the word in the context of the Bush Administration waging war in violation of international law and by the use of evidence it knew was tainted. We cannot expect a world of law and respect after such behavior. [Niccolo Caldararo, Daily Kos, via to Doug Bandow]
All of which is a bit much … even for the commenters at DKos. It’s such a logically decrepit argument that it attempts to use the 2003 invasion of Iraq to confer immunity on North Korea’s dynastic rulers for a completely preventable famine that began in the 1990’s, a nuclear program that began in the 1980’s, and a gulag system that dates back to the 1950s. Even our old friend Christine Ahn didn’t go that far in an uncharacteristically half-hearted defense of Kim Jong Il’s “mixed legacy,” portraying him more as a victim than a hero, and at least Ahn manages to understand the concept of chronology (in Ahn’s case, this is progress).
Personally, I would sooner call Eichmann a Holocaust survivor — well, technically, he was! — than Kim Jong Il a victim or a hero, and if the internet had existed half a century ago, I don’t doubt that some morally retarded person would have.
Posted by Joshua on December 22, 2011 at 8:42 pm · Filed under Kim Jong Eun
Soon enough, we’ll see different narratives about Kim Jong Eun emerge. North Koreans are already hearing about Kim Jong-Eun’s badass marksmanship, and I suppose we’ll see him credited with superhuman intellence next. Foreigners will want to believe he’s the next Gorbachev, and trust me, Peter Pan had nothing on our State Department. I’d love to believe that myself. And I suspect a certain former Washington Post reporter and frequent Pyongyang visitor is presently writing an op-ed telling us all that that’s so. Unfortunately, the little unverified information we have isn’t grounds for optimism:
North Korea’s new leader is depicted in U.S. intelligence assessments as a volatile youth with a sadistic streak who may be even more unpredictable than his late father, according to U.S. officials. U.S. intelligence officials say they have limited information about Kim Jong Eun, the youngest son of Kim Jong Il and his anointed successor. The U.S. has had few direct contacts on which to make a “conclusive assessment” of Kim Jong Eun’s nature and character, a senior U.S. official said. [….]
The portrait of Kim Jong Eun that emerges in his U.S. profile is that of a young man who, despite years of education in the West, is steeped in his father’s cult of personality and may be even more mercurial and merciless, officials said.
A senior U.S. official said intelligence analysts believe, for instance, that Kim Jung Eun “tortured small animals” when he was a youth. “He has a violent streak and that’s worrisome,” a senior U.S. official said, summing up the U.S. assessments. [Wall Street Journal]
In that case, let’s try to take comfort in the fact that he’s probably much too smart to do anything rash or dangerous:
He is the heir poised to become the next leader of rogue state North Korea. But a probe into the school days of Kim Jong Un - youngest son of dictator Kim Jong Il - proves he is little more than an academic failure who squandered his education playing computer games and basketball. [….]
‘Un tried hard to express himself but he was not very good at German and became flustered when asked to give the answers to a problem. The teachers would see him struggling ashamedly and then move on. They left him in peace. ’He left without getting any exam results at all. He was much more interested in football and basketball than lessons.’ A big fan of star Michael Jordan, Kim Jong Un - who was once caught with a bondage pornographic magazine in his school bag - proved to be a good player on the basketball court. [Daily Mail]
Well, in that case, take comfort in the fact that what Kim Jong-Eun is probably irrelevant to policy-making in Pyongyang now. And at least he’s reviving forgotten words like “regent,” “dauphin,” and “primogeniture,” and underused words like “porcine.”
While you’re at the WSJ, don’t miss two very good op-eds — one by old friend Sung Yoon Lee and new friend Sue Terry, and one by Melanie Kirkpatrick, who at last word was hard at work on a book on North Korean refugees.
Posted by Joshua on December 22, 2011 at 7:05 pm · Filed under Propaganda
At times like this, I do wish that the Korean Friendship Association would enable comments:
North Korea says a fierce snowstorm paused and the sky began glowing red above sacred Mount Paektu just minutes before leader Kim Jong Il’s death. State media say the ice on volcanic Lake Chon at the mountain in the far north cracked with a load roar. And in the city of Hamhung, a Manchurian crane circled a statue of Kim’s father, late President Kim Il Sung, before alighting on a tree, its head drooping before it took off toward Pyongyang. [AP]
Such unusual supernatural forces these are, which can light up the sky and stop snowstorms but can’t unclog arteries.
I don’t believe for a minute that any North Korean over the age of 13 still believes this stuff, and I have to think that the propaganda hacks who write it figured that out before I did. So why write asinine things like this? Just to subjugate people into repeating it? So that all the foreigners know to give the crazy guy whatever he asks for? Because they think that’s what the boss wants?
More thoughts on the deification of the Kims here.
Posted by Joshua on December 21, 2011 at 1:48 pm · Filed under Useful Idiocy
Two days after the announcement that the Dear Leader has gone tits-up, and still nothing on the “official” web site of North Korea. Did everyone in the “Korean Friendship Association” finally grow up and get a life? Or is this just grounds for some serious re-education?
You can read a four-part interview of Alejando Cao de Benos here. Scroll, click, read, and weep!
Posted by Joshua on December 21, 2011 at 1:13 pm · Filed under Kremlinology, Kim Jong Eun
By now, the conventional wisdom on North Korea’s succession has solidified around Jang Song-Thaek as the power behind the scenes in North Korea, in concert with other key figures who began to consolidate their power in 2009, after Kim Jong-Il’s strok — Jang’s wife and Kim Jong-Il’s sister, Kim Kyong-Hui, O Kuk Ryol, and Ju Sang-Sung.
Much has been said about how little we know about Kim Jong-Eun, officially, the Great Successor. His anointing began in 2009, after Kim Jong-Il’s incapacitating stroke. He’s a month shy of 28, and is Kim Jong-Eun is Kim Jong-Il’s youngest son. His mother was the dancer Ko Young-Hee whom Kim Jong Il expropriated from her husband but never married. He has his father’s personality — aggressive and narcissistic. There has been considerable speculation in the press that Kim Jong-Eun’s recklessness was behind the 2010 attacks on South Korea, although one it’s doubtful that anyone outside North Korea really knows for certain. He probably studied at a private school in Switzerland. Unfortunately for Jong-Eun, he has already become one of the most unpopular men in North Korea. Thus, as a successor, Kim Jong-Eun’s purpose will be to inspire awe and show continuity, but it’s difficult to imagine that he can succeed as an object of adoration. Just look at this face. Is this a face that the regime really wants displayed on portraits in the homes and schools of every hungry North Korean? For these reasons, but especially because of his age and inexperience, the most he is likely to be is a figurehead.
What we don’t know about Kim Jong-Eun matters much less than what we don’t know about Jang Song-Thaek. Selig Harrison has predictably tried to portray Jang as a closet reformer, of course, but Jang’s biography lends little support to this theory and few details that can be confirmed. He was born in North Hamgyeong province in 1946. He was an average student at Kim Il Sung University, but he was charismatic and popular for his singing and dancing. These talents attracted the affections of Kim Kyong-Hui, Kim Jong-Il’s sister and Kim Il-Sung’s daughter. The Kim family forbade the relationship, but astonishingly, Jang not only continued to date Kim Kyong-Hui, but survived Kim Il-Sung’s disapproval, and continued the relationship at a party school and at Moscow State University. The two married in 1971 or 1972.
Jang probably survived this and other conflicts because he knew how to make himself useful. He was a pioneer of North Korea’s use of diplomatic missions to earn foreign currency, through both legitimate and illicit business ventures. For reasons that aren’t clear, Jang was expelled from the party in 1977, but was on the path to rehabilitation by 1982. Jang dedicated himself to the work of making friends, building patronage networks, and establishing the infamous Bureau 39. In 1986, he was “elected” as a Deputy Delegate to the Supreme Peoples’ Assembly, a rubber-stamp parliamentary body. He became a candidate member of the Central Committee in 1989 and a full member in 1992. In 1995, he is thought to have had a role in the purge of the VI Corps
after its abortive mutiny in Chongjin. Jang vanished again between 2003 and 2006, either because he again fell into disfavor or because his activities abroad required him to keep a low profile. After he reemerged, he took over the regime’s internal security and inspection functions, making him one of the most powerful and feared men in North Korea. From this position, Jang was well postured to accumulate power from within the Kim family’s inner circle after Kim Jong-Il’s stroke. In 2009, he was appointed to the National Defense Commission, and became a Vice Chairman of that body the following year.
Like Jang, Kim Kyong-Hui was born in 1946, but was not considered an important player in the regime’s power structure until 2009. She and Jang have one son and one daughter, both born in the late 1970s. The nature of Kim’s relationship to Jang is matter of wildly varying speculation, characterized by some observers as one of romantic estrangement, even political competition. The circumstantial evidence suggests, however, that both Kim and Jang rose quickly in the regime power structure in 2009, at about the time that Kim Jong-Eun was chosen to be Kim Jong-Il’s nominal successor.
Another key player to watch is General O Kuk-Ryol, also a Vice Chairman of the National Defense Commission and long-time friend of Kim Jong Il. O, a war orphan adopted by Kim Il-Sung, has a history that suggests irrational rashness. For example, O was the mastermind of North Korea’s currency counterfeiting operations, which probably earned North Korea much less money than the sanctions it brought down. As head of the Reconnaissance Bureau, O almost certainly approved North Korea’s recent assassination attempts against Hwang Jang-Yop and a number of activists in China and North Korea.
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These are not the biographies of reformers. An extreme optimist would call them the biographies of pragmatists, but all of them are at the very heart of the existing power structure, have staked their lives on its preservation, and probably see reform as an excessive risk to their own survival. If they have plans to make even limited reforms, they are unlikely to make any policy changes for the next few weeks, as they ensure that they have the allegiance of key leaders in the security forces. For the short term, expect calm, even the appearance of paralysis in foreign relations (major policy initiatives anytime soon would suggest that Jang was fully, even suspiciously, prepared to assume power on Kim Jong-Il’s death).In the medium term, however, the new leadership may provoke a crisis to burnish its legitimacy. No doubt, a few South Korean generals will be working overtime in the days leading up to April 15th, the 100th anniversary of Kim Il-Sung’s birth and the start of Juche 101, and a date that has featured prominently in recent North Korean propaganda.In the long term, there are too many reasons why this can’t last.First, Korea’s history is not written in the language of compromise, but of intrigues, schisms, and warring states interrupted by a few interludes of unity. A power vacuum, a collapsed economy, and discontent in the provinces will all work against North Korea’s new leaders as they attempt to stabilize their broken kingdom.Second, Jang’s extraordinary ambition is a grave risk factor for Kim Jong-Eun’s personal survival. Jang must be North Korea’s most accomplished and cunning survivor. Not only did he survive the experience of dating Kim Il-Sung’s daughter despite his objections, he later married her, earned the confidence of his omnipotent in-laws, and (forgive the verb) penetrated the inner circle of the ruling family. His guile and charmisma, combined with Kim Jong-Eun’s personal unpopularity, suggest that Jang could plausibly take advantage of the awe and continuity provided by Jong-Eun’s presence in the leadership for a while, and then discard him. For now, Jang needs Kim Jong-Eun’s hereditary mystique, a force with an inestimable psychological power over North Koreans, including many who despise the regime.
Third, Kim Jong-Eun lacks the age, experience, hagiography, and credibility to consolidate his control over a group of survivors as ruthless and experienced as North Korea’s top leaders. His genes are his only marketable asset. He certainly cannot pull off the aura of ruthless guerrilla austerity of his grandfather, and he hasn’t had time to morph himself into the superhuman technocrat and cunning diplomat his father was portrayed as. The regime only just begun to indoctrinate North Koreans about Kim Jong-Eun. You can see what an exceptionally difficult thing this must be in a perpetually hungry society that values physical prowess, toughness, and age, and when the material you have to work with is Kim Jong-Eun:
“Youth Captain Kim Jong Eun is a great man who personifies the very modest and easygoing appearance of the Supreme Leader and Great General,” the material opines, adding, “He has a passionate love for soldiers and the people and looking after their lives.”
Also, it asserts impressively, “He is familiar with the Juche idea, military science, Juche political economy, Juche literature and art, and has a wide knowledge of all areas of history, from ancient to modern, economics, the military and culture.”
Kim Jong Eun has long been a favored son. According to Fujimoto Kenji, Kim Jong Il’s former chef who wrote a tell-all book about his years working for the Kim family, “Kim Jong Il said about Kim Jong Cheol, ‘He is not right. He is like a girl’, and often gave him a bad evaluation. On the other hand, his favorite son is Kim Jong Eun.”
“’Kim Jong Eun is an all round sports player and has leadership and an intrepid personality,’” the book claims, adding, “He resembles Kim Jong Il in appearance, shape, and even personality. He has a vigorous personality and… a strong competitive spirit.”
The mythologies and hagiographies of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il — along with ample measures of terror, mutual isolation, and exhausting labor — were essential to North Korea’s cohesion even while the state failed. Without those things, North Korea is Albania without Enver Hoxha. Without that cohesive force, the natural condition of Korea is internal division.
Posted by Joshua on December 21, 2011 at 10:40 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, China, Diplomacy
No, really. You’ll be as amazed as I was.
Posted by Joshua on December 20, 2011 at 2:11 pm · Filed under Kim Jong Il
You can listen to me holding forth on those topics in this podcast. For extra fun, you can also hear me flub the casualty count for the ROKS Cheonan and the name of a mostly forgotten document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is why I hate podcasting — you can’t research in real time.
Posted by Joshua on December 18, 2011 at 10:38 pm · Filed under Kim Jong Il
Good riddance to him. Any bets on who will actually run the place now?
It’s hard to imagine that anyone can fill the psychological void he leaves. It doesn’t matter that most North Koreans undoubtedly despised him. He was still a tremendous, terrible presence that no one else can be.
[KCNA, Reuters]
[Reuters, Kim Kyung-Hoon]
Update: Here are some posts that seem freshly relevant:
- Boldly, I had predicted that Kim Jong Il would die. But we could see this coming two years ago, and here, I prognosticated at greater length about the post-Kim Jong Il era.
- As if preparing for his own death, Kim Jong Il spent his last years purging old comrades. See also.
- A reminder of how little we really know about Kim Jong Eun, who would be a figurehead at most, and who is probably even more despised than his father.
- South Korea’s military is on high alert.
- As of 11:36 p.m. Washington time, KCNA has nothing on this. [Update: But just look at it now.]
Some other quick thoughts:
Who will take over now? Superficially, we’ve seen some recent signs that the regime was accelerating Kim Jong Eun’s deification, suggesting that it knew Kim Jong Il’s health was declining rapidly. Behind the scenes, it will be a collective leadership. Some people to watch are Kim Jong Il’s sister Kim Kyong-Hui, her (possibly estranged) husband, Jang Song Thaek, and master counterfeiter O Kuk Ryol.
Is diplomacy now a real possibility? No, but with Kim out of the way, an internal power struggle could soon commence, the result of which could create the conditions for that. Watch who comes out on the reviewing stand, and watch how the regime behaves. There won’t be a Pyongyang Spring anytime soon. The next weeks will either feature complete governmental paralysis or an unscheduled broadcast, followed by a series of unscheduled military deployments. One piece of good news is that the latest reports of a diplomatic “breakthrough” will come to nothing now, which is a much faster and cheaper way of achieving exactly the same thing.
It is a depressing thing to see a man who caused so much death and misery die untried and unpunished. It makes me want to believe that there is a hell, other than the one thatNorth Korea itself became because of Kim Jong Il’s necrocratic misrule. Here is a man who belongs alongside Pol Pot as one of the most destructive men who ever lived, one who would belong in the same category as Hitler or Stalin if he had ruled a country with a larger population or GDP. The legacy of Kim Jong Il will be of the millions he starved for his own profligacy and megalomania, and of the hundreds of thousands more who perished in the cruelest system of prison camps on this earth since Stalin died in 1953. When men like this die in their beds, the very idea of justice dies a little, too.
Update: The BBC has video of the announcement on North Korean state television.
Update: Here’s what I’d written about Kim Jong Eun for the New Ledger last year:
Not much else seems remarkable about Kim Jong-Eun, the new Porcine Prince of Pyongyang. It’s unlikely that he’ll be as much a successor to Kim Jong-Il as a figurehead for a junta of his septuagenarian minions. If we were speaking of any place but North Korea, it would count as remarkable that we know so little about him. We think that he is somewhere between 26 and 28, and that his mother was the actress Ko Young-Hee, whom Kim Jong Il expropriated from her then-husband but never married, and who later went mad and died in Moscow. Kenji Fujimoto, who spent part of North Korea’s Great Famine making sushi for Kim Jong-Il, says Jong-Eun inherited his father’s appearance and his narcissistic personality traits. Maybe he studied in Switzerland, and then again, maybe that was his younger brother Kim Jong-Chol, the one who possibly likes Eric Clapton, has a hormonal imbalance, and acts “like a girl.” It wasn’t until January of 2009 that Japanese and South Korean media first began to report on the regime’s campaign to deify him.
Our first look at Kim Jong-Eun has answered a few important questions. For one thing, we may have just found where all our food aid went. With all that we don’t know about North Korea, I’m confident in my disbelief that this is a face starving people will accept as a legitimate ruler and benefactor. South Koreans certainly were quick to poke the elephant in the room. As the British scholar Aidan Foster-Carter put it, “He sure looks like he gave up basketball.”
Of course, Kim Jong Il wore his own kleptocratic girth until his stroke in 2008, but even the dictator of a starving nation can survive if he wears his corpulence with confidence. Kim Jong Il had spent the decades before his father’s death cultivating relationships with his father’s generals. Now look at Jong-Eun’s eyes. There is cruelty and arrogance in them, but it’s the fear I see. That’s the sort of face a suburban sex offender wears to the exercise yard at Pelican Bay. No matter how many icons of him are placed in living rooms, classrooms, or lapel pins, he will spend the rest of his life stepping warily within a nest of vipers. The real power will stay with Kim Jong Il’s old comrades and relatives: Kim Young Il; Jang Song-Thaek, whose portfolio includes North Korea’s political prison camps; General Ri Yong-Ho; General O Kuk-Ryol, whose family controls the counterfeiting rackets; and Kim Jong Il’s sister (and Jang’s wife) Kim Kyong-Hui, who is said to have pushed hard for North Korea’s disastrous currency redenomination and confiscation last year. As a partial consequence of that, refugees report finding the night’s toll of the dead lying around the train stations each morning. That is why any hopes that this transition is a harbinger of reforms are probably false. The state isn’t interested in reform, and Kim Jong-Eun’s coronation won’t change that, because it is a sham. But that doesn’t mean that the regime can stop change forever.
Until public opinion polling becomes possible in North Korea, we will have to rely on anecdotal reports, clandestine cell phones, and defectors to gauge the reaction of the people to a medieval succession in a nominally socialist state. What reports we do have are overwhelmingly unfavorable for Jong-Eun, whose function is, after all, to be a genetic vessel for the legitimacy of a deiocracy once their god finally dies. If so, Jong-Eun may have outlived his usefulness. One defector claims that North Koreans openly call Kim Jong-Eun “an immature little bastard” who is “more savage than his father” and “a scoundrel who relies on his father’s power to do whatever he wants.” Students in Pyongyang and other cities criticize the feudal dynastic succession from father to son and call it “a betrayal of socialism.” Some North Koreans blame him for exhausting mass labor mobilizations and last year’s disastrous currency confiscation. Kim Eun Ho, a former North Korean policeman and now a correspondent for a Seoul-based radio station that broadcasts to North Korea, says, “For general citizens, Kim Jong Eun is vastly unpopular …. People cannot take him seriously, in reality. He just suddenly appeared, and he’s too young.” This discontent, by itself, is less consequential than the fact that North Koreans express it openly to fellow citizens, at least to the ones they trust.
It will have occurred to you by now that North Korea’s next mid-term election has yet to be scheduled, and that there is no effective opposition to its system. That is all true, and North Korea’s only hope is that these things should change. We can only hope — they can only hope — that somewhere in the outer provinces, a Madame Defarge works patiently at her knitting. At the confluence of desperation and hope, an organized opposition will eventually coalesce. The thought of trying to survive until the end of Kim Jong-Eun’s natural life should supply ample desperation.
It suddenly strikes me that the gathering of crowds for choreographed mourning ceremonies will be a volatile moment. If the clandestine reporting is accurate, Kim Jong Eun inspires loathing, but the regime has had little opportunity to deify him. I doubt that he inspires anything like confidence or respect (maybe “awe” is the word I’ve been searching for) in the minds of most North Koreans. To them, the idea of being ruled by this third-generation tyrant for the rest of their lives must be almost unimaginably dreary.
More updates, 19 Dec 2011:
First Bin Laden, then Khaddafy, and now Kim Jong Il. Overall, 2011 had more joyous obituaries than any year I can remember. It’s plausible to hope that Bashar Asad, Ayman Zawahiri, and Kim Jong Eun will be the most likely joyous obituaries of 2012.
Psychologically, so much has changed in North Korea. The regime was not really ready for this day. Its deification of Kim Jong-Eun has been uncharacteristically halting, even timid. The regime understands how volatile a moment this is. The Daily NK reports that it has closed its border with China, closed all markets, imposed a near-curfew, and filled the streets of at least one city with armed soldiers. This is not the reaction of a state that expects its subjects to erupt in spontaneous grief.
North Korea isn’t sending a conciliatory message to the outside world, either. Shortly after it announced Kim Jong-Il’s death, it tested a short-range missile off its east coast. South Korea is halting all visits to North Korea by its citizens, except at the Kaesong Industrial Park.
Updates:
Say what? It’s Lee Myung Bak’s birthday? That’s just too much.
Also, video from Pyongyang. Faking or not? In such a place as North Korea, it can’t be hard to find reasons to cry real tears.
Some reactions:
Bruce Klingner: “Kim Jong-un is a pale reflection of his father and grandfather. He has not had the decades of grooming and securing of a power base that Jong-il enjoyed before assuming control from his father. [He] may feel it necessary in the future to precipitate a crisis to prove his mettle to other senior leaders or deflect attention from the regime’s failings.”
Joshua Trevino: “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.” It’s a nice thought, but I suspect Hitchens would still be (is?) insisting to God that He doesn’t exist.
Robert Kaplan’s 2006 discussion of regime collapse in North Korea is worth rereading.
It seems appropriate to reprise two pieces by Christopher Hitchens. The first one is also the source of my masthead image; the second is a review of Brian Myers’s “The Cleanest Race.”
I would add: the story of Kim Jong Il’s misrule was best told by Barbara Demick, but the story that hasn’t been told is the story of how the free world lost its conscience in the face of Kim Jong Il’s crimes against humanity. For various reasons — nationalism, partisanship, Chinese malevolence, political expediency — the consciences of the Human Rights Industry, South Korea, America, and the U.N. were all paralyzed as U.S. and South Korean taxpayers were conscripted into the vile work of prolonging Kim Jong Il’s misrule through aid that was too easily diverted. Kim Jong Il’s misrule was terminated by more-or-less natural causes because of the banality of diplomacy.
Posted by Joshua on December 18, 2011 at 11:50 am · Filed under Anju Links
There are a few things I can’t let pass without comment this weekend.
The defection of a squad of armed North Korean soldiers — if true, as the compulsory caveat goes — could open a new chapter in the Kim Dynasty’s erosive dialectic. This sort of defection can’t happen on a mass scale despite the forceful suppression of the two fascist regimes that border the Yalu, but it does suggest that when North Korea eventually devolves into something like what Syria has become, there will be a political base for something akin to the Free Syrian Army in some North Korean units.
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Have you ever seen one image that instantly simplified a question of great moral complexity? I submit that this photograph does us this service regarding the question of food aid to North Korea. Every discussion of that question ought to begin with a contemplation of all that this photograph reveals about it:
[Reuters]
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Another North Korean camp survivor has escaped and lived long enough to tell her story.
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Two years after the passage of UNSCR 1874 and five years after the passage of UNSCR 1718, the House has passed a sanctions bill that would freeze the assets of companies — the overwhelming majority of them Chinese — that are still selling prohibited goods to North Korea. You can read an executive summary of the new bill here. If it becomes law, the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Reform and Modernization Act of 2011 would compliment the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act. Most significantly, the new bill would allow for the freezing of assets of companies that sell conventional weapons to the North Korean regime.
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How sad that (1) time and time again, it is foreigners and not other Koreans who are left alone standing up for the humanity of North Koreans, even in Korea itself, and (2) that when female foreigners assume this burden, they’re forced to tolerate the publication of unserious and irrelevant questions about their personal lives. Why is it that most South Koreans, who’ve distinguished themselves in so many ways for their brilliance and their fearless gall, are so persistently overcome by stupidity and cowardice when some impudent foreigner (or artillerist) turns the topic to North Korea?
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Two men who have inspired me died this week. One was Vaclav Havel. When I visited Prague in August of 1990, less than a year after the Velvet Revolution, he was certainly the most genuinely, sincerely beloved political figure I’ve observed in any place or time. It wasn’t just that his picture seemed to be on the wall of every shop — after all, one could say that about Kim Jong Il and Hafez Asad, or at various times, about Ceausescu, Saddam, or Khaddafy. But if you’ve ever had a conversation with strangers in a Czech beer hall, you will understand me when I say that “pious” and “idolatrous” are not words that even remotely describe the character of the Czech people, and that in those times, the afterglow was real. I will give you a quote from Mr. Havel:
The number of people who sincerely believe everything that the official propaganda says and who selflessly support the government’s authority is smaller than it has ever been. But the number of hypocrites rises steadily: up to a point, every citizen is, in fact, forced to be one. …
If every day someone takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny himself in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of dignity.
On the contrary: even if they never speak of it, people have a very acute appreciation of the price they have paid for outward peace and quiet: the permanent humiliation of their human dignity.
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Here’s a dare: name a person who didn’t vehemently disagree with at least one-third of the things Christopher Hitchens said. I think he often said things for the sheer joy of provoking others. Contrast, for example, his blasphemous rewriting of the Ten Commandments against his reverence for the language of the King James Bible. Even when I disagreed with Hitchens, and especially when I didn’t — “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox” — I found him more fun to read him than any other author, living or dead. I couldn’t choose just one favorite quotation, so I chose the ones I couldn’t help quoting here. First, on British royalty:
This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.
On religion, where I think Hitchens overlooked the socially stabilizing and altruistic aspects of some religions:
[Religious belief] is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you - who must, indeed, subject you - to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life - I say, of your life - before you’re born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I’ve been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He’s not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It’s a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It’s one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!
If nothing else, I owe Hitchens a debt for his contributions to this blog: some of the inspiration, and the image for my masthead. Hitchens never wanted to make a sympathetic figure of himself, but I can’t help feeling especially terrible for his wife and young daughter right now.
Posted by Dan Bielefeld on December 7, 2011 at 11:13 am · Filed under Human Rights, Activism
From NKnet:
On Saturday, December 10* in Seoul join South Korean citizens who have been walking 680km to rescue the Daughter of Tongyeong and her two daughters from imprisonment in North Korea for over 20 years.
Performances
• Elec-Cookie
• Traditional Martial Arts Performance
• Modern Dance Performance
• NB Crew (B-Boy group)
• A Song for Abductees – sung by singer Lee Kwang Pil
• Answer (North Korean Song Troupe)
• Ha-Ha-Ho-Ho (Brass Ensemble)
Ongoing during the day
• Forget-me-not face-painting
• North Korean Human Rights Photo Exhibition
• 1-million postcard petition campaign (sign online)
Schedule
Saturday, December 10, 2011
11:30am–1pm – Performances
1-3pm – Main Event
• Cultural performances, speeches, etc.
• Video about the Daughter of Tongyeong
• Releasing balloons of hope
• Culminates in a walk (approx. 2.5 km) on behalf of the Daughter of Tongyeong from Gwanghwamun to Independence Park, which is next to Dongnimmun Station on line 3
See our Facebook page for info on other events at Suwon, Anyang, and COEX in the days before the 10th and at the DMZ on the 11th.
Location
Cheong-gye Plaza, Seoul (at the start of the Cheong-gye Stream in Gwanghwamun)
Gwanghwamun Station, exit 5 – walk straight from the exit about 100m, then the plaza will be on your left
Notes
There won’t be English translation at the event, but please come and enjoy the performances and show your support by walking a few kilometers with those who’ve been walking 1700 ri (680km) – from Tongyeong on the south coast to Imjingak along the DMZ – to raise awareness about Shin Suk Ja, the Daughter of Tongyeong. We encourage people of all nationalities to come and participate — human rights concerns us all!
This event is being organized by a coalition of many organizations including NKnet.
Who is the Daughter of Tongyeong?
Fighting to Right His Wrongs
Daily NK
2011-10-12
More about the Tongyeong Trek
Cross-country trek to free NK detainee nears Seoul
Korea Times
2011-12-04
Trek for Tongyeong, Day 3
Daily NK
2011-11-21
Nothing Compared to Their Suffering
Daily NK
2011-11-18
“I was involved in the student movement as a leftist Juche ideology supporter in 1987, the time when Shin Suk Ja and her daughters first went to a political prison camp. I sided with the people who were giving them that pain.
So, because of that debt I owe to them I planned this trek. As a citizen just like Shin Suk Ja and her daughters, and also as a human being, I wanted to share in their pain.”
- Choi Hong Jae, leader of the Tongyeong Trek
Korean info at: http://cafe.naver.com/saveohyewon
*December 10, 2011, is the 63rd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sadly, only a few months separates its adoption and the official founding of the DPRK.
http://en.nknet.org/events-programs/campaigns/daughter-of-tongyeong/citizens-walk-save-the-daughter-of-tongyeong/
Posted by Joshua on December 4, 2011 at 9:08 am · Filed under Human Rights, Activism
Seoul-based Korean-American activist Kang Hun-Sok, who was introduced to me online by a trusted friend, asks for my assistance in getting the word out about a coordinated series of demonstrations next week. I’m glad to do so, and hope that other bloggers out there will do the same. Mr. Kang’s press release follows:
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This is an international call to protest on December 9th, 2011, 63rd anniversary of the United Nations Genocide Convention which North Korea is violating in every possible way (For more information, please see “North Korea and the Genocide Convention”:http://hir.harvard.edu/north-korea-and-the-genocide-movement).
Please organize protests and hunger strikes in front of DPRK/PRC/UN offices (or other location), and let us know about your demonstration at connect@stopnkgenocide.com.
Confirmed Protests So Far:
New York City, United States
12:00pm: Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan , silent march to DPRK Mission to the UN
1:00pm: Demonstration at DPRK Mission to the UN
Speech by North Korean Defector Activist Ji Seong Ho (President of NAUH)
Event Coordinator: cbk2004@gmail.com
For Interviews, contact: iptbak@gmail.com
Seoul, Republic of Korea
3:00pm ~ 4:00pm : Demonstration at Seoul Station Plaza
4:00pm ~ 5:00pm: March to UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees)
7:30pm ~ 8:30pm: Candlelight rally in Seoul Plaza
Event Coordinator: pink2011info@gmail.com
Berlin, Germany
3:00pm ~ 6:00pm : Demonstration at the Brandenburg Gate
Event Coordinator: kimsunderhiswing@googlemail.com
Tokyo, Japan
12:00pm ~ 12:50pm Demonstration at Hachiko Square in Shibuya, Tokyo
1:30pm: Demonstration at Chongryon
Event Coordinator: kanandoj@yahoo.co.jp
London, UK
1:00pm ~ 3:00pm Demonstration at North Korea Embassy
Event Coordinator: S.Yang10@lse.ac.uk
There are three main objectives of these international protests on December 9, 2011:
1) To bring unprecedented pressure upon not only the NK regime but the international community to meaningfully address the horrific crimes being perpetuated systematically.
2) To influence and awaken global public opinion to the real, genocidal nature of the NK regime.
3) To create a watershed movement for the liberation of NK itself.
Posted by Joshua on November 30, 2011 at 7:40 am · Filed under Anju Links
So, if I’d been asleep for the last six months, would I awake to find that the whole world had changed? Or would I roll over to see that the whole world was still snoring right there beside me? Via the AP:
North Korea has threatened to turn South Korea’s presidential palace into a “sea of fire” in response to any provocation, a day after Seoul’s military held a big exercise near the border.
The land, sea and air drill was staged on Wednesday to mark the first anniversary of a deadly North Korean attack on the South’s border island of Yeonpyeong, which sparked outrage among South Koreans and prompted international alarm. Pyongyang has always justified its bombardment on November 23, 2010 as a response to a South Korean artillery drill on Yeonpyeong, which it said dropped shells into the North’s territorial waters.
The North’s military Supreme Command said on Thursday the South should not forget the lesson of the Yeonpyeong attack. It described Wednesday’s anniversary drill as “little short of a new political and military provocation”. If the South dared in future to “fire one bullet or shell” towards the North’s territorial waters, air space and land, a “sea of fire” would engulf Seoul’s presidential palace. The North’s armed forces “are in full readiness to go into a decisive battle to counter any military provocation”, said the Supreme Command statement on Pyongyang’s official news agency.
Also announced by North Korea this week:
North Korea said Wednesday it is making rapid progress on work to enrich uranium and build a light-water nuclear power plant, increasing worries that the country is developing another way to make atomic weapons.
Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry said construction of an experimental light-water reactor and low enriched uranium are “progressing apace.” The statement added that North Korea has a sovereign right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy and that “neither concession nor compromise should be allowed.”
More here.
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. Hey, it was “worth a try.” Discuss among yourselves.
Update: So if you wonder why I question the judgment and competence of a large segment of our foreign policy brain trust, as well as the objectivity of some of the reporters covering this story, let me offer the example of Bruce Bennett of the Rand Corporation, who worries about Lee Myung Bak’s diplomatic “mistake” in stating that North Korea is “one of the world’s most well-armed and most belligerent countries.” Steve Herman of the Voice of America, for God’s sake, offers us Bennett’s perspective — and no others — to support a dubious narrative that Lee is engaging in “harsh rhetoric,” but without bothering to mention that the North Koreans had just threatened to flatten Lee’s residence. Maybe Bennett has adopted the Washingtonian custom of discounting North Korea’s rhetoric and detaching it from any consequence to diplomatic “relations” between North Korea and the world, but then again, it’s not his nation, personal residence, and family we’re talking about here. Nor does it seem wise to me, anyway, to discount the threats of a regime that killed 50 South Koreans last year, and which has recently engaged in a campaign of assassinations against activists in China and on South Korean territory.
Does anyone today really believe that the nuances of a South Korean President’s language, no matter how factual or how mild in their greater context, really have a material effect on Kim Jong Il’s behavior toward the rest of the world? Inexplicable as it may be to some of us uncredentialed observers, the answer is “yes.”
Posted by Christopher Green on November 25, 2011 at 10:32 am · Filed under China, Abductions, "United" Nations
Maruzki Darusman gave a press conference this morning to convey the results of his six-day trip to South Korea. The contents of my report on the event were published by Daily NK at the time, and are also republished below;
Maruzki Darusman, the UN’s special rapporteur on North Korean human rights issues, believes there has been no improvement since he took on the role in 2010, and has once again urged Pyongyang to take action to remedy its multitude of human rights failings.
Darusman, who gave a press conference at a Seoul hotel this morning, wrapping up a six-day visit to South Korea, noted that the only area in which any progress at all has been made with North Korea in the recent past is in terms of “cooperation with other UN entities, for instance the World Food Programme.”
Conversely, he slammed North Korea’s human rights record yet again, commenting, “The DPRK is perhaps the only country in the world today that does not recognize that non-cooperation with the human rights mechanism is not an option.”
Darusman’s criticisms of North Korea, derived from the fact-finding trip, include the prevalence of human rights abuses in the testimony of new defectors at Hanawon, the resettlement center for defectors south of Seoul, a 17% year-on-year increase in defector numbers reaching Seoul, the current separated family reunions freeze and the ongoing stonewalling by North Korea of calls for the repatriation of more than 500 South Korean abductees still thought to be being held in the country.
He also agreed to look into the case of Shin Suk Ja, saying, “The case of Oh Gil Nam is an emblematic case that illustrates the seriousness and magnitude of the problem and reminds us of the need to resolve the issue of abductions urgently.” It is the internment of Dr. Oh’s wife Shin and their two children in a North Korean political prison camp which forms the inspiration for the ongoing ‘Save the Daughter of Tongyeong!’ movement in South Korea.
However, disappointingly for the supporters of the movement, Darusman did so by saying that he plans to collect information on the case before “engaging the UN human rights mechanism, including the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances in Geneva,” rather than lending his voice to calls for Shin and her daughters to be released.
“I will continue to be in touch with this matter on occasions” so as to “bring it forward to its resolution, hopefully in the near future,” he added.
Darusman also initially refused to cite China directly for its role in repatriating defectors to face torture and imprisonment inside North Korea, instead noting simply that many defectors are “forcibly refouled or returned by the neighboring countries.” However he did, responding to a later question, note that “China would certainly be one of those countries.”
But I don’t think the original content really represents the nuance of the event. Although my headline was soft around the edges for reasons of unity with Daily NK’s Korean page, I personally believe the core of the story actually lies in the last two paragraphs.
For me, it is wholly indicative of the failure of the UN as it pertains to North Korea that the organization’s own special rapporteur on North Korean human rights would be able to talk about the repatriation of defectors for five full minutes without mentioning China, and then not even mention the abductions issue in his recommendations despite having met Oh Gil Nam during the trip. Any headline on this press conference that you have read will have led with the contents of the post-press conference Q&A, and as such we should remember; if the press had not pushed Darusman on these two points, there would have been no mention of China at all and almost none of Shin Suk Ja.
I was not a huge fan of Darusman’s predecessor Vitit Muntarbhorn, but that may have been simply because acting as the UN special rapporteur for this issue is such a thankless task in so many ways. However, to his immense credit, Muntarbhorn seemed clued up on the problems which he was required to address from the beginning. Darusman does not. He seemed uncomfortable to be responding to a question about Oh Gil Nam, at one point even seeking clarification of the question, and didn’t even appear all that sure how many children Oh and Shin Suk Ja actually have. He then tried quite hard to avoid namechecking China.
It was not an encouraging scene.
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