Washington seems to believe that North Korea will return to the six party talks and stop its belligerent behavior if its sources of overseas funding are cut off.
If that’s what “Washington” actually does believe, I think it’s wrong about that, but I do think that sanctions will do several other very useful things, like destabilize the power structure during the succession process, slow North Korea’s progress at proliferation, and break up the financial and logistical infrastructure of its proliferation networks.
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In the resolution filed with the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Tuesday, Rep. Charles Djou (R-HI) “condemns North Korea for the detainment of the Daesung 55 and hostile activity towards the Republic of Korea” and demands North Korea “release the 7-member crew of the Daesung 55.” [Yonhap]
Djou is one of Congress’s newest members; he was elected after the Democrats failed to agree on a single candidate and split their vote in a district they’d otherwise have won. Djou — neither he nor his wife is of Korean descent — may be Congress’s newest major player on Asia policy. He is also a strong supporter of the U.S.-Korea Free-Trade Agreement, of which I’m a more qualified supporter.
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War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery: North Korea sinks South Korean warship, shells maritime border, threatens a “real war,” … and then calls on South Korea to create a “peaceful atmosphere.” I eagerly await Christine Ahn’s call for an end to these provocations.
I suppose it’s worth a footnote to wish Chris Hill a fond buh-bye on his departure from Baghdad. The New York Times just can’t grasp how Hill’s tenure in Iraq could have been so controversial and ultimately unsuccessful when he’d obviously done such a great job negotiating with the North Korea. As to the latter, you’d think that the results speak for themselves, but the Times’s narrative seems not to have made room for a careful examination of the facts.
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The new Cold War in Asia brings America closer to Vietnam. It’s not surprising that China’s neighbors are increasingly alarmed about its claims on the international waters near its coast, and it’s shrewd of the Obama Administration to capitalize on this.
An octogenarian South Korean POW has been sent to a North Korean prison camp after he was caught attempting to escape the country and return to his homeland more than 55 years after being captured during the Korean War. [Open News]
According to the report, the “peace forest” that will be Jung’s final destination is the infamous Yodok, or Camp 15.
Follow me in a slightly cynical thought. If we’re going to start using the I.C.C. as a means to hold officials accountable for their unlawful human rights abuses, this would seem to be a clear violation of three documents the Chinese government has signed — the Korean War Armistice Agreement, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and its 1968 Protocol. Here’s hoping that someone will file an I.C.C. indictment against the Chinese officials responsible for abetting this old soldier’s torture and almost certain murder. Nothing bad could come of this. On the one hand, it could generate richly deserved bad press and condemnation for China. On the other, it might convince China to take a more active role in limiting the jurisdiction of the I.C.C.
North Korea is trying to launch a biochemical attack against the South prior to the G20 Summit in Seoul in November, a conservative activist claimed Thursday citing a North Korean source. Choi Sung-yong of the group Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea said the North is preparing to send 20 different deadly biochemical weapons attached to balloons and parachutes across the border. He said the campaign is led by Gen. Kim Kyok-sik, who commands the North’s frontline fourth corps, at the orders of leader Kim Jong-il’s heir apparent Jong-un.
Choi said the story came from “an active soldier in the North Korean Army.” Kim Kyok-sik was chief of the General Staff of the People’s Army before being demoted to his current post and is thought to have masterminded the torpedo attack on the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan. [Chosun Ilbo]
Choi’s source also tells him that that recent flood of anti-personnel mines that floated across the DMZ was sent down river intentionally, also on the orders of Kim Jong Eun (within a year, I predict Mike Chinoy and Selig Harrison will be trying to tell us that Jong-Eun is a reformer). On that point, I’d only say that North Korea seems to have record-breaking floods ever year. This year is no exception to that rule, and yet we have this unprecedented southward drift of explosives. And really, exactly how many mines would an army ordinarily bury right along a river bank that would just happen to wash away? I’d call this one suspicious but not proven.
“The source said the frontline fourth corps is collecting mines from all over North Korea, not only in Hwanghae Province where the fourth corps is located but from as far afield as North Hamgyong Province. It floated the mines down intentionally but blamed it on floods,” Choi claimed.
Asked about the claim, a National Intelligence Service spokesman was noncommittal, saying, “It’s possible to imagine a number of scenarios, but we can’t draw any conclusions at the moment.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff declined to comment.
The method of delivery certainly is an interesting coincidence, given North Korea’s possession of missiles, artillery, special forces, and other means of delivery.
Is this true? Hell if I know. But if you’d have asked me six months ago if North Korea was capable of sending a submarine across the NLL to torpedo a South Korean warship, I’d have said “no.” Recently, the quality of North Korea’s decision-making has been so consequentially awful, I incline toward the theory that Kim Jong Il has lost his capacity to think rationally, though the desire to raise tensions before Kim Jong Eun consolidates his succession could be a rational explanation for wanting to provoke a limited war.
So are even the North Koreans capable of trying something like this? I think so. They must have known they’d be prime suspects in the Cheonan attack, and despite the overwhelming evidence of their complicity, they still got 30% of South Koreans, Russia, and China to buy into their denial. In short, I think we’ve reached a stage at which deterrence has failed, Kim Jong Il is taking leave of his senses and his mortality, and North Korea is capable of just about anything. On balance, however, it’s just as likely that the rumor is false, or intentionally planted by the North Koreans themselves to try to disrupt the summit.
The definition of “international terrorism” in the U.S. Code includes acts that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion. President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 to reward it for giving up its nuclear weapons. As of last week, President Obama saw no particular reason to disturb that decision.
Several of you have e-mailed me (thank you) about the announcement that FIFA will open an investigation into reports that North Korea has ordered “harsh ideological criticism” sessions and hard labor for the players and coaches of its unsuccessful World Cup team.
“We sent a letter to the football federation to tell us about their election of a new president and to find out if the allegations made by the media that the coach and some players were condemned and punished are true,” FIFA President Sepp Blatter told reporters on Wednesday. “We are doing this as a first step and we will see how they answer.”
Just pray they don’t get sent to one of those Peace Forests.
Most of the reports source cite a Radio Free Asia report, which in turn cites “unidentified sources in North Korea and a Chinese businessman described as knowledgeable about North Korea affairs.” This AFP story hints at an another, unlikely source of damning information:
It followed new, unspecified, evidence brought to its attention by Chung Mong-Joon, the powerful South Korean former chairman of Hyundai, who is also the president of the South Korean Football Association.
The tradition of the Chung family and the Hyundai Group has been one of strong support for more-or-less unrestricted aid to, and accommodation of, North Korea.
In any event, I still couldn’t say (and don’t care) who won the World Cup, though I think we all now know who the big loser was. Let this be a lesson to all of the “expert” analysts out there who like to credit Kim Jong Il as a diplomatic genius, mostly as a way of explaining away how badly the State Department played a much better hand — admittedly, one that’s gotten steadily worse in the last 20 years.
If Kim Jong Il is really the Machiavellian supremo some would have us think he is, then I suppose we can agree that a few soccer matches don’t really mean a thing to him, and that game performance was merely incidental to the propaganda performance. If so, Kim Jong Il played his hand disastrously for foreign and domestic audiences alike. Only a self-deluded cretin would have been so certain of his team’s odds against the likes of Spain and Brazil to have dispensed with the simple precaution of a taped delay. Instead, the population of Pyongyang witnessed a Jesse Owens moment on live television.
Kim Jong Il’s greater unforced error was the diplomacy of imagery for a global audience. There was nowhere to go but up; North Korea has set the bar pretty low for its international image. Had the regime behaved according to minimal standards of sportsmanship, and had its players and coaches been directed to show just a bit of openness and humor with the press, this World Cup could have been a spectacular P.R. success, something defeat on the field would not have changed (you remember the Jamaican bobsled team, don’t you?). It was a perfect missed opportunity to prove people like me wrong — one that, if played more skillfully, would have paid off in the form of sponsorships, investments, and public opinion among nations where half of the voting public is, after all, of below average intelligence. Shouldn’t I question the media narrative of a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship? Isn’t the very normality and decency of these misunderstood people reason enough to doubt that their government really sank a South Korean warship without any provocation whatsoever? Might there could be some hope for reform, openness, and a negotiated disarmament after all? Well, no, actually, you say, but you’re not utterly ignorant of North Korea’s history and Kim Jong Il’s character — which places you in a statistically insignificant minority of World Cup viewers and of humanity in general.
My working theory is that, contrary to the best efforts of its useful idiot squad, North Korea doesn’t really want to be “demystified.” That’s not the brand image it sells to desperate diplomats, gullible investors, or even to those same inadequate social misfits from Barcelona to Oakland to Seoul, for whom its projections of brutal power have such a powerful psychological appeal.
But then, all of this is beside the point of the real question, which is just what happened to these players. We really don’t know, and based on things like this, I strongly doubt we ever will during this regime’s duration:
The head of the Asian Football Confederation, Mohammad bin Hammam, said Wednesday that he had spoken with four players last month, but that they had not reported mistreatment.
I’m glad FIFA opened an investigation — I called for one, after all — but this doesn’t mean I’m optimistic that it will enlighten us much. For example, asking North Korean players whether they’ve been mistreated, presumably while the minders are taking careful notes, foreshadows what we can expect from this investigation. You simply can’t get the truth from North Korea if you don’t understand how the regime works. These guys clearly don’t understand how this regime works.
More broadly, I can’t name a single occasion when an international institution did demand and get transparent cooperation from North Korea in getting to the truth of any matter (which reminds me that China is presumably a member of FIFA, too). Failing that, what international institution has ever held North Korea accountable for not giving its transparent cooperation, such as by denying it the benefits of membership in that institution? As a reader put it, FIFA will probably pull a Maggie Chan, but I suppose I should keep an open mind until my worst fears are eventually confirmed.
I think it’s safe to say that North Korea is going through something of a legal rough patch. Boycotting talks has worked well for North Korea, but boycotting trials, not so much:
A state-run North Korean bank has lost a lawsuit for not paying back a loan it borrowed from a Taiwanese bank nine years ago, the New York district court said Friday.
The District Court of New York confirmed it ordered the Foreign Trade Bank of Korea to pay compensations of just under US$6.77 million to the Mega International Commercial Bank (MICB) in a ruling made earlier in the week. [Yonhap]
By which they really mean the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Nit, picked.
The North Korean bank is widely viewed as Pyongyang’s main foreign exchange earner with branch offices in Europe, the Middle East and Hong Kong.
Hallelujah. We’ve finally located an institution capable of holding North Korea to the same standards as other human beings. I wish all of these plaintiffs the best of luck in collecting their winnings. But as the article notes, with all of these judgments piling up — by my count, fast approaching $500 million, or about a year’s worth of counterfeiting/dope peddling/proliferating income — people are going to hesitate to do deals with the regime if they think their funds, instead of going toward their North Korean partners, are likely to get attached by third-country courts to satisfy judgments in America.
since the currency reform, more middle-class North Koreans have been fleeing the North, a South Korean security official speculated.
A North Korean source on Tuesday said the currency reform alienated many people from the regime, and the spread of South Korean pop culture through videos and CDs clandestinely circulated in the North has also encouraged some middle and higher-class North Koreans to flee. In recent days, many people who lost their savings due to the currency reform have reportedly decided to flee.
Overseas ethnic Koreans who have recently been to North Korea say that the attitude of senior North Korean officials has changed. Before the currency reform, they were arrogant and complained about foreign aid. But now they are very humble. Some senior officials reportedly entreated them to help, and the situation is so serious that not only ordinary people but high ranking officials have difficulty making ends meet. Military rations are stalled and troops live on corn and potatoes. All that leads to hairline cracks in Kim Jong-il’s authority.
Seoul and Washington will simulate a rescue of South Koreans from the joint Kaesong Industrial Complex supposing they are held in North Korea once it closes down the industrial park. The drill will be part of an annual joint military exercise dubbed Ulchi Freedom Guardian on Aug. 16-26.
I’m just trying to imagine the wall of 23-millimeter fire those helicopters would have to fly through, or why subsidizing Kim Jong Il is worth the risk of a single American life. I can’t believe any responsible country would leave its citizens in a place where plans like this merit serious consideration. Enough, already. Bring them home.
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If Peter Lee is so positive that financial sanctions on banks that hold North Korean accounts are a proven failure, why does he feel so compelled to write another Asia Times rant about it every day? It almost seems as if he’s trying to convince himself of something ….
According to the sources, the arrests and executions were carried out in mid-May. “At that time, right after the disastrous currency reform, police discovered 23 Christians in Kuwal-dong, Pyungsung County, in Pyongan Province, who met at an underground church. After their arrest, they were interrogated at length. Eventually, the group’s “ringleaders” were sentenced to death and executed. The others were sent to Kwan-li-so (Penal labour colony) No 15 in Yodŏk.”
A Unification Ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the information’s classified nature, said North Korean authorities recently introduced price caps on the two staples at markets in Pyongyang.
“The regime appears to be increasingly allowing markets to take over the role its rationing system once played,” the official said, adding that the two items were not on the monitor list when his ministry obtained a copy of the document in February.
“If prices of products continue to fluctuate and transactions freeze in the market amid instability after the North’s recent currency reform, the possibility is high that even salaried workers at state-run companies will be much affected,” the Korea Development Institute said in the report.
To address the complaints of one of the regime’s key constituencies, Pyongyang might seek to print and supply more money to the workers, which the report said could result in inflation, prompted by a budgetary deficit. “If this turns out to be the case, deficit-sparked inflation will take place, worsening price fluctuations that the North has already been undergoing,” the report said.
So far, that’s speculation, although North Korea has previously tried to soothe state workers by paying them with more worthless currency.
Four South Korean and three Chinese fishermen were questioned for an alleged violation of the North’s exclusive economic zone, South Korea’s coast guard said in a statement. It said the fishing boat was being taken toward the North Korea’s eastern port of Songjin. A South Korean fisherman told South Korea via a satellite phone that his boat was being towed by a North Korean patrol, according to the coast guard.
The coast guard said it was not clear where exactly the 41-ton fishing boat was operating when it was seized. The boat departed South Korea’s southeastern port of Pohang on Aug. 1 and was scheduled to return home on September 10. South Korea called on the North to quickly return the fishing boat and its crew.
The boat was seized off of Cape Musudan, a sensitive area that includes a missile launch site, a nuclear testing site, and one very large political prison camp. North Korea sometimes claims that the waters far off that coast are part of an exclusive economic zone, one that isn’t recognized under international law.
If you appreciate irony as much as I do, you’ve probably noticed that the seizure comes just a day after the State Department released its new list of state sponsors of terrorism with one conspicuous omission. Feel free to stop me if you don’t know the background here, but for those who haven’t, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 to reward it for giving up its nuclear weapons. As of last week, President Obama saw no particular reason to disturb that decision.
Interestingly enough, other people are starting to raise some of the same questions I’ve been asking about North Korea’s shipment of arms to Iranian-backed terrorists and attempts to murder Hwang Jang Yop, as in, aren’t those classic examples of the sponsorship of terrorism? Yonhap quotes the State Department’s non-response to allegations that the North Korean arms shipment seized in Bangkok last year was headed for Hezbollah or Hamas:
Daniel Benjamin, coordinator of the State Department’s Office for Counterterrorism, told reporters that the department has been “looking into” those allegations.
“The secretary and others in the administration have been clear that if we find that Korea is, indeed, sponsoring terrorism, obviously we will revisit the issue of the listing as a state sponsor,” he said. “But Korea was de-listed in accordance with U.S. law in 2008 and it was at that time certified that North Korea had not supported any terrorism in the previous six months.”
“We’ve seen those reports. We are looking into them,” said Benjamin. “The Secretary [of State Hillary Clinton] and others in the administration have been clear that if we find that [North] Korea is indeed sponsoring terrorism, obviously, we will revisit the issue of the listing as a state sponsor.”
Benjamin said deciding which country will be put on the list is a laborious process that takes some time, adding that “I’m fully aware of that issue and we are looking at it quite carefully.”
And we still haven’t even broached the topic of North Korea’s possible sale of surface-to-air missiles to Al Qaeda for use in Afghanistan.
In one hat tip to the truth, State’s list notes that North Korea is still harboring four Japanese Red Army hijackers. The JRA, with the support of North Korea, carried out the deadly 1970 terrorist attack that killed 26 people — 17 of them Americans — and which was the subject of a recent $378 million judgment against North Korea. North Korea was amenable to suit in a U.S. federal district court because the 1970 attack was one basis for its original listing as a sponsor of terrorism, putting it within the 2001 terrorism exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
I just can’t figure this administration out. On one hand, it seems to be putting together a tough and potentially devastating sanctions policy, and is signaling its determination to keep those sanctions in place until it curtails North Korea’s illicit activity and forces it to change its belligerent behavior. To my ongoing astonishment, the Obama Administration’s overall North Korea policy is far, far tougher than President Bush’s, which was largely a bipolar fluctuation between tough words and weak actions.
And yet this administration’s refusal to reverse one of President Bush’s key errors and re-add North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism defies the evidence, misstates the law, and sends a signal of weakness that doesn’t really seem to accurately reflect the top policymakers’ intentions. Without knowing the substance of the internal debates inside the administration beyond the fact that there are debates, I can only explain this as the product of a compromise between opposing camps. I can understand that sending a nuanced set of mixed signals can be useful sometimes for signaling our willingness to talk, but when we twist law and fact and abandon core principles, the nuance is going to get lost in translation. But then, if North Korea’s own diplomacy is nuanced, that’s been lost in translation, too.
I know this probably stuns you as much as it stuns me:
Seoul police arrested two pro-Pyongyang activists on charges of starting a campaign to remove a statue of U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur from a park in Incheon under orders from North Korea.
According to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, two leaders of the Korean Confederation Unification Promotion Council were arrested on charges of receiving directives from a North Korean agent from 2004 to 2005 to stage a series of violent, illegal rallies from May to September 2005, demanding the removal of the MacArthur statue. The North also told them to organize an alliance of progressive civic groups to demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea.
Police said 12 additional members of the council are to be investigated in the case. [Joongang Ilbo]
Readers will recall that the demonstrators, many from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union, marched to the statue 4,000-strong with bamboo poles and “fucking USA” signs in hand. Naturally, they proceeded to attack the police, resulting in some unknown number of injuries (photos here). Hate and violence notwithstanding, Chang Young-Dal, a member of the standing committee of the then-ruling Uri Party praised the fifth columnists who led the rally for their “deep ethnic purity,” which is true in the same sense it might have been for Ernst Rohm in the 1920’s.
Inspired, no doubt, by the class, tact, and sensitivity they displayed on September 11, 2005, other leftist South Korean groups with a history of bleating out North Korea propaganda have followed the on-the-spot guidance of the Star of Mount Paektu and the Lodestar of the Nation.
The Korean Confederation Unification Promotion Council, formed in 2004, promotes North Korea’s philosophy of unifying the two Koreas in a confederation. In 2005, it staged a 69-day protest inside the park to demand the statue’s removal, which turned violent on September 11, 2005, when 4,000 protesters clashed with police.
Yup. No real surprise there.
Police now say that the rallies began on orders from North Korea. (Since the first protest in 2005, North Korea has publicly lauded the rallies in statements through its state-run media.) [….]
Police said the two arrested activists traveled to China in 2004 to meet a North Korean agent, who gave them orders to organize the rallies against the statue and U.S. troops in the South. “North Korea normally gives a direction in a larger framework, and pro-Pyongyang activists in the South come up with specific implementation plans,” said a security official.
Police and prosecutors said nine pro-Pyongyang groups held a meeting in 2005 to discuss how to implement the orders and formed a special committee to demand the withdrawal of U.S. Forces Korea. A team was also formed under the committee to campaign for the removal of the statue.
Another security official said the MacArthur statue was targeted because of the North’s loathing of the American general, who stopped North Korea from taking over the entire peninsula.
A consultation with the OFK archives confirms that, this news isn’t entirely new. In November of 2006, the Chosun Ilbo reported that one Kang Soon-jeong, the former vice chairman of the South Korean chapter of the Pan-Korean Alliance for Reunification, was arrested for providing “national secrets” to North Korea. At the time of the 2006 arrest, Kang was on parole after serving a 4 1/2 year term for … yes, that’s right, spying for North Korea. Kang also played a role in organizing violent protests against the Korea-U.S. free-trade agreement and the expansion of Camp Humphreys. There is other evidence that the anti-MacArthur movement took its philosophical inspiration from Pyongyang as well.
“The campaign to remove the statue is the symbol of the anti-American movement,” said another security official. “There is no actual gain for the North even if the statute is removed, but it will send a strong message to its people and solidify the network of pro-Pyongyang activists in the South.”
Lim Soon-hee, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute of National Unification, agreed. “The campaign will fuel ideological conflicts within the South and taint the image of South Korea for Americans.”
Well, then, consider that operation a success. Were this wave of anti-Americanism (a) peaceful and (b) confined to the fringes of society, we’d have dismissed it. But in fact, it was neither of those things. Both the beef idiocy and the Cheonan conspiracy idiocy show us that it’s far from over.
The latest reports in the Korean press tell us that the President will soon sign an over-arching executive order that will subsume the authorities of Executive Order 13,382 (see sidebars), and will also allow the blocking of assets used for proliferation, drug trafficking, and currency counterfeiting:
In a press briefing on Monday, Department spokesman Philip Crowley said, “We have no doubt that North Korea has engaged directly in counterfeit operations as a means of bringing currency into the country. This is a longstanding practice.” [Chosun Ilbo]
Several reports discuss plans by Treasury to blacklist specific individuals and institutions suspected of being involved in illegal activity and money laundering:
Observers say a financial services blacklist of individuals to be announced in the new sanctions will likely include O Kuk-ryol, vice head of North Korea’s National Defense Commission, which is led by Kim Jong-il and his family. O is known to be managing a company that tries to attract foreign investment to the North. [Joongang Ilbo]
It will be interesting to see whether the executive order will make findings that Bureau 39, or perhaps the North Korean government itself, is a primary concern for money laundering. That description has been applied to other states for much less — that is, a lackadaisical rather than intentionally criminal approach to the proceeds of illicit activity. If it weren’t for the State Department and its politics, Treasury would probably have designated North Korea years ago.
The United States is expected to blacklist three key North Korean finance officials believed to be taking care of leader Kim Jong-il’s secret funds as part of new sanctions against the communist nation, a government source said Wednesday.
One of the three finance officials is Kim Tong-myong, head of Tanchon Commercial Bank, the source said. “The U.S. is paying special attention to three people, including Kim Tong-myong, who operate North Korea’s secret funds abroad,” the source said on condition of anonymity. “If they are included in the new sanctions, it could deal a blow to North Korea’s leadership.”
The U.S. has also collected evidence that nine North Korean financial institutions operating overseas and as least two trading firms have been used for the regime’s illicit activities, such as trade in conventional arms, luxury goods and counterfeit money, the source said.
Overall, the U.S. is expected to add some 10-20 North Korean entities and individuals to its blacklist of those to be subject to sanctions, which include freezing their assets in the U.S. and banning them from dealing with American financial institutions. [Yonhap]
And given the lack of food or medical care in nominally socialist North Korea, you might be tempted to assume (or even mislead others to believe) that its government had no money to spend for such things. You would be wrong:
Data from the Bank for International Settlements released last month showed that North Korean deposits at banks around the world stood at $670 million as of the end of March. [Joongang Ilbo]
That sum represents just about enough to fund World Food Program operations in North Korea … for three years. Now explain to me again why North Koreans still starve.
Finally, the Daily NK’s Kim Yong Hun explains why Chinese banks will be forced to cooperate with the U.S. Treasury Department, whether the Chinese government wants them to or not. I won’t give you any quotes — just read the whole thing. Marcus Noland has more on this in via the Council on Foreign Relations:
China–which had been essentially unwilling to implement the sanctions on luxury goods–cooperated with the sanctions against BDA. The reason [for that cooperation] is it was not the Chinese foreign ministry or the customs administration, but rather the Chinese ministry of finance and central bank implementing these sanctions. Their concern was that they had much more at stake with respect to Chinese banks’ [access] to the lucrative U.S. market than they ever would have dealing with some small bank in Macao or possible financial transactions in North Korea. The lessons from this seem to be that financial sanctions–that play on banks’ desire to maintain a good reputation, stay within the increasingly stringent international rules on money laundering, and maintain a good relationship with the United States–play to our strengths in terms of the U.S. financial system and the increasingly well-defined and articulated set of international norms and agreements on money laundering. [Financial sanctions] will be more successful than the traditional trade sanctions that are oftentimes implemented less than rigorously.
One thing that I will say about this, however, is that we should be prepared for the Chinese government to look for ways to actively undermine Treasury’s efforts, such as shipping hard currency directly to North Korea in paper form, gold, or stored-value cards. This certainly isn’t a very efficient way to do things, but it might be just enough to keep the Kim Dynasty in power until the U.S. government decides to cave yet again for political reasons. As always, determination will be dispositive to whether this will work.
During the news conference held in Seoul, Monday, Einhorn played hardball with North Korea with regard to dialogue.
“We can’t repeat the kind of cycle that we’ve been through on a number of previous occasions where North Korea engages in talks, makes commitments, and then abandons those talks. We have to break that cycle,” he said.
“Before the six-party talks to be convened, it’s essential that North Korea demonstrate in an intangible way that it’s prepared this time to make commitments and to fulfill them. And there are some important commitments already existing such as September 2005 commitments.” [Korea Times]
When we see the new executive order that will be used as the legal basis for this plan, we’ll probably find out that 80% of the Korean press reports about this are actually true. Recently, we’ve seen some on the American left call South Korea the tail that wags the dog. Frankly, I happen to agree with them on this, up to a point. One of the things that I continue to find simply staggering is the extent of South Korea’s influence on U.S. government policymaking. Clientitis, in its various forms, is rife within these circles, though many of these insiders still privately suspect that the National Intelligence Service frequently plants stories to manipulate press coverage.
Fine, but where were these same people when the tail was Roh Moo Hyun, and the wag was indirect U.S. financial support for Kim Jong Il, his atrocities toward his people, and his proliferation? By which I mean that as U.S. soldiers (me being one of them) ostensibly defended South Korea from North Korea and subsidized its defense, South Korea sent Kim Jong Il billions of dollars in tribute that it didn’t have to spend on its own defense. If you agree that perpetuating North Korea’s capacity to terrorize and proliferate is contrary to America’s interests, and that finally working with allies in the region to address and suppress that threat is in its interests, then the “tail wags dog” meme would have been far more suitable to the years between 1997 and 2008.
North Korea raised the stakes in its face-off with the United States and South Korea on Saturday, threatening to use nuclear weapons if Washington and Seoul go ahead with military exercises planned for regional waters this summer. [WaPo]
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 to reward it for giving up its nuclear weapons, and as of June 23, 2010, President Obama saw no particular reason to disturb that decision.
Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control, said North Korea’s recent alleged sinking of a South Korean warship - which Pyongyang denies - and its aggressive rhetoric suggest it is not willing to make serious commitments toward denuclearization.
“I don’t know that we are ready today to resume those talks,” Einhorn told reporters in Tokyo. “North Korea’s actions raise legitimate questions about whether they are willing to live up to their commitments.”
Hundreds of North Koreans have died in floods this year. The record rains cover most of the country, from South Hamgyeong to the Yalu River. Heavy rains are pretty much an annual event each year at this time, but I have yet to read that rain has caused a famine in South Korea.
In it the young girl, Arai Anzu - which sounds like alliance when pronounced by a Japanese person - asks the boy, Usa-kun - a play on USA - why he is protecting her house.
“Because we have an alliance,” he says. “We are ‘Important Friends’.”
“It’s good to have a friend you can rely on to go with you,” the little girl concludes.
The idea is less silly than it seems. In America, comic books are for twelve year-olds and stoners. In Asia, manga often discuss politics and history. Heck, in Korea, they’re even used to teach children to hate Jews. My problem with this is more fiscal than format — it’s the host nation governments that need to do things like this, not ours.
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The highest-ranking North Korean to defect to South Korea has criticized the South Korean people as “pathetic” in their attitude toward the North. Hwang Jang-yop, former secretary of the ruling North Korean Workers’ Party, has consistently criticized the communist regime of his former country after fleeing to the South in 1997. In a recent news interview, he said certain South Koreans have rejected the official results of the scientific investigation into the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan, adding such ill-considered support for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will not only sabotage reunification, but prevent the South from defending itself. “I know Kim Jong Il was behind the Cheonan sinking, and it’s a pity that as many as 30 percent of the South Korean people don’t believe that” he said. [Donga Ilbo]
I don’t think Hwang has access to any more evidence about the Cheonan Incident than the rest of us, but I think he’s speaking unpleasant truths about South Koreans, many of whom will concede that they live in an exceedingly superficial society. Mind you, I’d love to be able to say that Hwang is wrong, but the great weight of the available evidence says he isn’t.
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According to a question posed in the State Department’s August 2, 2010 briefing, Aijalon Gomes is on a hunger strike in North Korea. The report is sourced to “the number-two of the British foreign office, Mr. David Howell,” who is said to have reported this fact to the House of Lords. The State Department spokesman professed no knowledge about the report.
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An interesting article on China’s new claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea, which would be a lot like the United States claiming sovereignty over the Gulf of Mexico. I’m sure Chas Freeman find some way to argue that China doesn’t really mean it.
I’ve been meaning to write about the latest off-year election results in South Korea for the last several days. In what must be a welcome shift for Lee, unlike the June local and provincial elections, the ruling GNP scored what Yonhap called “a stunning victory over the opposition parties.”
In crucial by-elections gauging public sentiment toward the Lee Myung-bak administration midway through its term, the ruling Grand National Party yesterday scored precious victories in high-profile districts, making a successful political rebound from painful defeats in last month’s local elections.
Eight vacancies in the National Assembly were filled through yesterday’s elections, and victories of two advisers of President Lee were confirmed last night in Seoul and North Chungcheong, as well as two more victories in Incheon and South Chungcheong. [Joongang Ilbo]
The big race, in my wife’s home district, put Lee Jae-Oh back into the National Assembly.
The Democrats were clearly disappointed. Party officials’ faces became tense as the vote count progressed. Reflecting such a mood, DP Chairman Chung Sye-kyun only visited the party’s headquarters around 10:10 p.m. “I and the party’s leadership did our best,” Chung said. “We humbly accept the outcome.”
It’s interesting to contrast the general lack of media interest in these results to the broadly reported consensus that the June local elections represented a “rebuke” by voters of Lee Myung Bak’s supposed “hard-line” policy toward North Korea (any reports of which are interpretive hallucinations).
What can I make of this change? There are several possibilities:
* These elections chose members of the National Assembly, not local executives. In other words, this time, the issues were national, not local. This is where the Cheonan Incident gains some direct relevance.
* Lee is wisely backing off on his ambitious local projects, and there has been a new sacrifice in accord with this.
* Turnout was high, which may mean that more conservative voters turned out. The mid-term effect was suppressed. Maybe the June elections shook some of them out of their complacency.
* The elections were held just as the U.S. and Korean navies held exercises that drew the predictable North Korean threats and much whining from the Chicoms. They also began as South Korean newspapers began to report that the U.S. government would start a global pursuit of North Korean assets to block. This time, there’s actually a credible case for there being a “hard line” to rebuke. And yet there was no rebuke.
As interesting as these theories are to me, a more likely one is that South Korean politics are just unstable and unpredictable, and that any efforts to make enough sense of them to achieve any predictive value are doomed.
Professor Sung Yoon Lee is a friend of mine, and this is why friends don’t let friends go on Al Jazzeera. When the floodlights snap on, you just might find yourself in a circus tent. In the extreme opposite corner, we have present “Professor” of Pacific Rim Studies Christine Hong, who appears to a an exact genetic clone of her comrade in the struggle, Christine Ahn, right down to the hip, urbane glasses (damn you to hell, Hwang Woo-Seok!).
The now-moot premise of Riz Khan’s interview is that the U.S.-South Korean naval exercises — but not North Korea’s sinking of a South Korean warship! — might have triggered more naval clashes. Khan asks Christine Hong whether she thinks that perhaps North Korea’s reaction to the exercise (the threat of a “physical response“) might have been excessive. Hong responds without hesitation: “Absolutely not!” If I understand Hong’s argument, North Korea has to sink South Korean warships, withdraw from the 1953 Armistice unilaterally, test nukes, proliferate, keep hundreds of thousands of people in prison camps, and threaten war — most of which she defends and justifies — because America and South Korea haven’t signed a peace treaty. To be precise, these people aren’t really pro-peace or anti-war, they’re just on the other side.
As much as I feel for the legions of young zombies Hong and others like her will be churning out, Hong really represents the die-hard remnant of an ideological shift in the American left on North Korea. The days of seeing North Korea as prepared to disarm, reform, and make peace but for G.W. Bush’s cowboy axis-of-evil rhetoric have ended for most of them. Only North Korea’s most extreme sympathizers can still defend its conduct. Even on the far left, Mike Chinoy and John Feffer can’t go that far, even if they’re forced to leave its conduct unexplained and unanswered in their proposals for more talks, which only makes those proposals seem more detached from reality than ever. The mainstream left is mostly following the Obama Administration’s recognition of the need for sanctions.
The opposite has happened in South Korea, where the mainstream left has adopted various conspiracy theories and disinformation. There’s probably a conspiracy theory for every individual’s emotional need to believe that someone other than North Korea sank the Cheonan, or even that all of this is somehow America’s fault. To which I say, there’s really no point in reasoning with the logically retarded. The only thing you can do about people like this is to a better job of raising and educating their younger siblings. Their emotions have already told them what they believe, and their only use for logic is to find some explanation, plausible or otherwise, to lend some support to their faith. They have no evidence to support their beliefs, of course, but they did have a generous assist from Lee Myung Bak’s government, whose various leaks and stumbles have given the twoofers plenty to pick at.
My understanding is that the complete report of the international investigation is much longer than the report I’d linked here. If so, it might be helpful to would-be de-bunkers to redact out the secret material and release the rest of it.
Robert Einhorn, President Obama’s special adviser for non-proliferation and arms control, is visiting Seoul and Tokyo this week. He is accompanied by Daniel Glaser, who works with Treasury’s Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and who was a key architect of the Banco Delta Asia sanctions in 2005 and 2006. At the risk of making a comparison that Glaser might not necessarily welcome, his presence in Seoul has far more deterrent value than parking an aircraft carrier off the coast of Nampo.
Einhorn and other U.S. officials have given more hints about what financial measures the government is like to take, and what they’re doing to secure international cooperation with them. What’s less clear is whether financial measures are a means to get North Korea to talk, to disarm, or to overthrow a regime determined to do neither. The answer probably depends on how North Korea responds to the pressure over the next year. I’ll predict now that once it begins to have an effect, North Korea will coo seductively about disarmament talks … if only we’d just lift the sanctions. That’s when the administration will be tested again.
Even so, a solid Plan B appears to be taking shape, just as I was about to give up on the Obama Administration. Even if the new policy reflects nothing more than new strength and gravitas about the relationship between pressure and diplomacy, this would be progress.
HOW WILL THE SANCTIONS WORK?
The precise form the measure will take still isn’t clear, but ought to be clearer later this week as Treasury and State add further detail to their plans. We do have some idea of the targeting and methods, however. Treasury will target “North Korea’s illicit transactions and activities regarding luxury goods and arms trade,” will allow for the public designation of “entities and individuals involved in” those activities, to include dollar counterfeiting, and will provide for the blocking of those entities’ assets and property. At least one report advises us to expect a new executive order to this effect:
Under the measure, the U.S. government will reportedly pinpoint North Korean businesses, authorities and individuals associated with illicit transaction or activities and then require U.S. financial institutions to take measures to block their activities and freeze their assets in the United States. [Korea Times]
“By publicly naming these entities, these measures can have the broader effect of isolating them from the international financial and commercial system,” he said. Einhorn was accompanied by Daniel Glaser, a senior Treasury official overseeing efforts to combat terrorist financing and financial crimes. [AFP]
It bears repeating that these criminal enterprises enrich the North Korean elite, but do nothing to feed the hungry:
“These measures are not directed at the North Korean people, but our objective is to put an end to [North Korea’s] destabilizing proliferation activities, to halt illicit activities that help fund its nuclear missile programs and to discourage further provocative actions,” Einhorn told reporters, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. [….]
Einhorn said the aim of the sanctions is to go after North Korean sources of “hundreds of millions of dollars” in hard currency, including counterfeiting U.S. currency, narcotics smuggling and other illegal activities. U.S. officials have said that the illicit sale of cigarettes, liquor and exotic food helps provide funding for North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear program. [CNN]
GAINING INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
I think it’s pretty obvious to everyone whose cooperation has been the most conspicuously lacking, and the statements from the Administration about China and North Korea this week are really something to behold. They’re more strident than anything I can recall seeing from any senior U.S. officials, quite possibly to include John Bolton, in the last two decades. They suggest a real readiness to impose real consequences on China’s economic and security interests.
Einhorn appealed to China, the North’s sole major ally and economic lifeline, to back the sanctions on both countries and not to take advantage of restraint by other countries.
“We want China to be a responsible stakeholder in the international system,” he said. “That means co-operating with the UN Security Council resolutions and it means not backfilling or not taking advantage of responsible self-restraint of other countries.” [AFP]
That’s a strikingly honest acknowledgment of what the economists have been telling us about China undermining UNSCR 1718, and would be a strong statement even if it had been off the record. It gets better:
“China is suffering the indignity of exercises close to its shores, and though they are not directed at China, the exercises are a direct result of China’s support for North Korea and unwillingness to denounce their aggression,” Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told a forum at the Nixon Center Tuesday, according to the center’s Web site. [….]
“China is also reflecting on the consequences of all parties’ inability to deter North Korean provocations,” Steinberg said. [….]
“The U.S. should exercise patience and send a message to Pyongyang that their old tactics will no longer work,” he said. “The administration’s strategy and policy should not be altered.” [Yonhap]
Steinberg’s tone, which appeals to Chinese government’s obsession with place and stature, is calculated to put its government under domestic pressure and show the Chinese people that its irresponsible shielding of North Korea has backfired.
State is also putting pressure on Burma to stop buying North Korean weapons.
The chocolate-making countries, which may hold up to $4 billion in North Korea’s infant formula fund personal assets of Kim Jong Il and/or Kim Jong-Eun, are promising to cooperate as well. That includes Switzerland, better known as the country that failed to see anything amiss about selling the North Koreans the same intaglio printing presses and optically variable ink used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing:
RFA cited Roland Vock, a senior official of the Sanctions Unit at the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affair, as saying that Switzerland is complying with sanctions on Pyongyang applied under UN Security Council resolutions 1718 and 1874.
“Any financial assets that fall under the scope of the resolutions would have to be frozen,” Vock was quoted by RFA as saying. Vock told RFA that if they are provided specific information about illegal financial transactions by North Korea through even unlisted bank accounts, they will start an investigation. [Joongang Ilbo]
Am I reading too much into Vock’s comments to say that I detect an undercurrent of skepticism?
“Give me the information,” he said. “Which bank [of about 500 Swiss banks], what money talking about, where money is coming from, then I can pass information to” the Swiss intelligence agency so that it can begin its probe. He said he meets American officials “very regularly” to exchange information.
Earlier on, Luxembourg also said that under the UN and U.S. sanctions, the country is closely watching for any illegal activities by the North using accounts there and will take “appropriate legal steps” if it finds them.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s slush funds in banks in Switzerland and Luxembourg are estimated at more than US$4 billion. [Chosun Ilbo]
More on Luxemburg’s assurances of cooperation here. North Korea is already reported to be trying to move large amounts out of some of its accounts there. The suggestion is that this is to bequeath them to Mini-Me, but one need not physically move a bank account to change its ownership or control. It seems more likely that any large movement of funds is designed to save those funds from being blocked, but it’s also plausible that as North Korea heads into the succession process and the September party conference, that it needs more goodies for its minions.
WILL IT WORK?
That depends on the objective, of course, but the objective still isn’t entirely clear. Here’s the official explanation:
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said, “We don’t take a cookie-cutter approach here. Iran and North Korea are two different countries. Iran has resources, particularly in the energy sector. North Korea does not. So we will apply measured sanctions against North Korea as we have in the past, and tailored to help influence the thinking of the government and those who support the government.”
“Likewise, we are directing sanctions at Iran and it’s the agencies that are linked to the concerns that we have — proliferation, nuclear concerns… But they are different,” he added. [Chosun Ilbo]
The Chosun Ilbo’s correspondent seizes on plans for a new executive order and the lack of present plans for new legislation as “confirmation that Washington will not slap the same strong sanctions on the North that it has imposed against Iran,” but the latter doesn’t follow from the former. For months, my spies have told me that Treasury’s most enforcement-minded officials have said that the legal authorities needed to put real pressure on North Korea are already there. As I’ve said for years, this could all be done with a series of executive decisions. And because the Daily NK’s Chris Green reads this blog, he naturally does a superior job of informing his readers:
Over the weekend, some concerns were raised about rumors that the U.S. is planning to pursue sanctions through an executive order, thus bypassing domestic legislative processes, and that this somehow signified a weakening of the proposed sanctions. However, this was refuted by South Korean experts, who noted that an executive order may be better in terms of handing the U.S. government the ability to act quickly in the face of North Korean changes.
Kim Sung Han, a Professor of Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security at Korea University, analyzed during the phone call conversation with The Daily NK, “The domestic law and administrative order is a matter of flexibility in the United States’ policy, not to distinguish the level of the sanctions. In order for the U.S. to take the initiative and respond to changes quickly, an administrative order, which is free from the unnecessary intervention of Congress, is better.” [Daily NK, Chris Green]
So I don’t take much from the fact that the administration isn’t asking for new legislation now, because I agree that it isn’t really needed yet. The comparison to Iran sanctions is off the mark. Iran, unlike North Korea, has strong trade relations with other countries and oil to sell that other countries — including this one — will continue to buy. Until we can learn to live without Iran’s oil, financial sanctions on Iran are far less likely to put its regime under real pressure. If the administration is asking for new legal authorities against Iran, it’s probably because it knows how much more difficult Iran’s financial links are to cut. But North Korea’s financial links to the Outer Earth are fragile and largely illicit. There is nothing that North Korea sells that anyone really needs.
Assuming, then, that the U.S. government is serious, exactly what is it serious about? There is some ambiguity here, if you believe this second report from the Daily NK, which relies in part on anonymous sources. It reports that the Cheonan Incident was “a turning point” in South Korea’s approach to the North, and has since been migrating in the direction of using sanctions to catalyze “fundamental changes in the country.” It reports that U.S. officials, despite their willingness to “target the North Korean leadership and their assets,” aren’t yet ready to support such an approach, but might be later if North Korea continues to refuse to “show its sincerity” about disarmament.
Those aligned with the Chinoy-Ahn axis are working overtime to mobilize opposition to the administration’s financial strategy. Their argument, offered with an unpersuasive amount of desperation, is that pressure won’t force North Korea to negotiate and will spoil the gemütlichkeit for talks. But if they really believe this, why the desperation? And more to the point, why did North Korea begin hinting at returning to the six-party talks just as press reports began to emerge that Washington would implement comprehensive financial sanctions? To its credit, the Obama Administration gets this, and openly questions the sincerity of North Korea’s belated expressions of interest in negotiations.
Critics of financial pressure could make a more accurate criticism if they were honest enough to make it: financial pressure still won’t “to convince Pyongyang to change course and pursue denuclearization.” For what little it’s worth, I believe we should remain open to the exceedingly unlikely possibility of a negotiated, verifiable, irreversible nuclear disarmament of North Korea, though this would require a fundamental transparency that the Kim Dynasty won’t ever accept.
By itself, the emerging Plan B probably won’t crumple the Kim Dynasty, either, though the succession of the grossly underqualified Kim Jong Eun increases the odds that it might. Mostly, financial pressure can gravely damage the regime’s capacity to proliferate, and inhibit its capacity to repress the latent dissent that will eventually destroy it.
A North Korean mine which drifted along a river into the neighbouring South killed a man and badly injured another when it exploded, military officials said Sunday. Several wooden box mines have been retrieved by South Korean soldiers and police, but it was not immediately clear how the mines ended up drifting into the South. The explosion was reported shortly before midnight Saturday in a restricted border area in Yeoncheon, 60 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of Seoul, the defence ministry said.A 48-year-old man died and a 25-year-old man was seriously injured. “Han was killed by one of the North Korean wooden box mines which had drifted south along the border river,” a ministry spokesman told AFP.
South Korean soldiers and police have retrieved 29 boxes of North Korean mines in their joint search which began on Friday along all streams connected to the Imjin River, he said, of which 18 boxes were empty. [AFP]
Separately, UPI reports that the South Koreans have found several more North Korean-manufactured mines on “small South Korean islands near the Yellow Sea border:”
The military launched a search after a fisherman reported finding an anti-personnel mine Friday on Jumin Island, just south of the border, Yonhap News Agency said. The other mines were discovered on Jumin and two neighboring islands. [UPI]
The Russians have been manufacturing box mines since at least World War II. The PMD series is still in common use by many armies today, including the North Korean army. Numerous counties now manufacture local variants. Because they use very little metal, PMD’s are very difficult to detect.
Time and time again, reading news stories involving military affairs becomes a source of frustration because so many reporters don’t know anything about the subject matter and don’t do some simple research. My favorite example comes via the AP’s professional atrocity mongerer Charles J. Hanley, who wrote about the magnesium flares that helicopters over Sadr city spat out as a defensive measure against heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles, and who out of misunderstanding or malice made it sound as though the U.S. Army was napalming the crowds. In this case, it’s unclear whether the troops found empty boxes for the storage of multiple mines — one inference of which is that North Korean troops crossed the DMZ to plant mines — or whether the boxes were simply empty and buoyant PMD boxes from which the explosives had tipped out (which seems more likely to me, even if I put nothing past the North Koreans).
I wonder if the Kyonggi provincial government is finally ready to take a tip that this isn’t the best time for hiking the DMZ after all.
Update: I see that GI Korea’s post on this has a picture of the explosive, and he seems to suspect that this was deliberate. Well, again, anything is possible with the North Koreans, so we’ll have to see, but if these mines are buoyant, then this is going to be hard to pin on Kim Jong Il. I would only plead with the South Korean government to establish some very strict message discipline about this, so that the Democratic Party conspiracy machine won’t have so much fodder next time around.
A North Korean mine which drifted along a river into the neighbouring South killed a man and badly injured another when it exploded, military officials said Sunday. Several wooden box mines have been retrieved by South Korean soldiers and police, but it was not immediately clear how the mines ended up drifting into the South. The explosion was reported shortly before midnight Saturday in a restricted border area in Yeoncheon, 60 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of Seoul, the defence ministry said.A 48-year-old man died and a 25-year-old man was seriously injured. “Han was killed by one of the North Korean wooden box mines which had drifted south along the border river,” a ministry spokesman told AFP.