Korean War II

Sung-Yoon Lee: Nukes are Pyongyang’s “nonnegotiable means of isolating & exercising dominance over Seoul.”

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Professor Lee raises, if ever so briefly, the standards of a newspaper that is simultaneously America’s most prestigious, and in terms of its North Korea coverage, easily its worst.

But a nuclear North Korea is unlike a nuclear China or Russia. During the Cold War, neither Beijing nor Moscow faced an existential threat in the form of an alternate Chinese or Russian state. Pyongyang, on the other hand, has had to live with a far more prosperous and legitimate Korean state across its southern border.

This internal dynamic of the Korean Peninsula compels Pyongyang to continue to threaten war and perfect its weapons of mass destruction. The regime’s logic is that the more advanced its nuclear capability, the less likely the United States will be to defend South Korea at the risk of sacrificing millions of American lives at home.

Hence, for the North, menacing the United States is a nonnegotiable means of isolating and exercising dominance over Seoul. This is how the regime of Kim Jong-un seeks to ensure its long-term survival. [Sung-Yoon Lee, The New York Times]

I often wish that I could write as well in my first language as Professor Lee can write in his second language. I always look forward to his op-eds — not only because they’re a pleasure to read, but also because off-hand, I can’t think of anyone else who writes about North Korea in the English language, who also reads North Korean propaganda in the original Korean, who possesses the additional understanding and context of having been raised in the Korean culture, and who is possessed of the good judgment to interpret that evidence usefully for the reader. If you’re as devoted a NYT non-subscriber as I am — I say this as someone who has co-written two op-eds (both with Prof. Lee) that the Times has published — this is well worth spending one of your free clicks.

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Korean War II, Propaganda

Some N. Koreans grow weary of a war that is forever imminent, as others yearn for it.

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For the last 60 years, the people of North Korea have been told that they must sacrifice all their wants — and too many of their needs — for the sake of a holy war with Oceania that has always been imminent. Pyongyang’s media manipulation strategy shows the world’s most gullible journalists (and I mean you, Will Ripley) images of subjects who are (or who appear to be) united in fanatical, robotic devotion to the state’s war propaganda. Yet out in the provinces, the people have stopped believing it.
People have also been overheard complaining among themselves about how the government has to take such actions to create an artificially tense atmosphere, as without them, the people would show no real concern. “North Korea would suffer unspeakable destruction if war breaks out, so are they really going to attack the US?” one resident said to the source.
Evidence suggests that the regime does not have any such intentions, and is merely focusing on creating an atmosphere of war without undertaking any significant military maneuvers. Years of false claims of a coming “total war” and threats of annihilation have damaged the government’s credibility among the people. [Daily NK]
Or, in the original German, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” And the people said “nein.”*
“These latest measures do not represent any change in the regime’s strategy, and their failure to even respond to this week’s joint US-South Korea military drills with exercises of their own is further proof. They will just continue with their saber-rattling, forcing the people to the streets for daily demonstrations, taking pictures and putting on a show, but nobody at this point believes they will really start a war,” the source said. [Daily NK]
But whether this confidence is an expression of weariness or reassurance (or some combination of both) may depend on the individual. Some North Koreans say “when the war comes” as code talk for “after the regime ends.” A former member of the Pyongyang elite told me this in a conversation more than a decade ago. Here is more evidence of that.

“An increasing number of residents are pointing out that, for them [the North Korean people], provoking the US is a losing battle. We are the ones who suffer from the regime’s belligerent behavior with no consideration for reconciliation and cooperation,” he added.

Some residents are said to be welcoming the regime’s propaganda that a war is imminent, a source in North Hamgyong Province said. We want the suffering to finally end even if it means losing a war,” he said.

“Kim Jong Un is using the same old strategy of his grandfather (Kim Il Sung) and father (Kim Jong Il) to consolidate the population with threats of war, but it is not really effective anymore.” [Daily NK]

Often, I think we underestimate how intelligent, and how perceptive some North Koreans are in seeing through the state’s propaganda, yet at the same time, they may not be nearly perceptive enough about the cost of the war Kim Jong-Un is leading them into. Are their circumstances so desperate that they would gamble everything to reset the future? I suspect we’d find different answers to that question in Pyongyang, in the provinces, and in the barracks. We should help all of them understand that cost in vivid terms, along with who will bear it, and who profits from this regime’s endless war hysteria and all of the hard labor it is used to justify. History is often written by people who see only their desperation, who yearn to erase the future, and who damn all consequences. But if the North Korean people are waiting for us, they are waiting in vain. No matter the circumstance or the scenario, the cost of rebooting their future will be great. It will be far greater for them if it involves war with us. If they want a future, they must take history into their own hands.

~   ~   ~

* The rhetorical similarities between Goebbels’s words and Pyongyang’s rhetoric today are uncanny. Said Goebbels in 1943: “Do you believe with the Führer and us in the final total victory of the German people? Are you and the German people willing to work, if the Führer orders, 10, 12 and if necessary 14 hours a day and to give everything for victory? Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?” You see what I mean? But war fever and Stakhanovite exhortations have short shelf lives — historically, no longer than ten years. A state can only sustain the ideological fervor for this level of self-sacrifice for so long before the people tire of it.

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Books & Films, Censorship, Korean War II, Media Criticism, Terrorism (NK)

Kim Jong-Un’s Moonshadow Policy is eclipsing free thought in S. Korea, and beyond

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As we begin rehashing the time-worn policy arguments about responding to a nuclear North Korea, it’s useful to inform those arguments with further evidence of just how Pyongyang is leveraging its nuclear hegemony, by escalating its control over speech in South Korea. Last week, a few of us noticed that KCNA published a “death sentence” against four journalists (two reviewers and two newspaper presidents) over a review of “North Korea Confidential” by James Pearson and Daniel Tudor, asserting further that “the penalties will be enforced at an arbitrary point in time at an arbitrary point, without any additional procedure.”

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.

I’ve posted the full text of KCNA’s threat below the fold (click “continue reading.”) The threat drew a mild condemnation from Seoul. What, do you suppose, are the odds that KCNA made this threat without the personal approval of His Porcine Majesty? No doubt, Pyongyang found the cover of the Korean edition to be provocative:

I don’t know if the reviewers would have even seen this cover. Pearson, an affable person who has done some excellent investigative journalism about North Korea’s money laundering in Malaysia and Singapore, also sent me a review copy when the book came out in English. My copy doesn’t have that cover. Other authors who’ve sent me review copies have done so by .pdf, and none of those texts showed a cover image. But then, the North Korean judicial system isn’t known for its evidentiary rigor or protections of due process.

Why else might Pyongyang target “North Korea Confidential?” It’s certainly a useful snapshot of how provincial North Korea in 2015 differed from the circa-1985 impression that most foreigners have of its society, culture, and economy, although a regular (or obsessive) Korea-watcher won’t read much there that she hasn’t read somewhere else. The book is hardly an indictment of North Korea’s political system. Pearson and Tudor don’t ignore the existence of the political prison camps or other human rights abuses, but those things aren’t the main focus of their book. They mainly focus on economic and cultural changes in North Korea since the Great Famine, and on evidence supporting the implication (of which I’m skeptical) that these things will necessarily drive political change. In their conclusion, they are “doubtful about the possibility of regime collapse” and skeptical of the proposition that “sanctions could push the DPRK to the breaking point.” They ultimately conclude that “the most likely scenario for North Korea in the short and medium term is the gradual opening of the country under the current regime.”

Of course, things don’t seem to be working out that way. Indeed, Kim Jong-Un’s greatest domestic achievement may be his success in sealing North Korea’s borders and implementing a moderately effective digital censorship regimen, perhaps with the technical assistance of well-meaning engagers here.

None of which is really my point. My point is that compared to any number of other North Korea books one can read in Korean, “North Korea Confidental” is mild stuff. It’s not half as inflammatory, subversive, or acerbic as most of what you might read at this blog, or at B.R. Myers’s Sthele Press. Having mostly finished this post last week, I decided to hold it for a few days while I emailed some other authors to ask whether their works are published in Korean. Professor B.R. Myers informs me that “The Cleanest Race” is; so is Kang Chol-hwan’s “The Aquariums of Pyongyang;” Yeonmi Park’s, “In Order to Live;” and most of Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard’s books. All of these books are more ideologically dangerous to Pyongyang than “North Korea Confidential.” Why not them?

The key to explaining this, I think, is that the authors themselves were not the targets of this threat; the Korean journalists who reviewed the book’s Korean edition were. And here, we find the makings of a pattern and an escalation, because a reader brings to my attention that KCNA has also published this threat against centrist and right-of-center Korean media — sorry, make that “Puppet Reptile Writers.” Apologies for the long quote, but this is worth reading and archiving in full:

Pyongyang, September 1 (KCNA) — Yonhap News, Chosun Ilbo, Dong-A Ilbo, Maeil Kyongje, Munhwa Ilbo and other vicious conservative media of south Korea professing to represent the south Korean media are speaking ill of the Korean People’s Army’s resolute warning for mounting enveloping fire on Guam and the will of the Korean people to wage death-defying resistance against the U.S. and are unhesitatingly trumpeting about such rhetoric as “enhanced war atmosphere” and “creation of tensions for maintaining social system”.

A spokesman for the Central Committee of the Journalists Union of Korea in a statement Friday says this clearly proves that the puppet conservative media are made up of hack writers, servants of bellicose forces at home and abroad and group of traitors with whom we can not live together.

The Central Committee of the Journalists Union of Korea sternly declares as follows reflecting the towering grudge and hostility of the mediapersons of the DPRK against the puppet conservative media going reckless to hurt the dignity of the DPRK while pointing an accusing finger at the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK:

We will sharpen the just writing brushes to defend our leader, our party and our social system and win a final victory in the confrontation with the U.S.

No matter how loudly the hostile forces may cry out, they can never check the advance of the DPRK dashing toward the bright future of humankind along the straight road of independence, Songun and socialism.

We will track down the puppet conservative reptile writers fostering discord within the nation under the auspices and at the instigation of the anti-reunification forces at home and abroad, and throw overboard all of them.

The puppet ultra-right conservative hack writers without elementary conscience as writers have to be completely stamped out. This is the unanimous will of the mediapersons of the DPRK, and this will be put into practice.

Our grime and merciless pen will sight the bases which commit hideous crimes against the DPRK by spreading misinformation about it, and beat them to pieces.

The puppet conservative media escalating confrontation with the DPRK while dare challenge the annihilating spirit of the army and people of the DPRK will never be able to evade the shower of retaliatory blows. -0- [link]

Let’s call all of this precisely what it is: terrorism. See also Pyongyang’s extraterritorial censorship of “The Interview” in the United States, Europe, and Asia. See also (in no particular order) its series of attempts between 2008 and 2014 to murder North Korean dissidents in exile, its 2012 threat to shell the offices of conservative South Korean newspapers, its 2014 threats against defector-activists who launch leaflet balloons over the DMZ, its approval of the 2015 slashing attack on the U.S. Ambassador, its 2016 threat to murder the President of South Korea, its 2017 threat to murder the ex-President of South Korea and just about anyone who angers it, and its 2017 murder of Kim Jong-Nam in Kuala Lumpur.

I offer that evidence for the benefit of anyone who is tempted to believe the palliative that we can just “learn to live with” a nuclear North Korea, to view our own acknowledgement of Pyongyang’s nuclear status as the end of this crisis, or to find reassurance in the belief that Pyongyang, having achieved nuclear hegemony at such cost, will rest contentedly within its own borders. On the contrary, from now until the end of Kim Jong-Un’s life, every book review, editorial, film, conference, and U.N. vote will be cast as a choice between the offending thoughts, on one hand, and assassination or war on the other. How much of your freedom of thought will you give up for the sake of “peace?” The problem with that question is that no one ever asks it just once.

I have written before about how the generals in Pyongyang believe they can gradually subjugate South Korea into submission and remote control by confederation, rather than attempt to occupy a country with twice its population and many times its wealth. I have written about how Pyongyang’s attempts to censor opinion in South Korea and elsewhere, including the United States and Europe, are at the vanguard of those plans, because Pyongyang knows that to control people, you must first control their thoughts. Pyongyang’s thought control takes many forms, from death threats, to hacking the email of scholars here, to threatening the organizers of conferences. So does the thought control of its simpaticos in South Korea, who use the courts to intimidate refugees, use South Korea’s oppressive libel laws to suppress parliamentary and political speech, send thugs from state-subsidized labor unions to attack their critics, and (as Roh Moo-hyun did) use selective and ideologically motivate tax audits against unfriendly newspapers. And these are just the things we know about.

It may be a complete coincidence that at this moment, Moon Jae-in and the hard-left labor unions are now using threats of criminal prosecution to assert ideological control over Yonhap and other state-owned media. Then again, it may not be a complete coincidence. Whatever this is, it is not “liberal.”

North Korea and the anti-anti-North Korean left in South Korea have many instruments for controlling the thoughts of South Koreans. Recently, I argued how various forms of censorship have gravely damaged South Korea’s liberal democracy and the quality of its political debate. Meanwhile, the fawning coverage that foreign and Korean journalists have given Moon Jae-in is enough to make Kim Jong-un envious of his treatment by KCNA. These are the journalists who are supposed to be the guardians of a free press. But at the critical moment, they are almost as derelict as (though less corrupt than) the Associated Press was when it made its Faustian bargain with the North Korean government. You won’t hear a critical word from the AP about the fact that its business partner just published a threat to murder four fellow journalists. Remember that the next time anyone from the AP makes a self-serving soapbox argument about its important role as a guardian of your freedom (which is exactly what the AP and journalists should be).

As for most foreign and Korean journalists, they’re so personally and ideologically enamored of Moon Jae-in, and so invested in the narrative of Pyongyang as David besieged by Goliath, that they’ve blinded themselves to this partial eclipse of South Korea’s freedoms. Pray that Kim Jong-Un’s Moonshadow Policy is no more successful than Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy was. You can try to reassure yourself that this is South Korea’s problem, but recent history suggests that the path of this eclipse will be global. And so far, Pyongyang’s campaign seems to be working. By the way, when was the last time you saw a movie about North Korea? I’ll bet it wasn’t made after 2014.

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Korean War II

… and Kim Jong-Un got the bomb, and we all just lived happily ever after.

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Since North Korea’s sixth* nuclear test, I’ve already read several analyses concluding that North Korea now has the bomb for good, and that we might as well give up on denuclearization — as if Pyongyang’s acquisition of a nuclear arsenal ends with us all living happily ever after together. You can only believe that if you either haven’t read much North Korean propaganda — or choose to ignore it, just as much of Europe ignored the words Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf in the 30s. But what North Korea wants is South Korea. It has always wanted South Korea, and it has never stopped saying that it wants South Korea. Its messianic vision of reunification has always rested on its express promise of reuniting Korea under its rule. You can try to pretend that away, but North Korea won’t be content to sit behind its borders and watch its legitimacy eroded away by unfavorable comparison — made vivid by every smuggled DVD of a South Korean TV drama — to a superior model of Korean nationhood.

Why do we refuse to believe Pyongyang when it makes its intentions so manifest? Because it couldn’t conquer and occupy the South by conventional war? Do we assume that Pyongyang’s plans haven’t evolved since 1953? I assure you — its current plans are much more rational and attainable than that.

In the meantime, Pyongyang needs cash, and it will sell any weapon to any buyer to get it. And it will threaten or murder any critic, foreign or domestic, whose words undermine the integrity of its propaganda, until in some small way, we are all subject to Pyongyang’s global censorship. Not even the U.S. Ambassador, or a Hollywood film studio, is off limits to its goon squads. Accepting a nuclear North Korea doesn’t mean this crisis is over. It means we’ve entered Korean War II in earnest. Korean War II is a war of skirmishes in which Pyongyang will seek to incrementally terrorize South Korea into submission and the U.S. into disengagement. It will mean a new period of accelerating crises and outrages that will almost inevitably lead to miscalculation and war. We cannot live with a nuclear North Korea.

The geniuses who’ve spent the last 30 years misjudging Pyongyang and counseling us to appease it are soon to fill your TV screens and op-ed pages. They would sit this episode out if they had any shame at all, and you will tune them out if you’re more sensible than they are. There is much overlap between these voices and those who said, in no particular order, that (1) North Korea only wanted nuclear reactors to generate electricity, (2) that if we cut a deal, it would keep its word, (3) Kim Jong-Un would be the reformer we’ve all been waiting for, (4) Pyongyang only wants nukes for defense, and (5) that years of tough sanctions — sanctions that almost none of these critics had read or knew the first thing about — haven’t worked. They now call for a deal, in the hope that you haven’t noticed how Pyongyang has insisted, again and again, that it will never give up its nukes. What, do they suppose, are we supposed to negotiate except this year’s price of extortion? We can neither talk, nor bomb, nor wait out way out of this crisis.

Clearly, sanctions haven’t worked yet, if you define “work” to mean disarm or topple Kim Jong-Un. Whether they’re beginning to work remains to be seen. It’s a lazy argument that equates coincidence with causation for polemic convenience. One could have made it after North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, when financial sanctions (as we know now) clearly had put Pyongyang under withering pressure and eventually forced it to return to talks (where we exchanged real concessions, including the lifting of sanctions, for false promises to disarm). There are some early signs that sanctions are beginning to fray the system’s financial and political cohesion, but as I’ve said all along, it will take two to three years for them to begin to show their effects, and it’s too early to call this evidence compelling.

If you remember nothing else about our sanctions against North Korea, remember these points. First, as a practical matter, and until early 2016, the U.S. had stronger sanctions in place against Zimbabwe than against North Korea. Our North Korea sanctions were among our weakest sanctions programs, out of deference to Beijing, which consistently cheated on U.N. sanctions, to the point of selling Pyongyang the trucks that carry its missiles. Even then, the U.S. only began to enforce the new sanctions authorities Congress gave it in June 2017. It’s time to offer Beijing a sharper choice than it has had to make before. That’s not just a threat of secondary sanctions and trade consequences; it’s also a threat of instability along China’s border. If Pyongyang and Beijing are willing to threaten our security, why should we refrain from doing the same to them?

So does this mean we’re too late? Yes, we’re too late to stop North Korea from having a nuclear arsenal, but not too late to stop it from having a bigger and better one, not too late to undermine Kim Jong-Un’s misrule politically, and not too late to truncate whatever crisis is to come four or five years from now. Our goal now must be to abbreviate, as much as possible, the amount of time we have to try to deter a state that’s increasingly undeterrable by abbreviating the rule of Kim Jong-Un.

Meanwhile, beseech the deity of your choice that the Defense Department is accelerating its development of boost-phase missile defenses; ground-based missile defenses like the Arrow, Iron Dome, and C-Ram systems; and hyper velocity projectiles that will allow conventional 155-millimeter and 5-inch artillery to be integrated into a missile defense network. That’s probably our only option for defending Seoul and Osan Air Base against North Korea’s tube artillery, and its chem/bio-capable 300-millimeter artillery rockets. Those systems may give us a partial sense of security a few years from now, at great cost, but the only way we’ll ever have lasting security from Kim Jong-Un’s threats is the end of his misrule. That change — the change that we need, and that the North Korean people need even more desperately than we do — must come from within.

~   ~   ~

Previously said “seventh.” Since corrected, thanks to a reader.

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Human Trafficking, Sanctions

Do you own any clothing made in North Korea? (Answer: Don’t be so sure.)

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The U.N. Security Council is reportedly considering a variety of new sanctions against North Korea over its latest missile test, and according to Reuters, a ban on textile exports is among the sanctions under consideration. For a few years, we’ve known that the export of textiles (or textile workers, who labor under sweatshop conditions for little or no pay) is increasingly lucrative for Pyongyang. I don’t need to explain that historically, textile work has lent itself to particularly exploitative labor arrangements.

As always with North Korea sanctions, enforcement is the rub. We can expect North Korean exporters to continue sewing “made in China” labels on their wares and sneaking them into foreign markets — including the United States — to defraud customs officials to get lower tariff rates, and to defraud consumers who would boycott North Korean products and the stores that sell them. In case you’re wondering, yes, we have a law against country-of-origin fraud, and yes, President Obama did sign an executive order prohibiting imports of goods made with North Korean goods, services, or technology (so that’s two felonies, in case you’re keeping count).

It’s entirely possible, of course, that retailers may be selling North Korean-made textiles without knowing it. This recent New York Times story, for example, claims that North Korean sweatshops sew “made in China” labels on their products. That’s consistent with other reports I’ve bookmarked over the years that Chinese exporters are conspiring to commit country-of-origin fraud. Way back in 2004, in the earliest days of this venerable blog, the Korea Times reported that JC Penney was importing and selling North Korean-made textiles in its stores. At the time, I wrote to JC Penney to inquire about the story. JC Penney wrote back promptly and strongly denied having ever imported or sold North Korean-made goods in its stores.

In other cases, manufacturers knowingly use North Korean labor while hoping we won’t find out about it. RipCurl Sportswear and Woolen Mills clothing both became objects of controversy recently for using North Korean labor. And of course, textiles were among the main products manufactured in the Kaesong Industrial Complex. Textile export sanctions would be yet another blow to Moon Jae-In’s plans to revive Kaesong.

As with other facets of the North Korea problem, there isn’t just one answer to this problem. Part of the answer lies in better due diligence by merchants about their supply chains. Next, suspend your sense of historical irony and learn a lesson from the American cotton industry, which has waged an effective anti-slavery campaign against cheap imports made with Uzbek cotton. The cotton industry collected evidence that this cotton is often harvested with forced labor, and then joined forces with human rights NGOs to mount an effective public and political pressure campaign. It also made good use of this regulation to petition Customs and Border Protection to exclude the imports from U.S. commerce.

Finally, when NGOs, industry groups, and investigators discover evidence of fraudulent or illegal North Korean exports within U.S. jurisdiction — either because the transactions were cleared through U.S. banks, because a U.S. person was involved in a transaction facilitating the exports, or because the wares entered U.S. commerce — the U.S. government has several tools it can use to prosecute offenders, and to freeze or forfeit their assets. These include the prohibition against country-of-origin customs fraud, Executive Order 13570 , the new discretionary textile export sanctions authority in section 104(b)(1)(E) of the NKSPEA (as amended here), and the new sanctions against users of North Korean forced labor, which blacklist not only the manufacturers that use North Korean labor, but also the governments that tolerate it.

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Diplomacy, Human Rights

Speaking out for the North Korean people is more than a full-time part-time job

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For months, I’ve heard rumors that the Trump administration isn’t fond of special envoys, and quietly, some of us fretted that the administration was planning to eliminate the job of Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea. As it turns out, Tillerson isn’t doing exactly that:

The functions and staff of the special envoy for North Korean human rights issues would now fall under the office of the under secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights, who will now also assume that title. The position of special envoy for the six-party talks dealing with North Korea will be removed, as the talks ended in 2008. [CNN]

Why stop there? Why doesn’t Tillerson just eliminate both posts? Because he can’t. The human rights envoy’s position is a creation of statute — specifically, of section 107 of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, now codified at 22 U.S.C. 7817. A cabinet secretary can’t unilaterally eliminate a position that Congress has created.

The good news is that the job would move out of the East Asia Bureau, where the Special Envoy’s mission was more easily subordinated to each Assistant Secretary’s pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize. But the proposal to merge the Special Envoy’s job into another position is problematic. Until recently, Congress cared deeply about the issues within the Special Envoy’s mandate. We’re about to find out if it still does. It was never pleased that former Special Envoy Jay Lefkowitz was a part-time Special Envoy. In the notes below section 7801, in fact, there is sense-of-Congress language expressing the sentiment that “the Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues should be a full-time position.”

The State Department will say that merging a position doesn’t mean it isn’t full time. Congress will answer that if you’re doing more than one job full-time you aren’t doing either job full-time, and the notion of a full-time part-time job is absurd. Anyone who can’t think of why this should be a full-time job doesn’t understand what the job should be. The Special Envoy should be the administration’s principal public voice who speaks to the world, and to the people of North Korea, in explaining, defending, and encouraging the implementation of policies that force Pyongyang to accept transparency, and to respect human life and dignity, or perish.

Congress and the world will not unite around a policy that diminishes or sidelines human rights. Transparency and respect for human life are logically inextricable from issues of war, peace, and proliferation. Those issues are also linked geographically, and perhaps operationally. To sideline human rights would throw away an important source of leverage over North Korea, China, South Korea, and Japan, which sees getting its abducted citizens back as a part of the Special Envoy’s job.

Human rights is also a test of whether diplomacy can work at all. If Pyongyang can’t accept transparency in its acceptance of aid or the amelioration of conditions in its gulags, why should anyone believe that we can have credible nuclear diplomacy? Human rights can be an important force multiplier in sanctions enforcement. If you’re a North Korean diplomat in Vientiane or Asmara who’s thinking about jumping the fence and taking your laptop and the passwords to your bank accounts with you, does this make it more or less likely that you’ll go through with that?

This proposal sends a message that America is abandoning the people of North Korea just when we need each other most. It will cost us the support of a global liberal coalition that is tempted to view sanctions-busting engagement or squandering unmonitorable aid as strategies for advancing humanitarian conditions in the North. It will undoubtedly please accountants in OMB and career diplomats in some quarters of the State Department, but it’s short-sighted and wrong. Congress should protest.

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Human Rights, Religion, The Camps

State Department issues new reports on N. Korean gulags, religious repression

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Last week, State issued two new reports on North Korea. The first of these reports, mandated by section 303 of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, terms itself a report on North Korea’s prisons. In fact, it only describes the worst tier of them — the dreaded kwan-li-so, or political prison camps, several of which are places where the condemned never leave.

CAMP 16 HWASONG
41.314103,129.342054

There is little information available on the total control zone Camp No. 16 (Hwasong political prison camp). Located in Hwasong County, North Hamgyong Province, 385 kilometers northeast of the capital of Pyongyang, there are no known former prisoners or camp officials available to testify about conditions in the camp. The limited information about the facility has been drawn from testimony by local residents. Camp 16 is reported to be a total control zone divided into three sections for prisoners whose crimes differ in severity. Unconfirmed reports suggest prisoners may be used in the construction of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site. This camp site also has hydropower capabilities and light agricultural and mining industrial activities along the waterway.

The National Human Rights Commission of [South] Korea has estimated there are approximately 20,000 prisoners in Camp 16. Some NGOs report that prisoners from Camp 22 may have been transferred to Camp 16 in 2012. Satellite imagery analysis does show some modest construction at Camp 16 around that time, but more information would be necessary to conclude whether the expansion was the result of a growing prisoner population.[2] [U.S. State Dep’t]

Of course, North Korea also has other levels of prisons, including local jails and detention facilities, and larger re-education camps that hold a mixture of actual violent criminals, lower-grade political criminals, and economic criminals who may fall into a gray area between the two. Imagery of Camp 16 was first published at this humble blog, describing a reported mass escape that I’ve never been able to confirm, and on which I’ve never seen any subsequent reporting. Years later, I published a much longer, prisoner’s-eye analysis of imagery of the camp, and of the nuclear test site immediately adjacent to its western boundary, as a public service to anyone who thinks the nuclear and human rights issues can be separated.

The report doesn’t cite its sources, but it appears to rely heavily on the excellent reports and imagery analysis of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, specifically its long-form “Hidden Gulag” reports, and the shorter updates it publishes on observations in the satellite imagery.

This is not to say that State’s report isn’t helpful. I know of at least one prominent NGO that’s already poring over it, and will likely cite it in an upcoming authoritative report that could have global and historical implications. Furthermore, the very publication of this report forces State to confront this issue, and will frustrate those (on the far left, the far right, and aspiring Nobel Peace Prize winners in the State Department) who would rather not upset His Porcine Majesty by speaking of such unpleasantries.

Which is exactly what happened with State’s annual report on religious freedom.

North Korea “categorically rejected the report, branding it as the thing that does not deserve even a passing note,” its state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted a spokesman for the country’s Religious Believers Council as saying.

The spokesman said the U.S. action “is nothing but a last-ditch effort for tarnishing at any cost the international image and strategic position (of North Korea) … and further fanning up the climate of sanctions and pressure against the DPRK.” The DPRK is the abbreviation of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“The Religious Believers Council of Korea will as ever take a strong counteraction against the U.S. arbitrary practices and hostile policy toward the DPRK in a solidarity with the international religious organizations,” the spokesman said. [Yonhap]

Pyongyang claims that its people are perfectly free to practice any religion they choose and maintains several sham churches for the convenience of gullible journalists and other visitors who accept that illusion at face value. North Korean Christians will tell you otherwise:

The government continued to deal harshly with those who engaged in almost any religious practices through executions, torture, beatings, and arrests. An estimated 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners, some imprisoned for religious reasons, were believed to be held in the political prison camp system in remote areas under horrific conditions. CSW said a policy of guilt by association was often applied in cases of detentions of Christians, meaning that the relatives of Christians were also detained regardless of their beliefs.

Religious and human rights groups outside the country provided numerous reports that members of underground churches were arrested, beaten, tortured, or killed because of their religious beliefs. According to the NKDB, there was a report during the year of disappearances of people who were found to be practicing religion within detention facilities. International NGOs reported any religious activities conducted outside of those that are state-sanctioned, including praying, singing hymns, and reading the Bible, could lead to severe punishment including imprisonment in political prison camps. [U.S. Dep’t of State]

To read the rest on your own, go here and mouse over “countries.” For reasons that become clear to the student of political psychology, Pyongyang is absolutely terrified of Christianity. Click here for more posts on North Korea’s persecution of Christians — which is one of two compelling cases for a charge of genocide (the murder of ethnically mixed, half-Chinese babies of refugee women being the other).

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Arms Trafficking, Money Laundering, Sanctions

FBI, Treasury & DOJ hit N. Korean enablers with secondary sanctions, forfeitures

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Two months ago, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) released its groundbreaking report, “Risky Business,” which used open-source business records to trace the 5,233 companies that (according to C4ADS) comprise nearly the entirety of North Korea’s “limited, centralized, and vulnerable” financial networks in China. At the time, I speculated that we hadn’t heard the last word from the FBI, the Treasury Department, and Justice Department, and yesterday, my suspicions were confirmed.

First, Treasury designated a series of North Korean, Chinese, and Russian nationals for dealing with sanctioned entities through the dollar system, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The effect of the designations is to freeze any assets of those entities that are in the United States, prevent them from using the dollar system for future transactions, and prevent U.S. persons from providing them with any goods, services, or technology.

“Treasury will continue to increase pressure on North Korea by targeting those who support the advancement of nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and isolating them from the American financial system,” said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. “It is unacceptable for individuals and companies in China, Russia, and elsewhere to enable North Korea to generate income used to develop weapons of mass destruction and destabilize the region. We are taking actions consistent with UN sanctions to show that there are consequences for defying sanctions and providing support to North Korea, and to deter this activity in the future.” [Treasury Dep’t Press Release]

Among yesterday’s notable targets:

* China-based Dandong Rich Earth Trading Co., Ltd., for buying vanadium from sanctioned Korea Kumsan Trading Corporation, a front for the General Bureau of Atomic Energy.

* Russia-based Gefest-M LLC and its director, Ruben Kirakosyan, for procuring metals for sanctioned Korea Tangun Trading Corporation, a front for the Second Academy of Natural Sciences, which is involved in North Korea’s WMD and missile programs.

* China- and Hong Kong-based Mingzheng International Trading Limited (“Mingzheng”), the subject of this previous Justice Department forfeiture case, which acts as a front company for the Foreign Trade Bank (FTB) of North Korea. Treasury designated the FTB in 2013 for proliferation financing. The U.N. recently designated it in UNSCR 2371.

* Three more Chinese companies that are “collectively responsible for importing nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of North Korean coal between 2013 and 2016,” including Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Materials Co., Ltd. (“Zhicheng”), JinHou International Holding Co., Ltd., and Dandong Tianfu Trade Co., Ltd. Dandong Zhicheng was exposed by C4ADS as part of the Sun Sidong network in June. This is the single largest purchaser of North Korean coal. That’s going to leave a mark.

* Three Russians and two Singapore-based companies involved in providing oil to North Korea.

Transatlantic Partners Pte. Ltd. (“Transatlantic”), Mikhail Pisklin, and Andrey Serbin were designated pursuant to E.O. 13722 for operating in the energy industry in the North Korean economy. Pisklin, through Transatlantic, concluded a contract to purchase fuel oil with Daesong Credit Development Bank, a North Korean bank designated in 2016. Serbin is a representative of Transatlantic who worked with Irina Huish of Velmur Management Pte. Ltd. (“Velmur”) to purchase gasoil for delivery to North Korea. Velmur was designated for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, Transatlantic. Velmur also sold gasoil to North Korea. OFAC also designated Velmur’s executive director, Irina Huish, for acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Velmur, and she has also worked with Transatlantic to circumvent sanctions. Both of these companies have attempted to use the U.S. financial system to send millions of dollars in payments on behalf of North Korea-related transactions.

Lest anyone accuse Treasury of singling China out, the designation of Singapore-based entities should send a strong message to a state that has largely overlooked the enforcement of North Korea sanctions and consequently become a haven for Pyongyang’s money laundering. I was also pleased to see Treasury go after KOMID’s slave labor racket and arms factory in Namibia, which I’ve previously written about here, here, and here, although I maintain that the NKSPEA also requires the President to sanction the Namibian entities that have knowingly dealt with sanctioned North Korean entities like KOMID. I hope Angola will be next.

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Just over an hour after Treasury released those designations, the Justice Department filed two civil forfeiture complaints against $11 million belonging to Velmur, Transatlantic, and Dandong Zhicheng. I downloaded both complaints from PACER, for the good of humanity, so you don’t have to.

Velmur complaint   |  Dandong Zhicheng complaint

You’re welcome, humanity.

This complaint alleges that Velmur and Transatlantic Partners Pte. Ltd. (Transatlantic) laundered United States dollars on behalf of sanctioned North Korean banks that were seeking to procure petroleum products from JSC Independent Petroleum Company (IPC), a designated entity. The complaint also seeks a civil monetary penalty against Velmur and Transatlantic for prior sanctions and money laundering violations related to this scheme.

According to the complaint, designated North Korean banks use front companies, including Transatlantic, to make U.S. dollar payments to Velmur. The complaint relates to funds that were transferred through four different companies and remitted to Velmur to wire funds to JSC Independent Petroleum Company (IPC), a Russian petroleum products supplier. On June 1, 2017, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls (OFAC) designated IPC. The designation noted that IPC had a contract to provide oil to North Korea and reportedly shipped over $1 million worth of petroleum products to North Korea. [U.S. Attorney’s Office]

Don’t focus on the fact that the putative claimants were selling fuel. Focus on the fact that they were dealing with a sanctioned North Korean entity through the dollar system, which is a felony. (U.N. sanctions only ban exports of aviation and rocket fuel, and U.S. fuel export sanctions are discretionary and have humanitarian exceptions.)

The government is seeking to forfeit $6,999,925 that was wired to Velmur in May 2017. The U.S. dollar payments, which cleared through the U.S., are alleged to violate U.S. law, because the entities were surreptitiously making them on behalf of the designated North Korean Banks, whose designation precluded such U.S. dollar transactions. The government also is seeking imposition of a monetary penalty commensurate with the millions of dollars allegedly laundered by Velmur and Transatlantic. [U.S. Attorney’s Office]

Regarding Dandong Zhicheng, a/k/a Dandong Chengtai …

The government is seeking to forfeit $4,083,935 that Dandong Chengtai wired on June 21, 2017 to Maison Trading, using their Chinese bank accounts. The investigation revealed that Maison Trading is a front company operated by a Dandong Chengtai employee. These U.S. dollar payments, which cleared through the United States, are alleged to violate U.S. law, because the recent North Korean sanctions law specifically barred U.S. dollar transactions involving North Korean coal and the proceeds of these transactions were for the benefit of the North Korea Worker’s Party, whose designation precluded such U.S. dollar transactions.

This case relates to a previously unsealed opinion from Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which found that probable cause existed to seize funds belonging to Dandong Chengtai.  [U.S. Attorney’s Office]

As noted here. And lest we forget to give credit where it’s due …

The FBI’s Phoenix Field Office is investigating the case involving Velmur Management Pte Ltd. and Transatlantic Partners Pte., Ltd. The FBI’s Chicago Field Office is investigating the case involving Dandong Chengtai Trading Co. Ltd. Both investigations are being supported by the FBI Counterproliferation Center.

Assistant U.S Attorneys Arvind K. Lal, Zia M. Faruqui, Christopher B. Brown, Deborah Curtis, Ari Redbord, and Brian P. Hudak, all of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, are prosecuting both cases. Paralegal Specialist Toni Anne Donato and Legal Assistant Jessica McCormick are providing assistance. [U.S. Attorney’s Office]

Finally, let’s not forget the important work of C4ADS. Today, it will release an update to “Risky Business,” revealing that in addition to having funds in U.S. banks, the Chinese national who runs Dandong Zhicheng, Sun Sidong, owns real estate in the United States. Check C4ADS’s web site for the update.  

When I read C4ADS’s reports, I’m often reminded of the line from “Lawrence of Arabia” when Mr. Dryden (delivered by the wonderfully dry and underrated British actor Claude Rains) learns that Lawrence has conquered the Turkish base at Aqaba with an army of Arab tribesmen: “Before he did it, I’d have said it couldn’t be done.” Indeed, for years, scholars at famous think tanks assured us it couldn’t be done. First, they told us that sanctions against North Korea were maxed out. Then, they told us that Pyongyang’s networks were needles in a field of haystacks, and that the field itself was obscured and beyond our sight. And yet, without so much as a single security clearance between them, two brilliant young analysts at C4ADS mined data from open sources and traced the networks. It may be on the brink of proving all the “experts” wrong.

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Update: C4ADS writes in to say that the update was delayed, and will be released in a few days.

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Proliferation, WMD

Latest cases of chemical proliferation remind us why Kim Jong-Un must go

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The first mid-term report of the U.N. Panel of Experts should be out any day now, and among its revelations will be yet more evidence that Pyongyang is helping Assad gas his own people:

Two North Korean shipments to a Syrian government agency responsible for the country’s chemical weapons program were intercepted in the past six months, according to a confidential United Nations report on North Korea sanctions violations.

The report by a panel of independent U.N. experts, which was submitted to the U.N. Security Council earlier this month and seen by Reuters on Monday, gave no details on when or where the interdictions occurred or what the shipments contained.

 “The panel is investigating reported prohibited chemical, ballistic missile and conventional arms cooperation between Syria and the DPRK (North Korea),” the experts wrote in the 37-page report. [Reuters]
Add this evidence to the already-long dossier on Pyongyang’s chemical weapons assistance to Syria. The vendor, predictably, was KOMID, or the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation, Pyongyang’s main arms dealing agency. (According to the Panel’s most recent annual report, by the way, KOMID representatives continue to operate openly in and transit through China.)

Two different member states intercepted the shipments. Previously, Greece, Turkey, and Israel have all intercepted shipments of banned items from North Korea in the eastern Mediterranean. Last year, Egypt intercepted a shipment of North Korean-made rocket-propelled anti-tank grenades at the southern end of the Suez Canal. And just so we’re clear, Pyongyang is willfully supplying the chemical weapons that Assad is using to do this:
Source: http://cbrainard.blogspot.com/2013/08/assad-threatened-to-use-chemical.htmlSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbi2FaMQA-s Source: http://nation.com.pk/national/22-Aug-2013/1-300-die-insyriachemical-attack Source: http://kufarooq22.over-blog.com/2013/08/children-killed-in-syrian-regime.html
During the last year, we’ve also learned that Pyongyang is perfectly willing to make its own use of the deadliest chemical weapons known to mankind, including the persistent nerve agent VX against a noncombatant in an area crowded with completely uninvolved civilians in the capital city of a friendly nation. We know that North Korea would proliferate anything, including the means to produce nuclear weapons, to Syria.

Suspend your belief that Pyongyang (as it continues to insist) will never negotiate away its nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles. Suspend your disbelief that Pyongyang would comply with its agreements even if it signed yet another one. At no point have talks with Pyongyang so much as broached its proliferation, or its chemical weapons, or its biological weapons, or the tube and rocket artillery (some of it chem/bio-capable) it has pointed at the people of Seoul. There is no diplomatic process or agreement that will foreseeably end that threat before Pyongyang proliferates it globally.

Yes, you can rail against Clinton, Bush, and Obama for wasting years we did not have, but we are where we are. The best alternative left to us may be a combination of sanctions and information operations to destabilize the regime, along with the best blockade of North Korea we can now manage in the meantime. When member states don’t inspect North Korean cargo as required under UNSCR 2270, it may not be legally possible to search them, but it’s certainly physically possible. To complicate that option, however, most of North Korea’s maritime trade is run through short-haul trips across the Yellow Sea to China. It would be risky, but possible, to search smuggling ships and those running with their lights and beacons off, but that presents a high risk going hot with Chinese or North Korean ships. If that’s more risk than you’re willing to accept, the KIMS Act would also allow us to penalize ports don’t meet their inspection requirements and flag states that reflag North Korea’s ships, but that would come with economic costs for us. An amendment to the NKSPEA (“notwithstanding section 203(b) of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act”) could close the legal loophole that Air Koryo continues to fly through, and could — eventually — ground it, but that, too, would take time to work.

These measures could eventually shut down most of North Korea’s external maritime trade, but implementation is never immediate — at best, it would take months. Other measures, like mining harbors or bombing runways, present undue risks of causing civilian casualties or starting a war. But increasingly, we must balance all of the risks of shutting down Pyongyang’s proliferation against the risk of the civilian casualties that Pyongyang’s proliferation is causing right now, and could cause for years to come.

I occasionally see scholarly articles arguing that destabilizing the regime in Pyongyang presents an unacceptable risk that “loose” WMDs would proliferate. What I’d like to ask the scholars writing these articles is this: isn’t the greater proliferation risk that a “stable” regime in Pyongyang endures?

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Famine & Food Aid

Whatever happened to North Korea’s agricultural reforms? Just what I expected.

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Starting around 2012, with a boost from an AP Pyongyang guided tour and some optimistic (but thinly sourced) analysis from Randall Ireson, Andrei Lankov, and others, a consensus formed among the pro-engagement school of North Korea watchers that Pyongyang was finally striking out on a bold new course of reform in an area of obvious need — its agriculture sector. In practice, the “reform” amounted to breaking up big collectives into smaller ones, and allowing collective farmers to keep and sell in the markets a portion of the crops they grew, a model that hardly evokes historical memories of social justice in the context of the Reconstruction-era South. It also looked suspiciously like a case of Pyongyang again trying to adjust to an economic reality that its people had imposed by necessity.

Although Pyongyang appears to have changed the way it taxed farmers starting in 2012, this blog has taken a consistently skeptical view of any analysis characterizing this as “reform.” Engagement advocates tend to view North Korea’s economic policies as socialism rather than economic totalitarianism with ideological decorations, which helps them characterize un-socialist policies as economic reforms. This, in turn, is a platform from which they leap to predictions that political reform will inevitably follow. But in addition to the paucity of evidence of what the changes to North Korea’s agricultural policies really meant in practice, there were reasons to doubt their implementation and question their significance. Indeed, there was evidence to support skepticism about them almost from the very beginning. By 2015, North Korean farmers “no longer believe[d]” that the changes would benefit them given state’s confiscation of their surpluses for the military and other expenses.

To their credit, both Ireson and Lankov eventually retreated from their optimistic predictions when they didn’t pan out, and most talk of agrarian perestroika has since died away. Even so, it’s still useful to follow just how Pyongyang’s experiment with sharecropping worked out. This analysis from last September, citing a recent defector from Ryanggang Province, gives us some evidence of the results.

A defector who goes by Mrs. Han offered invaluable insight to the problems pervading the new system at a recent event hosted by the North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS) in Seoul. “When the pojeon system was first introduced, rural residents were singing its praises, thinking to themselves, ‘We’re finally going to be able to make a living.’ But when the system was actually implemented, the vast majority of the yield went to the state, leaving very little behind for the farmers who worked the land. That turn of events was deeply dispiriting for the workers,” said Mrs. Han, formerly the manager of the TaeHong Country Cooperative Farm in Ryanggang Province before she defected last October.

NKIS President Kim Heung Kwang added that if the pojeon family unit system was truly implemented, the degree of autonomy and living standard of agricultural workers should have improved. “But that is simply not what has happened,” he pointed out. [Daily NK]

According to Ms. Han, the state’s unsustainably high production quotas and its practice of charging farmers for fertilizer and pesticides mean that farmers seldom have a surplus to sell. According to a second report, where the state collected surplus crops and promised to redistribute them, that redistribution didn’t happen. Other reports note that regime officials tend to confiscate and divert the surplus that farmers were told they could keep and sell.

“Our provinces are known as the breadbasket, but the rice we’ve harvested has all been sent to the army, leaving us with nothing. Furthermore, the public distribution system is dispensing nothing. So people from this province haven’t been able to even taste the very rice they grew. They have to go as far as Ryanggang Province when they want to buy rice,” a source in North Hwanghae Province reported to Daily NK on August 5.

The extent of the problem is severe, she added, noting that “even as recent as ten years ago, our living standard wasn’t this low. These days, there are more and more people who have been forced to live as kotjebi [homeless orphans]. We’ll starve if we’re forced to endure another year or two of this.” [….]

“People around here are forced to watch the rice they’ve harvested being sent to Pyongyang. Far from receiving public distribution rations, they haven’t even seen that system in action. It’s ironic that this province produces the largest rice yield in the country, and yet its residents are forced to purchase smuggled Chinese rice in Ryanggang Province at above market price.”

This is in stark contrast to the cities, where markets are always open and bursting with a diverse array of goods. In the agricultural villages, however, product selection is scant and the markets operate on an irregular schedule (e.g. only on the 1, 11, and 21 of each month). Moreover, a poor logistics and distribution framework means few products are available to rural dwellers, most of whom live hand to mouth. [Daily NK]

The plight of African-Americans in the American South continues to be a useful historical parallel. As then, sharecropping in North Korea is contributing to a Great Migration of the rural poor to the cities. Historically, Pyongyang has controlled the movements of its population with a system of travel passes. It has been particularly careful to control who is allowed to live in Pyongyang. Surely it knows that rapid urbanization that concentrates large numbers of rural poor in the cities is a potential threat to the stability of the state.

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Korean War II

The North Korean people didn’t elect Kim Jong-Un. Stop threatening to bomb them.

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I’m already on record on the topic of threatening war against North Korea: it scares our friends more than our enemies (who assume, correctly I hope, that we’re bluffing). If we want to threaten the thing our enemies fear most, threaten to sow the seeds of the revolution that the people of North Korea desperately need. Nukes aren’t much good in that kind of war, and China would never tolerate their use so close to its borders. If we can’t resist threatening to bomb someone, at least threaten to bomb the person who is responsible for this crisis, and deliver those threats privately. The people of North Korea didn’t elect Kim Jong-Un. At least Americans had a choice, sort of.

The people of North Korea don’t make policy, can’t criticize their government’s policies, and often don’t even agree with those policies. They’d rather eat than have missiles. So I really wish we would not play directly into the hands of Kim Jong-Un’s propaganda by threatening the very people we’ll need to befriend, support, and empower to verifiably disarm His Porcine Majesty.

One aspect of the defense secretary’s statement, however, was deeply troubling: “The DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.” The overriding evidence suggests that Kim Jong Un cares not a whit for his people — threatening their destruction will not serve to deter him and is, more importantly, detrimental to US aims. Over the longer term, the United States has an interest in the peaceful unification of the peninsula under Seoul’s democratic leadership. Threatening the North Korean people with destruction is to make enemies of potential friends; it is, more troublingly, a promise to extend and deepen, rather than end, the suffering that the Kims have long inflicted on their people. [Michael Mazza, American Enterprise Institute]

Mind you, everything I’ve seen or heard about Mattis until now has given me reason to admire his intellect and patriotism. Maybe he has the wrong people in charge of his press office, but this is a terrible message to send at a time when our need to gain the confidence of Koreans on both sides of the DMZ is greatest. Statements like this, and especially this one from Senator Graham, send a message that Korean lives are unimportant to us. Talk like this not only empowers everyone, north and south, who hates us, but it sends a message throughout the world that America is a dangerous ally to have and should be kept at arm’s length. If America blunders into a nuclear war in Korea, what ally would ever want to be close to us again?

I am not one of those Pollyannas who believe the myth, popular among those who’ve misjudged North Korea for decades or spent the last eight years whistling toward the very crisis I predicted here, that Kim Jong-Un only wants nukes to deter us. North Korea wants nukes for much more than that.

We cannot coexist with a nuclear North Korea because it will not coexist with us. Its political system requires conflict and crisis to justify itself. Trump is right that this is a crisis. But a crisis is no time to shoot one’s self in both feet.

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Religion

God and Eric Hoffer in North Korea (Pt. 2)

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For the reasons I described here, if a resistance movement ever arises in North Korea, it will almost necessarily draw its essential inspiration and cohesion from Christianity. It requires extraordinary inspiration for anyone to sacrifice her individual interests for collective interests, and it is almost inevitably messianic faith — in Christianity, Islam, or Marxism in its various idealistic or pseudo-nationalist variations — that has supplied that inspiration to adherents of revolutionary movements. Pyongyang obviously knows this, which is why its propagandists stole so many elements of Christian dogma, and why it allows no gods before Kim. The comparison was the first thing about this leaflet that struck me.

As a non-religious person who often finds himself in sympathy (and in league) with Christian human rights activists, I often hear pastors, particularly Korean-American pastors, claim to have contact with underground churches or religious organizations inside North Korea. I always hope that it’s true, but it’s in the nature of a cynical lawyer to disbelieve whatever isn’t proven to me. In a place like North Korea, religious beliefs and associations are profoundly courageous and presumably scarce for the same reason: they are inherently subversive. That’s why the North Korean security forces carefully interrogate defectors to try to identify those who have had contact with Christians, and it’s also why the authorities single them out for the harshest punishments, including torture, long sentences in prison camps, and public execution.

One can find claims on the internet that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of secret believers in the North. I can’t help being skeptical of those claims. But recently, the Daily NK ran an interview with a defector who claims he converted to Christianity and returned to the North as a missionary. I’m in no position to verify any of the declarant’s claims, naturally, but their consistency with other facts I’ve read over the years makes it ring true. I won’t even bother to graf it, but there are many reasons to read it, including the story of escape, his emotional path to loss of faith in the state and the transfer of his faith, and his claim that high-ranking officials attended his underground church.

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China

Washington sounds ready for a trade war with Beijing over North Korea

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Just as our diplomacy with Pyongyang has always failed because we were unwilling to induce a regime-determinative economic or political crisis there, our diplomacy with Beijing over North Korea (and other differences) has always failed because we were unwilling to attach a high enough cost to its willful support for Pyongyang’s proliferation. As Professor Lee put it, Beijing will not enforce sanctions against Pyongyang “unless the costs become unbearable on China.”

A trade war, needless to say, would hurt both the U.S. and China. But for several reasons, I believe it would hurt China more. China is an export-oriented economy whose rising wages and high corruption no longer make it a manufacturer’s ideal venue. In the short term, a trade war would disrupt global markets and spur inflation. Manufacturers would pass those added costs on to consumers, and the result would be inflation. In the mid-to-long term, manufacturers might shift more capacity to Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, or Mexico.

A mass migration of manufacturing from China would threaten its stock market, housing market, and banking sector. It could depress China’s growth rates below the level needed to pay its pensions. China’s banks also have a notoriously high debt load, much of which is linked to an inflated real estate market. Its stock market is probably also held up, in large part, by intervention by state-controlled banks. And when China holds its ruling party congress this fall, Xi Jinping will want not distractions to interfere with his installation of cronies in key positions or the extension of his own rule. Thus, while I pray that the rising talk of war in Washington is a bluff — and that it will stop — I hope recent trade threats against China, which are implicitly or explicitly tied to North Korea, are sincere.

One of those threats is to invoke section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, against Chinese manufacturers that steal or rob U.S. manufacturers of their intellectual property. Section 301 authorizes the U.S. to “to deny U.S. trade benefits or impose import duties in response to foreign trade barriers.” 

Democrats are also pushing for a harder line. Senator Schumer is calling on the President to direct the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to disapprove Chinese investments in certain industries that are deemed vital to U.S. national security, and where it has the authority to disapprove foreign acquisitions. Schumer is explicitly linking that threat to China’s non-cooperation on North Korea.

Sections 314, 315, and 321 of the KIMS Act give the President other economic weapons against China, to say nothing of those in section 104 of the NKSPEA.

I have long said that our relations with Beijing and Pyongyang will have to get worse before they can get better. I don’t deny that all of these things would have serious and adverse economic impacts on the United States. But compare them to the humanitarian and financial cost of another Korean War, or any of these consequences, and suddenly, the economic costs of a trade war don’t seem all that bad.

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Update: This Wall Street Journal story says that the White House has delayed plans to take Beijing on over trade because it still hopes to gain Beijing’s cooperation on North Korea. Similarly, this Reuters story says that the U.S. held off on additional secondary sanctions against Chinese banks (which had been the topic of rumors) in the hope that China will enforce UNSCR 2371. Now obviously, it’s much better if we don’t have to use these threats to get Bejing’s cooperation, but for obvious reasons, I’m skeptical.

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Censorship, Propaganda

How censorship is leading Korea to ruin

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Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19]

Last year, I wrote a post, which I fear is already becoming prescient, about how North Korea could plausibly win the Korean War. In condensed form, the strategy involves Pyongyang leveraging its nuclear, cyber, and chemical weapons supremacy and the South’s political divisions to provoke a series of crises, force Seoul into “peace” talks, and extort it, crisis-by-crisis and negotiation-by-negotiation, into unilateral disarmament, de facto editorial control over its media, the silencing of Pyongyang’s critics, the withdrawal of U.S. forces, and effective domination through a one-country, two-systems confederation. Given the strength of the nationalist faction now vying for control of U.S. foreign policy and the calls from other quarters for peace at any price, all of this could be a fait accompli before most Koreans even knew what had happened, especially if most journalists and editorial writers celebrated a de facto capitulation (as they certainly would) as the end of tensions and a new beginning for peace.

If it all sounds alarmist or even paranoid, consider that humans are accomplished at rationalizing their fears away, especially when the other surroundings of life still seem just as “normal” as they did the day, month, or year before. Although a sympathetic foreign press corps hardly noticed, former President Roh Moo-Hyun (whose Chief of Staff is the current President) had already gone far down the road of subsidizing friendly media and suppressing hostile media. There is also a published road map for this paranoid delusion of mine. The June 15, 2000 Inter-Korean Declaration called for, among other things, a confederation as a predecessor to “to resolve the question of reunification independently and through the joint efforts of the Korean people, who are the masters of the country.” (Update: which sounds much like how B.R. Myers translates the word “juche.”)

Pyongyang already has plenty of ways to enforce its censorship in the South now, including libel suits in which the truth is no defense, attacks by state-subsidized hard-left goon squads, the occasional assassination or threat of assassination, military provocations, and preemptive censorship by South Korean authorities who would (as Park Geun-Hye did) ban “slander” of the North Korean political system to avoid provoking it. To these instruments, Pyongyang recently added nuclear blackmail. 

“President Moon has expressed concerns regarding propaganda leaflets to North Korea as a matter that could prompt accidental clashes,” the official at the presidential office told Yonhap News Agency over the phone. “(The president) ordered aides to find ways for clashes to not occur,” the official added.

The remarks were reportedly made during a meeting with senior aides last month after Pyongyang announced it test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, in an apparent effort to minimize the risks of an inter-Korean conflict amid heightened tensions.

“The president explained past situations in which the North fired anti-aircraft guns towards balloons from the South carrying leaflets and then our military fired return shots,” the official explained, adding that Moon expressed a “considerable amount of concern” towards accidental conflicts.

For years, North Korean defectors in the South and conservative activists have flown the leaflets to the North via balloons to help encourage North Koreans to rise up against the Pyongyang regime. South Korea has said there are no legal grounds to prevent the activists from sending the leaflets, citing freedom of expression. [Yonhap]

This is how free people are tempted to trade liberty for security: Kim Jong-Un’s censorship knows no limits or borders. To submit to it is to forfeit one’s freedom. And if Kim Jong-Un will not disarm peacefully, and if we cannot live with a nuclear North Korea, and if we can neither talk nor bomb nor wait our way out of this crisis, then only spreading the truth to North Korea will set us free from the fear of war.

If Moon moves forward with this, he’ll probably do what authoritarians usually do when they want to censor inconvenient speech — disguise it as the enforcement of some politically neutral regulation, such as against littering, or as some kind of safety regulation. In the U.S., and probably in other legal systems, our courts are alert to this tactic and do not allow state regulations to burden “fundamental” constitutional rights unless they show that the regulation is narrowly tailored to advance a “compelling governmental interest.” And as Professor Lee and I conceded in an op-ed in the New York Times three years ago, moving the launch sites away from populated areas may meet that test and would certainly be prudent. But to ban the launches entirely would be yielding to a particularly flagrant and implicitly violent use of the “heckler’s veto.” It would, in effect, sacrifice a right to nonviolent free speech, which some states recognize as customary international law, in the face of a state’s threats of politically motivated violence against noncombatants (read: terrorism). One need not even ask if Moon would at least demand a reciprocal cessation of North Korea’s leafleting in South Korea.

[A friend of mine found this one on the way home from morning PT formation.]

It is not difficult to see how a series of accommodations like this one could evolve into a dual political system like that in Hong Kong, supervised by a Control Commission of strident North Koreans and pliable South Koreans, steadily rolling back the limits of what speech is permitted, what speech is subsidized, and what speech is verboten. Once Seoul is disarmed (in both a political and a martial sense), events would progress quickly. Of course, the last thing Pyongyang wants right now is to send its impoverished soldiers to occupy a prosperous (or recently prosperous) South. But with sanctions lifted at “peace talks,” the Commission would quickly implement “balanced development of the national economy through economic cooperation,” a South-to-North subsidy of the Pyongyang elites and the North’s “wavering” classes, and the relative impoverishment of the South, to achieve material parity across the DMZ. The two systems would be on a path to become One Slave Korea.

One reason why South Korea is relatively defenseless against this threat is that both the “left” and the “right” censor each other, at the expense of debate, discourse, and the pursuit of objective truth. I’ve tried to be just as strident in criticizing the right when it censored a professor for expressing pro-North Korean views, when soldiers shot and killed a man for trying to swim to North Korea, and when Park Geun-Hye’s government both justifiably prosecuted Lee Seok-Ki and unjustifiably dissolved his entire political party. Politicians on both sides have used libel suits to censor and even jail their political critics — Park Geun-Hye did it, Moon Jae-In did it, and both were illiberal and undemocratic when they did it.

But when “libel” amounts to “you hurt my feelings,” the practice of competent journalism risks professional and financial ruin, and it is safer to wage politics by planting rumors on Naver and MissyUSA comment threads than by making and defending charges against your political opponents openly. Thus, most of the news that’s fit to print is unverified, unverifiable, or simply fake. No wonder foreign journalists complain about standards of Korean journalism (though they seldom identify the causes of this). No wonder political discourse is dominated by rumor and innuendo. No wonder the courts are effectively rubber stamps for trial-by-protest, where crowd counts mean more than rules of evidence or forensic analysis. A society that is unable and unwilling to adjudicate truth is defenseless against the manipulations of its enemies. And when the prevailing view in Korean society is, as Nat Hentoff summarized it, “Free speech for me, but not for thee,” why does Pyongyang’s censorship sit on a lower plane than anyone else’s? 

~   ~   ~

I concede that what I’m presenting as plausible seems facially fantastic and conspiratorial. Moon certainly doesn’t seem to fit the part of a Manchurian Candidate; he doesn’t radiate the angry delusions of grandeur of a Jeremy Corbyn and displays none of the boisterous, power-drunk inanity our own president does at times. His very niceness clashes with what his record suggests, and with the evidence of what some of his closest advisors certainly are. Admittedly, Moon is still in his “honeymoon” phase, but press coverage of him gives KCNA’s adulation of Kim Jong-Un a run for its money. Even so, Moon knows that his voters are wary of the North. As Moon supporter Duyeon Kim argues, he is waiting for the right moment to reveal and implement his actual North Korea policy, which is both probably true and profoundly terrifying. Certainly few of the academics and journalists who cover Korea want to believe that what I’m suggesting here is plausible. Nor do I suggest that any of the small limits Moon would put on free speech necessarily means that Korea is careening to the bottom of the slippery slope. All I am saying is that if my worst fears come true, it would all look a lot like this in the beginning.

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"United" Nations, Sanctions

UNSCR 2371: Text and commentary (see update)

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Today, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2371 unanimously. The text is in black, my commentary is in blue italic.

PP1: Recalling its previous relevant resolutions, including resolution 825 (1993), resolution 1540 (2004), resolution 1695 (2006), resolution 1718 (2006), resolution 1874 (2009), resolution 1887 (2009), resolution 2087 (2013), resolution 2094 (2013), resolution 2270 (2016), resolution 2321 (2016), and resolution 2356 (2017), as well as the statements of its President of 6  October 2006 (S/PRST/2006/41), 13 April 2009 (S/PRST/2009/7) and 16 April 2012 (S/PRST/2012/13), (updated PP1 of UNSCR 2321)

PP2: Reaffirming that proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as their means of delivery, constitutes a threat to international peace and security, (PP2 of UNSCR 2321)

PP3: Expressing its gravest concern at the July 3 and July 28 of 2017 ballistic missile  tests by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“the DPRK”),  which the DPRK has stated were tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles, in violation of resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016) 2321 (2016), and 2356 (2017), and at the challenge such tests constitute to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (“the NPT”) and to international efforts aimed at strengthening the global regime of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the danger they pose to peace and stability in the region and beyond, (PP3 of UNSCR 2321)

PP4: Underlining once again the importance that the DPRK respond to other security and humanitarian concerns of the international community, (PP4 of UNSCR 2321)

PP5: Underlining also that measures imposed by this resolution are not intended to have adverse humanitarian consequences for the civilian population of the DPRK, (PP5 of UNSCR 2321)

PP6: Expressing serious concern that the DPRK has continued to violate relevant Security Council resolutions through repeated launches and attempted launches of ballistic missiles, and noting that all such ballistic missile activities contribute to the DPRK’s development of nuclear weapons delivery systems and increase tension in the region and beyond, (PP6 of UNSCR 2321)

PP7: Expressing continued concern that the DPRK is abusing the privileges and immunities accorded under the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Relations, (PP7 of UNSCR 2321)

PP8: Expressing great concern that the DPRK’s prohibited arms sales have generated revenues that are diverted to the pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles while DPRK citizens have unmet needs, (PP8 of UNSCR 2321)

Are you listening, Singapore?

PP9: Expressing its gravest concern that the DPRK’s ongoing nuclear- and ballistic missile-related activities have further generated increased tension in the region and beyond, and determining that there continues to exist a clear threat to international peace and security, (PP9 of UNSCR 2321)

PP10: Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, and taking measures under its Article 41,

1. Condemns in the strongest terms the ballistic missile launches conducted by the DPRK on 3 July and 28 July of 2017, which the DPRK has stated were launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and which used ballistic missile technology in violation and flagrant disregard of the Security Council’s resolutions; (Based on OP1 of UNSCR 2270)

Reading that language, it’s not hard to reverse engineer how the argument between the U.S. and Russian diplomats went.

2. Reaffirms its decisions that the DPRK shall not conduct any further launches that use ballistic missile technology, nuclear tests, or any other provocation; shall suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile program and in this context re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launches; shall abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner, and immediately cease all related activities; and shall abandon any other existing weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner; (OP 2-4 of UNSCR 2270, adapted and combined)

Designations

3. Designate individuals and entities for asset freeze/travel ban:  Decides that the measures specified in paragraph 8(d) of resolution 1718 (2006) shall apply also to the individuals and entities listed in Annex I and II of this resolution and to any individuals or entities acting on their behalf or at their direction, and to entities owned or controlled by them, including through illicit means, and decides further that the measures specified in paragraph 8(e) of resolution 1718 (2006) shall also apply to the individuals listed in Annex I of this resolution and to individuals acting on their behalf or at their direction; (OP3 of UNSCR 2321)

4. Designation of additional WMD-related Items: Decides to adjust the measures imposed by paragraph 8 of resolution 1718 (2006) and this resolution through the designation of additional goods, directs the Committee to undertake its tasks to this effect and to report to the Security Council within fifteen days of adoption of this resolution, and further decides that, if the Committee has not acted, then the Security Council will complete action to adjust the measures within seven days of receiving that report; (OP25 of UNSCR 22270)

5. Designation of additional Conventional Arms-related Items: Decides to adjust the measures imposed by paragraph 7 of resolution 2321 (2016) through the designation of additional conventional arms-related items, materials, equipment, goods, and technology, directs the Committee to undertake its tasks to this effect and to report to the Security Council within thirty days of adoption of this resolution, further decides that, if the Committee has not acted, then the Security Council will complete action to adjust the measures within seven days of receiving that report, and directs the Committee to update this list every 12 months; (Based on OP7 of UNSCR 2321 and OP25 of 2270)

Transportation

6. Prohibit port calls by designated vessels tied to illicit activities: Decides that the Committee may designate vessels for which it has information indicating they are, or have been, related to activities prohibited by resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), 2356 (2017), or this resolution and all Member States shall prohibit the entry into their ports of such designated vessels, unless entry is required in the case of emergency or in the case of return to its port of origination, or unless the Committee determines in advance that such entry is required for humanitarian purposes or any other purposes consistent with the objectives of resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), 2356 (2017), or this resolution; (New)

I’m not sure this adds much to existing sanctions that already require member states to seize designated North Korean ships that enter their harbors. It may be that member states were so reluctant to deal with the hassle of disposal that someone figured it would be easier to require them to keep the ships out of port entirely. I’m not so sure. 

7. Prohibit chartering of vessels flagged by the DPRK: Clarifies that the measures set forth in paragraph 20 of resolution 2270 (2016) and paragraph 9 of resolution 2321 (2016), requiring States to prohibit their nationals, persons subject to their jurisdiction and entities incorporated in their territory or subject to their jurisdiction from owning, leasing, operating any vessel flagged by the DPRK, without exception, unless the Committee approves on a case-by-case basis in advance, apply to chartering vessels flagged by the DPRK;

The only country I’ve heard was doing this is a Middle Eastern country that starts with “i” and ends with “n” and is spelled “i-r-a-n.”

Sectoral

8. Full ban on coal, iron and iron ore: Decides that paragraph 26 of resolution 2321 (2016) shall be replaced by the following:

“Decides that the DPRK shall not supply, sell or transfer, directly or indirectly, from its territory or by its nationals or using its flag vessels or aircraft, coal, iron, and iron ore, and that all States shall prohibit the procurement of such material from the DPRK by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, and whether or not originating in the territory of the DPRK, decides that for sales and transactions of iron and iron ore for which written contracts have been finalized prior to the adoption of this resolution, all States may allow those shipments to be imported into their territories up to 30 days from the date of adoption of this resolution with notification provided to the Committee containing details on those imports by no later than 45 days after the date of adoption of this resolution, and decides further that this provision shall not apply with respect to coal that the exporting State confirms on the basis of credible information has originated outside the DPRK and was transported through the DPRK solely for export from the Port of Rajin (Rason), provided that the exporting State notifies the Committee in advance and such transactions involving coal originating outside of the DPRK are unrelated to generating revenue for the DPRK’s nuclear or ballistic missile programs or other activities prohibited by resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), 2356 (2017), or this resolution; (New)

The good news: there is no longer a coal cap for China to cheat on. The bad news: there is now a complete coal ban for China to cheat on. A little birdie tells me – and in the near future, that little birdie will also tell you — that the North Koreans are smuggling their coal to China via third countries. My guess is that even if this isn’t airtight in practice, it will still make it harder and more expensive for Pyongyang to sell its coal, meaning it will cut into Pyongyang’s export profits.

9. Prohibit seafood exports from the DPRK: Decides that the DPRK shall not supply, sell or transfer, directly or indirectly, from its territory or by its nationals or using its flag vessels or aircraft, seafood (including fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and other aquatic invertebrates in all forms), and that all States shall prohibit the procurement of such items from the DPRK by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, whether or not originating in the territory of the DPRK, and further decides that for sales and transactions of seafood (including fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and other aquatic invertebrates in all forms) for which written contracts have been finalized prior to the adoption of this resolution, all States may allow those shipments to be imported into their territories up to 30 days from the date of adoption of this resolution with notification provided to the Committee containing details on those imports by no later than 45 days after the date of adoption of this resolution;

Good on you, U.N., for using this nifty idea. I first suggested the same thing in this post, and section 311 of the KIMS Act now allows the President to designate anyone who buys fishing rights, food, or agricultural products from North Korea. I read the resolution’s language to cover the sale of fishing rights as well as seafood. For its next act, the U.N. should also ban food exports entirely. Pyongyang has no business exporting food for hard currency while the poor starve.

10. Prohibit lead exports from the DPRK: Decides that the DPRK shall not supply, sell or transfer, directly or indirectly, from its territory or by its nationals or using its flag vessels or aircraft, lead and lead ore, and that all States shall prohibit the procurement of such items from the DPRK by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, whether or not originating in the territory of the DPRK, and further decides that for sales and transactions of lead and lead ore for which written contracts have been finalized prior to the adoption of this resolution, all States may allow those shipments to be imported into their territories up to 30 days from the date of adoption of this resolution with notification provided to the Committee containing details on those imports by no later than 45 days after the date of adoption of this resolution;

I did not even realize North Korea exported lead, but evidently, it does. 

11. Ban the hiring and paying of additional DPRK laborers used to generate foreign export earnings: Expresses concern that DPRK nationals frequently work in other States for the purpose of generating foreign export earnings that the DPRK uses to support its prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile programs, decides that all Member States shall not exceed on any date after the date of adoption of this resolution the total number of work authorizations for DPRK nationals provided in their jurisdictions at the time of the adoption of this resolution unless the Committee approves on a case-by-case basis in advance that employment of additional DPRK nationals beyond the number of work authorizations provided in a member state’s jurisdiction at the time of the adoption of this resolution is required for the delivery of humanitarian assistance, denuclearization or any other purpose consistent with the objectives of resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), 2356 (2017), or this resolution; (New)

Here is the first binding limit on North Korean labor exports, but it’s really a cap. On the bad side, because everyone involved in these contracts was already concealing or misrepresenting the number of North Korean laborers anyway, it will be hard to tell what “exceeds.” On the good side, this doesn’t prevent the U.S. from using section 321 of the KIMS Act to sanction employers of North Korean slave labor or their governments, and it will give the U.S. a stronger argument to convince host nations to send those workers home. This assumes we’re making that effort – and I keep hearing that we are, quietly. I also don’t interpret this to diminish the existing requirements of UNSCR 1718, paragraph 8 that purchasers of North Korean labor (a) “ensure” that the money doesn’t go to the nuke fund, and (b) abstain from dealing with designated persons.

Financial

12. Prohibiting new or expanded joint ventures and cooperative commercial entities with the DPRK: Decides that States shall prohibit, by their nationals or in their territories, the opening of new joint ventures or cooperative entities with DPRK entities or individuals, or the expansion of existing joint ventures through additional investments, whether or not acting for or on behalf of the government of the DPRK, unless such joint ventures or cooperative entities have been approved by the Committee in advance on a case-by-case basis; (New)

So, got your tickets yet for that big investment fair in Rason in two weeks? Are those tickets refundable? Yeah. Unfortunately, the word “existing” means that this isn’t necessarily the end for the MKP Group, although some parts of it (such as banking joint ventures) are banned by other resolutions. Ditto Orascom. It would be nice to get more definition on the words “new,” “existing,” and “expansion,” which seem like potential loopholes.

13. Clarifies that the prohibitions contained in paragraph 11 of resolution 2094 (2013) apply to clearing of funds through all Member States’ territories; (New)

This is useful. Although section 201 the NKSPEA effectively (if indirectly) banned direct and indirect dollar clearing services for North Korean banks, this extends that obligation to other issuers of convertible currencies – the EU, the UK, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Japan, etc. – and also closes a potential loophole for offshore dollar clearing. As always, detection and enforcement will be key.

14. Clarifies that companies performing financial services commensurate with those provided by banks are considered financial institutions for the purposes of implementing paragraph 11 of resolution 2094 (2013), paragraphs 33 and 34 of resolution 2270 (2016), and paragraph 33 of resolution 2321 (2016); (New)

In other words, shadow banks and money launderers (such as DCB Finance and Kim Chol-Sam) are banks for purposes of the resolutions. That matters, because North Korea increasingly relies on trading companies to perform the functions of banks.

Chemical Weapons

15. Prohibiting use of chemical weapons and calling for accession to the CWC: Recalls paragraph 24 of resolution 2270 (2016), decides that the DPRK shall not deploy or use chemical weapons, and urgently calls upon the DPRK to accede to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and Their Destruction, and then to immediately comply with its provisions; (Based on OP24 of UNSCR 2270)

For reasons that ought to be obvious ….

Vienna Convention

16. Abiding by the VCDR/VCCR: Demands that the  DPRK fully comply with its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations; (New)

In South Dakota English, this means stop renting out your embassies as eurotrash flophouses.

Impact on the People of the DPRK

17. Regrets the DPRK’s massive diversion of its scarce resources toward its development of nuclear weapons and a number of expensive ballistic missile programs, notes the findings of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance that well over half of the people in the DPRK suffer from major insecurities in food and medical care, including a very large number of pregnant and lactating women and under-five children who are at risk of malnutrition and nearly a quarter of its total population suffering from chronic malnutrition, and, in this context, expresses deep concern at the grave hardship to which the people in the DPRK are subjected; (New)

I can’t overstate how smart and important this language is. Pyongyang will always try to use its people as human shields against sanctions. It will always steal from the poor to give to the rich and the military. The world needs to remember exactly why so many North Koreans are poor and hungry, and it’s not because North Korea is a poor country, or because of weather, or sanctions. It’s because of choices – choices that are made in Pyongyang.

Sanctions Implementation

18. State implementation report: Decides that Member States shall report to the Security Council within ninety days of the adoption of this resolution, and thereafter upon request by the Committee, on concrete measures they have taken in order to implement effectively the provisions of this resolution, requests the Panel of Experts, in cooperation with other UN sanctions monitoring groups, to continue its efforts to assist Member States in preparing and submitting such reports in a timely manner; (based on OP36 of UNSCR 2321)

If they weren’t filing their reports before, it’s going to take more than a strongly worded appeal to make them file now. That’s where the BRINK Act becomes important. Take a gander at section 104 for some of the sanctions non-compliant states might face.

19. Redouble implementation efforts: Calls upon all Member States to redouble efforts to implement in full the measures in resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013) 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), and 2356 (2017), and to cooperate with each other in doing so, particularly with respect to inspecting, detecting and seizing items the transfer of which is prohibited by these resolutions; (OP38 of UNSCR 2321)

20. Update Committee and POE mandate: Decides that the mandate of the Committee, as set out in paragraph 12 of resolution 1718 (2006), shall apply with respect to the measures imposed in this resolution and further decides that the mandate of the Panel of Experts, as specified in paragraph 26 of resolution 1874 (2009) and modified in paragraph 1 of resolution 2345 (2017), shall also apply with respect to the measures imposed in this resolution; (OP39 of UNSCR 2321)

21. Standard “seize and dispose” provision: Decides to authorize all Member States to, and that all Member States shall, seize and dispose (such as through destruction, rendering inoperable or unusable, storage, or transferring to a State other than the originating or destination States for disposal) of items the supply, sale, transfer, or export of which is prohibited by resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), 2356 (2017), or this resolution that are identified in inspections, in a manner that is not inconsistent with their obligations under applicable Security Council resolutions, including resolution 1540 (2004), as well as any obligations of parties to the NPT, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Development of 29 April 1997, and the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction of 10 April 1972; (OP40 of UNSCR 2321)

This provision addresses what I call the Mu Du Bong problem. Remember when Mexico seized the Mu Du Bong after it ran aground off the port of Tuxpan? For the longest time, the Mexicans didn’t know what to do with the ship. This question eventually came to me via an indirect route. I pointed out that paragraph 8 of UNSCR 2087 already authorized Mexico to seize, destroy, or dispose of the ship as it saw fit. Of course, 2087 isn’t a Chapter VII resolution, but the Mu Du Bong became an artificial reef shortly thereafter, so I’d like to think I played some small role in the lives of some red snapper and grouper.

22. Force majeure clause: Emphasizes the importance of all States, including the DPRK, taking the necessary measures to ensure that no claim shall lie at the instance of the DPRK, or of any person or entity in the DPRK, or of persons or entities designated for measures set forth in resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), 2356 (2017), or this resolution, or any person claiming through or for the benefit of any such person or entity, in connection with any contract or other transaction where its performance was prevented by reason of the measures imposed by this resolution or previous resolutions; (OP41 of UNSCR 2321)

This keeps governments that freeze assets from getting tied up in litigation for enforcing the resolutions – theoretically. Of course, not all member state courts will recognize this, and it only applies to claims by North Korea or by designated persons. It will require good implementing legislation, which (let’s face it) very few countries have.

23. Request Interpol notices: Requests that Interpol issue Special Notices with respect to designated individuals, and directs the Committee to work with Interpol to develop the appropriate arrangements to do so; (New)

OK, I’ll admit that I’m mildly impressed by this. I’ll believe it when Kim Chol-Sam leaves China for good.

24. Expand POE capacity and resources: Requests the Secretary General to provide additional analytical resources needed to the Panel of Experts established pursuant to resolution 1874 (2009) to strengthen its ability to analyze the DPRK’s sanctions violation and evasion activities; (Based on OP42 of UNSCR 2321)

Hmm. Are they hiring lawyers, and what do they pay?

Political

25. Reiterates its deep concern at the grave hardship that the people in the DPRK are subjected to, condemns the DPRK for pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles instead of the welfare of its people while people in the DPRK have great unmet needs, and emphasizes the necessity of the DPRK respecting and ensuring the welfare and inherent dignity of people in the DPRK; (OP45 of UNSCR 2321)

As stated above, this matters.

26. Reaffirms that the measures imposed by resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), 2356 (2017), and this resolution are not intended to have adverse humanitarian consequences for the civilian population of the DPRK or to affect negatively or restrict those activities, including economic activities and cooperation, food aid and humanitarian assistance, that are not prohibited by resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013), 2270 (2016), 2321 (2016), 2356 (2017) and this resolution, and the work of international and non-governmental organizations carrying out assistance and relief activities in the DPRK for the benefit of the civilian population of the DPRK and decides that the Committee may, on a case-by-case basis, exempt any activity from the measures imposed by these resolutions if the committee determines that such an exemption is necessary to facilitate the work of such organizations in the DPRK or for any other purpose consistent with the objectives of these resolutions, and further decides that the measures specified in paragraph 8(d) of resolution 1718 (2006) shall not apply with respect to financial transactions with the DPRK Foreign Trade Bank or the Korea National Insurance Corporation if such transactions are solely for the operation of diplomatic missions in the DPRK or humanitarian assistance activities that are undertaken by, or in coordination with, the United Nations; (Based on OP46 of UNSCR 2321)

So, spoiler alert: the FTB, which Treasury designated in 2013, and which featured prominently in this recent civil forfeiture suit, is designated in one of the annexes below, which is good. When I say that Pyongyang uses its people as human shields, the Foreign Trade Bank is a perfect example of that strategy, and how some humanitarian aid NGOs have been willing accomplices of it. That exemption is probably a smart move, tactically.

27. Reaffirms its support for the Six Party Talks, calls for their resumption, and reiterates its support for the commitments set forth in the Joint Statement of 19 September 2005 issued by China, the DPRK, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States, including that the goal of the Six-Party Talks is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner, that the United States and the DPRK undertook to respect each other’s sovereignty and exist peacefully together, that the Six Parties undertook to promote economic cooperation, and all other relevant commitments; (OP47 of UNSCR 2321)

Note the language “reaffirms its support.” I occasionally see claims, either from soft-liners here or from Beijing, that the resolutions require us to return to six-party talks — never mind that North Korea won’t return to them — and that some notion of reciprocity consequently releases China from its obligations to enforce the other provisions. But “reaffirms its support” is non-binding language, in contrast to the sanctions provisions that say “decides,” and which are binding. The obligations aren’t reciprocal, and the idea that this provision requires anyone to return to the talks (including Pyongyang) is baseless. The resolutions do, however, use “decides” when they require Pyongyang to completely, verifiably, and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear, chemical, biological, and ballistic missile programs.

28. Reiterates the importance of maintaining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in north-east Asia at large, and expresses its commitment to a peaceful, diplomatic, and political solution to the situation and welcomes efforts by the council members as well as other States to facilitate a peaceful and comprehensive solution through dialogue and stresses the importance of working to reduce tensions in the Korean Peninsula and beyond; (OP48 of UNSCR 2321)

29. Affirms that it shall keep the DPRK’s actions under continuous review and is prepared to strengthen, modify, suspend or lift the measures as may be needed in light of the DPRK’s compliance, and, in this regard, expresses its determination to take further significant measures in the event of a further DPRK nuclear test or launch; (OP49 of UNSCR 2321)

30. Decides to remain seized of the matter. (OP50 of UNSCR 2321)

Now, the designations.

Annex I

Travel Ban/Asset Freeze (Individuals)

1. CHOE CHUN YONG

a. Description: Representative for Ilsim International Bank, which is affiliated with the DPRK military and has a close relationship with the Korea Kwangson Banking Corporation.  Ilsim International Bank has attempted to evade United Nations sanctions.

b. A.K.A.: Ch’oe Ch’un-yo’ng

c. Identifiers: Nationality: DPRK; Passport no.: 654410078; Gender: male

With respect to each of these guys, I can only ask: are their designated successors in Beijing yet?

2. HAN JANG SU

a. Description: Chief Representative of the Foreign Trade Bank.

b. A.K.A.: Chang-Su Han

c. Identifiers: DOB: November 08, 1969; POB: Pyongyang, DPRK; Nationality: DPRK; Passport no.: 745420176, expires on October 19, 2020; Gender: male

3. JANG SONG CHOL

a. Description: Jang Song Chol is a Korea Mining Development Corporation (KOMID) representative overseas.

b. AKA: n/a

c. Identifiers: DOB: 12 March 1967; Nationality: DPRK

4. JANG SUNG NAM

a. Description: Chief of an overseas Tangun Trading Corporation branch, which is primarily responsible for the procurement of commodities and technologies to support the DPRK’s defense research and development programs.

b. A.K.A.: n/a

c. Identifiers: DOB: July 14, 1970; Nationality: DPRK; Passport no.: 563120368, issued on March 22, 2013; Passport expiration date: March 22, 2018; Gender: male

5. JO CHOL SONG

a. Description: Deputy Representative for the Korea Kwangson Banking Corporation, which provides financial services in support to Tanchon Commercial Bank and Korea Hyoksin Trading, a subordinate entity of Korea Ryonbong General Corporation.

b. A.K.A.: Cho Ch’o’l-so’ng

c. Identifiers: DOB: September 25, 1984; Nationality: DPRK; Passport no.: 654320502, expires on September 16, 2019; Gender: male

6. KANG CHOL SU

a. Description: Official for Korea Ryonbong General Corporation, which specializes in acquisition for the DPRK’s defense industries and support for the DPRK’s military-related overseas sales. Its procurements also likely support the DPRK’s chemical weapons program.

b. A.K.A.: n/a

c. Identifiers: DOB: February 13, 1969; Nationality: DPRK; Passport no.: 472234895

7. KIM MUN CHOL

a. Description: Representative for Korea United Development Bank. 

b. A.K.A.: Kim Mun-ch’o’l

c. Identifiers: DOB: March 25, 1957; Nationality: DPRK

8. KIM NAM UNG

a. Description: Representative for Ilsim International Bank, which is affiliated with the DPRK military and has a close relationship with the Korea Kwangson Banking Corporation.  Ilsim International Bank has attempted to evade United Nations sanctions.

b. A.K.A.: n/a

c. Identifiers: Nationality: DPRK; Passport no.: 654110043

9. PAK IL KYU

a. Description: Official for Korea Ryonbong General Corporation, which specializes in acquisition for DPRK’s defense industries and support to Pyongyang’s military-related sales. Its procurements also likely support the DPRK’s chemical weapons program.

b. A.K.A.: Pak Il-Gyu

c. Identifiers: Nationality: DPRK; Passport no.: 563120235; Gender: male

List Update for Aliases:

• JANG BOM SU (KPi.016) – New AKA: Jang Hyon U with date of birth 22 February 1958 and diplomatic passport number 836110034, which expires on 1 January 2020.

• JON MYONG GUK (KPi.018) – New AKA: Jon Yong Sang with date of birth 25 August 1976 and diplomatic passport number 836110035, which expires on 1 January 2020.

Annex II

Asset Freeze (Entities)

1. FOREIGN TRADE BANK (FTB)

a. Description: Foreign Trade Bank is a state-owned bank and acts as the DPRK’s primary foreign exchange bank and has provided key financial support to the Korea Kwangson Banking Corporation.

b. AKA: n/a

c. Location: FTB Building, Jungsong-dong, Central District, Pyongyang, DPRK

Now we’re talking.

2. KOREAN NATIONAL INSURANCE COMPANY (KNIC)

a. Description: The Korean National Insurance Company is a DPRK financial and insurance company and is affiliated with Office 39.

b. AKA: Korea Foreign Insurance Company

c. Location: Central District, Pyongyang, DPRK

Another good one, though the failure to designate the Korean Shipowners’ Protection and Indemnity Association, which insured the Chong Chon Gang, seems like an oversight. 

3. KORYO CREDIT DEVELOPMENT BANK

a. Description: Koryo Credit Development Bank operates in the financial services industry in the DPRK’s economy.

b. AKA: Daesong Credit Development Bank; Koryo Global Credit Bank; Koryo Global Trust Bank

c. Location: Pyongyang, DPRK

4. MANSUDAE OVERSEAS PROJECT GROUP OF COMPANIES

a. Description: Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies engaged in, facilitated, or was responsible for the exportation of workers from the DPRK to other nations for construction-related activities including for statues and monuments to generate revenue for the Government of the DPRK or the Workers’ Party of Korea. The Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies has been reported to conduct business in countries in Africa and Southeast Asia including Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Benin, Cambodia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Malaysia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Namibia, Syria, Togo, and Zimbabwe.

b. AKA: Mansudae Art Studio

c. Location: Pyongyang, DPRK

In theory, African dictators will have to build their own big, ugly statues now. Recall that UNSCR 2321 banned the export of statues. But … no Air Koryo? Really? I guess we’ll have to wait for the nuke test for that one.

These sanctions could be damaging — if member states enforce them. The sanctions in UNSCR 2270 should have been more damaging than they were, but China violated them and, until very recently, got away with it. Getting other member states to enforce the sanctions will require the President to use the authorities Congress has given him in the NKSPEA and the KIMS Act. A truly effective policy will require a whole-of-government approach: the State Department will have to lobby foreign governments, the Treasury and Justice Departments must be prepared to sanction violators, and the Homeland Security Department must step up the screening of cargo from ports that don’t inspect North Korean cargo.

Finally, the administration must speak coherently about sanctions, diplomacy, human rights, the proper role of engagement, what happens if diplomacy fails, and how to reunify Korea peacefully (or, as peacefully as possible). So far, I’ve seen some encouraging steps on sanctions enforcement, but not the coherent whole-of-government effort we’ll need.

~   ~  ~

The question most people are asking now is, “Will things be any different this time?” There’s one reason to think that they just might be. No, this isn’t the first sanctions resolution that might have done serious harm to Pyongyang’s palace economy if it had been enforced, but as I’ve said before, U.N. sanctions don’t enforce themselves. All the U.N. can really do is pass new resolutions and issue the occasional Panel of Experts report. (The Panel, which had previously issued its reports annually, will now start issuing them bi-annually. Its first mid-term new report should be coming out in the new few days. Expect it to be bleak about enforcement and compliance efforts so far, but it will also call out more cheaters and concentrate the attention of the FBI, the Treasury Department, and the Justice Department on them.)

Persuading governments and companies that want to trade with Pyongyang to stop doing so sometimes requires either an inducement or a threat. Yun Byung-Se was skilled at the use of inducements, particularly in Africa, but with Moon Jae-In in office, the U.S. has probably lost Seoul as a valuable diplomatic ally against Pyongyang. 

The Trump administration has recently become more willing to use threats. It hasn’t talked about it much yet, but the Treasury and Justice Departments have begun to seize and forfeit the funds of the trading companies that broker Pyongyang’s coal exports to China. It has also zapped one Chinese bank that was involved in laundering money for North Korea, and fired a shot across the bow of the correspondent banks that carelessly clear those transactions through our financial system. As the Justice Department noted last September, Pyongyang has tried to switch to non-dollar currencies, but without much success. Sellers prefer dollars. Now, for the first time, the U.S. has made a credible threat to banks and trading companies that facilitate Pyongyang’s coal exports. 

As for those who might be tempted to accept China’s view that Pyongyang’s coal exports were for “humanitarian” purposes, a new story by the Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey cites the Justice Department filings I refer to in the preceding paragraphs to debunk that cynical lie (as I characterize it in the article, which quotes me):

Documents from a recently unsealed U.S. court filing, combined with another federal case, suggest that much of the money China has paid to North Korea for coal over the years went toward the country’s weapons and military efforts.

The coal trade cited in the court documents, which has accounted for as much as a third of North Korean exports, helps explain how North Korea continued to develop its weapons programs despite being impoverished and under trade sanctions. The connections to the military also undermine Chinese claims that their imports were benefiting North Korean civilians.

“We considered that to be a very narrow [humanitarian] exception, but it soon became clear that not all others shared our view,” a State Department spokesperson said before the vote.

In the most recent court filing, unsealed last month, U.S. government attorneys were granted a seizure warrant against the largest Chinese importer of North Korean coal and four related front companies after presenting evidence that the Chinese company’s transactions with North Korea were “ultimately benefiting sanctioned North Korean end users, including North Korea military and North Korea weapons programs.”

The documents cite a defector, deemed “reliable,” who said that the vast majority of the revenue from the country’s coal exports go toward the military, nuclear missiles and weapons programs.

Those disclosures followed a court case filed in September in which federal attorneys cited a spreadsheet showing a major Chinese coal importer making purchases from various North Korean government agencies.

The Chinese importer was also purchasing from a North Korean company controlled by a secretive government branch believed to be conducting illicit activities and slush funds for political leaders. [WaPo, Peter Whoriskey]

It’s always refreshing to see journalists find, read, and cite primary sources rather than call up the same familiar “experts” who may not know anything about sanctions or even about North Korea, but who can be relied on to validate their own opinions. Read the whole thing. 

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Appeasement, Diplomacy

The freeze fantasy: Don’t tell us to talk to North Korea if you aren’t listening to North Korea

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A weird logic prevails among certain North Korea-watchers, to whom Pyongyang’s every violation of the many disarmament agreements it has already signed becomes “fresh” evidence that we must pay it to sign yet another disarmament agreement. Thus, every time Pyongyang launches a missile or tests a bomb, we can expect a new crop of op-eds making shopworn and increasingly oblivious arguments for a freeze deal that Pyongyang has said — clearly, emphatically, and repeatedly — it doesn’t want and won’t sign.

And Pyongyang could not be more clear or emphatic: it doesn’t want a freeze deal, it isn’t going to disarm. If it won’t disarm, what exactly are we supposed to talk about, and how much leverage, what interests, and which principles are we supposed to throw away to get nothing discernible? And while we’re at it, aren’t the people dispensing this advice mostly the same geniuses (or their acolytes) who brought us Agreed Framework I, Agreed Framework II, and the Leap Day Deal, and who ended up leaving it to President Donald J. Trump to “handle” the world’s worst nuclear crisis since 1962?

Every time I read an iteration of this talk-to-North-Korea op-ed, I want to grab the writer by his lapels and scream into his face: “Don’t tell me to talk to North Korea if you aren’t listening to North Korea!” So, in that spirit, let’s take a moment to listen to North Korea.

~   ~   ~

2/2017: “It is the stand of the DPRK not to hesitate or make any concession in bolstering up its capability for self-defence. The U.S. is sadly mistaken if it thinks the nuclear deterrence of the DPRK is a matter for political bargaining and economic deal after putting it on the negotiating table.” [Rodong Sinmun]

3/2017: “For the DPRK standing in confrontation with the U.S., the chieftain of aggression advocating the doctrine that nukes are all-powerful, its strong nuclear attack capabilities serve as a treasured sword for averting a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula and defusing the danger of war against the Korean nation. The power of the nuclear strike means of the DPRK precisely means its national power and dignity.” [Rodong Sinmun]

3/2017: “As it presents itself as an immediate vital requirement for the DPRK to further bolster the capabilities for self-defence with a nuclear force as pivot given that the U.S. is staging joint military exercises for aggression after introducing largest-ever strategic assets into the Korean peninsula, the DPRK can not but take into serious account its participation in the conference and, therefore, decided not to take part in the conference.” [N. Korean Foreign Ministry, via KCNA]

4/2017 (at the UN Disarmament Conference, of all places!): “It is an entirely just right to self-defence of a sovereign state to keep itself highly alert and bolster in every way its strong war deterrent capable of mercilessly wiping out the aggressors as required by the grim situation where an actual war may break out any moment…. As long as the U.S. and its vassal forces persistently pose nuclear threat and blackmail and continue the nuclear war racket masked as an annual one at the doorstep of the DPRK, the DPRK will as ever bolster up its capabilities for self-defence and preemptive attack with the nuclear force as a pivot.” [Rodong Sinmun]

5/2017: “Beautified by the Trump administration, as if they are performing a little act of kindness for North Korea, the essence of the ‘engagement’ policy is simple… they want to disarm us,” the editorial, published in the DPRK’s most widely read newspaper, reads. “With flowery rhetoric, every day the U.S. is saying that ‘engagement’ is needed for ‘peaceful resolution’ [with the North] while claiming that not only the pressure, but the ‘resolving through talks and negotiation’ is what the U.S. wants.” [Rodong Sinmun, via NK News]

7/2017: “The only way out for the U.S.…is to withdraw the…hostile policy toward the DPRK and kneel and apologize before its army and people.” [KCNA]

7/2017: “The DPRK would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case.” [Kim Jong-Un, quoted in KCNA]

7/2017: “Under the present international situation where the U.S. and its vassal forces’ policy of nuclear threat and blackmail persist, the DPRK will bolster up military capability for self-defense with nuclear force as pivot and ability of making a preemptive attack in order to preserve the country’s sovereignty and the nation’s right to existence. The DPRK’s measures to bolster up the nuclear force for self-defense will go on until the nuclear weapons are eliminated from the earth.” [KCNA]

~   ~   ~

Still not enough for you? Then go to the S.T.A.L.I.N. search engine and look up “treasured sword” or “nuclear deterrent.” Now, already, the frequent Air Koryo flyers (as B.R. Myers calls them) are saying, “But I went to Pyongyang and Vice-Minister Kim said …,” or the perennial 38North favorite, “If you parse it, they really mean ….”

Parse all you want. Bruce Klingner and Sue Terry met with them at Track 2 talks early this year. The North Koreans were “unambiguously clear.” They “will not be deterred from augmenting [their nuclear arsenal or test-launching an intercontinental ballistic missile.” They offered “no signals of flexibility or willingness to negotiate on these programs.” Their message was that “denuclearization is off the table.” No “combination of economic and diplomatic benefits or security reassurances” can make them keep the other denuclearization agreements they signed in 1994, 2005, 2007, or 2012 (to name just a few examples).

Also, for all the talk from American soft-liners that we must drop our preconditions to talks that obviously aren’t about disarmament, the North Koreans are now offering a precondition of their own: “First accept us as a nuclear state, then we are prepared to talk about a peace treaty or fight. We are ready for either.” In which case, we’ve lost just by showing up.

Still, the calls for us to talk to Pyongyang about its inexhaustible list of insatiable demands (but none of ours) just keep rolling off the conveyer belt that runs from the Northwest Washington think thanks to the desks of editors — often from the same geniuses who’ve built long and successful careers out of misjudging Pyongyang’s intentions. It may be too much to ask that they stop peddling this fantasy about a deal Pyongyang doesn’t even want and won’t keep. But won’t they at least read and try to rationalize away Pyongyang’s words at some point along the way?

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Interviews, Propaganda, Subversion

Propaganda in the age of Kim Jong-Un: A discussion with Professor B.R. Myers

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What follows is an email discussion between myself and Professor B.R. Myers of Dongsoo University, author of “The Cleanest Race” and “North Korea’s Juche Myth,” and keeper of the Sthele Press blog. At the end of the discussion, I thought readers might enjoy reading it, and Professor Myers graciously agreed to let me print it here.

~   ~   ~

Stanton: A few weeks ago, a commenter at my blog cited your work as evidence that North Koreans probably still believe in their political system. That raises several questions: first, do North Koreans believe in their political ideology; second, do they believe in Kim Jong Un; and third, can they distinguish between the two in a place like North Korea where the personality cult is so critical?

In “The Cleanest Race,” you argued that North Korea’s propaganda was effective. I see plenty of evidence that it works on a significant number of South Koreans. Although the sentiments of North Koreans are harder to measure, I agree that nationalism and xenophobia probably still play well with South and North Koreans — even better than they play in most other places. The tribal instinct predates humanity itself, after all.

I doubt, however, that most North Koreans hold Kim Jong-Un in high regard. I see no evidence that they do and plenty of evidence that they don’t. He hasn’t cultivated the same monastic, martial, self-sacrificing persona that Kim Il-Sung could and that even Kim Jong-Il tried to. Just look at him. Look at his appearances with a laughingstock like Dennis Rodman — who is, in KCNA’s racist vernacular, a monkey with impure blood.

I think the true sentiments of North Koreans are probably complex. I suspect they probably believe in some elements of the system and not others. I suspect they are proud of their weapons programs and also see them as a waste of resources. Most of them can tell that the system is not providing for them, and I suspect that their views of Kim Jong-Un vary from apathy to antipathy, and are far less favorable than their views of Kim Il-Sung or even Kim Jong-Il.

Myers: I tend to agree with you in regard to Kim Jong Un himself. When I was there in 2011 even my minders could not work up much enthusiasm about him. No state can keep its people at the same pitch of fervency forever, especially not after losing the monopoly on providing culture and information to the masses. Kim Jong Un has made many blunders on the propaganda front. The Dennis Rodman stuff was indeed a fiasco. Kim Il Sung met African leaders in public, but like all foreigners they showed the proper deference. Rodman slouched next to Kim Jong Un in dark shades and a baseball cap. I knew then that Chang Song-thaek wasn’t pulling the strings, because if he had been, that would never have happened. 

But Kim has obviously been getting better advice lately. He is speaking much better too. He rushes his speeches a bit, but he has a good, rich voice, the voice of a more mature man. I’m sure the nuclear and ballistic triumphs he’s racking up at the moment are helping his “poll numbers”. By the regime’s military-first standards of performance he is doing better even than Kim Jong Il.  

In any case, his relative lack of popularity is not as important as the lack of popularity of a president in South Korea, where there is no bedrock state support to keep people patriotic even when they dislike a leader. 

But we Americans are more like the North Koreans in that regard. Does our patriotism rise and fall depending on who is in the White House? If we don’t like a president, do we start finding America’s enemies more likeable? No. We should therefore not assume that Kim Jong Un’s relative lack of stature means that support for the state is weakening.

And if we’re going to jeer at North Korea for being a de facto monarchy, we must also acknowledge the main advantage of such a system: no divisive squabbling over who has the right to rule. On my book tour for “The Cleanest Race” I used the example of my British mother: a firm supporter of the monarchy with different estimations of the various royals. She doesn’t like the idea of Charles becoming king, but accepts that it will and must happen. 

I’ve also often spoken of a defector (an artist) who told me how, when crossing the Tumen River into China, he was seized with a horrible guilt at betraying the nara, the country. This although his hatred of Kim Jong Il had been a big factor in inducing him to leave. For most North Koreans the state equals the race, equals the country. This is where the North has been so much more successful than what I call the “Unloved Republic” of South Korea. There, as in Weimar Germany, the state is seen as having betrayed the race. When Moon Jae-in looks back on the history of the ROK he holds up only the anti-state riots and protests as high points.  

It’s time we all acknowledged the genius of the North’s propaganda apparatus, however much distaste we feel about it. It works with the grain of human nature. Kim Il Sung’s first speech in Pyongyang in October 1945 went down terribly, because he lacked the natural charisma to make plausible the biographical legend the Soviets had chosen for him. But the propaganda apparatus quickly made clear that by swallowing his legend, the whole nation could regard its own colonial past in a nobler light. In celebrating the leader as the embodiment of ethnic virtues, 25 million people celebrate themselves. Which is not to say the cult hasn’t cooled a lot. 

Western observers focus more on the regime’s economic failures than the North Koreans themselves do. Remember that it was only in recent modern times that Western societies began expecting the state to secure constant economic growth and rising prosperity. Well into the 20th century people expected little more from the state than that it protect them from foreign powers, and expand the influence or territory of the nation. Prussia was remarkably like North Korea in many ways, yet we remember it as a very successful state. If we judge North Korea by its own standards — instead of by the communist standards we hope its people judge it by — we must admit it has performed very well. 

The whole point of the military-first policy was not so much to whip up support for the military as to de-ideologize the economic sector, to make it possible to dismantle the command economy without dismantling the authority of the whole system. 

This is why (as I never tire of repeating) North Koreans can frequent black markets and still consider themselves good citizens, as was impossible in the communist East Bloc. So the situation now is more like Japan or Germany in 1944, say, than like East Germany in the 1980s. Widespread government corruption? Check. An entire population of economic criminals? Check. Constant griping about the state, the party, even some joking about the leader? Check. (Even good Nazis had their Hitler jokes.) A general readiness to fight for the state? Well, there’s certainly more readiness in the North than in the South. 

It all comes down to what neither the softliners nor the hardliners want to acknowledge: this is a successful right-wing state, not a failed communist one.

Stanton: Your sentence about patriotism not changing with one’s view of the leader is insightful, although I wonder how well the comparison holds up in a place like North Korea where propaganda ties the state so closely to the leader himself. Our own propaganda, such as it is, is one of loyalty to principle and nation, but discourages loyalty to parties and personalities. We preserve a duality in which one can be patriotic to the system even if one loathes the president. That duality doesn’t exist in North Korea.

Myers: I see what you mean. If Kim Jong Un is Chosun, as the slogan goes, then his decline in popularity must be the state’s too? But it doesn’t work that way. We all need to give our lives a sense of significance, of a meaning that lives on after our deaths. The North Koreans get that from their nationalism, which is one with their patriotism. If they lose that, what do they have? 

Don’t get me wrong, we can always hope for an uprising. But it is more likely to be sparked inadvertently, as it were, by traders protesting against their provincial or municipal government’s highhandedness and corruption, in the naive hope that the state will step in on their side.

Whether such an uprising becomes a revolution is another matter. Remember what Hannah Arendt said: Revolutions are usually a matter of people picking up the power of a state in disintegration, a government that has lost the will to enforce its laws. Of the two states on the peninsula, I see the South as closer to fitting that bill. There were recent reports of demonstrators around the THAAD site stopping and checking police cars.

Stanton: I agree that the two Koreas seem to be in a sprint to the bottom. I also think we underestimate the amount of anarchy in North Korea’s eastern and northeastern provinces because (1) reporters seldom see those parts of North Korea, and (2) instead, they are led through a circuit of soda-straw views of elite, regimented Pyongyang. It’s lazy journalism that justifies the propagation of a distorted image of North Korea with the argument that some news is better than no news at all. I don’t agree that an unrepresentative sample informs us about how most North Koreans live.

I agree that North Korea’s greatest political vulnerabilities are matters of retail economics and market policies. A propaganda campaign that linked songbun (class), corruption, and the state’s economic policies to the economic grievances of the people might resonate among North Korea’s poor and merchant class. Isn’t it always the case that revolutions are sparked by economic grievances that polarize around political grievances and class envy? Wasn’t that fundamentally true of 1989 and the Arab Spring?

So far, our broadcasts to North Korea have been bland, straight-news programs that have been afraid to take a more subversive approach that reports on local corruption and protests, for fear of upsetting China & South Korea. I believe that, a more subversive tone in our broadcasting might be a way to pressure Beijing,  Seoul, and Pyongyang. Pyongyang has shown a surprising amount of concern about even those silly loudspeakers along the DMZ.

My point is that regardless of North Korea’s nationalism, the regime is still vulnerable to class-warfare propaganda. This is not to say that we could not also harness Korean nationalism — particularly if the message did more to highlight China’s ambitions to divide, dominate, and exploit Korea.

Myers: The Arab Spring was at its heart an Islamist uprising whipped up by a Muslim clergy for which in North Korea there is no equivalent. The only non-secular force of note is shamanism, which merely encourages the family-centricity that keeps people from joining forces against the state. As for 1989, the USSR made no secret of loosening its grip over its sphere of influence. Gorbachev dropped Honecker in spectacularly obvious fashion. From that point on, the East Germans knew the regime was going down. And in Romania, there was a multi-ethnic dynamic you don’t have in North Korea either, the few ethnic Chinese hwagyo being focused on cross-border trade, and very happy with the status quo.

And at the risk of sounding like a broken record: this is a far-right, militarist state. Such states tend to experience uprisings only when they have failed by militarist or nationalist standards, as the Argentinian junta did in 1982.

Such states are not the sort of smoothly functioning machines that Orwell describes in 1984. They are much more ramshackle things, with plenty of loopholes and little freedoms that a communist state would try harder to eliminate. John Everard, the former British ambassador to North Korea — who believes that North Korea is closer to Nazi Germany than to the USSR — has recorded his surprise at the freedom of movement, the freedom to shape their own leisure time, which average citizens enjoy even in Pyongyang.

You use the word anarchy; I think that’s going too far. Again, let’s recall Japan in the war. There too people were bribing or making deals with owners of the stalled factories in which they were “frozen,” so they could go off and catch fish for someone else. 

It was a kind of lawlessness to which a blind eye was turned, but I wouldn’t call it anarchy. It covers only areas that are ideologically uncharged. In any part of North Korea, someone who publicly insults the leader is going to be punished as immediately and brutally as such a person would have been 50 years ago.

I agree generally with you about what our propaganda approach should be. I have been saying for at least 10 years now that the balloon leaflets are too amateurish. I am not happy with the extent to which their composition is left to defectors, who are overwhelmingly from the least propagandized, most rural part of the country. For decades the basic message has been, “Dump the leadership, because it lives high on the hog while you toil and starve.” That’s the sort of sloganeering that might help undermine a communist state. 

It won’t work in a far-right, ultra-nationalist state. The pomp that surrounds Kim Jong Un is the whole nation’s pomp, as it were. I have urged American officials who ask me about propaganda to encourage a nationalist approach to it, stressing the North’s disgraceful dependence on China, contrasting the North with an internationally respected South that has really put Korea on the map.

I’m not sure this will be enough though. The crucial issue, from a nationalist North Korean’s perspective, is likely to be: Which of the two states is more intent on righting the wrongs foreigners have done to us? Which state wants to unify the peninsula, the nation? And the South all too obviously allows the North to play the heroic role of the sole unifying force. Park Geun-hye made efforts to rectify that neglect but it was too little, too late. And now a very different president is in power.

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