More required reading from Jasper Becker. Thanks to Norbert Vollertsen for the hat tip. What is this nagging inconsistency about the region’s North Korea diplomacy? Becker articulates:

Anyone proposing to offer Kim cast-iron security guarantees and unconditional aid thus has to engage in a kind of “double think.” They must ignore their better instincts in order to justify engaging him and simultaneously believe that, given his track record, he is capable of unleashing nuclear weapons. Chinese diplomats routinely claim that there would be tremendous civil disorder if he fell from power. Kim therefore becomes the pillar of regional stability. South Korean officials claim the burden of restoring the North Korean economy is too huge even to think about. Instead of being seen as the chief obstacle who needs to be removed in order to make progress, Kim is elevated to becoming the vital conduit for change.

Becker’s essay goes into so many aspects of what’s wrong with the assumptions beneath our diplomacy, I couldn’t begin to find one paragraph to do it justice. He also tabulates the North Korean regime’s butcher’s bill, which adds up to a ghastly seven million dead. And then there’s this:

The moral case against the North Korean regime was already strong in 1994, but has been strengthened immeasurably with the famine. After Kim deliberately allowed three million of his own people to die in the famine, should he be allowed to stay in power? Genocide is normally interpreted to mean the mass killings of another race … but this too is a form of genocide.

Legally speaking, I’d agree if the Genocide Convention hadn’t been influenced by Stalin’s diplomats to exclude the mass murder of political and social groups. The message to aspiring tyrants is that they are free to slaughter all the commies, fags, kulaks, class enemies, and bespectacled “new people” they wish without having to confront the “G” word in a court of law. Needless to say, the definition is controversial and differs from common understanding of the term.

But is Kim Jong Il a mass murderer? By all means. The rest is up to the lawyers and the hangman.

I’d add that I bought Becker’s new book, Rogue Regime, last weekend, and it does not disappoint. This would make four books on North Korea that I’m currently reading, since I finally turned up that copy of Marcus Noland’s Korea After Kim Jong-Il that I lost on that hectic night I had to bring my son to the hospital.

This is your must-reading of the day.

Nicholas Eberstadt has a new piece out in The Weekly Standard. Here’s a sample.

Not far from Seoul–maybe a half hour’s journey north, by jet plane–an untold number of terrified Koreans are hiding in a foreign land, engaged in a grave and uncertain struggle for survival. . . . These wretched vagabonds–most of them women and children–are escapees from North Korea. They have crossed the Yalu and the Tumen into China in tiny groups, driven into the unknown by Kim Jong Il’s man-made famine. That catastrophe–the only peacetime famine to befall an urbanized, literate society in all of human history–claimed hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of victims in the 1990s; though the death toll from the ongoing North Korean food crisis seems for the moment to have subsided, hunger remains a dire problem there–especially for that society’s officially disfavored strata.

Emphasis mine. Eberstadt goes on to argue convincingly that accepting North Korean refugees is (1) morally compelled; (2) legally compelled by the ROK Constitution; (3) beneficial to the long-term socio-economic interests of unification; and (4) an excellent means of nonviolent diplomatic pressure on an intransigent North.

There is too much good material there to excerpt, although some of it will look familiar to regular readers of this site.

Now go read the rest on your own.

HT: Rob at The Kommentariat.

As predicted, the truth of what took place during the Bush-Roh meeting is starting to leak out from behind the U.S. and Korean governments’ message machine. The “left” faction of Uri, as represented by Anti-Unification Minister (of Silly Talks) Chung Dong-Young, appears to want a do-over, and Chung has stepped up and declared himself the man for the job. Seoul’s most pliable man is now on his way to Washington to bring fresh tidings of the reformed man formerly known as Kim Jong-Il to Washington’s least pliable man: Dick Cheney.

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young will travel to Washington tomorrow to meet U.S. counterparts and discuss his recent meetings with North Korean officials, including Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang.

The ministry said yesterday Chung will pay a five-day visit to Washington and relay the outcome of last week’s inter-Korean ministerial meeting and his talk June 17 with Kim.
. . . .

Chung, who also heads the presidential National Security Council, is likely to meet Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, among others, but the schedule has not been confirmed yet, ministry officials said.

The South Korean government has been moving fast to spread North Korea’s hint at a change in attitude regarding its anticipated return to the six-party talks after Kim Jong-il personally told Chung the North may return to the talks next month if it gains respect from Washington.

Here’s more classic Uri, and have your wastebasket on your lap for this one:

[G]overnment sources say the minister is going chiefly to persuade Vice President Dick Cheney, the administrations most ardent hardliner, to soften his stance on North Korea. Chung will meet Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley.

“After North Korea sent positive signals recently about returning to six-party talks [on its nuclear program], the restart of the negotiations, which have been stalled for a year, is at hand,” a Korean official said Monday. “Vice President Cheney needs to say something reassuring to North Korea.”

Since we can’t say “peace is at hand,” or “peace in our time,” we need some less daring famous last words. “Talks are at hand.” Fine, but talks have been at hand for a decade; accomplishment of something in those talks isn’t.

More here. There is even one reason for qualified praise for Chung:

Chung said he will use the sixth round of Red Cross talks slated for this August to begin a full-fledged discussion with the North on the return of hundreds of South Korean soldiers who were believed to have been abducted to North Korea and prisoners of war during and after the 1950-1953 Korean War.

My post on the April visit of two of these POWs to Washington here, if you haven’t seen it yet.

Now, I said “qualified” praise for a reason–Chung’s under political duress. Oppo leader Park Geun-Hye has also been talking about the issue, arguably for reasons that are more expedient than principled, but in a way that certainly sounds more credible than Chung. I recommend this entire article, in fact, because it might even lead you to believe that the Grand National Party is finding the voice it needs to present an alternative vision and seize the agenda from a demoralized and divided Uri. Money quote:

“The government must boldly bring up the issues of military prisoners, dispersed families and North Korean defectors, and North Korea should make pledges and hold to them, in return for our aid,” said Park chairwoman of the main opposition Grand National Party, in a speech to the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club at the Korea Press Foundation.

Criticizing the government for its “hesitant and weak approach” toward the North, Park asserted the need for a firm and transparent North Korean policy to keep up the current optimistic atmosphere after President Roh Moo-hyun’s successful summit with the U.S. President George W. Bush and the reopening of talks between the two Koreas.

Could this be the end of the GNP’s “Sunshine Lite,” and a movement toward a Korean “hawk engagement?” How long before we learn of her involvement in some orphanage-land-speculation scandal?

Roh-begone

Having taken on both Vice President Cheney and the opposition, you’d think that Chung would have enough problems on his hands. Yet it seems that up to this point, I’d managed not to notice that Chung is on the outs with Roh himself. That fact came out in the course of Roh’s latest self-pitying Hamlet act in front of the cameras, something he tends to do after political trouncings. Have a look at this cryptic little paragraph from yesterday’s Joongang Ilbo:

Mr. Roh opposed party moves to hold the current party leadership responsible and to entice former party leaders such as Unification Minister Chung Dong-young and Health Minister Kim Keun-tae to return to the party. “If they [Mr. Chung and Mr. Kim] come back to the party now, they will only get hurt rather than showing leadership,” Mr. Roh said.

Under the circumstances, you have to wonder whether Chung really represents the President of the Republic of Korea. It seems more plausible that this is just the latest of Chung’s machinations to build up his base for his next run at the presidency. It’s another sign of growing fissures in the Korean left, even as the GNP appears to have acquired an agenda:

Feeling a sense of urgency for the shaky governing party, President Roh Moo-hyun sent a letter both scolding and encouraging Uri Party members yesterday.

“I regret to see that the Uri Party is shaking now, and state affairs are difficult,” Mr. Roh wrote in the letter. “A political party that does not have minimum regulations and discipline cannot receive public support.”

Mr. Roh’s letter came amid dropping popularity of the governing party and allegations that his aides and other Uri lawmakers are involved in several scandals.
“The decisive reasons that made circumstances difficult for the party are the loss of ethical trust by the people, a loss of influence and fading power to hold party members together,” the letter said.

As predicted, the truth of what took place during the Bush-Roh meeting is starting to leak out from behind the U.S. and Korean governments’ message machine. The “left” faction of Uri, as represented by Anti-Unification Minister (of Silly Talks) Chung Dong-Young, appears to want a do-over, and Chung has stepped up and declared himself the man for the job. Seoul’s most pliable man is now on his way to Washington to bring fresh tidings of the reformed man formerly known as Kim Jong-Il to Washington’s least pliable man: Dick Cheney.

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young will travel to Washington tomorrow to meet U.S. counterparts and discuss his recent meetings with North Korean officials, including Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang.

The ministry said yesterday Chung will pay a five-day visit to Washington and relay the outcome of last week’s inter-Korean ministerial meeting and his talk June 17 with Kim.
. . . .

Chung, who also heads the presidential National Security Council, is likely to meet Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, among others, but the schedule has not been confirmed yet, ministry officials said.

The South Korean government has been moving fast to spread North Korea’s hint at a change in attitude regarding its anticipated return to the six-party talks after Kim Jong-il personally told Chung the North may return to the talks next month if it gains respect from Washington.

Here’s more classic Uri, and have your wastebasket on your lap for this one:

[G]overnment sources say the minister is going chiefly to persuade Vice President Dick Cheney, the administrations most ardent hardliner, to soften his stance on North Korea. Chung will meet Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley.

“After North Korea sent positive signals recently about returning to six-party talks [on its nuclear program], the restart of the negotiations, which have been stalled for a year, is at hand,” a Korean official said Monday. “Vice President Cheney needs to say something reassuring to North Korea.”

Since we can’t say “peace is at hand,” or “peace in our time,” we need some less daring famous last words. “Talks are at hand.” Fine, but talks have been at hand for a decade; accomplishment of something in those talks isn’t.

More here. There is even one reason for qualified praise for Chung:

Chung said he will use the sixth round of Red Cross talks slated for this August to begin a full-fledged discussion with the North on the return of hundreds of South Korean soldiers who were believed to have been abducted to North Korea and prisoners of war during and after the 1950-1953 Korean War.

My post on the April visit of two of these POWs to Washington here, if you haven’t seen it yet.

Now, I said “qualified” praise for a reason–Chung’s under political duress. Oppo leader Park Geun-Hye has also been talking about the issue, arguably for reasons that are more expedient than principled, but in a way that certainly sounds more credible than Chung. I recommend this entire article, in fact, because it might even lead you to believe that the Grand National Party is finding the voice it needs to present an alternative vision and seize the agenda from a demoralized and divided Uri. Money quote:

“The government must boldly bring up the issues of military prisoners, dispersed families and North Korean defectors, and North Korea should make pledges and hold to them, in return for our aid,” said Park chairwoman of the main opposition Grand National Party, in a speech to the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club at the Korea Press Foundation.

Criticizing the government for its “hesitant and weak approach” toward the North, Park asserted the need for a firm and transparent North Korean policy to keep up the current optimistic atmosphere after President Roh Moo-hyun’s successful summit with the U.S. President George W. Bush and the reopening of talks between the two Koreas.

Could this be the end of the GNP’s “Sunshine Lite,” and a movement toward a Korean “hawk engagement?” How long before we learn of her involvement in some orphanage-land-speculation scandal?

Roh-begone

Having taken on both Vice President Cheney and the opposition, you’d think that Chung would have enough problems on his hands. Yet it seems that up to this point, I’d managed not to notice that Chung is on the outs with Roh himself. That fact came out in the course of Roh’s latest self-pitying Hamlet act in front of the cameras, something he tends to do after political trouncings. Have a look at this cryptic little paragraph from yesterday’s Joongang Ilbo:

Mr. Roh opposed party moves to hold the current party leadership responsible and to entice former party leaders such as Unification Minister Chung Dong-young and Health Minister Kim Keun-tae to return to the party. “If they [Mr. Chung and Mr. Kim] come back to the party now, they will only get hurt rather than showing leadership,” Mr. Roh said.

Under the circumstances, you have to wonder whether Chung really represents the President of the Republic of Korea. It seems more plausible that this is just the latest of Chung’s machinations to build up his base for his next run at the presidency. It’s another sign of growing fissures in the Korean left, even as the GNP appears to have acquired an agenda:

Feeling a sense of urgency for the shaky governing party, President Roh Moo-hyun sent a letter both scolding and encouraging Uri Party members yesterday.

“I regret to see that the Uri Party is shaking now, and state affairs are difficult,” Mr. Roh wrote in the letter. “A political party that does not have minimum regulations and discipline cannot receive public support.”

Mr. Roh’s letter came amid dropping popularity of the governing party and allegations that his aides and other Uri lawmakers are involved in several scandals.
“The decisive reasons that made circumstances difficult for the party are the loss of ethical trust by the people, a loss of influence and fading power to hold party members together,” the letter said.

More required reading from Jasper Becker. Thanks to Norbert Vollertsen for the hat tip. What is this nagging inconsistency about the region’s North Korea diplomacy? Becker articulates:

Anyone proposing to offer Kim cast-iron security guarantees and unconditional aid thus has to engage in a kind of “double think.” They must ignore their better instincts in order to justify engaging him and simultaneously believe that, given his track record, he is capable of unleashing nuclear weapons. Chinese diplomats routinely claim that there would be tremendous civil disorder if he fell from power. Kim therefore becomes the pillar of regional stability. South Korean officials claim the burden of restoring the North Korean economy is too huge even to think about. Instead of being seen as the chief obstacle who needs to be removed in order to make progress, Kim is elevated to becoming the vital conduit for change.

Becker’s essay goes into so many aspects of what’s wrong with the assumptions beneath our diplomacy, I couldn’t begin to find one paragraph to do it justice. He also tabulates the North Korean regime’s butcher’s bill, which adds up to a ghastly seven million dead. And then there’s this:

The moral case against the North Korean regime was already strong in 1994, but has been strengthened immeasurably with the famine. After Kim deliberately allowed three million of his own people to die in the famine, should he be allowed to stay in power? Genocide is normally interpreted to mean the mass killings of another race … but this too is a form of genocide.

Legally speaking, I’d agree if the Genocide Convention hadn’t been influenced by Stalin’s diplomats to exclude the mass murder of political and social groups. The message to aspiring tyrants is that they are free to slaughter all the commies, fags, kulaks, class enemies, and bespectacled “new people” they wish without having to confront the “G” word in a court of law. Needless to say, the definition is controversial and differs from common understanding of the term.

But is Kim Jong Il a mass murderer? By all means. The rest is up to the lawyers and the hangman.

I’d add that I bought Becker’s new book, Rogue Regime, last weekend, and it does not disappoint. This would make four books on North Korea that I’m currently reading, since I finally turned up that copy of Marcus Noland’s Korea After Kim Jong-Il that I lost on that hectic night I had to bring my son to the hospital.

This is your must-reading of the day.

Nicholas Eberstadt has a new piece out in The Weekly Standard. Here’s a sample.

Not far from Seoul–maybe a half hour’s journey north, by jet plane–an untold number of terrified Koreans are hiding in a foreign land, engaged in a grave and uncertain struggle for survival. . . . These wretched vagabonds–most of them women and children–are escapees from North Korea. They have crossed the Yalu and the Tumen into China in tiny groups, driven into the unknown by Kim Jong Il’s man-made famine. That catastrophe–the only peacetime famine to befall an urbanized, literate society in all of human history–claimed hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of victims in the 1990s; though the death toll from the ongoing North Korean food crisis seems for the moment to have subsided, hunger remains a dire problem there–especially for that society’s officially disfavored strata.

Emphasis mine. Eberstadt goes on to argue convincingly that accepting North Korean refugees is (1) morally compelled; (2) legally compelled by the ROK Constitution; (3) beneficial to the long-term socio-economic interests of unification; and (4) an excellent means of nonviolent diplomatic pressure on an intransigent North.

There is too much good material there to excerpt, although some of it will look familiar to regular readers of this site.

Now go read the rest on your own.

HT: Rob at The Kommentariat.

This is your must-reading of the day.

Nicholas Eberstadt has a new piece out in The Weekly Standard. Here’s a sample.

Not far from Seoul–maybe a half hour’s journey north, by jet plane–an untold number of terrified Koreans are hiding in a foreign land, engaged in a grave and uncertain struggle for survival. . . . These wretched vagabonds–most of them women and children–are escapees from North Korea. They have crossed the Yalu and the Tumen into China in tiny groups, driven into the unknown by Kim Jong Il’s man-made famine. That catastrophe–the only peacetime famine to befall an urbanized, literate society in all of human history–claimed hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of victims in the 1990s; though the death toll from the ongoing North Korean food crisis seems for the moment to have subsided, hunger remains a dire problem there–especially for that society’s officially disfavored strata.

Emphasis mine. Eberstadt goes on to argue convincingly that accepting North Korean refugees is (1) morally compelled; (2) legally compelled by the ROK Constitution; (3) beneficial to the long-term socio-economic interests of unification; and (4) an excellent means of nonviolent diplomatic pressure on an intransigent North.

There is too much good material there to excerpt, although some of it will look familiar to regular readers of this site.

Now go read the rest on your own.

HT: Rob at The Kommentariat.

The Midland Ministerial Alliance is not really a newcomer to the movement for human rights in North Korea, but the journey of a group of them to Seoul–and to the center of the spotlight–is. They have proven their influence over President Bush on Sudan, and they are shifting their focus to North Korea. Perhaps that explains why the South Korean government agreed to meet with them. What I wouldn’t give to see the discomfort in that room.

Members of the Midland Ministerial Alliance, a network of more than 200 churches in the city, are in Seoul this week seeking support for their latest push for improved human rights in the communist North.

“North Korean human rights will be the primary focus that we encourage the community here to actively engage in, to use their influence, and to not rest until the lives of North Koreans have changed for much better,” alliance spokeswoman Deborah Fikes told South Korean lawmakers Friday.

The Alliance is inviting Kang Chol-Hwan back to Midland in August.

Meanwhile, we have yet another reaction from North Koreans on Kang’s visit to the White House. In contrast to the gushing praise the visit received from defectors, the North Koreans who share the big reviewing stand are less positive:

The defector’s visit to Washington has drawn ire from the North, whose official news agency Thursday called Kang “human trash” and said Bush speaking to him was an “act of throwing a wet blanket on the efforts to resume” the nuclear talks.

If those talks have any chance of success, it will be fear of the Ceausescu Scenario that creates it. Kang’s words, as Pyongyang knows, could add greatly to the pressure to isolate the North Korean regime rather than purchasing more of its costly lies.

So says the Sankei Shinmun, apparently via U.S. intelligence agencies. Insert your own disclaimers.

At issue is technology used in cruise missiles known as Kh-55s that Ukraine exported to Iran in 2001 under former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, the Sankei Shimbun daily said, quoting Japanese government and ruling party sources.

“They are linked by a network beneath the surface regarding the development of weapons of mass destruction,” Sankei quoted a Defense Ministry source as saying about Iran and North Korea.

The possible leak of technology was conveyed to Japan by a U.S. intelligence agency, said Sankei, a conservative daily.

Developed in the late 1970s in the former Soviet Union, the Kh-55s have a range of 3,000 km (1,864 miles), long enough to hit any part of Japan if deployed by North Korea, Sankei said.

North Korea’s current known cruise missile inventory (Russian Sunburns and Chinese Silkworms) has nothing like that range. What makes this disturbing is the difficulty of intercepting cruise missiles, which fly so low that they’re difficult to spot and track until they’re very near the target. Their airspeed, however, is relatively slow. The Kh-55 bears a close resemblance to the Tomohawk, which flies at about 500 miles per hour and has a similar range.

What’s more disturbing is the realization that North Korea is critically short of cash, but well supplied with other noxious things that Iran wants even more.