Archive for August 2006

Is He Crazy After All?

August 26, 2006 Kim Jong Il, Kremlinology, WMD 12 comments

A big welcome to the new readers from Gateway Pundit, and as always, many thanks to Jim for his link and his support.

All of us who wonder why Kim Jong Il has does some of the bone-headed things he’s done lately have shared a few common assumptions about him as we engaged in this speculative parlor game of ours:

* He is sane, rational, calculating, and reasonably well informed about his foes’ thought processes (some, however, would also argue that Kim is temperamental and impulsive, and therefore prone to emotional, irrational actions).

* He seeks to isolate his people. He knows that he could not withstand comparison to other systems of government, must prevent such comparisons at all costs, and is therefore unwilling to open his economy to the outside world (some believe that trade and aid can coax North Korea out of its isolation, although that view is largely discredited by recent events).

* Somewhat paradoxically, he needs controlled commerce with, and aid from, other countries to provide his regime with income to feed soldiers, pay perks, and keep the machinery of repression running (there is, of course, much disagreement about just how much trade Kim Jong Il will tolerate, and what effect it will have on North Korea’s political system).

* He created this crisis to achieve political or diplomatic advantages (some — and count me in here — think he means to do this by acquiring nukes; others think he just wants the better deal that we’ve stubbornly refused to give him).

* Finally, we’re all assuming that he’s the one calling the shots, and no evidence of which I’m aware seriously suggests otherwise.

But with Kim Jong Il openly threatening to test a nuclear weapon, you have to question how he can rationally expect to do anything but make his own predicament much worse. That’s causing me to reevaluate my assumptions. None of the conventional theories, all of which impute rational and calculating motives and plans to him, makes much more sense than the Chewbacca Defense. Either our assumptions are wrong, or we’re all analyzing this too rationally.

Extortion

This is the conventional wisdom. Most observers think Kim Jong Il’s motive is extortion; some are willing to pay, while others aren’t. The Chosun Ilbo echoes the conventional wisdom, that this is simple extortion:

If the North goes through with the test, the objective must be to goad the U.S. into coming to bilateral negotiations. Since its declaration in February last year that it is a nuclear power and its missile tests last month proved fruitless, the North is now monkeying around with a more powerful card.

I don’t agree with that, because it should be obvious enough that nuclear extortion won’t accomplish North Korea’s imputed aid-seeking goals. The United States, Japan, and China would only punish North Korea for it, and South Korea would give the North anything it wants just for the asking anyway. This isn’t lost on the Chosun Ilbo, either. The reaction to the missile launches, after all, was the death of the Sunshine policy, a sharp downturn in diplomatic (and possibly economic) relations with China, and a sharply harder line by Japan, which is cooperating with the United States to impose some supposedly dreadful economic sanctions.

What’s more, if Kim Jong Il just wants a better deal, why did he turn down the deal of a lifetime? It’s hard to see how a rational North Korean government could reject a deal so good that one influential Republican staffer in Congress declared it dead on arrival. If Kim Jong Il is rational and aware of his foes’ thought processes, he can’t expect that a nuke test (or threats of a nuke test) will get him aid, benefits, trade, or recognition.

“Barrel of a Gun”

I proposed my own “Barrel of a Gun” theory, but its predictive power is inconclusive at best. That theory is named after North Korea’s most popular political novel, generously provided to me by Oranckay when we met last April in Seoul. The idea is that the missile tests were the equivalent of a ransom note to prove to the North Korean people that Kim Jong Il is strong when in fact he was about to ask for more aid.

Kim has in fact indicated his willingness to accept South Korean aid, but the unexpected severity of the floods just weeks after the missile launch make it more difficult to associate that request with a pre-existing strategy (although the North was already headed for severe food shortages). The launches had the effect of forcing even South Korea to promise to reduce aid (for what that’s worth, which isn’t much). In the end, my theory suffers from the same problem as all the rest of them — it’s already having too many of the wrong effects for any rational actor to continue pursuing it.

Strategic Disengagement

Richardson’s theory of “strategic disengagement,” that the North Koreans are doing this to withdraw from the world and keep their people isolated, makes sense on several levels. In fact, the North Koreans do desperately need to preserve a psychological state of war with the outside world to justify the isolation of the population. Were the people to find out how the other half lives, well, take Andrei Lankov’s word for that. It looks like Richardson’s side of the debate has picked up a new (ex-North Korean?) adherent at the Daily NK:

The Kim Jong Il regime, which already lost its ability to self-reliance, is in a dilemma as to whether it keeps the three survival conditions or weakens the conditions through transaction with the outside community. To Kim Jong Il, relationship from outside is a double-edged sword. In order to breakthrough the deadlock, Kim developed a “˜cooling strategy.’ He cools down the external relationship, periodically, by launching missiles and developing nuclear weapons.

Expected effect of “˜cooling strategy’ includes;

1. The regime is able to gain more stable and safe benefit from cooling strategy than from normal relationship with the outside. Normal economic transaction with the international community would threaten the regime’s tight control over its people and weaken the isolationism.

2. The cooling strategy increases the level of tension and fear among the North Korean public. And therefore popular control becomes more effective. Kim Jong Il learned this from decades of his experience.

3. Kim Jong Il’s hawkish stance against the international community through “˜cooling strategy’ creates a defiant image of him, so firm control over North Korean military can be maintained.

I have some problems with this theory, too, however. First, it assumes that the North Koreans are intentionally cracking a walnut with a sledge hammer. Kim Jong Il is already in complete control of business and other exchanges with this country now. Witness the “Iron Ajumma” episode with Hyundai Asan if you doubt his ability to reduce his economic ties with the outside world without paying a diplomatic price. To control its interaction with the outside world, he need only announce that he is renegotiating the contracts on its own terms.

What of Kim’s profitable “legitimate” trade, such as the Kaesong Industrial Park, or Kumgang Mountain? Why would Kim jeopardize that? After the July missile tests, U.N. Resolution 1695 demanded that all states be “vigilant” about funds they send to the North, and how they’re spent. The benefits of these ventures may not be what we thought them to be, however. Our Treasury Department now says that cigarette counterfeiting is now North Korea’s largest source of forex. Nor are those ventures free of political cost, as I noted here:

In the end, however, the cultural isolation of Kaesong’s hand-picked workers will fail. The workers will eventually take note of the health and prosperity of their southern counterparts, and they will talk about it. And when the regime’s security forces find out, they will do what they did after learning that some members of the nation’s cheerleading squad talked about what they saw in Busan. Kaesong itself will not be immune to that reaction. That means that predictions of explosive growth at Kaesong will prove premature, and that Kaesong will be fortunate to remain what it is now: a small, carefully sealed cash cow for Kim Jong Il’s regime.

Kim could conclude that Kaseong creates more domestic political trouble than it’s worth to him financially. If its main purpose was really sudpolitik, the Uri Party’s abyssimal polling and its beating in recent elections could have convinced a rational actor that the political game was pretty much up, at least as it concerned electoral politics. That would suggest that Kim will shift toward subversion through radical labor and student groups.

The biggest problem I have with the theory is that Kim’s means of isolating himself are also causing the United States to get serious about cutting off Kim Jong Il’s foreign bank accounts, from which his largest sources of external funds come. It’s also reducing the incentive for nations hosting those accounts to resist the U.S. efforts to isolate him. The loss of those accounts threatens the funding that sustains the regime, and which comes from enterprises (lawful and otherwise) in which he has invested much time and money. Why jeopardize them, since they’re (1) profitable, (2) probably essential, and (3) no threat to the regime’s self-imposed isolation? The effect of losing those sources of income would be to increase North Korea’s dependence on China, which has never seemed more displeased with North Korea, to the point of reportedly reducing North Korea’s fuel supply. Doesn’t North Korea depend on Chinese fuel? Maybe not, if you put any credence on this report, or this one. Still, I doubt that Iran, Venezuela, and other arms clients would support Kim Jong Il if he lost both his Chinese patronage and his access to the global banking system.

The Scott Evil Theory

If rational explanations fail, we should look for irrational ones. Last month, James posted a piece called “Power Maddens, Absolute Power Maddens Absolutely?,” linking to a piece by Jay Homnick in The American Spectator. The executive summary is that perhaps we have overestimated Kim Jong Il’s propensity to act rationally. After all, we are talking about a man who Jasper Becker claims shot his barber over a bad haircut (a haircut that bad must be quite a sight). Jerrold Post, who profiled terrorists, dictators, and various narcissistic megalomaniacs, still finds Kim Jong Il to be an exceptional case:

“One of the most interesting questions about Kim Jong Il is: What does it mean to be the son of God?” says Jerrold Post, a George Washington University psychiatrist and a former psychological profiler for the CIA. “It’s hard enough to succeed a successful father, but it’s quite another thing if the father is elevated to a godlike stature.”

A gratuitous anecdote that I couldn’t resist adding:

In interviews, they were surprisingly kind to the Dear Leader. Sure, he drank too much, cheated on his wife and humiliated his underlings, they told reporters, but he was also smart, funny and hard-working — a man who would make a great Hollywood producer.

Choi told a story that made the Dear Leader seem almost charming: One day, he came for a visit and asked, “What do you think of my physique?”

She hesitated, pondering how to answer such a question when it comes from a short, dumpy dictator known to execute his enemies.

“Small as a midget’s turd, aren’t I?” he said, smiling.

One theme that emerges is a great desire for constant attention and adulation. One wonders how Kim Jong Il reacts to being despised, or ignored. It that woman had spoken the truth, there isn’t much question of how it would have ended for her. We speak here of a man who is capable glib charm, but lacks ordinary psychological restraint. It’s also very likely that Kim Jong Il has a ferocious temper, and that that temper is actually setting North Korea’s security policy. Dr. Post, who is after all a medical professional, has a diferent diagnosis. It follows a long discussion of Kim’s upbringing, one that redefines the word “dysfunctional:”

All this family drama and trauma could drive a man crazy. And Jerrold Post, the GWU professor and former CIA psychiatrist, believes that the Dear Leader has a serious mental illness.

“He has the core characteristics of the most dangerous personality disorder, malignant narcissism,” Post theorized in a recent psychological profile.

The disorder is characterized by self-absorption, an inability to empathize, a lack of conscience, paranoia and “unconstrained aggression.”

The Dear Leader, Post concluded, “will use whatever aggression is necessary, without qualm of conscience, be it to eliminate an individual or to strike out at a particular group.”

The Wikipedia entry on malignant narcissism suggests that we can expect more dangerously impulsive, irrational behavior:

Otto Kernberg described malignant narcissism as a syndrome characterized by a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial features, paranoid traits, and ego-syntonic aggression. Some also may find an[] abscence of conscience, a psychological need for power, and a sense of importance (grandiosity). Pollock wrote: “The malignant narcissist is presented as pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioral regulation with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism.”[1] Malignant narcissism is considered part of the spectrum of pathological narcissism, which ranges from the Cleckley’s antisocial character (the today’s psychopath) at the high end of severity, to malignant narcissism, to NPD at the low end.

Kernberg wrote that malignant narcissism can be differentiated from psychopathy because of the malignant narcissists’ capacity to internalize “both aggressive and idealized superego precursors, leading to the idealization of the aggressive, sadistic features of the pathological grandiose self of these patients.”[2] According to Kernberg, the psychopaths’ paranoid stance against external influences makes them unwilling to internalize even the values of the “aggressor”, while malignant narcissists “have the capacity to admire powerful people, and can depend on sadistic and powerful but reli[a]ble parental images.” Malignant narcissists, in contrast to psychopaths, are also said of being capable to develop “some identification with other powerful idealized figures as part of a cohesive “gang” … which permits at least some loyalty and good object relations to be internalized.”

Malignant narcissism is highlighted as a key area when it comes to the study of mass, sexual and serial murder.

Some, but not all, of the characteristics associated with the related diagnosis of “psychopathy” also seem consistent with what we know of Kim Jong Il, or are worth contrasting to the imperfect information we have. Here’s the actual test used by psychologists today, known as the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Values in brackets are mine.

This is a clinical rating scale with 20 items. Each of the items in the PCL-R is scored on a three-point (0, 1, 2) scale according to specific criteria through file information and a semi-structured interview. A value of 0 is assigned if the item does not apply, 1 if it applies somewhat, and 2 if it fully applies. The items are as follows:

Glibness/superficial charm [2]
Grandiose sense of self-worth [2]
Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom [?]
Pathological lying [1]
Cunning/manipulative [1]
Lack of remorse or guilt [2]
Shallow affect [?]
Callous/lack of empathy [2]
Parasitic lifestyle [2]
Poor behavioral controls [1, although it will be a "2" if he tests a nuke.]
Promiscuous sexual behavior [2]
Early behavioral problems [?]
Lack of realistic, long-term goals [an excellent question]
Impulsivity [2]
Irresponsibility [1]
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions [1]
Many short-term marital relationships [2]
Juvenile delinquency [?]
Revocation of conditional release [n/a]
Criminal versatility [2]
The items are then summed in order to obtain a total score. The cutoff for psychopathy is 30 points or greater (25 in some studies).

I put him at 23, just below the cutoff, but (1) I’m operating with incomplete information, and more importantly, (2) I’m a lawyer, not a psychologist. Although this is definitely not a delusional, wacky sort of madness, it’s scary stuff indeed for those who had believed Kim Jong Il incapable of any number of destructive acts that would also mean the end of his regime, and his life. Madness is a matter of degree, of course, but irrational men are not as easily deterred.

China’s Game in Korea: Choose Your Own Reality

August 26, 2006 China & Korea, NK Economics, WMD One comment

[Update: This new report says that the growth rate of Chinese-N. Korean trade fell last quarter, but there are varying explanations. During the first months of this year, however, South Korea's trade with the North also showed a modest rise, but a decrease in South Korean products (including aid) going North.]

As Richardson noted earlier, there has been much recent speculation about the state of Chinese-North Korean relations, particularly since China voted for weakened but potentially significant sanctions at the U.N. Now, ABC News reports that China is fiddling with the valve that controls North Korea’s oil supply.

China has reduced shipments of crude oil to North Korea, apparently in response to Pyongyang’s missile tests, a news report said Saturday.

China, the communist North’s closest ally and key provider of oil, also has agreed with South Korea to cooperate to prevent a possible North Korean nuclear test.

South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper said China has reduced “a significant amount” of its oil supplies to Pyongyang since the July 5 missile launches.

More here. Kyodo News adds more fuel to this (pun not intended), with a report that Kim Jong Il had some uncomplimentary words for his would-be masters to the North.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has criticized the North’s traditionally close allies China and Russia as unreliable and said Pyongyang must surmount the current difficulties it faces concerning its nuclear development program on its own, according to diplomatic sources.

Kim’s skepticism toward China and Russia was expressed at an ambassadorial meeting in Pyongyang, which took place July 18-22 soon after the July 15 unanimous passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the North’s test-firing of missiles, the sources told Kyodo News.

But this UPI story claims that China has made a strategic decision to “stay friends” with North Korea, something that doesn’t seem compatible with cutting off its fuel.

In a recent high-level discussion, Chinese officials decided to maintain friendly ties with North Korea and its leader Kim Jong Il.

President Hu Jintao was one of those at the central meeting on foreign affairs work, along with top Chinese diplomats, Kyodo News Service reported.

China is North Korea’s closest ally but officials were angered by the recent missile test, which was done over Chinese objections. On the other hand, China fears that problems in North Korea could lead to an influx of refugees.

Meanwhile, the planet’s single most intrepid reporter (for the Daily NK, of course) stows away in a truck, sneaks into a warehouse, and brings back pictures of the apparently undiminished trade between China and North Korea.

One description of these reports that would plausibly harmonize them would be to say that China is bringing Kim Jong Il to heel. I’m still pretty skeptical of China’s intentions, and haven’t ever seriously considered the idea that our interests in North Korea have merged with China’s. China may be seeking more obedient protectorates, not just in the North, but in the South, too. What’s more, I question the sources of the reports of friction between China and North Korea, which consist of a Chinese state employee and Kim Jong Il himself. Finally, the Chinese have a motive to fabricate the appearance of pressuring the North, something that the American government would certainly expect in the runup to a nuclear test. That’s still true even if I agree that China’s interests would be harmed by a North Korean nuclear test, as they were harmed by the missile tests in July.

If there is anything to the dissolution of the Chinese-North Korean alliance, it would be a delectable photonegative of the concurrent dissolution of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. To be sure, this paints a tempting picture for Korean nationalists in the short-term. In the longer term, it threatens to leave Korea, in the same weakened, vulnerable, and isolated state in which it found itself just over a century ago. Koreans would do well to remember whose army occupied Korea before Japan moved in. The more things change ….

Lefkowitz: N.Korean Refugees Welcome in America

August 26, 2006 "United" Nations, Activism, Human Rights, Refugees, U.S. & Korea, Washington Views No comments

North Korean refugee woman and baby, Bankgok, Thailand. The refugees risked arrest and repatriation to North Korean gulags -- or worse -- as they traveled thousands of miles along a modern-day underground railroad.Updates: This chatroom for English-speaking expats in Thailand has pictures of the refugees and pages of outraged, sympathic comments. One of them points to this BBC story. The Thai government’s reaction is to increase patrols on the Mekong to keep the refugees out.

Look at this baby’s face. Then try to comprehend what will happen to her if she is sent back to North Korea.

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====== (original post follows) ======

With somewhere around 175 North Korean refugees in a state of limbo in Thailand, the South Korean government is sending the right signals, yet no one is landing at Incheon Airport yet. President Roh and UniFiction Minister Lee Jong Seok must not be looking forward to more scenes like this, perhaps believing that they have some rational relationship to tensions with the North, but also because it would mean a reversal of former UniFiction Minister Chung Dong Young’s die-in-place / rot-in-hell policy. They seem to be debating whether to filter them in in small groups or load them onto one plane and be done with it.

One is entitled to suspect that they may hope for some other way out, but yesterday’s statement from Jay Lefkowitz, extending America’s welcome to Korea’s least-wanted citizens, has made that option unpalatable for Korea’s pride:

The United States will keep its door open for North Korean people wanting to flee oppression in their homeland and continue to serve as a “safe haven,” a U.S. government-funded broadcaster reported Saturday, quoting a senior U.S. diplomat in Washington.

“We are looking to help facilitate the passage of North Korean refugees into freedom. And to the extent that North Korean refugees would like to come to the United States, that is something that we want to make available,” Jay Lefkowitz, Washington’s special envoy for North Korean human rights, told Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Read more

Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 5

August 23, 2006 Appeasement, Counterfeiting, Drugs & N Korea, NK Economics 7 comments

Stuart Levey’s visit to Asia last month is paying off. Yet another nation is cutting off Kim Jong Il’s finances.

Vietnamese banks have already closed down North Korean accounts over the past few weeks, most likely forcing Pyongyang to move its money to its last remaining haven, Russia, said Peter Beck, head of the International Crisis Group’s Seoul office, on Tuesday.

Beck said Nigel Cowie, general manager of North Korea’s Daedong Credit Bank in Pyongyang, e-mailed him last week and said Vietnamese banks have shut down Daedong’s and other North Korea-held accounts.

[....]

“The only financial window they (North Koreans) have left now is Russia, I am told,” Beck said at a roundtable on North Korea hosted by the Mansfield Foundation.

Somewhere, the world’s smallest violin is playing an adagio for Nigel Cowie, although I still count Switzerland and Luxemburg as two countries that may yet harbor North Korean accounts. I also recommend Andy Jackson’s post here, which discusses North Korea’s most “legitimate” banker. Cowie and his constituency of defenders in the comments probably set a record for most uses of the word “legitimate” per column inch, which I suppose depends on how you define the term. Whether Cowie is laundering money, wittingly or otherwise, is a matter I’ll leave to the Treasury Department, since there’s really little point in speculating in a factual vacuum about an investigation I can only assume to be ongoing, based on the media reports. You may also choose to accept Cowie’s explanation of why his bank’s “legitimate” transactions are conducted with large bundles of cash.

Third, there are good reasons why much of the international trade of the DPRK for these sorts of goods is cash-based. This relates mainly to the fact that the local currency is not convertible (and indeed we do not handle local currency), so imported goods are bought and sold for hard currency. The absence of the normal system of reciprocal correspondent bank accounts that exists in other countries which enables transactions to be settled by electronic book entry; the shortage of liquidity in the local market, which means that people are reluctant to deposit money in banks because they don’t know when they’ll be able to get the money out, so they would rather carry cash – and so on. This is quite a big subject in itself, and I have done a separate paper on this issue, but the bottom line is that people do tend to transact largely in cash, which in itself is not illegal – in this market, it is in fact often the only way.

Most of this could just as well apply to the Taliban in 2000. What all those conditions have in common is that they’re self-inflicted by the North Korean regime itself, out of a combination of economic dysfunction, repressive statism, recalcitrant lawlessness, and no small measure of concealment. But let’s make Nigel Cowie the only man in North Korea entitled to a presumption of innocence and assume that his bank’s transactions are all lawful. He has chosen to set up shop among stacks of dope money, suspicious dual-use imports, and counterfeit Benjamins. Then, Cowie complains when he winds up in Treasury’s impact zone as a result. In a regime as intentionally opaque as North Korea’s, some “collateral damage” to a relative sliver (veneer? perish the very thought!) of “legitimate” activities is inevitable. Things seems particularly murky in the wake of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1695, which demands that North Korea’s financiers exercise “vigilance” in assuring that their funds don’t go to the missile fund.

What we do know about Mr. Cowie’s business is that he aspires to profit by financing this regime, and that he knows damned well how Kim Jong Il will spend those finances. And won’t. If this is legitimate, then the world owes Walther Funk a historical absolution. Or, as Stuart Levey puts it:

“You don’t want to be the one ten years from now who’s got (Korean leader) Kim Jong Il’s money,” Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey said in an interview with Reuters.

“(It’s) just like we saw during the (former U.S. President Bill) Clinton administration when they exposed the Nazi banks,” Levey said. Swiss banks were embarrassed in 1997 by revelations that the German government had passed funds through the Swiss National Bank and other Swiss banks during World War II to finance the Nazi war effort.

“You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that. I think banks understand that. I just don’t know whether they are taking all the steps that they can and we would encourage them to do it,” he said.

There’s no laundering the culpability that goes with enabling some things.

An Open Letter to Ambassador Lee Tae-Shik on the 169 Refugees Held in Thailand

August 23, 2006 "United" Nations, Activism, Famine & Food Aid, Human Rights, Refugees 4 comments

Click for caption and source.[Update: Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon is promising to take "appropriate measures," which is encouraging in a vague sort of way. Foreign diplomats also sound optimistic. I infer that this was an underground railroad operation, and get the distinct idea that it was betrayed from within, as I also suspect in the case of a previous operation in Laos. Note also that various reports count as many as 179 refugees, most of them women and kids.

Separately, Yonhap reports a big spike in defections from the North this year. With the food situation worsening, expect that to continue.]

By separate mail, I invited Ambassador Lee to respond, promising to print his complete response, unedited. Keep watching for updates.

Your Excellency,

According to a new report, 169 North Koreans — who are citizens of your country under Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic of Korea Constitution — are under arrest in Thailand. Unless your country accepts them, they may be sent back to North Korea. If they are sent back, they will be sent to concentration camps or shot.

I ask because in the past, your government has expressed a policy of not accepting large numbers of North Korean refugees. I specifically refer you to an interview by ex-Unification Minister Chung Dong Young in OhMyNews, which I link with comment here. I quote:

[T]he government clearly opposes organized defections. For the people in the North to live their lives in the North with their families is necessary both for individuals and for co-existence and co-prosperity. The policies of reconciliation and cooperation call for humanitarian aid to the North along with strengthening of economic cooperation, and continuous pursuit of North Korea’s participation in the international community. . . . With this in mind, it is not desirable for anyone to organize defections, intentionally bringing people out of North Korea. In particular, this runs counter to the government’s policy of co-existence and co-prosperity. . . . [Incidents like last summer's mass airlift of defectors] have been unfortunate from the point of the total interests of the Korean people.

Is your government aware of this situation? Will it allow these Korean citizens, including dozens of women and children, to be sent back to their deaths in North Korea? Do you believe that you could defend this under your country’s Constitution, or under the U.N. Convention on Refugees?

The Korean Embassy’s Web form, which didn’t work for me, is here. The Thai Embassy is here. You may want to remind them that the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea is one of their country’s most distinguished legal scholars, Vitit Muntarbhorn. Dr. Muntarbhorn calls North Koreans hiding in third countries “refugees sur place,” meaning that the 1951 Convention forbids sending them back to North Korea.

It will be interesting to see how much attention the lives of 169 innocent people fleeing persecution get from the Human Rights Industry.

Maybe They Should Get Out of Iraq…

August 22, 2006 Islam, Terrorism (NK), Terrorism/Iraq 5 comments

A LEBANESE student suspected of trying to paralyse the German railway network with a bomb concealed in a suitcase appeared in court yesterday, as a huge police hunt for a second suspect continued.

The root cause of this is clearly that unequivocal German support for Israel, and for Bu$h’s war, which of course started this whole terrorism thing:

[T]he case has rattled Germans, many of whom have clung to the belief that their government’s opposition to the war in Iraq would insulate them from attacks like those in London or Madrid.

Why (sniff) do they hate us? I suspect that most Americans, at least, are well beyond asking, or caring.

NK Freedom Watch, No. 5

August 22, 2006 Activism, Europe, Human Rights, Washington Views 6 comments

public execution in North KoreaCourtesy of Freedom House (with a hat tip to the staff there), here. Portions of this issue read like an indictment, which mainly makes it painfully obvious how far away we are from seeing a real one.

The same methods of execution are applied to political criminals and economic criminals. When the death warrant is issued for a criminal, he is immediately cut off from all food supplies and his arms and legs are broken at the joints so that he may not take any desperate actions. He is then beaten with a club for a whole week until his body becomes inert like a living mummy. On the eve of the execution, the death-row convict is gagged with a bit or coiled spring so that he may not speak. Different prisons use different gagging methods; but the majority use bits. The convicts usually do not open their mouth, so the bit is forcibly pushed into the mouth, breaking the teeth and badly smashing the lips.

The recent conference in Rome produced a few statements from various Eurocrats, although the response from the main conglomerates of the Human Rights Industry clearly aren’t going beyond token gestures as North Koreans suffer and die by the millions. If just one of them could only land himself a cell in Gitmo, not only might he regain some body mass, even Kofi Annan might finally pay him some attention. In these times, gulag garb just doesn’t catch a sympathetic eye. Today, all the fashionable victims are wearing RDX and roofing nails.

Ministry of Perfect Timing

August 21, 2006 Appeasement, The Fifth Column, WTF? One comment

Seoul Condoles [?] N.Korea on Death of Spymaster– Chosun Ilbo, August 21, 2006

Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok on Monday expressed his condolences to his North Korean counterpart Kwon Ho-ung on the death of Rim Dong-ok, the vice chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland[....] The North Korea committee happens to have another job in planning anti-South Korean operations like dispatching spies, in cooperation with the 35th office of the Workers’ Party.

Chameleon N.Korean Spy Nabbed in Seoul
– Same paper, same day.

Prosecutors say they found Jeong is a spy under the 35th office of the North’s Workers’ Party and took pictures of nuclear power plants in Uljin, air force radar stations in Cheonan, the USFK base in Yongsan, Seoul and the Ministry of Defense in Seoul. Jeong also unsuccessfully tried to photograph Cheong Wa Dae twice in March 1996. He started his operations in Southeast Asia in July 1993 and changed his identities four times, from Bangladeshi to Thai, Chinese and Filipino.

Kaesong Update

August 21, 2006 Appeasement, NK Economics, U.S. & Korea, Washington Views One comment

[Correction: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A reader (thanks!) notes that Ms. Schwab is the U.S. Trade Representative. As it happens, the USTR has been independent from the State Department since 1962! My apologies to the State Department for the unintended defamation.]

This may be the most unequivocal thing I’ve ever heard anyone in our State Department say, ever. And it pertains to including (North Korean) Kaesong products in a possible FTA with South Korea:

The United States cannot agree to South Korea’s request for a free trade pact between the two countries to include goods made in an industrial park in North Korea, the top U.S. trade official said on Friday.

“It won’t happen, can’t happen,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said in an interview taped for C-Span television’s “The Newsmakers” that was set to air on Sunday. “That won’t change.”

Any questions?

Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 4: Smoke ‘em While You’ve Got ‘em.

August 19, 2006 Axis of Evil, Counterfeiting, Drugs & N Korea, Japan, NK Economics, Washington Views 6 comments

Several months ago, some misguided BBC staffer asked me to fight above my weight and debate former Ambassador Donald Gregg about the allegation that British American Tobacco was secretly making cigarettes in North Korea. (The debate was for a pilot program and never aired.) At the time, I argued that the decision to grow or import tobacco should also be viewed as a decision not to grow or import food. Amb. Gregg, now president of the Korea Society, is a strong proponent of “engaging” North Korea. His argument was that smoking is bad. I saw that argument as having marginal moral relevance, a dodge of the question of whether this kind of engagement was really good for North Korea or the world. Amb. Gregg also touted his Society’s exchange programs with North Korea. On further investigating their Web site, I learned that the Korea Society’s contribution to North Korea opening itself to legitimate commerce consisted, in part, of teaching the North Koreans digital watermarking (useful for counterfeiting intellectual property) and secure fax technology. I’d love to show you, but that page later disappeared from the Korea Society site.

[Update: Here is a link to the paper, entitled "Bilateral Research Collaboration Between Kim Chaek University of Technology (DPRK) and Syracuse University (US) in the Area of Integrated Information Technology." Among the signatories on the front cover are "Donald P. Gregg and Frederick F. Carriere, The Korea Society, Han Song Ryol and An Song Nam, Permanent Mission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea." Ah, Han Song Ryol. Remember him? Here is the relevant passage, which appears on Page 3:

At the invitation of KUT, SU sent a delegation to Pyongyang in mid-June 2002. During this time, SU researchers met again with their KUT counterparts and were given tours of research labs and facilities and provided an overview of KUT research priorities in information technology. Areas of particular interest included a secure fax program (this is now being marketed through a Japanese company), machine translation programs, digital copyright and watermarking programs, and graphics communication via personal digital assistants.

I don't claim to know what technology was actually transferred, nor do I claim to be an expert on digital copyright or watermarking programs, beyond having found that it's designed to protect intellectual property. If you can fill us all in on the legitimate and other uses of this technology, please drop us a comment. Thanks much to The Oriental Redneck and his wayback machine.]

One of the reasons BAT kept that business relationship secret was the effect it had on one of BAT’s executives, who was running for the leadership of Britain’s Conservative Party. Another was the likely fear of litigation by BAT’s competitors, who might want to know where the North Koreans acquired the specialized knowledge to make so much money by counterfeiting their top-selling brands:

North Korea is believed to earn between US$500 million and $700 million a year by making and selling fake U.S. and Japanese cigarettes, a U.S. radio station reported Wednesday, quoting a former U.S. official.

“Counterfeit tobaccos are one of the largest, probably the largest single source of income for the North Korean regime,” David Asher said in an interview with the Washington-based Radio Free Asia.

Asher, who until July 2005 had served under former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs James Kelly, said the North’s communist regime operates as many as 10 plants to make fake U.S. and Japanese cigarettes.

Those plants are scattered throughout North Korea, including its capital, Pyongyang, and its eastern industrial zone, Rajin, he said.

The counterfeit cigarettes, Asher said, are usually packed and sent in containers to China and then to other Asian countries for sale.

The largest source of income? Staggering.

It would be interesting to see which tobacco companies would try to sue the North Koreans for counterfeiting their brands. Since the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act wouldn’t seem to offer much protection for their commercial activities, the next question is whether they’d even make an appearance to contest the suit. My bet is that they wouldn’t, meaning that we’re looking at a potential default judgment and the attachment of their assets, wherever they can be found. This presumes, of course, that the tobacco companies can get the evidence to meet the “preponderance” standard, and that the North Korean pocket is in fact deep enough to justify litigation. The frozen North Korean assets identified by the U.S. Treasury Department should be sufficient to pay the lawyers. And although I’d prefer to see that money go for North Korea’s reconstruction, a new RJR Headquarters is probably still a better use than propagating Kim Jong Il’s racketeering tyranny.

This revelation also fuels my suggestion that we lower the PATRIOT 311 boom on them, in addition to whatever other sanctions Rep. Dana Rohrabacher thinks we’re about to impose.

“We are going to discuss with the regional leaders here and determine what is appropriate (as a sanction) but we’ll make sure that North Korea realizes that if they do launch missiles (again) they will be shot down by the U.S.,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher told Yonhap News Agency in an interview.

The Republican from California declined to disclose the nature of the new sanctions being considered by the U.S. government but said there will be in addition to financial sanctions clamped down on the communist country last year.

With so much of the wrong kind of attention focused on North Korea’s cigarette counterfeiting, don’t expect it to go on long. After all, the Japanese are reporting that they’ve shut down most of North Korea’s ampetamine racket there.

(Kyodo) _ The amount of illegal amphetamines seized by Japanese police in the first half of this year marked an 85.6-percent year-on-year decrease to a record-low 13.1 kilograms as the police have targeted key trafficking routes from North Korea, the National Police Agency said Thursday.

In particular, a crackdown on sea routes contributed to the decrease, with NPA officials saying the amount of amphetamines seized during the period was the smallest since 1991, when they began keeping half-year tallies.

The police plan to use sting operations to stop drug couriers flying to Japan with amphetamines hidden in their luggage, the officials said.

According to the NPA’s survey, 6,319 people were arrested or sent papers during the period on suspicion of being involved in stimulant drug cases, down 1.6 percent from a year earlier. Of the total, 54 percent, or 3,413, up 3.1 percent, were gangsters or those close to crime syndicates in Japan, it indicated.

The survey also showed fewer people in their 20s or younger were involved in illegal drug cases in the January-June period, but the number involving people of all other ages increased.

Due to the supply shortage, the black-market price of amphetamines has risen to about 60,000-65,000 yen per gram, the officials said.

How serious is the United States about stopping North Korean counterfeiting? This serious:

The White House accused North Korea on Thursday of counterfeiting dollars to support terrorism and said the United States would continue to try to stem such illicit activity as well as Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

Well, it would be nice if Mr. Snow would give us some details of his allegation, and if Reuters would report them. Surely this can’t be it:

“The North Koreans have walked away because they are doing money laundering to finance global terror. We don’t want them to have money to finance global terror, sorry, period,” Snow said.

“We don’t think it’s in our interest to allow them to be selling weapons that could be used to destroy innocent human lives,” he said.

That’s it? Well, I don’t think it’s accurate to say “finance global terror” is the same thing as “support terrorism” without more details that this report doesn’t contain. Conventional weapons like the Taepodong II, after all, can create a state of “global terror,” particularly given who North Korea’s customers are. The North Korean connection to the Hezbollah and the Bekaa Valley goes way, way back, of course. I’d like more details. And of course, Snow was talking about dollars, not Marlboros, but if the issue is what North Korea buys with its ill-gotten gains, it’s really a distinction without a difference.

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