I will have to miss the “Failure to Protect” panel today (see NK Freedom Week schedule, below). If you can be there, I’d like to post your observations, anonymously or otherwise. Regular readers, commenters, and fellow bloggers are especially welcomed.
[Update:Â video of the event and full text of the speech below]Â
So I went to this yesterday, thanks to the kind invitation of the organizers, and left with the usual sense of guilt I feel every time I meet Jay Lefkowitz. Lefkowitz has acquired an understandable “Oh sh*t, not that guy again” expression whenever he sees me. If I were him, so would I. Even when I’ve been critical of him, I’ve said that Lefkowitz is sincere, highly intelligent, and well informed on the issues. Unfortunately, he’s also become a complete non-entity in the Bush Administration’s North Korea policy. The best evidence for that is the almost complete absence of Korean media when he speaks these days. They know the game; they’re following Chris Hill instead.
(They occasionally pause to misquote him, so this time, he stated very clearly that countries should not import products from Kaesong. Good.)
My fear is that Lefkowitz’s sincerity and good intentions may actually be harming this cause by mollifying its proponents, who ought to be feeling the outrage of betrayal. For example, Lefkowitz suggested that North Korea wouldn’t be removed from the terror list until it accounted for international abductees (later he backed off of this).  He also said that there would be no full normalization of relations without significant human rights improvements, but admitted that North Korea isn’t even willing to discuss the issue in the “normalization” working group, and implicitly conceded that neither he nor his office have a seat at the table. Instead of proposing bold initiatives, he spoke of gradual process without specifics or benchmarks. He’s neither a commanding presence nor a dynamic speaker, but he’s a gifted polemicist, and you can see how much his knowledge of the subject matter has sharpened in a short time.  He articulates lofty principles as if he believes them, because he really does.  But this sincerity can mislead people into thinking that it bears some relation to actual policy.
After the speech, he took questions. I asked the first one, which came very close to this: Read more
[Update: Link fixed; sorry!] My good friend Adrian Hong of LiNK fame has ended the debate on the anti-Korean backlash (that never was) with this piece in the Washington Post. Â
Korean Americans do not need to apologize for what happened Monday. All of us, as fellow Americans, feel tremendous sorrow and grief at the carnage. Our community, as it should, has expressed solidarity with and sent condolences to the victims, and as Americans, Koreans certainly should take part in the healing process.
But the actions of Cho Seung Hui are no more the fault of Korean Americans than the actions of the Washington area snipers were the fault of African Americans. Just as those crimes were committed by deranged individuals acting on their own initiative, and not because of any ethnic grievance or agenda, these were isolated acts by an individual, not a reflection of a community.
I would add that even a crime based on an ethnic or religious grievance only reflects on a larger group to the extent that the criminal’s views reflect the larger group’s views. Now, my favorite part:
Further, it is inappropriate for the Korean ambassador to the United States to apologize on behalf of Korean Americans and speak of the need to work toward being accepted as a “worthwhile minority” in this nation. While the Korean ambassador represents the interests of Korean nationals in the United States, and the interests of the Republic of Korea, he does not speak for naturalized Koreans here.
Absolutely. Adrian deserves kudos for dethroning Ambassador Lee from his imagined dominion over everyone of Korean ethnicity within our borders. I once met Lee briefly — though not enough to make much of an impression — but just about everything Lee has said this week has succeeded mightily at pissing me off, from his public expressions of concern that Americans would react with discrimination and violence, to this. For a guy whose job is to represent his country favorably, Lee Tae Shik could use a semester of remedial charm school.
The Korean claim to guilt and shame on behalf of Cho Seung Hui is well-intentioned but misguided. We are Americans first. While we share an affinity with Korea and appreciate and respect Korean culture, at the end of the day we are Americans. Our president is in the White House, not in the Blue House. And our response to this crisis should be as Americans, not as Koreans.
Read the rest on your own.
Finally, here’s an opposing view. The writing style of the commenter called “Wolmae” is as distinct as a fingerprint. There is only one person I know who writes like this. I won’t tell you who he is, but I will say he’s someone I respect very much, and whose views generally align closely with my own.  He doesn’t happen to agree with me this time, although I think the passage of time is proving — thankfully — that there isn’t much of a foundation for his fears. Just the same, don’t miss it.
*Â Cho Myong Rok, who is probably the second or third-most important North Korean official, is reported to be dying. Cho is the one Kim Jong Il designated to visit Washington and meet with President Clinton years ago.
Doctors expect the 79-year-old vice marshal to live another month or two, as he already had one of his kidneys removed 10 years ago, and has gone through treatment for cancer in his intestines, the organization said.
Here’s a brief Global Security profile. The report comes soon after word of the replacement of Premier Pak Pong Ju, another of the top echelon. One can hope that so many personnel changes at the top will start a new round of purging and backstabbing that will further sap the regime’s cohesion. He’ll be with Saddam soon enough.
* Projection, Perhaps? I wonder why a major South Korean paper would run with a piece of baseless and sensationlist garbage that stops just short of predicting an anti-Korean progrom in surburban Virginia because of the Virginia Tech murders. I see absolutely no sign of this here, and I question the judgment of people pulling their kids out of school or secluding themselves in their apartments.  Could it be because they understand the temptation to project blame on entire nationalities just a little too well? In any event, the fears appear to be unsupported (and to me, deeply insulting).
*Â I’m not sure how meaningfully, but 31 nations have now taken at least some domestic measures to implement UNSCR 1718, which limits North Korea’s trade in WMD components, weapons, and luxury goods.
* One Man’s Story. I’m always interested in stories about how ordinary North Koreans live through hunger, and how they come to the decision to reject their government and leave.
At that time, the greatest obstacle to our play was hunger. When you run around and play, you need food to regain your energy. There were even times we had no strength to sit up and play. Rather we lay, slumped. During those times, we sat around day-dreaming. We would play truth or dare and pretend to smoke with cigarette butts we had secretly collected and talked nonsense while lamenting over our lives. [Daily NK]
It’s sad to think of kids having to grow up like this; at the same time, their resilience and the loyalty of their friendships strikes you.
Human Rights Watch, one of the industry bigs that (until now) had been mostly absent from the discussion of human rights in North Korea, has made an important entry into that discussion, via this Washington Post op-ed by Kay Sok. Ms. Sok makes several important points here, and the first of these is how North Korea’s version of socialism is a recipe for selective deprivation as a weapon of class warfare:
Many of these North Koreans crossed the border because the state failed them. North Korea claims to have a socialist system under which all citizens receive free food, education, medical care and housing. But the reality is that only the country’s elite enjoy such privileges. The rest of the population is left to fend for itself. Undertaking the dangerous and difficult journey to China is a form of self-defense. The North Korean government fails to feed its people but then persecutes them for trying to survive.
The second point is what a bunch of sick, heartless fascist thugs the Chinese police are:
A 59-year-old North Korean woman told us about her deportation from China and punishment in North Korea. Her crime? She had left without state permission, which is considered an act of treason. “I went to China because I had no food at home. But I had to live in hiding there, so I tried to go to South Korea,” she said. “I was caught. The Chinese police took all the money I saved. They beat and kicked me.
Finally, Ms. Sok tells us that the North Korean regime has intensified the brutality of those whom China repatriates to the North:
When I was sent back to North Korea, things got even worse. They made me strip, and a doctor searched my vagina to see if I hid any money they could confiscate. They treated me like an animal, because they considered me a traitor.” After serving a prison sentence, she escaped to China again in September.
A 42-year-old woman from Haeju said she was deported from China in December 2003 and served 18 months in a North Korean labor camp. “Every day, I saw someone dying. We were given a fistful of powdered corn stalk, three times a day, and people had trouble digesting it. Many people died after having diarrhea for a week,” she said. “They left patients in the hallway outside toilets. So many people died, they wrapped bodies in plastic sheets and buried them in a mountain.”
Often in the past, North Korea had been relatively lenient to some of its nationals who were sent back: traders, those who had crossed just to get food, and those who had no contact with South Koreans, Westerners, Japanese, or missionaries (those who had contact with those latter groups were generally as good as dead, either quickly or slowly). That deplorable situation is changing for the worse as North Korea tries to restore control over the border, a matter of survival for Kim Jong Il’s rule.
Update:Â Or maybe just wishful South Korean thinking?
Contrary to published reports, the United States has seen no signs that North Korea has begun to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear facility as called for in a February 13 six-country agreement, a senior U.S, official said on Tuesday.
News reports in South Korean media are “just not accurate … We have seen no actions on the North Koreans’ part that at this point leads us to believe they are fulfilling their part of the 60-day actions,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official also said there was no indication the North had yet collected $25 million in accounts from a Macau bank that had been frozen as a result of U.S. action and then released as a way to persuade Pyongyang to return to negotiations over its nuclear program.
“We’re puzzled,” the official told Reuters.
Me, too, for reasons I explain below. North Korea has so little to lose and so much valuable time and money to gain by doing this. I guess we’ll see. Read more
Police identified the classroom shooter as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a senior from South Korea who was in the English department and lived in another dorm on campus. They said Cho committed suicide after the attacks, and there was no indication Tuesday of a possible motive. [AP]
Police also report, however, that Cho left behind a “disturbing” note that may give us some idea what kind of ideas took root inside this young man’s fevered mind. I’ll post more when I know more.
And yes, he was described as “a loner.” Â Read more
I suspect that relatively few members or staffers had time to read the long-winded written statement I submitted to the record with my September 27, 2006 congressional testimony. Starting on page Page 79, I described the many procedural and institutional reasons why American soldiers do not receive fair trials in Korean courts. I drew heavily on stories that GI Korea and USinKorea had originally linked in preparing it, along with the assistance of a good friend I asked to fact-check some of my assertions, in case they might have grown stale with time.
Marmot’s Hole guest-blogger and lawyer Brendan Carr, speaking to a reporter for the Stars and Stripes, now offers an invaluable contribution to this discussion. Brendan’s criticism of Korean society and its attitude toward the importance of truthfulness in a courtroom is blunt. At its root, the study of modern culture is a collection of generalizations about how humans in a particular society tend to behave differently from humans in other societies. Read more
Somewhere, Kafka’s spirit is smiling.  A South Korean court and has handed down guilty verdicts to five members of the Il Shim Hue spy ring individuals who had coincidentally all possessed similar loyalty oaths to the Lodestar of the Great Korean Race and received their pay and instructions at a safe house at 3089 Dongxuhuayuan, 18 Shuangqiaodong-lu, Zahoyang-qu, on the outskirts of Beijing.
Bailiff!  Read the verdict!
A Seoul court convicted five people, including a Korean-American businessman, of spying for North Korea, but acquitted them of charges of forming a spying ring, saying the group was too loosely organized to be called a formal organization….
“The court acknowledges that Jang recruited the four accused and formed individual relationships with each of them,” said Judge Kim Dong-o, who presided over the trial. “But, it is hard to identify their group as an anti-state organization under the National Security Law because such an organization should have a certain hierarchy and system.  [Ser Myo-Ja, Joongang Ilbo]
Alrighty then. I respectfully ask to read back the transcript of the defendant’s indictment, at which Your Honor presided:
Jang Min-ho (44), who was apprehended on charges of creating the pro-North group “Ilsimhoe,” admitted in court that he created the organization and contacted North Korean officials.
In the second round of the first hearings conducted by the 25th criminal division of the Seoul Central District Court (presided by Judge Kim Dong-o) on December 28, Jang said, “After creating a private unification project group in January 2002, it is true that we used the name Ilsimhoe for convenient reasons.
They called it a “Valentine’s Club” when communicating with their handlers in North Korea, you know.
On contact with North Korean agents, he said, “I didn’t know they were part of the espionage, but I have met North Korean officials. [Donga Ilbo, 29 Dec 2006]
And these days, what ordinary North Korean citizen isn’t reading dossiers on South Korean politicians and notes of the internal deliberations of South Korean political parties? Most likely, these guys were looking for juicy gossip for their blogs.
The irony of this result is that if the Il Shim Hue case had a weakness, it wasn’t the question of the organization of this conspiracy so much as the confidentiality of the information they sent to North Korea. The subversion case always seemed stronger han the espionage case. Il Shim Hue was a full-service fifth column cell. It was at least one of North Korea’s chosen tools for fanning the hatred of America in South Korea, for plotting both large and small-scale political violence, for trying to manipulate at least one very significant election, and for gaining a high degree of influence over one minor opposition party. There’s little question that it was an active, well-organized cell whose lines of control came from Pyongyang, through Jang, by far the best paid member, down to the other members. The information passed back to Pyongyang seems to have been a fairly minor part of their activities. But for whatever reason, the court and the prosecution took a different path.
Even so, the defendants got hard time by Korean standards, although probably not enough to induce cooperation for a promise of leniency or parole:
Jang Min-ho, 45, also known as Michael Jang, received a nine-year prison term from the Seoul Central District Court and a 19 million won ($20,391) fine. He took orders from a North Korean agent in China, and provided confidential information about South Korea. Jang was also convicted of possessing anti-state propaganda materials.
Four others were also convicted of cooperating with Jang and spying for North Korea. Lee Jeong-hun, 44, a member of the Democratic Labor Party’s Seoul chapter, and Son Jeong-mok, 43, who runs a cram school teaching students how to write essays, each received six years in prison. The court handed down a five-year prison sentence to Lee Jin-gang, 44, an office worker, and four years to Choi Gi-yeong, 40, former vice secretary general of the Democratic Labor Party. [Joongang Ilbo, previous link]
Expect their sentences to be commuted by December, and for this investigation to stop dead in its tracks. Shortly after this spy ring group of individuals who acted alone was discovered, at the moment when the investigation threatened to reach the Blue House itself, the Roh Administration hastily replaced the head of the National Intelligence Service with a loyal party hack. Jang, as you may recall, was an American and a former American soldier who was stationed at Yongsan. Later, his wife even got a job there, as a Lieutenant Colonel’s secretary. Jang would be well advised to get himself an American lawyer, because he may well be subject to the personal jurisdiction of the feds.
Prosecutors said Jang created the Ilsimhoe spy ring in 2002.
Jang moved to the United States in 1982 and was introduced to the North’s ideology through a Korean-American friend there, prosecutors said.
The prosecution has said Jang visited the North in 1989 via Europe and was trained there for one week. In 1998, Jang met a North Korean agent in Beijing, China, and was ordered to create a spying organization. He then recruited the four other members, prosecutors said.
So who is appealing this odd result? Absolutely everyone!Â
Update: Speaking of sleeper agents ….
*  My latest K-blog discovery is “Six Happy Feet,” a superb photoblog with a great name. You’ll want to put this one on your blogrolls. It’s hard to read it without concluding that this is just a genuinely nice family.
* A Nation’s Conscience. Some South Koreans are demanding freedom for those North Korean refugees in Laos — the ones the South Korean government refused to help.
* Heal Thyself, Part 1. I can understand why the Chosun Ilbo might have its own tribal reasons for making Japan’s leaders sound like the greatest threat to world peace since Brecht and Weil fled the Berlin theater district one step ahead of the Gestapo. Still, you have to wonder how many South Koreans realize that Japan’s rearmament is the direct result of their own government helping North Korea become the bull in this Noritake shop. Outside of the alternative universe that is Korea’s perception of Japan, history will attribute the coming East Asian arms race to Roh Moo Hyun, who couldn’t even manage a sustained reduction in his largesse to Kim Jong Il after the latter tested missiles and a nuke.  Not yet, anyway ….
* Heal Thyself, Part 2. We’ve already heard some make the spurious accusation that the FTA would “brainwash” South Koreans with American movies. Now, a legislator — from the supposedly pro-U.S. GNP, no less – sees an evil Yankee plot to control the Internet:
An opposition lawmaker on Monday warned that the free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States will greatly limit the Internet use of South Koreans due to excessive protection of the intellectual property rights of online contents.
“The U.S. is the information provider for 40 percent of the contents worldwide, while South Korea is rather an information demander,” said Rep. Kim Young-sun of the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP) during a plenary session of the parliamentary committee for science and technology policy. [Yonhap]
If you want to understand the greatest threat to Korea’s Internet freedom, just ask Gerry Bevers, or the boys in the Ministry of Information and Communications.
*  Plan B? If, as seems likely, North Korea fails to comply with its part of Agreed Framework 2.0, what consequences will it face? Few. South Korea is now saying it will halt a shipment of rice it had promised the North. Ordinarily, I would oppose linking humanitarian aid to the actions of the North Korean regime, but we have a pretty good idea that South Korea’s rice aid isn’t going to those in greatest need. More interestingly, South Korea has cancelled a contract for 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, which was to be delivered as a “coordinated” step with the North’s shutdown of Yongbyon.
* Extension Granted. Chris Hill says,
China has asked us to be patient for three or four days, that seems like a wise thing to do. [Chosun Ilbo]
It pains me to agree, but I do. We shouldn’t have let the BDA issue into the intial phase of this new Agreed Framework, but we did, and between us and the Chinese, we bungled it mightily. Giving the North a few more days removes BDA as an excuse for noncompliance. I find much less to agree with in this statement:
It’s not for the U.S. to take unilateral actions…. We need to work closely, multilaterally with our partners.
Yada yada. I’ll let Korea University Professor Yoo Ho-Yeol respond to that one for me. Money quote:
if the countries involved run about like headless chickens in the initial stage, the process of actually dismantling the North’s nuclear weapons will take even longer. Seoul and Washington both face presidential elections. They should learn their lesson from the failure to meet the initial deadline and tackle the North Korean nuclear crisis from a position that transcends domestic politics.
* In other news, the Russian partner is blaming America for all of this.
* Is Compliance Too Much to Ask? Recently, Kathreb argued that no one should be in any big rush to meet the denuclearization deadlines of Agreed Framework 2.O, and that perhaps the 60-day deadline the North Koreans agreed to was really too short.  (Tong Kim, probably knowing more about the technical aspects than me, says otherwise.) Kathreb’s site is beautifully designed and well written. That said, I disagree with almost everything Kathreb writes, I commented in opposition to that argument, and Kathreb has since responded:
However, when I argue that 60 days is too short a time, I do not refer to the matter of flicking a switch. I am referring to the process of ‘negotiation – agreement – implementation’. I also factor in time to counter and respond to the delaying tactics of the DPRK. I feel that it would be remiss not to do so because I think we can find no (or few) examples of when the DPRK has proceeded from negotiation to agreement to implementation in a prompt manner and in the spirit of good will. I said one year only as a ball park figure and would happily take counter responses that another time period, longer than 60 days, would be enough time.
With regard to lowering our expectations at the cost of the very significance of the deal, I agree with you in part. Having to adjust and lower expectations does undermine the significance of the initial deal made. But I would argue that perhaps our expectations should not have been so high in the first instance. Having low expectations that are meet might be preferable than having to lower expectations. Having to lower expectations, especially publicly, has the added negative aspect of making the US look weak and/or a patsy to the DPRK’s demands.
So are we now obliged to concede that all of the explicit terms of our agreements with North Korea are amorphous, meaningless, and negotiable? Does the United States also get the benefit of this rule? Agreements on issues the reach the heart of nations’ national security interests are meant to prevent war by giving each party a reasonable degree of security about the other’s capabilities and intentions. If this agreement doesn’t accomplish that purpose but helps to perpetuate the threat that Kim Jong Il poses, what exactly have we gained? How does it serve the purpose of securing the peace?
I suspect that more than a few of you will also disagree with Kathreb, who is invariably polite and respectful when disagreeing with me (I like to have some dissent around here – especially that kind – so please be nice).
* Hate Kills. I do not feel sorry for this man or for the people who exploited his self-murder. Nothing truly worth keeping is thrown away like this. I sympathize with his family, which is a separate issue.
* Arrested Decay. A correspondent returns to Pyongayang after a 15-year absence and finds the place caught in a time warp. Presumably, that’s a far better state of affairs than one would find in Hamhung, Hungnam, or Chongjin, or this dreadful wreck.
