Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 20, 2008 at 4:48 pm · Filed under Anju Links
I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN THEY SEE IT: The New York Times reports that the N.Y. Phil’s concert in Pyongyang will be broadcast live on North Korean TV. I doubt it. North Korea has perfected pulling away the football an instant before Charlie Brown kicks it. That would be as easy as letting the power go out. Then there’s this question: how will anyone really know? Does the fact that something shows on TV in the Koryo Hotel means that North Koreans can watch, too?
MORE COMPETITION! The new British Ambassador to South Korea, Martin Uden, is about to start his own K-blog.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 20, 2008 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Six-Party Talks
One day, I must cease picking on poor Larry Craig. Maybe tomorrow.
Though Hill denies the obvious, at least for now, he’s sticking to his guns on the North Korean declaration:
But Hill said that is not good enough for the “complete and correct declaration” that was promised at the arms talks.
“We cannot pretend that activities don’t exist when we know that the activities have existed,” he said, without giving specifics. [IHT]
North Korea also continues to deny any uranium enrichment activities. Deja U.
The one area where Hill could still claim some progress, the “disablement” of Yongbyon, has now been slowed to “a snail’s pace” because North Korea insists on getting more goodies first. Siegfried Hecker, the sort of man who always sees another concession we should make first, obligingly relays the North Korean line. But on the positive side, U.S. and North Korean experts there are positively chummy.
Hill transcript below the fold (thanks to a reader).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 20, 2008 at 11:02 am · Filed under Appeasement, Human Rights, Refugees
Original post here.
- Via the Joongang Ilbo, the South Korean NIS claims that they found oysters in the two boats, and that they notified President-Elect Lee’s transition team of the impending repatriation. (Note that various descriptions of the boats continue to be wildly inconsistent — fishing boats? rubber rafts? powered or unpowered?).
- Via the Chosun Ilbo, outraged North Korean refugees are finding their voice, and giving us some factual context:
The [Committee for Democratization of North Korea] slammed the South Korean government’s methods of questioning North Korean defectors. Han Chang-kwon, the head of an organization of North Korean escapees, said, “South Korean investigators kept threatening to return me to North Korea while I was being questioned for six months. The 22 would have been terrified by the questioning and might have not expressed their hope to find asylum here.” Han demanded the NIS make records of the questioning public.
- Richardson, who has himself debriefed North Korean defectors, offers a very plausible explanation:
If they were asked as a group [whether they wanted to return home], the interrogators basically ensured they’d answer no; if any answered yes for the rest to hear and somehow they were all sent back to North Korea, that person would have been guaranteed being sent to a concentration camp or executed. This is - or should be - absolute basic knowledge to anyone dealing with potential North Korean defectors.
If that is indeed what happened — it’s only speculation for now — the ratio of malice to incompetence would depend what motivated it.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 20, 2008 at 8:00 am · Filed under Korean Politics
Lee Myung Bak has announced some more cabinet picks. I’ve already given my strong approval to his pick for Unification, and I like his pick for National Defense, too:
Lee Sang-hee, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, will be the defense minister, sources also said. Lee is known for his hard-line stance toward the North. After the North fired seven missiles on July 5, 2006, the Blue House called it “high level political pressure.” Lee openly criticized the statement, calling the North’s act “an obvious armed provocation.” [Joongang Ilbo]
Lee was also in the middle of the embarrassing muddle about the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” that same month. Before that, he was at the center of the national humiliation that followed North Korea’s 2002 sinking of a South Korean patrol boat. More background on Lee at his Wikipedia page.
On the negative side, I’m very disappointed that Lee Myung Bak didn’t pick Park Jin to be his Foreign Minister.
Instead, that job will go to Korea’s current Ambassador to Japan, Yu Myung-hwan, a specialist on the United States who served as Vice Foreign Minister in Roh’s government. In November of 2006, Yu predicted, prematurely but accurately, that the United States was about to lift its sanctions on Banco Delta Asia, causing considerable embarrassment:
A Foreign Ministry official in an unofficial press briefing the same evening explained Yu’s remarks were the vice minister’s personal opinion, and there had been no agreement on the issue between Washington and Pyongyang. “North Korea requested that the financial sanction issue be resolved when it returns to the six-party talks, but the U.S. responded it could not guarantee a resolution and would only discuss the issue when the North returns to the talks. And that’s about it.” “There were so many questions in relation to BDA, and Yu gave his own personal opinion about the issue,” the official said. “I talked with U.S. chief negotiator to the six-party talks Christopher Hill on the phone for a long time yesterday and met U.S. Ambassador to Seoul [Alexander] Vershbow to listen to what he says about the issue today,” he added. “And the agreement was that a working group would be set up to discuss the BDA issue.”
There are conflicting views about the gaffe. “It seems that Yu talked about something that shouldn’t be made public that way, so the Foreign Ministry officially denied what he said,” an official with the Prime Minister’s Office said. “In short, Yu revealed a precious secret that shouldn’t be divulged.” But the official added it goes against usual practices for a Foreign Ministry official to make it public in the National Assembly what the U.S. or China told Seoul privately, so the ministry “would have no option but to deny it.” But some in the ministry said lawmakers were pressing Yu hard on the matter, so perhaps he became overly optimistic in talking about it. But a ministry official added, “If the six-party talks go well, things may turn out as Yu explained.” [Chosun Ilbo]
Another dumb Yu statement, made as Ambassador to Japan, was to fret that North Korea’s nuclear test could prompt Japan to go nuclear. I question the judgment of anyone who sounds more worried about Japan having the bomb than North Korea.
The choice of Yu looks like a grasp at continuity with a policy that has reached an obvious failure point. While that choice is understandable on some levels, Yu himself hasn’t handled his own role in that policy all that skillfully. “Just doing his job” or not, Yu was closely associated with letting North Korea off the hook for criminal activity. He will soon be the next Unification Minister’s boss, and with the designee for the latter already becoming a lightning rod to the left, it suggests that Sunshine Lite might trump what Robert refers to as “John Bolton’s wet dream.”
That would make Nam Joo Hong South Korea’s Jay Lefkowitz.
The Joongang Ilbo has more information on the picks for Education, Culture, and Commerce. It also has pictures of the nominees here.
Not surprisingly, a pissing match has already broken out, which raises our hopes for seeing some fine brawls on the floor of the National Assembly.
(Yu photo: Reuters)
