This appears to be the most reliable confirmation we’ve seen yet, albeit coming from a man who’d previously denied all knowledge.
This kind of situation calls for an amendment to the Hippocratic Oath — something along the lines of, “Do not heal those who would do harm to millions.”
How likely a story does this sound to you?
The accident took place in April 2005 when, it is claimed, a helicopter owned by Air Koryo, the North Korean state airline, was dispatched from Pyongyang, the capital, to collect a woman who was in labour with triplets from a remote island. On the return flight it crashed into a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, causing a fire that destroyed a large amount of humanitarian relief goods. [Times of London]
It didn’t sound very likely to a consortium of reinsurers, including Lloyds of London, either. Suspecting fraud, they refused to pay, so the North Koreans sued in a British court. There have been previous reports that North Korea has engaged in fraud and staged accidents to collect reinsurance payments. This particular case resulted in years of expensive litigation.
Today, the Moonie rag Segye Ilbo is reporting that North Korea has won the case, for 39 million Euros (linked story is in Korean).
So what can we all learn from this? For one thing, if you are going to do business with some of the world’s most notorious international criminals, at least read the contact carefully before signing it:
According to the contract, disputes were to be settled under North Korean law and last month a court in Pyongyang ordered the reinsurers to pay the North Korean company the €44 million. They refuse to do so. [....]
The contract also states that claims in North Korean won will be converted at a rate of 160 won to the euro, close to the Government’s exchange rate. But the black market rate, which is used for all practical purposes in North Korea, is closer to 2,000 won to the euro. If this were applied it would reduce the reinsurers’ bill from €44 million to €3.5 million.
More background here. An interesting question this raises is how the insurers will be able to pay that sum to the North Koreans without violating UNSCR 1718, which would require them to “ensure” that the North won’t spend the whole sum — or any of it — on uranium centrifuges and large-bore aluminum tubing. Of course, there are some who take a less skeptical approach:
“All this business about spending the money on their nuclear programme is complete tosh,” a source close to the North Korean side said. “They just don’t like the contract they wrote and they regret it bitterly.
Right. What could I possibly have been thinking?
Update: Noted North Korea authority Aidan Foster-Carter notes that North Korea obtained a settlement, not a judgment. That’s consistent with what I’ve heard more recently. He also notes that the largest payor was Allianz, not Lloyds. I will defer to Mr. Foster-Carter on that point. By all means, read what he has to say about this subject.
Not surprisingly, the North reneged on the agreements it made with USAID to get food aid. Its interest is in feeding its elite, our interest is in feeding those in greatest need, and there’s little overlap between those two groups. It’s more surprising to see Americans with the courage to hold North Koreans to their commitments. We are now learning that things broke down last August, and that most of the food aid was never delivered.
A much-heralded U.S. program to restart food aid to North Korea has run into difficulty as Washington and Pyongyang haggle over the terms of access, according to U.S. and overseas officials. The previously undisclosed problems come amid estimates of growing hunger in the isolated communist country.
A report released Monday by the U.N. World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization said that despite a better-than-usual harvest, more than a third of North Korea’s population will need food aid in the coming year. The agencies’ estimate of the number of hungry has jumped from 6.2 million to 8.7 million.
U.S. officials noted that food aid delivered via nongovernmental organizations continues but acknowledged that the main effort — through the World Food Program — has stalled. They said they are trying to resolve the problems, which concern disputes over the number of U.S. personnel in Pyongyang and Korean-speaking U.N. employees around the country.
“The United States seeks to fully implement the terms of the food aid agreement with the DPRK, which included agreed-upon improvements in monitoring and access conditions that are necessary to effectively ensure food is reaching those most in need,” State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said, referring to North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. [WaPo, Glenn Kessler]
Kessler, who can’t even find fault with North Korea for starving its own people, uses words such as “haggle” to suggest that both sides are equally to blame. I wish his article provided fewer rhetorical flourishes and more specificity about what the actual disputes were. Instead, Kessler goes on to quote U.N. official Tony Banbury’s predictions about how bad things may well get in North Korea if food aid is not delivered. But isn’t all that beyond the point if our aid won’t reach the people who need it?
You won’t read it in the Post’s story, but I’m told that the hero of this story is USAID official John Brouse. Since the North Koreans first asked us for food last spring, Brouse has credibly threatened to walk away if the North Koreans did not allow significant improvement in monitoring. The North did make some concessions, but started to go back on them within just a few weeks. And in a rare demonstration of spine, we stood our ground and refused to deliver aid we knew would be doled out according to political pedigree or used as a weapon.
Chris Hill’s words to the press speak well enough for themselves, but the testiness of his tone tells us just as much. He has no one but himself to blame for his own humiliation, of course. It’s just unfortunate that his personal ambition created such risk and suffering for so many others.
Christopher R. Hill ,Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
China World Hotel
Beijing, China
December 11, 2008ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Good morning. Obviously we would like to see progress made on this verification protocol, but so far we have not seen it. So you can draw your own conclusions.
QUESTION: Ambassador, is it possible that North Korea will be included back into the list of state sponsor of terrorism?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I am not speculating on anything. We’re trying to get through a verification protocol here.
QUESTION: Ambassador, on today’s discussion, are you ready to give some compromise, or are you going to stick to the points that you made yesterday?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Are we planning to compromise today? Look, we’ve laid out our views on the verification protocol. Our views have been pretty clear for weeks – even months – on end, so it is not for us to be bargaining with ourselves. It is up to the North Koreans to do what they said they were going to do.
QUESTION: KCNA was excited to be included among the nuclear powers. Do you think that designation will last?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: KCNA gets excited by a lot of things, but neither we nor any of the other civilized countries accepts North Korea as a nuclear power.
QUESTION: But they were citing a U.S. Defence Department report.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I don’t know what you’re talking about, frankly. We don’t recognize them as a nuclear power. Even KCNA knows that.
QUESTION: What do you expect to happen today?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I’ll tell you after today. I don’t know. I think we have a meeting right now with the Chinese. We’ll see what happens.
QUESTION: Do the Chinese appear to be in recess and waiting, or not?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: No, but I’m sure we’ll have a discussion about what to do this morning.
QUESTION: The South Korean envoy just said that he had come down to say goodbye. Are you also saying that?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Oh, he said goodbye? Well, as soon as the Chinese decide what to do, I’ll let you know. And if goodbyes are appropriate, then that’s what I’ll do.
QUESTION: And do you expect the four will want to meet? Or bilateral meetings? Do you have any idea?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I don’t know. I understand that the Chinese want to meet with us, so presumably it will be another head of delegation meeting. I just don’t know. I’ll know shortly.
QUESTION: Ambassador, the understanding that you’ve been talking about with the North Koreans – the understanding that the U.S. has with the North Koreans – what is the status of that?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Well, it’s the same old problem. The North Koreans don’t want to put into writing what they are willing to put into words.
QUESTION: But the understanding itself is still remaining?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Yes. But we can’t go forward on a verification protocol without something written down. Okay?
QUESTION: Heads of delegation meeting at nine?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I’m not sure, are you telling me or asking me?
QUESTION: Asking you.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I don’t know. I’ll find out.
QUESTION: Before or after the meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I really don’t know, but we’ve been told to go out to Diaoyutai, and I better do that right now.
Okay? All right, see you all later.
Update: More below the fold.
Read more
There are two entries in this merry vigil:
- Roh’s brother ordered jailed over a bribery scandal.
- A left-wing agitprop history textbook heads off for the ash-heap of …. Still, the counter-revisionism is going a tad too far when episodes like Kwangju are flat-out written out of history. The idea is to put historical events into their proper context. Kwangju no more defines South Korean history or its modern reality than the Pullman Strike defines American history or its modern reality. And as I’ve pointed out, the North Korean famine often killed as as many people as Kwangju in a single day for six-plus years, has immense significance to one’s understanding of modern North Korea, and — I’ll go out on a limb here — probably draws little or no mention in these lefty texts. That doesn’t mean Kwangju isn’t a significant historical event; it means that if your entire view of history is built around the Japanese occupation, No Gun Ri, Kwangju, and a bought summit with Kim Jong Il, you’re not being educated about history, you’re just being indoctrinated with it. And ultimately, isn’t that what many Koreans are complaining about with regard to Japanese textbooks?
Our first merry vigil of the day comes in the way of several reports, which I’ll just link and let you read on your own:
- Kim Jong Il’s private train hasn’t moved for three months.
- A senior NSC official confirms that Kim Jong Il probably had a stroke.
- South Korea’s Defense Minister has raised media eyebrows with a reference to “diverse unstable factors” in North Korea.
Whoop de doo. The six-party talks have started again. China has circulated a draft protocol that strives mightily to top Chris Hill’s gift for vagueness by omitting the word “sampling.”
I don’t think the people who designed this six-party concept, in retrospect, realized what a perfect venue this was for Chinese, Russian, and (often) South Korean back-stabbing. The concept may be with us for a while, at least as a superficial demonstration of Obama’s commitment to “multilateralism.”*
With the clock running out and with a consensus forming that Chris Hill has accomplished bupkes, Hill is forced to set some very ambitious goals:
“We’ve come here with three goals in mind … to complete the verification protocol. We also want to complete the schedule of energy and schedule of disablement,” Hill told reporters as he headed to the Chinese state guest house Diaoyutai for the second day of negotiations on denuclearizing North Korea.
“Our plan is to get all the three done,” he said.
Hill was responding to a question on Seoul’s assertion that the provision of economic assistance to the North should be linked with whether Pyongyang signs a verification protocol that sets guidelines for the inspection of its nuclear facilities. [Yonhap]
DLTDHYOTWO, Chris. The Japanese aren’t playing until the abduction situation is addressed, and the South Koreans are saying — imagine this! — that they won’t offer any more aid until North Korea actually lives up to its agreements and does what Hill stopped demanding months ago — disarm.
Wow. They must really hate peace to say that.
* To the left, multilateralism is exalted over all expectations of substance, but only as long as it paralyzes American decisions the left disagrees with (even if only in retrospect). Korea policy is the exception that proves the rule. The left wanted Bush to make concessions to the North Koreans and figured that cutting our allies and sometimes-allies out of the picture would facilitate that. Suddenly, the left demanded bilateral talks. But as we should realize by now, it’s not about the shape of the table. It’s about coming to it with some bargaining power, an understanding of whom we’re dealing with, and some firm-yet-realistic expectations.
A UN agency reports that North Korea’s food production this year will be up slightly over last year’s, which is a lot like predicting that the Nasdaq will perform better next year than this.
The production figure of 3.3 million tons of cereals is still far short of the North’s total needs — 800,000 tons short — and lower than the average annual production of the post-famine period. At the same time, the WFP and FAO are both saying that 40% of North Koreans desperately need short-term food aid.
Why do I do this every day, you ask? (Again with those straw-man questions I plant in your heads.) I do it because of stories like this.
South Korean firms that lost big on the Kaesong bubble are demanding compensation from, or possibly suing, the government. So would the government in the caption — where it says “defendant” — be the government that actually shut down their operations in breach of all of the written understandings and for no legally defensible reason … or the one with the deep pocket? Guess wildly or consult the oracle of your choice.
(Wouldn’t Kim Jong Il redefine the term “judgment proof?” Actually, no.)
On a related note, doesn’t this seem like a pretty bad time to propose an inter-Korean Peace City, unless it’s just a bone thrown to mollify a few swing voters whose systems haven’t purged out the “we are one” Kool-Aid? I’d opt for a more traditional solution: orange juice and anti-histamines.
Just as Washington seems to have almost forgotten the name of the current president, hardly anyone still remembers Chris Hill, a media hero for one brief while after he conned George W. Bush out of one part of the “cowboy diplomacy” they loved to loathe. Also mostly forgotten: for the brief interlude when it was tried, the cowboy diplomacy worked. Less so: what replaced it did not.
Hill is now about to round up the six various parties for one last great charade, where the North looks likely to renounce any agreement to allow meaningful verification.
The American assistant secretary of State, Christopher R. Hill, will use the Beijing talks, scheduled to begin on Monday, to try to persuade North Korea to allow outside experts to take nuclear waste samples for testing, a key procedure in determining the reclusive country’s past nuclear activities.
Mr. Hill held preliminary talks with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, in Singapore last week and later said he expected the Beijing conference to be “difficult. On Sunday, Kim Sook, the South Korean envoy to the six-nation talks, said: “I am not very optimistic.
In its final weeks in power, the Bush administration is struggling to complete the so-called “second phase” toward Washington’s ultimate goal of dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. [NYT, Choe Sang Hun]
The Times report includes this neat little epitaph for whatever it was that Chris Hill wasted the last two years of Bush’s presidency doing:
Since he became Washington’s front man on North Korea in 2005, Mr. Hill has cobbled together key agreements with North Korea, including the September 2005 deal that laid out a road map toward the North’s nuclear disarmament. But he has stumbled over Pyongyang’s tactic of giving vague commitments to win American concessions and then retracting them, saying nothing was written down.
The latest case in point involved the dispute over nuclear samples. In October, Washington announced that the North agreed to allow sampling, and removed the North from the terror list. But a month later, the North said it had never given such a promise and Washington had no written document to prove otherwise.
Off the record, U.S. officials will tell you that North Korea most definitely did agree to allow sampling at the agreed sites at Yongbyon, but then reneged on that commitment. The North Koreans know Bush lacks the will to use what power he has left. They’re already calibrating their concession-seeking strategy for the next administration.
Just for extra drama, the North will also try to exclude Japan from the next session of the talks. Japan, understandably, won’t contribute Yen One to the North Korean fuel oil fund until its abducted citizens are returned. Bush’s de-listing of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism — despite North Korea’s refusal to even seriously discuss returning the abductees — has done grave damage to U.S.-Japanese relations. The Times report that the United States is now approaching Australia and New Zealand to kick in Japan’s share of the contribution. Such a strategy is sure to worsen matters by creating the perception that America is going about Japan, reducing its bargaining power regarding a vital national interest, and abandoning Japanese hostages to the whim of their captors.
It’s exceedingly difficult to see what benefit we have gained to justify the alienation of our most important ally in Asia.
