Minced beef with bread is now available in Pyongyang, leading North Korea watchers everywhere to whether full nuclear disarmament and freedom of the press can be far behind.
Seriously … why is this news?
Update: Here’s a more practical response to the protein shortage in the North Korean diet. Why, they say it tastes exactly like beef! So do you want fries with your burger?
In our second great WTF moment of this week, the Republican Party just called me asking for money to buy ad space to condemn Barack Obama’s weak Jimmy Carter-style foreign policy.
Set aside the fact that the major premise of the pitch just doesn’t square with the truth. How the hell can anyone make that claim with a straight face in light of George W. Bush’s North Korea legacy? Did these people, in the name of a strong foreign policy, just seriously ask me to help them turn the keys to our foreign policy back over to … Colin Powell and Condi Rice? And for that matter, who can name a major political party that isn’t sure to install Chris Hill to “manage” some spectacularly dangerous foreign policy crisis by feeding whatever beast growls at us, slipping the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a rufie, and sodomizing its entire membership live and unpixelated on C-Span 2?
Fuck these people.
Is it any wonder that the Republicans are a minority? There are precious few politicians in either party worthy of our support today, and I can easily count them on my digits — Brownback, Royce, Lieberman, Bayh sometimes, Ros-Lehtinen, Frank Wolf, McCain, and … and that’s about it. That leaves 14 more digits to count with, including the finger I’m holding up now.
The accuser, Im Chun-Yong, escaped from North Korea with several comrades in his unit a decade ago. That alone should tell you something about the state of morale in North Korea’s most elite forces even then. Im claims that he kept this story to himself until now:
“If you are born mentally or physically deficient, says Im, the government says your best contribution to society”¦ is as a guinea pig for biological and chemical weapons testing.” [....]
The former military captain says it was in the early 1990s, that he watched his then commander wrestle with giving up his 12-year-old daughter who was mentally ill. The commander, he says, initially resisted, but after mounting pressure from his military superiors, he gave in. Im watched as the girl was taken away. She was never seen again.
One of Im’s own men later gave him an eyewitness account of human-testing. Asked to guard a secret facility on an island off North Korea’s west coast, Im says the soldier saw a number of people forced into a glass chamber.
“Poisonous gas was injected in,” Im says. “He watched doctors time how long it took for them to die.” [Al Jazeera]
Words fail me when I read things like this. There’s nothing I can add to the horror of it, and yet I have no way of drawing a firm conclusion about its accuracy. For one thing, this isn’t coming from the most reputable news service. For another, I’ve caught enough inconsistencies in at least one similar report that I can’t conclude that it’s true without some corroboration. Yet there have been multiple reports of this kind, and there is evidence and corroboration to support the regime’s commission of equal and greater evils. It’s within the radius of what the North Korean regime is capable of, but then, what isn’t?
There’s little question that this regime is capable of this sort of depraved cruelty, but I can’t presume that this report is accurate because the regime reaps the advantage of the reasonable doubts it creates through exceptional secrecy. All I can do is wring my hands and say, “demands further investigation,” even knowing that the complicit Ban Ki Moon and our complicit State Department certainly won’t demand it.
There’s less reason to question reports that North Korea is embarked on an anti-Christian jihad, publicly executing those who would put other gods before His Withering Majesty. We’ve heard recent reports of hundreds (if not thousands) of public executions in North Korea, we’ve seen smuggled video of at least one such execution, and there is plenty of evidence that North Korea imprisons, tortures, and executes people for believing in or propogating Christianity. The regime is correct that Christianity represents an existential threat to the system. Christianity is the only ideology with the potential to spread, inspire loyalty, collect intelligence, and ultimately, to become the essential ideological foundation without which a resistance movement cannot establish itself.
Sadly, the civilized world has lost its sense of this very hard fact — there are some problems that no drum circle can solve. Can there be any question that if North Korea is to become a less barbaric place, that the regime must be overthrown violently?
Recalling that the Korean war of aggression ignited by the U.S. imperialists 59 years ago was the most brutal and brigandish war in the history of world wars, the statement continued [....]
Should the U.S. imperialists ignite another war, oblivious of the lesson drawn from their past defeat, the heroic Korean People’s Army will fully display its invincible might of the powerful revolutionary army of Mt. Paektu which has grown under the care of the great Songun commander and bury the aggressors in this land to the last man, the statement warned. [KCNA]
Let us resolve to drink together when we hear this word that our spell checkers do not know.
You remember what diplomacy was like in the days before it was smart, right? When diplomats let slip undiplomatic truths about Kim Jong Il being a “tyrannical dictator” who subjected his people to a “hellish nightmare?” When Presidents “loathed” their adversaries instead of sitting down and sharing a bong with them? Thank goodness change has come!
It says a lot about the North Koreans that they can’t just rise above this and hold the high ground.
So does this mean the North Koreans might just be assholes even after Bush isn’t President anymore?
When you campaign on a platform of “smart diplomacy,” the clear implications are that (a) your predecessors weren’t smart, and (b) that you will be. We should have doubted that the minute that this campaign hired Joe Biden for his diplomatic suavity, and made its Secretary of State someone who had to fib about getting shot at in Bosnia to demonstrate any foreign policy cred. Clinton has made gaffe after gaffe since coming into office, and the White House needs a full time spokesman just to explain Joe Biden (no, he didn’t really mean to sow public panic; no, he did not green-light Israeli air strikes on Iran; no he wasn’t really drooling on the nubile Ukrainian hotties, for whom he has immense respect). Clinton’s performance probably isn’t unrelated to her reported loss of influence in the power struggle between State and NSC. Not that sidelining the State Department is necessarily a bad thing.
Look, I’ve been fairly supportive of Barack Obama’s North Korea policy, and would add that so far, it’s been far “smarter” than Bush’s. In fact, it might just be too good to last. But let’s not make the common Washington error of conflating policy with diplomacy. That error is never greater than in the peculiar case of North Korea, which is seldom influenced by what diplomats say, but which knows that it’s vulnerable to what bankers do. Diplomacy, of course, was the skill that most of the Democratic candidates stressed, and which Obama’s diplomats have done with obvious ineptitude.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has insulted through inadvertence as ably as John Bolton ever did by design. Please don’t take this as an objection to the idea of insulting the North Korean dictator and system if there’s a design behind that. If and when it finally occurs to the administration that there’s no way to negotiate Kim Jong Il out of his nukes, we might decide, as a matter of policy, that it’s in our interests to discredit Kim Jong Il in the eyes of his subjects. One way to do that might be to challenge his aura of invincibility by making a global laughingstock of him. In these times, increasing numbers of North Koreans would find out, and there are plenty of underfunded broadcasting services in Seoul who could help us get a churlish message through. Having met Ambassador Bolton for a discussion of North Korea policy while he was U.N. Ambassador, I believe that his remarks were by design, but it was also very clear to me that the Bush Administration didn’t share that design. If, as is now rumored, Hillary Clinton is about to offer the North Koreans a massive new package of incentives — Agreed Framework III — there’s nothing smart about either the policy or the diplomacy.
Update: I see GI Korea had similar thoughts.
If this doesn’t win “WTF of the Decade,” it’s an honorable mention:
The last time I spoke to my friend Michael Jackson was about a month ago, 3 weeks before his shocking death. He had called me late one night to ask about another of my close friends who he had read about in the news. Laura Ling, a former colleague and friend, was detained originally by North Korean border guards along with her colleague Euna Lee on March 17th. [....]
Michael had read some of the details regarding Laura and Euna’s predicament. As was often the case with him and global events he read about ““ from famine in Africa to victims of natural disasters in far off countries, to orphans created by wars ““ he felt a deep sense of empathy for Laura and Euna. When I shared with him that Euna had a four-year-old daughter, he was even more anguished.
He asked me whether I had had any contact with Laura. I told him I had written her a few letters and had been assured they were getting through. Outside of that, her own family had only heard from her twice ““ brief monitored phone calls ““ in the over three months they had been imprisoned. When I told him that, Michael paused.
“Do you think,” he said hesitantly, “that the leader of North Korea could be a fan of mine?” [Gotham Chopra, Herald de Paris]
Someone please pipe up and tell me this is a parody.
I didn’t really know how to respond. Not much is known about the reclusive Kim Jong Il or “Dear leader” as he is called in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Over the years it’s been alleged he has a thing for Hollywood, certain NBA stars, Elvis, and specific liqueurs. Still, I’d never heard about any connection between Michael Jackson and Kim Jong Il.
Michael said he had seen some pictures on the internet of the Dear Leader. “You know, he wears jackets like mine.
Well, now I’ve seen everything. I don’t know if I actually believe this, but don’t count Michael Jackson out as a Special Envoy to Kim Jong Il just because he’s deceased. He’s still more charismatic than Al Gore, looks more alive than John Kerry, has a better ethical record than Bill Richardson, is less of an embarrassment than Joe Biden, and has more influence with President Obama than Hillary Clinton.
Update:Â A reader reminds me that, by a happy coincidence, the Eternal President of North Korea also happens to be a dead guy. Wow. That could be the most lively conversation since Ban Ki Moon met Warren Christopher. And at the rate things seem to be going, Kim Jong Il and Michael Jackson will be together soon enough for everyone but the people in these places.
Blaine Harden’s Washington Post article on Monday cited a report by the Korean Bar Association that contains an extensive collection of interviews of North Korean concentration camp survivors and witnesses. If I had a copy of that report, I would undertake a detailed examination of those witness’s statements for consistency with each other, with previous reports, and with satellite imagery of the camps. If possible, I would use that report to greatly expand my Google Earth posts about the camps. If the interviews are as detailed an extensive as I’ve been told they are, I could use them to publish something that expands the boundaries of our understanding of the camps beyond anything that currently exists anywhere.
My internet search skills have failed to locate a copy of the report, as have my usual contacts. I would accept a Korean language version if I can’t get an English version, but obviously, I would prefer an English version. If anyone can get me a copy of that report — especially in English — either on the internet or elsewhere, I would be very, very much in that person’s debt.
Update:Â Thank you. A reader has graciously offered to send me a copy.
Progress on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is always tenuous and remains incomplete. But the regime’s nuclear declaration is the latest reminder that, despite President Bush’s once bellicose rhetoric, engaging our enemies can pay dividends…. Now the president must not prematurely close the books on North Korea’s alleged uranium enrichment activities and nuclear exports. We must ensure there are credible verification and monitoring procedures to ensure North Korea is out of the nuclear business for the long term. — Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, June 26, 2008.
In much the same way that the North Koreans play bait-and-switch with our diplomats and politicians, our diplomats and politicians have learned to play bait-and-switch with us. Then, as President Bush announced that he would strike a still-recalcitrant North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, politicians in both parties tried to deceive us by suggesting that their support was conditioned on North Korea’s future performance. Anyone who’d been watching North Korea’s past performance, to say nothing of our State Department’s, could easily see this bait-and-switch for exactly what it was. Since Kerry’s statement, North Korea has balked at verification, removed all doubt that it has a uranium enrichment program, completely reneged on Agreed Frameworks I and II, launched an ICBM, and tested a nuke. John Kerry can’t possibly be fooling anyone, except anyone who hasn’t bothered to reach into the memory hole for his own words. Regrettably, too many journalists fall into the latter category.
Since he became Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry has done everything in his power to protect Kim Jong Il from the consequences his own behavior, no matter how strongly Kerry has implied otherwise. That is dishonest of Senator Kerry, and it’s too bad that no one else (a journalist, for example) is asking Kerry to explain his bait-and-switch appeasement of North Korea. That’s probably why it continues to this day.
Yesterday, Kerry’s diplomacy of enabling suffered a minor setback when the ever-stalwart Senator Brownback joined forces with Sen. John McCain and Democratic heavyweight Evan Bayh to add an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill. The “sense of the Senate” amendment recounts North Korea’s recent provocations and its recent history of aiding terrorist organizations, and calls for President Obama to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism. The amendment isn’t even binding, so the President would be completely within his power to ignore it, and yet Senator Kerry opposed even this. Here’s the full text of the amendment:
Despite Senator Kerry’s protestations, the amendment made it into the final bill, which the Senate will vote on today. The chances that this amendment will become law are now greatly enhanced. Whether President Obama will actually re-list North Korea is another story. His failure to do so is a weak spot in his administration’s otherwise surprisingly strong North Korea policy. The evidence clearly shows that the months since North Korea was de-listed as a terror sponsor have seen a sharp rise in North Korea’s terrorist behavior.
It’s enough to make you wonder what imminent diplomatic progress with Kim Jong Il Senator Kerry really thinks this amendment would endanger. It’s rumored that Kerry is angling to go to Pyongyang to negotiate for the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Perhaps Kerry doesn’t want to injure his own chance to aggrandize himself, but neither Kerry nor anyone else should go begging to Pyongyang for the release of these women.
Let’s sort a few things out here. First, no matter how brave, dumb, or both Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee were at the time of their arrest — and there are still enough unanswered questions about it that I’m drawing no firm conclusions — there is absolutely no justification for sentencing two journalists to 12 years in a labor camp for merely crossing a border and taking pictures. If there’s no justification, there’s clearly an explanation: North Korea wants a ransom of some kind, it wants a propaganda coup, and it wants to intimidate journalists who cover North Korea from angles that aren’t officially approved by the state. It has accomplished the third goal, but it should be denied the first two, because a crime of violence done “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” is terrorism, and only a fool rewards a terrorist. Kerry, never one to let principle stand in the way of self-aggrandizement, must be salivating, not just as he dreams of posing with Laura Ling and Euna Lee before a mob of reporters at LAX, but at the prospect of telling those reporters that North Korea has held out the chance for “a new beginning” — “peace in our time,” if you will — if we’d only lift a few more sanctions. Kerry, in other words, yearns to be the man who brings home Agreed Framework III. But Senator Kerry should not give North Korea its ransom or its propaganda coup, and he should cease to Congress’s primary protector of Kim Jong Il from the consequences of his own actions. If Kerry succeeds in frustrating the Administration’s promising financial constriction of North Korea, one consequence that may be averted is the extinction of Kim’s odious dynasty, one that has willfully starved and murdered millions of North Koreans.
All of this is especially ironic when even President Obama has seen the futility of appeasement and begun moving to shut down Kim Jong Il’s palace economy. So who will be the last North Korean to die for John Kerry’s ego? Given North Korea’s record of nuclear proliferation even while it negotiates with us, we might also wonder who will be the first American.
Update: First, a correction. Not being as expert as I should be on Senate procedure, I garbled one point in the post above. Yesterday, Senate procedure ensured that the proposed amendment would get voted on, but the amendment hadn’t yet secured a place in the final bill. That vote was held today, and the amendment lost. Kerry then backed a watered-down amendment of his own, which merely calls on the State Department to produce a report on re-listing in 30 days. Kerry’s amendment passed, 66 to 31.
First, I’ll print the roll call, and below that, an excerpt from the debate (Kerry, by the way, does much to confirm the suspicion I express above). The vote was closer than it might have been before, but the loss was a bitter one anyway. You may want to look for a list of your own senators on this one. The only Republicans voting against the amendment were the worthless Richard Lugar, who represents Foggy Bottom in the Senate, and Bob Corker, probably for arcane fiscal reasons. Four Democrats (Bayh, Nelson, Nelson, and Lincoln) voted Aye: Read more
It is rare to be granted a look inside Hanawon, the first stop for North Korean defectors arriving in the South, but this summer the center opened its doors to international media in recognition of its 10 year anniversary, allowing journalists (and readers/viewers) a rare glimpse into the facility.
As a result of the media invite, the L.A. Times ran a story about the rehabilitation center earlier this month and just recently VOA released a video story about Hanawon and the experiences of the North Korean defectors who walk through its doors.
The center’s recent media invitation seems to have been received with mixed reactions. It has been described as a “propaganda ploy, talent show and sob fest,” (as per the L.A. Times) and indeed, certain instances between reporters and Hanawon residents make one wonder how prepared the residents were for the media invasion that blasted into their new worlds. From the L.A. Times:
Later, some of the 160 journalists touring the facility pushed to get a shot of two North Korean women at computers. The scene was so tense that one woman covered her face and ran from the room.
Several former Hanawon residents who returned for the anniversary were asked whether they missed North Korea.“Why do you ask me that kind of question?” responded Kim, the pianist. “We’re supposed to be exemplary settlers.”
If the L.A. Times piece is accurate, you can’t help but wonder if sensitivity to the situation was disregarded in exchange for a public relations gig. (For what it’s worth, I believe it is possible to give exposure to Hanawon without compromising the individual dignity of those who reside there.)
But I wasn’t there so I don’t know how (dis)tastefully the media tour was executed. However, since it already happened, it’s worth taking advantage of the opportunity to see inside the facility even via tightly controlled media events such as what was offered this summer.
We should also take the opportunity to ask more questions: For example, within the decade that Hanawon has been in operation, what sort of measurable results can be obtained from its work? What role will such rehabilitation centers play in the event of a reunified peninsula? And what successes and failures can be taken from Hanawon’s efforts to be replicated (or avoided) in other facilities serving victims in other countries?
At last. The Washington Post has done a truly detailed, comprehensive, well-researched story on North Korea’s concentration camps. It’s a story that the Post wouldn’t have done had Anthony Faiola or Glenn Kessler been doing the reporting; Blaine Harden deserves much credit for writing what deserves to become a major exhibit in the indictment of our State Department for its culpable complicity. The satellite imagery of the camps features prominently in the story.
(Disclosure: I provided Mr. Harden and one of the Post’s News Designers with research assistance for this story — imagery, coordinates, put them in touch with David Hawk, and engaged in much discussion with them about what the evidence does and does not support. You’ll see OFK and also, our good friend Curtis, linked and credited at this excellent interactive graphic, which may be the best part of the story.)
This is one you’ll want to read in its entirety.
I’ll add just two observations. First, does this sound like someone who ever had any business being in charge of America’s leading organization advocating human rights in North Korea?
Containing that crisis has monopolized the Obama administration’s dealings with North Korea. The camps, for the time being, are a non-issue. “Unfortunately, until we get a handle on the security threat, we can’t afford to deal with human rights,” said Peter Beck, a former executive director of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
This is tough. I know Peter well, and I also like Peter a lot personally despite our disagreements on policy matters, but really, no person who feels that human rights should take a back seat to everything else should ever have sought or held a position of leadership in the world’s leading organization advocating human rights in North Korea (Peter has since gone on to a great gig at Stanford, and I wish him well there). Didn’t it ever occur to Peter that we couldn’t inspect North Korea’s nuclear test site, for example, without asking who dug the tunnels, or how many of them there are? Or why we ought to be distrustful of what North Korean scientists tell interviewers, or why else North Korea would be so resistant to inspections on demand? There are defensible arguments for why discussions about human rights should be deferred, but you can’t lead HRNK effectively and still believe them.
I’ll close with a thought evoked by this quote:
The camps have never been visited by outsiders, so these accounts cannot be independently verified. But high-resolution satellite photographs, now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, reveal vast labor camps in the mountains of North Korea. The photographs corroborate survivors’ stories, showing entrances to mines where former prisoners said they worked as slaves, in-camp detention centers where former guards said uncooperative prisoners were tortured to death and parade grounds where former prisoners said they were forced to watch executions. Guard towers and electrified fences surround the camps, photographs show.
The first one to make that observation, of course, was Senator Sam Brownback, when he said that “Google Earth has made witnesses of us all.” Brownback was the first person of any national prominence to see the moral and policy significance of these images, and it’s not as if flogging this issue is going to get Brownback any votes in Kansas. We’re a schizophrenic country to ask ourselves, as we often do, why more politicans don’t lead on matters of principle when we so seldom reward those who do. Yet the vast majority of journalists, bloggers, and commenters who’ve covered Senator Brownback’s one-man delaying action against the State Department’s attempts to sideline any discussion of these death camps have treated Brownback with a snark that’s been out of its depth both factually and morally. What Brownback has done is in America’s very best, most conscientious traditions, and it’s worthy of our profound admiration. That’s no less true of those of us who don’t share all of his views on social issues. Events have redeemed Sam Brownback, and the least that Chris Nelson, Joe Klein, and the rest of them should do is admit that it was they who were wrong about how to deal with North Korea.
Clarification: By crediting Senator Brownback for being the first to recognize the significance of these images, of course, I mean these specific images. I certainly don’t mean to take anything from David Hawk, who paved the way for all of this.
