Archive for August 2009

Preventing Another “Three Kingdoms” Era

August 27, 2009 Kremlinology, Reconstruction, Regime Change 8 comments

In The National Interest, Michael Green, the NSC’s primary Asia advisor during President Bush’s first term outlines a series of scary stages that he thinks are approaching rapidly as Kim Jong Il withers away and North Korea dies with him. The lines of fracture in such an opaque regime are extremely difficult to predict, of course, but most of Green’s analysis makes sense to me. First, Green says the current regime can’t be stabilized in the long term, and that recent history has shown that doing so won’t make us more secure, but would send the wrong message to other proliferators.

Second, Green doesn’t invest any more faith in Kim Jong Un’s readiness to be a real successor to Kim Jong Il than I do. He thinks the succession contest that has probably already begun marks the first stage of North Korea’s descent into becoming a failed state:

At a minimum, it is already becoming clear that the regime is hardening its ideological stance in anticipation of the death of the Dear Leader. In addition to the rapid acceleration of nuclear and missile tests to achieve full nuclear status by 2012, the regime has expelled most aid workers and has begun closing markets that opened when the state could no longer feed its people through the rationing system. With the future balance of power within the National Defense Commission uncertain, no senior general or party official is likely to promote compromise or diplomacy with the United States, South Korea or Japan. If anything, the collective impulse will be bellicosity toward the outside world in order to mask internal challenges.

And this is why we are already seeing the first signs of the inevitable nuclear blackmail we will soon face. The first stage has thus begun. [Michael J. Green, The National Interest]

I’d take that a step further. Kim Jong Il was just “ready” enough to seize power, but not “ready” enough to prevent famine, economic collapse, and the breakdown of state control over all but a few key industries. The first stage really began in 1994 with the death of the last leader most North Koreans viewed as “legitimate” to some degree, loss of Soviet aid, and the accession to power of a functionally incompetent bacchanalian — incompetent at everything but palace intrigues and global brinkmanship, anyway.

From there, Green thinks things only get worse. He goes on to explain the why North Korea is effectively undeterrable with regard to proliferation. It thinks it can get away with anything, and pretty much has. Take North Korea’s construction of a nuclear reactor in Syria, which our government tried to cover up, then forgave, because of its enchantment with Agreed Framework II. The North Koreans have learned that our “red lines” mean nothing. Green suggests that the fragmentation of North Korea’s security forces increases the danger of loose WMD’s. I’d say that danger is just as great with the current regime in power and taking advantage of a well-developed proliferation network than with it fractured and preoccupied with fratricide.

Green correctly notes that when the regime fragments, the various factions are likely to invite in foreign powers to assist them, meaning that the states in the region need to do better contingency planning, with South Korea’s role being especially important. It also calls for some good diplomacy with China and Russia, diplomacy that (in my view) ought to begin with the understanding that we’ll stay out of northern Korea if they’ll agree to do the same (we can make limited and temporary exceptions for humanitarian aid and WMD dismantlement). Given the chaos that’s already overtaking North Korea, we’ll all eventually thank one another for such an agreement.

What’s given too little attention in all of the analysis of this issue, including Green’s, is the influence of the North Korean people in a post-Kim North Korea. Korea’s future — and by extension, the geopolitics and economics of the entire region — will depend on the extent to which they favor or resist any potential occupier or form of government. Within 20 years, a unified Korea could be a prosperous nation with vastly enhanced military and economic power, nuclear weapons, and a strong infrastructure, and even a robust birthrate. Or, the battle lines between warring rump-states backed by competing foreign powers could consolidate, leading to several more decades the would superficially resemble the Three Kingdoms era, and with local conditions resembling those in Mogadishu or Kandahar. (Great-power competition could be particularly intense in North Korea’s far northeast, where the Chinese have invested heavily to get access to North Korean ports, but where Russia also has the advantage of proximity.)

three-kingdoms.jpg

Green manages to squeeze in a pitch for standing up for the basic rights of North Koreans as human beings:

And the Obama administration should not lose sight of the plight of the North Korean people. The United States should be clear and consistent in building international pressure on the regime for its horrifying human-rights record. More should also be done to provide food and medical assistance to the North Korean people, as long as it can be monitored by something close to international standards. It is also important to continue modest international NGO and training efforts now in place for the North Korean people, as long as the regime itself does not receive cash, technology or propaganda benefits. The more we can expose the North Korean people to the possibilities before them, the better prepared they will be.

But this still falls short of the kind of broad outreach necessary to crystallize and shape North Koreans’ amorphous discontent, to entice them with the promise of unification, or to steel them against becoming a Chinese colony. How unfortunate that the administration Green served never managed to pursue even the limited goals he outlines here.

(Hat tip and thanks to a reader.)

For Chinese, Hard Questions About North Korea Hit Close to Home

August 26, 2009 China & Korea 7 comments

And it’s dangerous for Chinese to ask hard questions that hit close to home. But why would Chinese find the nostalgia of visiting North Korea sufficiently rewarding to pay money for that dubious privilege? Maybe because human beings have a natural obsession with the things they fear the most, and because for many Chinese, the fear persists:

I have spoken with many of these Chinese travelers and have always been struck by how seldom their accounts dwell on the stark human costs of a system like North Korea’s, or on the political system that makes such extreme repression and deprivation possible on a national scale.

Xianhui Yang’s “Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp,” a newly translated collection of firsthand accounts that the publisher calls “fact-based fiction,” is about what might be called the Gulag Archipelago of China. Reading it, one begins to appreciate why travelers to North Korea are so reluctant to reflect on human suffering: the reality of North Korea today is too painfully close to a situation endured by the Chinese well within living memory. [Howard W. French, N.Y. Times]

Read the rest of French’s review to see how North Korea’s present ties into China’s past, although I doubt that even in China, all of that is completely in the past.

I sometimes wonder if China’s support for Kim Jong Il might have dropped away a decade ago had we made half as much effort to demonize China for its rape of North Korea as China has made at demonizing America, or demonizing Japan for its rape of China and Korea half a century ago. Not until now has an American administration made even a superficial effort to make Kim Jong Il into a diplomatic, moral, and historical liability for China.

Must Read: On N. Korean Counterfeiting

August 26, 2009 Counterfeiting 13 comments

We’ve seen much first-rate reporting on North Korea’s “supernote’ counterfeiting recently, and here’s one via The Independent that frankly outdoes all of them in its scope and detail, and fills in many missing details. I’m not going to even try to quote just one part of this. Just go and read.

The comments are edifying in their own way. The British left is fond of saying that it isn’t really anti-American, just anti-Bush. And yet nothing seems to have changed for The Independent’s readers. If there is no policy America can adopt that can make these bitter, envious, yappy little Yorkies like us, can’t we learn to just ignore them? Now that they’re biting the ankles of Barack Obama, most of the press already has, but that’s another story.

We Have Lift-Off

August 25, 2009 Missiles 5 comments

I didn’t think President Lee would actually go through with this. Although I’m not sure this launch is a wise move in the broader context of attempts to disarm the North Koreans — who will seize on this to justify their own banned program — it’s almost gratifying to see a South Korean president so unconcerned about what North Korea says. And while I reject most of the comparisons to the North Korean Taepodong II launch last spring, both launches no doubt had domestic political motives, and in both cases, the satellites failed to enter orbit.

Feel free to insert your own innuendo in the comments section.

South Korea isn’t banned from developing or using missile technology. The North is limited by no less than three such resolutions — 1695, 1718, and 1874 (see sidebar; scroll down).

Wow. Those Hostages Eat a Lot.

August 24, 2009 North-South, Sunshine 9 comments

I didn’t say much about Yu Song Jin during his 137 days as a guest of Kim Jong Il, mainly because I really didn’t care that much about the predicament in which he placed himself. Yu, a South Korean employee at the Kaesong Industrial Park, was accused of attempting to infect one of the hand-picked North Korean factory slaves with his thoughtcrimes — an offense that, if true, might have endangered her life. I’m no great fan of North Korea profiting by crossing the line from the arbitrary cult-enforcement that passes for law there to outright hostage-taking, but Yu’s case never caused me the conflict or angst that the case of Euna Lee and Laura Ling did. I have little sympathy for anyone stupid and amoral enough to willfully accept employment at Kaesong, nor do I accept the self-serving “arbeit macht frei” lies used to justify it. A South Korean at Kaesong assumes at least some small portion of the risks the North Korean slaves there live with every day of their lives.

Today, we learn some of what it cost Hyun Jeong-Un, the Chairwoman of Hyundai Asan Corporation, to get Yu back, in addition to a set of jammies and some health books. There’s no confirmation as to whether “Final Exit” was among them, but let’s not forget that Hyun became Chairwoman of a company that lives or dies with Kim Jong Il’s whims after her husband flung himself from a skyscraper after being implicated for making illegal payments to North Korea. Hyun’s late husband thus acted as one of the bag men who helped Kim Dae Jung buy his Nobel Prize with the embezzled money of South Korean taxpayers and shareholders, and with the involuntary servitude of North Koreans.

Today, we learn that the North Koreans billed Hyundai Asan for $20,000. Mind you, insurance will cover the cost, which is itemized as room and board at $115 a night for 137 days, not ransom.

Duly noted.

How Hyundai Asan or South Korea justify this payment under UNSCR 1874 is beyond me, which may be why Kim Jong Il was satisfied that he’d won a significant victory by extracting even this modest sum (U.S.S. Pueblo lawyers, take note). The lesson? Doing business with the North Koreans is always more expensive than it would initially seem, and it eventually demands the corruption of everyone who partakes, though Ms. Hyun initially offered token resistance.

For their part, the North Koreans sound glad to be rid of Mr. Yu. The ingrate even had the temerity to burden his hosts with repeated requests for more rice and complaints about the side dishes. Yu should thank the deity or fetish object of his choice that the North Koreans didn’t add a ten-year sentence in Yodok to his troubles.

Lisa Ling’s Husband Expresses Concern for Refugees; Mitch Koss, Laura Ling, and Euna Lee Remain Silent

August 24, 2009 China & Korea, Ling/Lee Incident, Media Criticism 23 comments

The Wall Street Journal has published its own report on the scandal that is becoming a serious threat to (among other things) Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s public image as newsworthy victims. The Journal’s story adds fuel to suspicions that Ling, Lee, and producer Mitch Koss recklessly endangered the lives of refugees and activists by carrying video of them into North Korean territory, or otherwise failed to take measures to prevent that video from falling into Chinese and North Korean hands.

Paul Song, Laura Ling’s brother-in-law, speaking on behalf of the two journalists, on Sunday expressed his concern for the missionaries, human-rights workers and displaced North Koreans inside China. “The potential for increased crackdowns is a concern for all of us,” he said in a phone interview from Los Angeles.

Mr. Song stressed that Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee repeatedly took steps “to ensure the safety of all aid workers” both before and after their arrests. [WSJ, Gordon Fairclough and Jay Solomon]

You’ll see me quoted in the article as well; Solomon interviewed me last week. A point I stressed to Solomon but which didn’t make it into the final copy was that each risk must be weighed on its own merits. With perfect hindsight, it’s too easy and simplistic to say that no one should try to infiltrate past North Korean minders to bring us unofficial views of North Korea. I would emphatically disagree with such a proposition. Recently, some have criticized Lisa Ling’s undercover visit to North Korea with a team of eye surgeons, a criticism that wasn’t evident at the time her extraordinary documentary first aired. I strongly disagree with that criticism, and I defend Lisa Ling’s documentary because while it took substantial risks — mostly for Ms. Ling herself — the only North Koreans it endangered were her Bowibu minders. On the other hand, the result of Lisa Ling’s ruse was first-class journalism that drove home the cultish depravity, crushing poverty, and pervasive intimidation in which North Koreans must somehow survive. It informed the public by breathing life and authenticity into facts most viewers only knew vaguely. On balance, the information it provided us was worth the risks Ms. Ling took. I doubt it had much negative impact on other humanitarian operations in North Korea; after all, with the exception of trusted NGO’s like the Eugene Bell Foundation, which echoes the regime’s talking points in the American press, even to the detriment of the greater North Korean population, North Korea has never allowed many NGO’s in anyway, and probably only to help pre-selected loyal citizens with the right songbun. Around the time it seized Ling and Lee, North Korea ordered out all American NGO’s and rejected American food aid, almost certainly for unrelated political or diplomatic reasons.

Now contrast that with what Laura Ling and Euna Lee did. Of the risks, we’ve said plenty, and we eagerly await Ling and Lee’s side of it. But exactly what great hidden truth lay across that remote stretch of border? Video of huts and fields? I can’t imagine that these things were what enticed them to cross, and it’s why we need to hear much more about the Chinese guide who is widely rumored to have lured Ling, Lee, and Koss into crossing the border, whom the Chinese arrested last month, and whom they released shortly thereafter (see update). An obvious suspicion is that the guide is actually a North Korean agent who lured the three journalists into crossing just as Kim Jong Il was planning to launch an ICBM and test a nuke (and consequently, to test a new American president). This wouldn’t go very far to absolve Koss, Ling, or Lee, but it would dramatically alter the analysis of North Korea’s culpability.

If true, this would be fairly characteristic behavior for the North Koreans (as would stretching the boundaries of what is “characteristic,” even for them). After all, North Korea has kidnapped dozens of people from Japan, South Korea, and other countries. It agents, whom the Chinese allow to operate on its territory to drag refugees back across the border, kidnapped the wheel-chair-bound U.S. lawful permanent resident Kim Dong Shik in 2000, dragged him across the border (almost certainly with China’s full knowledge and assent), tortured him to death, and (according to Andrei Lankov) buried him in a shallow grave on a North Korean army base near Sinuiju. American protestations over Rev. Kim, including those from then-Senator Obama, proved to be as ephemeral as all other American protestations. What could be better than luring some reckless Americans into becoming their next hostages just as His Withering Majesty planned to provoke a global crisis? The arrest of the refugees would have been an unexpected bonus.

With all of that said, I’m conflicted because I’m glad Ling and Lee decided to cover this story to begin with, but also because of another fact you probably aren’t aware of. Paul Song, Lisa Ling’s husband, is a long-time supporter of the human rights of the North Korean people and flew all the way across the country two years ago to appear at a LiNK fundraiser. Ling and Lee probably undertook this story with the best of intentions. That may be why when Song asks us to keep our minds open, I’m willing to oblige to some degree. But if there’s any truth to this story at all, Ling and Lee need to speak out — promptly and vocally — for the refugees whose faces appear in those videos. Public pressure probably won’t change the way North Korea treats those in its prisons, but it could stop the Chinese from shipping North Koreans to its gulags, and it might force China to suspend bounty payments for North Korean refugees, or to restrict the actions of the North Korean agents who operate on its territory with China’s assent.

Song’s statement is a welcome expression of concern, but it doesn’t begin to put the kind of pressure on China that will be needed to stop China from jabbing wires though the noses of North Korean refugees, stringing them together, and dragging them back across the North Korean border to be tortured to death or shot in front of their neighbors:

China’s brutal and inhuman practices flagrantly violate the 1951 Convention on Refugees and its 1968 Protocol, both of which China signed. Our dismay with the actions of Ling, Lee, and Koss, shouldn’t cause us to lost sight of the fact that the real murderers here are Kim Jong Il and his Bowibu, and that China’s fascist dictatorship is both the accessory to and enabler of every atrocity that happens in North Korea today.

N Korea Charm Offensive Not Working

August 24, 2009 Sanctions No comments

One for the archives:

By Paul Eckert, Asia Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (Reuters) – North Korea is waxing conciliatory after months of military provocations — but experts say now is no time for the United States to relent on sanctions aimed at ending Pyongyang’s nuclear programs.

North Korea has lowered tensions with several gestures from releasing two jailed U.S. journalists and freeing a detained South Korean businessman to offering to reopen frozen North-South business and tourism ventures.

A high ranking North Korean delegation on Sunday attended the funeral of a former South Korean president and delivered a message from North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to Seoul’s President Lee Myung-bak, the first formal communication since Lee took office about 18 months ago.

And on Monday South Korean media said Pyongyang had invited the U.S. official charged with managing relations with North Korea, Steven Bosworth, to visit the North next month for talks on its nuclear program.

But long-time observers of wily North Korean leader Kim Jong-il see only a tactical shift aimed at weakening international sanctions imposed after North Korea’s nuclear weapons test in May. They say Kim’s moves are in fact evidence that U.N. curbs on Pyongyang’s finances are starting to bite.

North Korea had not even begun to address the nuclear proliferation dispute that has isolated it from the international community, said Abraham Kim of the Eurasia Group political risk consultancy.

“Instead they are trying to focus on atmospherics, to give the sense that things are getting better, but in reality nothing is getting better,” he said.

“Clearly we have seen some toning down of rhetoric … some actions and language that seem conciliatory,” said a senior U.S. official, cautioning that Washington had made only initial assessments of the North’s new diplomatic outreach.

“What we haven’t seen, and what we are still looking for, is any kind of indication that the North Koreans are willing to return to multilateral talks on denuclearization.”

TARGETING WASHINGTON, SEOUL, BEIJING

North Korea faces sanctions aimed at curtailing its lucrative missile trade under U.N. resolutions adopted following the North’s long-range rocket launch in April and nuclear test in May.

Washington wants the North to rejoin the United States in disarmament-for-aid talks that also include South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. Pyongyang considers these dead and wants only direct talks with the United States, which Washington refuses to conduct outside the six-party framework.

North Korea also appears to want to be recognized as a nuclear power — a nonstarter for its negotiating partners.

Korea expert Bruce Klingner at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington says Pyongyang is trying to “get the U.S. and South Korean governments to water down their approach towards North Korea, generate differences between the allies and to undermine the effectiveness of international sanctions.”

North Korea’s neighbor and chief benefactor China, which appears to have shaken Pyongyang by endorsing the latest U.N. sanctions to an unprecedented degree, is also a target of the North’s latest outreach, he added.

Kim says a Pyongyang’s aim, demonstrated by the emotional outpouring at the late Kim Dae-jung’s funeral, is “playing on the South Korean public to pressure the Lee Myung-bak administration to have a less tough stance on the North.”

South Korean President Lee in 2008 put the brakes on policies of open-ended aid that funneled billions to North Korea in a policy that Kim Dae-jung began a decade earlier.

Lee demanded reciprocity from Pyongyang for Seoul’s largess and North Korea angrily shut down inter-Korean business and tourism projects. The North now needs the money so is willing to discuss reopening them, say analysts.

“BUZZSAW” OF SOLIDARITY

Jack Pritchard, a former U.S. negotiator with North Korea, said Pyongyang has “run into a buzzsaw” of an Obama administration that is more firm than it had expected, a Lee administration in Seoul that has shrugged off war threats and U.N. sanctions that are starting to hurt.

“They’ve run into a problem they did not anticipate,” he said of a North Korea that has historically been able to exploit gaps between Washington and Seoul.

“They’re not collapsing now, they’re not going to fold now, but they’ve taken a look and said ‘This path is not sustainable. We’ve got to fix it and how can we do this?’” said Pritchard, head of the Korea Economic Institute.

So far, the United States is holding firm to its stance that North Korea’s only route to talking with Washington is through the six-party talks. To keep up pressure, Philip Goldberg, the U.S. coordinator for the U.N. sanctions, visited Seoul just after North Korea’s funeral overture.

Klingner and other experts say Washington should stick to its tough position. “We have the U.S. and its allies remaining firm, and here we have North Korea making the first gesture, so I think the policies are working,” he said. (Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by David Storey)

Easing of Tensions Amid Intensifying Sanctions Confounds Diplomats, “Peace Studies” Majors

August 23, 2009 Diplomacy, North-South, Sanctions 2 comments

Funny thing is, it was just yesterday that Selig Harrison was telling us that sanctions would make the North Koreans so mad they’d stomp away and not talk to us. And then I read this:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has sent word that he wants to hold a summit with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in the latest sign of easing tensions between the divided nations, news reports said Monday.

Kim’s envoy proposed the summit during a rare meeting Sunday, and Lee told the envoy that he would be open to a summit if it is discuss North Korea’s nuclear program, the South’s mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo daily reported, citing an unidentified government official.

Another leading newspaper, the JoongAng Ilbo, carried a similar report.

However, the South’s presidential Blue House denied the reports, saying that Lee and the North’s envoy had general discussions on improving relations between the two sides, but that nothing related to a summit was mentioned. [AP]

So what was it that President Lee did to achieve this great thaw? Could it have been Lee’s breaking of international sanctions by resuming the flow of unconditional aid? Pulling out of the Proliferation Security Initiative? Dropping his criticism of the North’s human rights record at the U.N.? Canceling joint exercises with the Yankee imperialists? Maybe it was his refusal to coordinate with the Americans to put financial pressure on the North? Or was it the way he chased after Kim Jong Il’s emissaries like a stalker off his thorazine?

What? None of the above? So all those mean things Lee Myung Bak did and said were not the End of Diplomacy As We Know It?

You’re Beautiful When You’re Angry

August 23, 2009 WTF? One comment

I counted at least four levels of hotness at 0:45. Ssssssssssssssss.

Take the OFK Challenge: Name One Time Selig Harrison Was Right About North Korea

August 22, 2009 Media Criticism, Washington Views 2 comments

The AP’s Foster Klug interviews North Korean tool Selig Harrison, and catches him in this Kanye West moment:

Harrison, addressing his critics, says: “Everything I’ve ever said about North Korea since 1972 has seemed at the time like screaming into the wilderness, and everything I’ve ever advocated has come to pass.” [AP, Foster Klug]

If Harrison means that he consistently called for the U.S. to cave and it always did, Harrison is correct. Never overestimate the U.S. Department of State. But off-hand, I can’t think of anyone with a worse track record of predicting Pyongyang’s next move than its most frequent guest. Moreover, Harrison’s reporting is invariably flavored with official North Korean spin, frequently at the expense of accuracy. Quoted in the June 13, 1994 edition of the Times of London, Harrison described Kim Il Sung as “‘very sharp, very alert,’ if slow on his feet at 82.” Three weeks later, Kim was promoted to the supine position of “eternal president” on the undertaker’s slab.

And so it goes: Harrison was a prolific proponent of the myth of North Korean economic reform (he explained away the absence of clear evidence for this by calling it “reform by stealth” driven by a cabal of latent moderates). He was wrong that North Korea signed Agreed Frameworks I and II with a good faith intent to disarm. He was wrong in his inflexible atheism about North Korea’s HEU program. He consistently ignored North Korea’s horrors and blamed its nuclear provocations on George W. Bush until Kim Jong Il detonated a nuke and launched an ICBM toward Hawaii on Barack Obama’s watch. Now, he blames Barack Obama for driving North Korea away from talks by criticizing it for launching a missile in flagrant violation of two U.N. resolutions.

With a record like that, I’ve long wondered why newspapers continue to quote Harrison. The subtle subtext of Klug’s article is that reporters are starting to wonder the same thing — that journalists are beginning to look at Selig Harrison as less of an elder statesman than an eccentric uncle, the man whose reaction to every North Korean lie, cheat, and crime against humanity can be summed up thusly: “more cowbell.”

By the way, Foster, thanks for stopping by:

Harrison’s comments on the North often infuriate conservatives.

Joshua Stanton, a blogger at One Free Korea, has written: “One can only wonder what about the North Koreans is so believable to Harrison’s more credulous side.”

Harrison also has been criticized for what some see as the North’s habit of using him to try to renegotiate the terms of already settled nuclear agreements with the United States.

Klug, by the way, isn’t a drive-by Korea correspondent. He’s been concentrating on the story for a number of years and providing generally good, balanced coverage, albeit coverage that’s focused on the diplomacy and disarmament angle. You can read what I said in its full context here.

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