Archive for September 2009

Unfortunately, This May Mean He’ll Stay in Washington Instead

September 24, 2009 Useful Idiocy 4 comments

John Kerry has no immediate plans to go to Pyongyang, despite months of rumors that he was trying to invite himself there. One can only hope that the Obama Administration sent a young White House staffer to sew Kerry’s trousers to his chair.

You might question whether helping a foreign enemy advance its tyrannical world view and sideline the U.S. government in negotiations is smart diplomacy, but for Kerry, it’s a well established practice. It could have been just like old times if Madame Binh flew to Pyongyang for a reunion.

There aren’t many elected politicians I deeply, deeply loathe, and John Kerry is one of the few.

Demonstrations Around the World Today Against PRC’s Repatriation of NK Refugees

September 24, 2009 Activism, China, Human Rights, Refugees 12 comments

Seoul Demonstration

A little before 1 p.m. today across the street from the Chinese embassy in Seoul 40+ people gathered to remind the Chinese government of a commitment it made 27 years ago today.  On September 24, 1982, the PRC signed the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, the major international agreements which lay out how signatory governments say they will handle refugees.

Today’s demonstration in Seoul was one of approximately a dozen scheduled for September 24 around the world.  They are being coordinated by the North Korea Freedom Coalition.

Though North Korean refugees in China face harsh interrogation, imprisonment, usually forced labor, and even sometimes execution — simply for the crime of leaving their country to search for a means to feed their family — the Chinese government systematically rounds them up and repatriates them anyway.  When asked why they do not honor their international agreements related to protecting refugees, the PRC claims that North Korean refugees are economic migrants.

Below the fold are more photos from today’s event in Seoul, info on a group of 9 North Korean refugees who’ve entered an embassy in Hanoi, and a reminder about a major conference on NK Human Rights tomorrow in Seoul.
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China Stabs Obama (and America) in the Back on North Korea

September 23, 2009 China & Korea, Sanctions 21 comments

I’ve been skeptical of reports, most of them directly from the ChiCom propaganda mill, that China was cooperating with U.N. sanctions against North Korea. So after a brief flurry of displays of cooperation, here is what the statistical record tells us:

North Korea’s trade with China declined slightly during the first half of this year, likely due to falling prices of crude oil, a South Korean agency and officials said Wednesday.

Trade volume during the January-June period totaled US$1.1 billion, down 3.7 percent from a year earlier and the first decline since 1999, the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) said in an emailed release that cited official Chinese data. The drop was in striking contrast with a 41 percent increase during the same period last year and a 16 percent gain in 2007. [Yonhap]

Got that? China halted the rate of growth in its support for North Korea, growth that was presumably designed to make up for what South Korea reduced since Roh Moo Hyun’s extinction. But overall, trade only declined by low single digits, most of that the result of North Korea actually getting a better deal on Chinese fuel. Most contemptible of all was China’s increased supply of food directly to the North Korean regime and army, which undercuts any multilateral pressure on North Korea to allow monitored food aid distributed on the basis of need, rather than loyalty.

China isn’t going to help us defang North Korea, and any president who believes they will is delusional. China wants North Korea to have nukes and helped North Korea get them. The only way to stop China from propping up Kim Jong Il is to begin methodically sanctioning Chinese entities that do business in or with North Korea, using a tool such as Executive Order 13,382. Then, other Chinese companies with substantial investments in the United States will have to choose between doing business with us, and doing business with Kim Jong Il. Most will make the choice themselves without having to be prodded.

Pictures of the North Korean Countryside Show a Lean Year Unfolding

September 23, 2009 Famine & Food Aid 2 comments

The photos are worth seeing, though I see no other evidence to support the photographer’s contention that the regime is relaxing its suppression of religion. A photograph of what are probably Peoples’ Safety Agency agents “praying” at a sham church in Pyongyang is not evidence that supports that contention.

On the other hand, there are numerous reports emerging from North Korea which support the contention that this year’s harvest will be way down from recent years, which themselves have been poor.

North Korea’s corn yield this year is expected to fall by 40 percent due to a fertilizer shortage and bad weather, the head of a Seoul-based aid group said Tuesday after a survey in the North. The North’s corn crop for this year is estimated to be less than 1.5 million tons, considerably down from the 2.5 million to 3 million tons it usually garners, said Kim Soon-kwon, a leading corn biologist and head of the International Corn Foundation. The forecast yield portends a severe food shortage in the country where corn is believed to make up 40 percent of the total food supply.

“Of all the corn harvests I’ve seen while visiting North Korea over the past 12 years, this year’s crop was the worst,” Kim said over the telephone from China where he was staying after last week’s trip to the North. [Yonhap]

That evidence is consistent with Open News’s alarming August report on a recent spike in corn prices.

I’ve noticed that North Koreans have learned to hoard food year by year, and that one bad harvest isn’t enough to plunge the country into famine because people somehow find a reserve on which to sustain themselves. But last year was also a bad year, and peoples’ stocks may well be replenished.

Now, private aid groups in South Korea are criticizing their government for not allowing them to provide aid to North Korea. To the extent they say that humanitarian aid should not be conditioned on the regime’s nuclear disarmament, they are right. We should be treating North Korea’s downtrodden as allies to be cultivated. But to the extent they want to embark on breakaway aid programs with insufficient controls on where the food goes, they’re wrong. Their intentions are good, but they’re only contributing to the problem.

The unavoidable conclusion about North Korea’s food situation is that the regime wants some people to eat, but either doesn’t care if the rest eat or simply wants them to starve. If so, then giving aid to the regime only allows it to feeds its military and members of the loyal castes, removing all of our bargaining power to monitor the aid and get it to those in greatest need. We’ll only have the bargaining power to get food into the bellies of the hungriest North Koreans when donors band together and demand, as one, sufficient monitoring controls, including nutritional surveys. Unilateral aid by breakaway NGO’s and governments is counterproductive to that greater good and only sustains the misery of the majority.

Clinton: Kim Jong Il Looked Healthy to Me

September 22, 2009 Kim Jong Il No comments

Interestingly, Jimmy Carter observed the same thing about Kim Il Sung in June of 1994, when he thought he’d brought back Peace In Our Time and prevented North Korea from going nuclear. Wrong and wrong, Jimmy. It would take a few more years of Carterian presidential drift before North Korea tested its first nuke, but it wasn’t even a month before all that sam-gyop-sal and child-flesh finally got The Great Leader wheeled off to the Great Meat Locker. But then, politicians say those things when they’re being diplomatic, and we all know how carefully Jimmy Carter chooses his words. Especially in his bitter dowager years.

Similarly, I don’t put much stock in the powers of observation of any man who, while in a state of apparent sobriety and while being the most powerful man on earth, also thought Monica Lewinsky was hot enough to justify adultery, scandal, perjury, and impeachment.

Clinton even engaged in the subterfuge of bringing his own doctor to give Kim the onceover, something His Withering Majesty seemed quite cognizant of. How strong an opinion a doctor can form about a person’s health without the use of a syringe and a rectal thermometer, I will let you decide on your own.

President Obama publicly accepts Clinton’s assessment at face value, but also boasts — and with some justification, I think — about the success of sanctions at building pressure on North Korea.

My assessment: Kim Jong Il seems to be keeping a fairly busy schedule and didn’t look significantly worse in early September than he did in the spring. This doesn’t prove that he’s not dying, it just strongly suggests that for the time being, he’s a fully functional democidal tyrant. Which, to some, is a good thing.

For a dissenting view, see this report from Open News, which has it that Kim Jong Il is being driven to desperation by the reaper’s shadow.

North Korea’s Foreclosure Crisis (No, Really.)

September 22, 2009 Inside NK, NK Economics 6 comments

I have to say, this came as a surprise to me:

He noted, “Since 2000, new kotjebi have been people who have gone to ruin and lost their homes to loan sharks. These days their numbers are drastically increasing, so the authorities cannot stand by indifferently.

According to one source, a Korean-Chinese loan shark called Cho Jung Cheol was recently caught by the PSA on suspicion of taking a total of seven houses from defaulters.

North Korean people usually offer their house as security on a loan. Cho lent money at 30% interest for two weeks to a month, and used gangsters to take houses from those who couldn’t pay.

Those who lose their houses in this way roam the streets with their family members, the family splits up, or sometimes they escape from North Korea. After 2005, this became a common social phenomenon. [Daily NK]

When the state’s supply doesn’t meet the people’s demand, eventually, someone will step in to fill the void.

The Comfort Women of Our Time: North Korean Women Are Turning to Prostitution to Survive

September 21, 2009 Human Trafficking, Inside NK 6 comments

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Laura Ling and Euna Lee went to China to tell the story of what it means to be a North Korean woman today. What it means, increasingly, is having no future, and often, having no means to keep body and soul united but sacrificing the latter to preserve whatever remains of the former. If the historically weighty term “comfort woman” means a woman coerced into prostitution by the actions of an oppressive government, the women of North Korea are the comfort women of our time, and in these times, men and women in China and both Koreas are their exploiters, and often, their means of survival.

It would be an overstatement to suggest that the North Korean regime is directly impressing women into prostitution against their will, [Update: I stand corrected] but the regime’s actions, while less direct than those of the Japanese 60 years ago, frequently have the same ultimate effect. For an apt illustration, let’s return to the story of Ban Yong Mee:

Born in the town of Sinuiju, the city across the river from Dandong, Miss Ban studied hard at school to achieve her childhood dream of becoming a doctor. But despite getting excellent grades, a medical college refused her application on the grounds that she was from an ideologically “unreliable” family.

The problem was her grandfather, who had been a moderately prosperous businessman before the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. His fabrics factory employed only a few dozen people, yet in the eyes of North Korea’s communist leadership he was an exploiter, capitalist and counter-revolutionary threat.

His factory was confiscated, he was executed as a “public enemy”, and ever since, his descendants have been treated with suspicion – Miss Ban’s parents were forced to work on a cooperative farm.

Rejected from medical school, Miss Ban attempted to join the Korean People’s Army and was rejected for the same reason. “They said, ‘We don’t need a person who may betray us any moment and whom we can’t trust’,” she said with a sad smile. “They think that I want revenge for my grandfather.”

Instead, she had no choice but to join her parents, toiling in the co-operative’s rice fields. [London Telegraph]

Miss Ban became a victim of the North Korean regime’s system of political castes known as
songbun, meaning she was written off as unworthy and expendable. Some of the women in Miss Ban’s position say they were lured into Chinese brothels with false promises. Miss Ban makes no such claim. She admits knowingly selling herself to a brothel. There was simply no other alternative. Miss Ban was a subject of a nominally socialist regime that smothers private markets but which chooses to squander its resources on weapons and white elephants for the Inner Party rather than provide for its people, and which refuses to let other countries feed them, either:

“Most of us had absolutely nothing to eat,” she said, recalling the famines in the communist state that killed an estimated 300,000 people between 1995 and 1998. “We went to the hills to look for edible grass, wild animals and birds. I remember we even ate insects and caterpillars.” [London Telegraph]

Other North Korean women interviewed for this report, most likely having no idea of their own songbun status, simply claim that they were hungry — often because a provider died, leaving then no other means of support. A few others were targeted and abducted by the North Korean accomplices of Chinese gangs.

Like all North Korean refugees in China, Ms. Ban lived as a hunted fugitive under an unadjudged death sentence — the constant fear of being sent back to die in a North Korean gulag, or in front of a North Korean firing squad. One day, Chinese police caught her with fake documents. The price of Miss Ban’s survival was giving in to the sexual demands of six of the policemen and turning over all the earnings she had. And still, that was better than the alternative:

“The only way I’m going back to Korea is in a coffin,” she said, a look of defiance flashing across her face. “F*** you, comrade Kim Jong-il.”[London Telegraph]

Open News recently published several reports on the rising trend in this industry — forcing North Korean women to perform in front of web cams for South Korean customers hundreds of miles away. The South Korean partners in these ventures supply the Korean-Chinese pimps with South Korean national ID’s (presumably fake) for the North Korean women, so that they can chat online on South Korean web sites. According to Open News, the women don’t discuss where they come from, but the South Korean customers certainly recognize their North Korean dialects. Let it never be said that South Koreans never did anything for starving North Koreans, although there are things to be said for this commerce — it’s probably better than physical rape, and it’s still probably keeping more North Koreans alive than anything Kim Dae Jung or Roh Moo Hyun ever did for North Korea’s expendable classes. Here’s your “We Are One” feel-good moment of the year:

Mr. B told us that these chatting girls from North Korea have to do more than what is stated above because the more they work, the more money they can earn.

These chatting girls work usually around midnight. Because there are lots of customers after 6 pm, the work continues from 1 am to 4 am. There is no fixed time when the work will be done. It is also possible these women be driven by customer during the day.

Mr. A and Mr. B both said that these women are not free from supervision of the managers even after their work is done. They are confined 24 hours and not allowed to leave the building. Even if some are exceptionally allowed out, they will be accompanied with managers to be under their control. [Open News]

The women must meet earnings quotas or risk losing even this life, such as it is. But the earning potential is still phenomenal by North Korean standards:

These “North Korean refugee chatting girls” have a sales target (a mandatory minimum sales amount assigned by the employer) that must be met each day. The amount varies by employer; the lowest sales target is known to be 50,000 won (South Korean) per day, or 220,000 won per week.

According to Mr. A’s testimony, however, it is actually easy to earn a daily average of 100,000 won. Accordingly, it is easy to earn 500,000 won per week or 2 million won per month, in which case the chatting woman would receive an income (calculated as 30 percent of the sales revenue) of 600,000 won (approximately 4,000 yuan) (Note 1). Furthermore, the income is directly proportional to the duration of the chat; the longer the women draw out the chat, the higher their income. [Open News]

In North Korea itself, women and children are also being forced into prostitution by a deteriorating food situation and a state that won’t provide for them:

“Around stations in big cities, you can see many pimps affiliated to inns . . . . They approach pedestrians, euphemistically saying that “˜I am selling a bed,’ or “˜selling a flower.’” Sadly, some of those forced to survive this way are children. [Daily NK]

The beneficiaries of the majority’s misery are the minority with power and money. The Daily NK has previously reported on a prostitution scandal in which twenty North Korean officials in Hamhung were purged, and several senior military officers were shot for patronizing a “tea house.” This month, the Daily NK reports that in the city of Hyesan, the regime engaged in an inspection campaign directed at hotels that are selling women and girls to North Korean and foreign customers:

At the Hyemyung Inn, located in Hyemyung-dong, the superintendant, Mr. Lee, and the manager Mr. Baek allegedly ran a prostitution ring from 2005, despite the fact that it is a state-operated residential facility frequently used by Central Party officials. They charged 10,000 to 15,000 North Korean won per room for officials, and 4,000 won per room to average customers.

According to the source, prostitution at the Hyemyung Inn took place behind the disguise of flower sales. The superintendant and the manager connected male customers to various “flowers” according to their demands. What has been causing the most shock is the apparent coercion of girls as young as middle-school graduates into working at the inns.

The women selling flowers were classified into those selling “red flowers” (girls in their late teens~early 20s), “blue flowers” (unmarried women over 25), “yellow flowers” (married women) and “purple flowers” (widows). The superintendant was provided with the women through another supplier. These prostitutes divided payments for their services with the suppliers at a 40:60 or 50:50 ratio.

The source explained, “The most expensive ‘red flower’ costs around 20,000 won for two hours and 40,000 won for the entire night. It was even revealed that the supplier has good connections in China, so some of his women crossed the border and went as far as Changbai in China to work.” [Daily NK]

This time, different government actions are implicated in the rise of survival prostitution — the regime’s attack on the markets many North Koreans depend on to survive, and the mass mobilization that takes them away from the hard work of getting by day by day:

The source also explained, “Since the 150-Day Battle began, the number of women selling their bodies has progressively increased.” As households are being mobilized for farm labor and construction projects, and the markets are opening at past 4pm, the income of households in the cities has dramatically decreased, resulting in greater numbers of women engaging in sex trafficking as a means of survival. [Daily NK]

Take nothing I say here as a moral objection to voluntary commercial sex among free and consenting adults. Certainly there are greater social evils than this in North Korea today. Take this as an objection to an oligarchy that deprives human beings of their aspirations and their innate potential, and which forces them to choose between a degradation in a brothel or dessication in a grave.

Hostile Policy Update

September 20, 2009 North-South 2 comments

Scores of North Korean trawlers fishing for blue crab crossed the Northern Limit Line near Yeonpyeong Island in the West Sea for three consecutive days from Sunday to Tuesday. Military authorities are at a loss how to respond.

A government source on Tuesday said between 20 and 50 North Korean fishing boats crossed the de-facto sea border in waters northwest of Yeonpyeong Island for three straight days since Sunday. “They returned north after fishing for three to four hours until South Korean high-speed patrol boats arrived.” [Chosun Ilbo]

This doesn’t sound completely inadvertent, somehow.

North Korea Closes Largest Unofficial Market

September 20, 2009 An Alliance?, NK Economics 4 comments

But it can’t be! Victor Cha, Selig Harrison, Keith Luse, Frank Januzzi, and every Peace Studies professor in South Korea can’t all be wrong!

North Korea has shut down its largest unofficial market in a sign that the Communist government was intent on quashing, or at least better controlling, market activities that it had tolerated for years, Seoul-based organizations monitoring the country said last week.

The market, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, was closed sometime in June and vendors were dispersed to two or three smaller nearby markets, according to the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, or NKNet, which says it monitors the North using informants from inside the country. [N.Y. Times]

Wow. That’s some return on a seven billion-dollar investment, and that’s not counting the nuclear weapons it helped a megalomaniac acquire, or the uncounted North Koreans who’ve suffered and died under Kim Jong Il’s unnaturally prolonged misrule.

Don’t feel so smug. All the while South Korea was cutting its defense budget and reinvesting the money in Kim Jong Il, American taxpayers were subsidizing South Korea’s defense. No wonder Americans are still asking why they’re paying to subsidize the armies of both Koreas, including the one that has artillery pointed at our soldiers there.

Sanctions Are Good for Diplomacy, But Diplomacy Won’t Disarm North Korea

September 19, 2009 Diplomacy, Sanctions No comments

Despite warnings from the foreign policy establishment (most notably, Selig Harrison and Ralph Cossa, among many others) that sanctioning North Korea would drive North Korea away from disarmament talks, the opposite seems to be happening — the election of a seemingly liberal administration brought only provocations from North Korea, while tough sanctions are forcing them to feign interest in disarming:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il told a visiting Chinese envoy he will work to end his country’s nuclear arms programme through multilateral talks in an apparent breakthrough, but similiar vows in the past have not been met with action. [....]

North Korea has made conciliatory moves in recent weeks, including the release of U.S. journalists it had held for illegal entry, in what analysts said was a way to replenish its coffers after it had been hit by sanctions for nuclear and missile tests.

“Kim Jong-il … said North Korea will continue adhering towards the goal of denuclearisation … and is willing to resolve the relevant problems through bilateral and multilateral talks,” China’s Xinhua news agency said. [Reuters, Jack Kim]

But South Korean officials, including President Lee Myung-bak, have cautioned against any hasty optimism, saying North Korea has shown no willingness to disarm.

They say North Korea’s recent conciliatory gestures came because it feels the pain of U.N. sanctions on its weapons exports and financial dealings that were imposed after it conducted a nuclear test in May. [AP, Kwang-Tae Kim]

Not that I believe North Korea would ever voluntarily disarm, so let’s not mistake North Korea’s not-necessarily-hostile policy for material progress. But it is proof, if more were needed, that the “engagement” school of North Korea policy is wrong. The fact that the Obama Administration continues to say that sanctions will remain in place until North Korea verifiably disarms suggests that this particular species of stupidity has been marginalized.

If only for that reason, Kim Jong Il’s reversal is progress. The next test will be whether the Obama Administration can hold to the principle it has staked out. If it does, it will eventually have to confront the fact that North Korea isn’t going to disarm, and that China will try, ever so gradually, to restore its financial support for Kim Jong Il. How will we respond then?

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