Archive for December 2009

North Korea Says It Has Robert Park (Updated; Another Statement by Park)

December 28, 2009 Robert Park 32 comments

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a brief dispatch Tuesday that the American was detained and under investigation after illegally entering through the North Korea-China border last Thursday. [AP]

I suppose this comes as no surprise. The North Koreans don’t identify Robert Park by name, but I think we can assume it’s him.

You don’t have to agree with Park’s methods to pity him now. There are two theories here: one, that North Korea will want to use Park as a bargaining chip and will keep him in what passes for a gilded cage in North Korea. That was the theory I’d inclined to when I gave this interview, but Tim Peters — Tim is one of those rare people I consider a hero — added a point that chills me:

Tim Peters, an activist in Seoul who knows Mr Park, tried to persuade him against the plan, which he characterised as “reckless”. “I found out about Robert’s plan three days before he left for China,” he said in an interview. “By that time, however, he already turned off his cellphone and was not responding to e-mails any longer.

“I completely acknowledge that Robert Park’s heart was very much in the right place, which I have to make very clear. But I personally disagree whether that will necessarily be an effective way.

With Mr Park in custody, observers said, North Korean authorities will want to extract any information he may have about missionaries in China and others who work underground helping North Korean refugees. “He knows activists in China and throughout north-east Asia,” Mr Peters said.

Clearly Robert Park is a man with his heart in the right place, but who has lost possession of his mind. As indefensibly foolish as his move was, I’m not sure he’s in a state to bear full mental responsibility for it. I don’t think anyone can deny that these are the actions of a troubled person, and that a man of equal devotion and greater judgment would have simply gone to work for the underground railroad, or gone into the business of smuggling in food, radios, bibles, or even guns — for what North Korea needs more than anything else is the capacity to do what people must “when government becomes destructive of these ends.” I fear for Robert Park as I feared for Laura Ling and Euna Lee, but as then, my greater fear now is what he’ll tell his captors.

And as always, Claudia Rosett’s take is worth reading, especially her kind words for this site.

Update, 29 Dec 09:

My co-blogger Dan Bielefeld has a little more about Robert Park’s activism before he crossed into North Korea. Park seems to have been the driving force behind this group, which was one of the groups that participated on this march to Seoul Station and organized some of the events at the station thereafter. I’m not going to relate all of the details now; Dan is busy with other things now but I want to give him the chance to tell the whole story himself when he concludes that other business.

When I look at the pictures of those demonstrations, I’m struck by how few Korean faces there are in those crowds, but also by the obvious sincerity of all those in attendance of all nationalities. Robert Park might have done a lot more good if he’d stayed in Seoul and helped launch balloons, or recruited a few cells of people to expand smuggling routes across the Chicom-North Korean border.

Update 2, 29 Dec 09:

A reader forwards another purported statement by Park. I don’t have reason to doubt it, but can’t confirm it. Read more

28 December 2009: Another Nuke Test, Proliferation Updates, Hard Times for N. Korean Workers Abroad

December 28, 2009 Anju Links 3 comments

BRING IT ON: There’s speculation that North Korea may test yet another nuke, to which I say, that’s one less it can sell.

MORE ON THE LOGISTICAL CHAIN behind the Bangkok weapons seizure, at the Wall Street Journal. Still no finality on the final destination for the weapons, however, though I’m sticking with my educated guess that it was Iran, in part because the shipment contained parts for long-range missiles.

IF YOU CAN’T TRUST A FELLOW MARXIST OLIGARCH, WHO CAN YOU TRUST? Here’s proof, if more were needed, that North Korea would sell weapons to anyone. According to this report, North Korea has been selling weapons to Congolese rebels — probably in addition to the government forces whose soldiers it had trained. I’m ambivalent about some of the Congolese rebels, who are ethnic Tutsis originally mobilized by Rwanda and Burundi to fight against the genocide of their people by the Hutus — a classic case of people taking up arms to stop a genocide that the U.N. wouldn’t. There aren’t any heroes in that terrible war, but the worst villains are the Mai-Mai militias the Tutsi rebels are fighting. The Congolese government, by the way, has the armed backing of the armies of Angola and North Korean ally Zimbabwe. The lesson? Not even Robert Mugabe can trust Kim Jong Il.

NORTH KOREAN WORKERS IN DUBAI are feeling the effects of its recession. As always, that “voluntary” wage withholding is an added burden.

MEANWHILE, IN RUSSIA, a group of North Korean loggers has defected. Those workers probably labor under worse conditions than most prisoners.

MORE ON THE SPREAD OF CELL PHONES in North Korea.

SF GATE REVIEWS BARBARA DEMICK’S “Nothing to Envy,” which I’ll soon get to read, thanks to Ms. Demick reaching out to me and offering me a review copy. I’ve been looking forward to this one (hat tip to a reader).

Iran Rises Again

December 28, 2009 Axis of Evil, Iran, Proliferation No comments

I confess that I’d written off the Iranian protest movement for this year, but I was wrong: the movement actually appears to be spreading to new places and attracting support beyond its traditional base among the students.

Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the country’s pious heartland.

Demonstrations took place in Esfahan, a provincial capital and Iran’s cultural center, and nearby Najafabad, the birthplace and hometown of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose death Saturday triggered the latest round of confrontations between the opposition movement and the government.

The central region is considered by some as the conservative power base of the hard-liners in power.

Iranian authorities are clearly alarmed by the spread of the protests. Mojtaba Zolnour, a mid-ranking cleric serving as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the elite and powerful Revolutionary Guard, acknowledged widespread unrest around the country.

“There were many [acts of] sedition after the Islamic Revolution,” he said, according to the website of the right-wing newspaper Resala. “But none of them spread the seeds of doubt and hesitation among various social layers as much as the recent one.” [L.A. Times, Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi]

The regime’s latest move, the arrest of opposition activists, strikes me as the act of a regime in panic. It seems like something that would inflame, rather than suppress, protest.

Sunday’s violence erupted when security forces fired on stone-throwing protesters in the center of Tehran. Opposition Web sites and witnesses said five people were killed, but Iran’s state-run Press TV, quoting the Supreme National Security Council, said the death toll was eight. It gave no further details. The dead included a nephew of Mousavi, according to Mousavi’s Web site, Kaleme.ir. Police denied using firearms. [AP, Ali Akbar Dareini]

Every death means another political funeral for another political martyr.

When I watch events in Iran, I scour the usual news sources, of course, but I also watch Pejman Yousefzadah’s blog — Pejman is originally from Iran — and of course, some of the YouTube channels that show us what traditional media can’t anymore:

Crowds as large and as energetic as these suggest a movement that won’t be suppressed easily. I wonder if the security forces can maintain their cohesion as long as the protesters can maintain their courage.

The North Korean connection? Substantial, of course. Iran is probably the largest single customer of North Korean weapons, and the financier of what North Korea sells to Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other places. The fall of the Iranian regime would shatter the Axis of Evil. It would be a devastating blow to the North Korean regime’s finances and expose more North Korean proliferation efforts in Iran, where numerous North Korean scientists currently reside doing God-knows-what. It would open the way for a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear program, allowing a greater focus on containing North Korea. It would help to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would reinvigorate the advance of representative government in the Middle East. It would strip Hezbollah, Syria, and Iraqi Shiite militias of a source of weapons and funding, also shifting more of our diplomatic attention to North Korea.

Thirty Years Ago Today, Afghanistan’s Nightmare Began

December 27, 2009 Uncategorized 3 comments

Too many of us have forgotten the horrors that the Soviet Union wreaked on Afghanistan, as I write at The New Ledger, and it is a rare occurrence of historic justice that Afghanistan catalyzed the extinction of the Soviet Union itself.

Great Confiscation Updates

December 27, 2009 NK Economics, Resistance 2 comments

The Washington Post’s Blaine Harden writes today that popular discontent over the Great Confiscation isn’t going away:

It was an unexplained decision — the kind of command that for more than six decades has been obeyed without question in North Korea. But this time, in a highly unusual challenge to Kim’s near-absolute authority, the markets and the people who depend on them pushed back.  Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. Exchange limits have been eased, allowing individuals to possess more cash.

The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim’s power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world’s most repressive state. The change is driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country’s 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them.

The currency episode seems far from over, and there have been indications that Kim still has the stomach for using deadly force. There have been public executions and reinforcements have been dispatched to the Chinese border to stop possible mass defections, according to reports in Seoul-based newspapers and aid groups with informants in the North.

Still, analysts say there has also been evidence of unexpected shifts in the limits of Kim’s authority.  “The private markets have created a new power elite,” said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “They pay bribes to bureaucrats in Kim’s government, and they are a threat that is not going away.”

On balance, however, the signs I’ve seen are these:  (a) the regime’s partial reversal of the confiscation has reduced public anger; (b) in the near term, the rage has given way to acceptance, and the odds of a broader wave of public protest are diminished in the short-term; however (c) the Pandora’s box of public dissent has opened, and will prove very difficult to close in the medium to long term.  That’s especially so now that the people have forced the regime to change a major economic policy.  Furthermore, the measures the regime is taking to appease the people in the short-term, such as cash payments to workers and farmers, may not be sustainable in the long term, particularly as a new bout of hyperinflation eats away at the value of the new currency and makes it impossible to save for leaner times.  In North Korea, food supplies typically run shortest in the spring, after winter reserves run out and before the first harvests come in.  Finally, the misery that the Great Confiscation has already caused will linger for years.

One positive aspect of this is that cash the regime spends on buying domestic stability can’t be spent on enriching high-ranking cadres, the military, and WMD development.

I don’t conceal my view that North Korea won’t change barring the overthrow of this regime, which can’t happen peacefully, and that expressions of discontent are signs that the North Korean people are prepared to support a clandestine opposition movement, should one arise.  No such movement has arisen yet; such a movement still lacks a nationwide galvanizing ideology around which a clandestine organization can coalesce and build.  But I suspect that if such an ideology were propagated to North Koreans via Radio Free North Korea or Open Radio, leaders would emerge locally to support it.

Korean-American Activist Crosses Into North Korea (Updated)

December 25, 2009 Activism, Human Rights, Robert Park, Useful Idiocy 11 comments

careuterscom.jpgOh God, not again.

Reuters is reporting that Robert Park, a 28 year-old American, has walked across the Tumen River from China to the North Korean town of Hoeryong, which is infamous for being both the birthplace of Kim Jong Il’s mother and the town nearest to Camp 22. Park’s apparent objectives were (1) to get himself arrested and (2) thereby raise global attention about North Korea’s brutal political prison camps. Rest assured that Park will accomplish Objective Number One. The North Korean soldiers who arrested Laura Ling and Euna Lee in March are still being lauded as heroes.

The North Koreans have yet to confirm that they have Park in custody.

Park was known, but not well known, among American activists working to bring attention to North Korean human rights issues, help North Korean refugees, and pressure North Korea and the governments that sustain it with aid. Fellow activists who’ve e-mailed me in the last several hours describe Park as something of a fringe figure someone who orbited around them, but whose views were neither influential nor particularly well known to many of them. If Park was plugged into any activist organization, it must have been South Korean. Yet Park obviously wasn’t acting completely alone, and this stunt appears to have been premeditated:

Activists told Reuters that Robert Park, 28, had crossed into North Korea from China on Friday, while South Korea’s Yonhap news agency and the Kukmin Ilbo newspaper quoted activists who went with him to the border as saying he had crossed at a sparsely patrolled point near the northeast border city of Hoeryong.

Park was quoted by activists who went with the border as shouting when he went across: “I am an American citizen. I am bringing God’s love. God loves you.” The activists asked not to be named due to security concerns.

Park told to Reuters in Seoul earlier this week that he saw it as his duty as a Christian to make the journey and did not want the U.S. government to try to free him. “I don’t want President Obama to come and pay to get me out. But I want the North Korean people to be free,” Park said on Wednesday before departing for China.

“Until the concentration camps are liberated, I do not want to come out. If I have to die with them, I will. (For) these innocent men, women and children, as Christians, we need to take the cross for them. The cross means that we sacrifice our lives for the redemption of others,” he said. [Reuters, Jon Herskovitz]

You’re on your own making sense of that one. Obviously, Park willfully confronted a grave risk, and it’s entirely possible he won’t come back from North Korea for a very long time, if ever. He doesn’t want to be ransomed out, and I hope (but doubt) there will be general agreement that he shouldn’t be. Yet given the amount of criticism heaped on Laura Ling and Euna Lee, Park will probably draw much harsher criticism and evoke less sympathy. If Park’s goal was to strike a blow against the North Korean regime, it’s far more likely that he’ll end up being traded back to a tool like Bill Richardson for a ransom paid in the form of money, diplomatic concessions, and political legitimacy. The only winners will be North Korea’s most opportunistic apologists in America and Kim Jong Il, who will again show everyone how magnanimous he can be toward our foolish children … for the right price. Park’s stunt will assuredly set back the very cause he claims to want to advance.

Some links in Korean here and here.

I’ve posted a copy of what’s purported to be Park’s statement below the fold.

Update: The description of Park’s bizarre behavior as he crossed the border further calls into question just what he hoped to accomplish, and whether that hope is remotely realistic.

A 29-year-old American Christian, claiming God showed him a vision of North Korea’s liberation and redemption, has entered the country to urge leader Kim Jong-Il to repent, activists said Saturday. Robert Park, a US citizen of Korean ancestry, crossed the frozen Tumen River from China and walked into the North without permission on Christmas Day, they said.

“While crossing the frozen river in a snowstorm, Park shouted loud, saying “˜I’m a US citizen, I came here to proclaim God’s love’,” a colleague of Park’s told AFP, quoting others who saw Park cross the border. “But all were silent on the other side of the river. We assume he was arrested by North Korean border guards there. But we don’t know about his fate,” he said on condition of anonymity.

Park, a self-proclaimed seer and activist, is a leader of an international campaign for North Korean human rights called “Freedom and Life For All North Koreans: 2009,” his colleague said. The group describes itself as a worldwide coalition of Christian ministries and activists working to promote human rights in the North.

Park reportedly carried a letter addressed to Kim and other leaders calling on them to repent. “I proclaim Christ’s love and forgiveness towards you today. God promises mercy and clemency for those who repent,” Park said in the letter, which was made public Saturday. “He loves you and wants to save you and all of North Korea today,” he said.

US embassy officials said they had no information on the reported incident. [AFP]

There are many brave Christian activists who risk lengthy terms in Chinese prisons to help guide North Korean refugees to safety, smuggle Bibles into North Korea, support its underground house churches, and propagate the blasphemy that there are gods greater than Kim Jong Il (a particularly worthy one is Helping Hands Korea). Those groups are doing much to help North Korea’s most vulnerable people and subvert its brutal system from the bottom up. One of those activists, Steve Kim, recently spent four years in a Chinese prison for sheltering North Korean refugees. Park, by contrast, seems to be one whose madness happened to find a vehicle in religion.

As easy as it is for us to reject the ridiculous notion that this quixotic act might cause Kim Jong Il to repent and experience a religious conversion, Park’s madness is only a few degrees removed from our foreign policy establishment’s faith that the right Special Envoy can inspire Kim Jong Il to repent and experience a diplomatic conversion. Scratch almost anyone in the State Department’s East Asia Bureau today and there’s a Robert Park who thinks that he’s The One who can do it. No doubt, as we speak, junior and has-been diplomats all along the Eastern Seaboard are imagining themselves escorting Robert Park up the steps of a charter flight at Sunan Airport, having left behind enough ransom aid to run a small concentration camp for years.

Read more

Korean American Robert Park Reportedly Enters North Korea

December 25, 2009 Activism, Human Rights, Robert Park One comment

Updated Below

Late last night (the night of December 25th, Seoul-time) a couple Korean media outlets reported a Korean American, Robert Park, crossed from China into North Korea.

Twelve hours later I couldn’t find anything more on the story, and I wondered if maybe Park had not carried it out. But within the last hour Reuters also has the story, though no comment from the North Korean government as of yet.

SEOUL (Reuters) – A U.S. human rights activist trying to raise global attention about the suffering of the North Korean people has crossed into the reclusive state, other activists and South Korean media said on Saturday. [article]

Also is now in YTN.

Disclosure, I have met Robert Park or seen him on several occasions, though I’ve never talked to him at length and don’t really know him very well. I am posting this before running out the door, and may not have time to write more on it for some time. But when he gets the chance I imagine Joshua may have plenty of thoughts, analysis, and perhaps further developments that we all come to this site for.

Update:

A couple more links in the Korean media.

Treasury Issues Alert on Another North Korean Bank

December 23, 2009 Money Laundering, NK Economics, Sanctions No comments

Just days after Stephen Bosworth’s mostly unproductive visit to Pyongyang (it was, despite much spin to the contrary) the Treasury Department has issued a financial advisory against one of North Korea’s largest banks, Kumgang Bank, for “[i]nvolvement in [i]llicit [f]inancial [a]ctivities,” based on “publicly available information.” You can read Treasury’s advisory in full here, but you’ll find it terse and otherwise lacking in detail about Kumgang’s transgressions. The advisory updates this broader advisory against North Korean financial institutions, issued following the passage of UNSCR 1874 (see sidebar for text). The advisory isn’t technically a sanction, but it will have the effect of driving legitimate businesses, or those which are themselves worried about being sanctioned by Treasury, away from Kumgang.

To be one of the largest banks in North Korea is a lot like being one of the largest hockey rinks in Botswana. Still, Kumgang is on most lists of North Korean banks that handle export transactions. This one, archived by Curtis at North Korean Economy Watch, is actually the text of a 1995 State Department Cable that attempts to provide a snapshot of North Korean financial institutions:

23. Kumgang bank is located in the central district, P’yongyang. Its telegraphic address is Kumgang Pyongyang; Its telephone numbers are 32029 and 32797; its telex is 5355 kgbk kp. Kumgang Bank settles accounts for export-import transactions of North Korean trading corporations, including Korea Pyongyang Trading Corporation and Korea Ponghwa General Trading Corporation.

24. According to the NUB, Kumgang bank was established in September 1978. Its subordination is not clear as the NUB says it is under the state administration council’s jurisdiction, while KDI says it is under the Central Bank’s. (Comment: to further complicate the issue, the NUB document notes in its write-up of Korea Ponghwa General Corporation (SEPTEL) that Ponghwa itself operates the Kumgang Bank.) [North Korea Economy Watch]

So what “publicly available information” leads Treasury to issue this alert? After much searching, I came up with nothing, though one line of reasonable speculation arises from the recent seizure of a 35-ton consignment of North Korean weapons in Bangkok, possibly bound for Iran and for terrorists in Gaza, Lebanon, or even Iraq. This obviously doesn’t exclude plenty of other options.

The larger story here may be that so far, the Obama Administration’s willingness to pursue talks with North Korea hasn’t interfered with its determination to follow North Korea’s illicit money trail and effectively sanction North Korean institutions involved in it.

You mean to tell me that seven people got into this open boat, drifted South “accidentally, braved nine-foot waves, and now want to go back to North Korea?

December 22, 2009 North-South, Refugees 4 comments

Seven North Koreans expressed their desire to return home after they were found drifting south of the Yellow Sea border, a government source here said Tuesday. The North Koreans were detected by South Korean Coast Guard officers Monday afternoon and have since been under investigation by intelligence and police authorities.

“Roughly speaking, they appear to want it (repatriation),” the official, who is well-versed in North Korea-related intelligence, said on condition of anonymity because questioning is still under way. But the Unification Ministry in charge of inter-Korean affairs could not yet confirm whether the North Koreans wanted to return home or intended to settle in the South. [Yonhap]

Roughly speaking? How roughly do you need to speak to them before they figure South Korea is just like the North? I suppose anything is possible, but in the context of an eerily similar incident involving a North Korean soldier this year, it seems suspicious.

boat.jpg

And we all remember how the last such incident worked out, don’t we?

My suspicions may be paranoid, but frankly, I still don’t have a strong sense of what Lee Myung Bak’s game plan is with respect to North Korea, and how well that game plan has been disseminated to the players on the field. For the most part, I suspect Lee wants Sunshine but isn’t willing to pay up or kiss North Korean ass for it, and expects a little reciprocity in return. If that is the plan, it has long since collided with the hard reality that North Korea doesn’t do reciprocity.

Biting the Hands that Feed Them

December 22, 2009 Health & Disease, Propaganda One comment

Via Open News for North Korea, we learn that the regime is blaming the H1N1 outbreak in North Korea — which has killed six students under 18 — on South Korea, the country that offered immediate and unconditional aid to help control said outbreak. After all, all bad things in North Korea come from beyond its borders.

According to a source, North Korean Health Department has stated that the new strand of flu spreading in North Korea originated from South Korea. According to the source, directors of North Korean universities, middle schools, and elementary schools, as well as local health officials received a message on the new strand of flu through phone and internal messages. They state that the new strand of flu spreading quickly throughout North Korea originated from South Korea through Kaesung Industrial Complex, and all universities will be off from 2pm, December 5. [Open News]

It’s too bad Roh Moo Hyun isn’t alive to see how much good will and co-prosperity the Sunshine Policy has built over the years. Sure, it cost a few billion dollars, but with Uncle Sugar ultimately footing much of the bill for South Korea’s defense anyway, subsidizing a failing state on your border and making sure there’s a need for that subsidy only keeps the money flowing through the Hub of Military Welfare. Hey, it’s a win-win. Unless, of course, you’re an American taxpayer. Or a North Korean.

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