Archive for January 2010

The Great Confiscation Backfires, Badly

January 28, 2010 Famine & Food Aid, NK Economics, Subversion 3 comments

How can we tell that North Korea is in a state of self-inflicted economic chaos? When the regime can’t even conceal it from the barbarians.

AFP, quoting an unidentified Western diplomat via Yonhap, reports that “[a]t the Koryo Hotel where many foreigners stay, the [North Korean won exchange] rate swung from 51 won to 120 in the space of a few hours on January 22.” Another report says that currently, prices in North Korea are “anyone’s guess” and that in shops near the railroad stations, there are “stacks of unsold goods” because no one really knows how much to sell them for.

Another AFP report mostly reinforces what we already know — that North Korea’s “politically motivated currency revaluation” didn’t recollective the economy, but instead created a lot of inflation, chaos, “widespread anger,” and hardship, and that has forced people to barter just to get enough to eat. The report goes on, “This prompted authorities to further strengthen control of market activities. However, the situation is getting worse.” U.N. Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn seems to agree it’s not working out so well, as do Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard:

“Such an effort is doomed to failure as long as the state lacks the resources and capacity to put goods on the shelves,” they wrote. Despite the regime’s “sheer ruthlessness” including reported executions, there was little evidence it had succeeded in stamping out the market entirely, they said.

Open News reports that food prices continue to rise amid the regime’s dithering failure to set food prices:

The hope that North Korea’s monetary reform would bring stability to inflationary prices has already failed. A source in North Korea communicated on the January 17 that prices have shot up over the past 40 days since the reform. In addition as food prices, the standard measurement for inflation, have rose so have the prices of goods on black markets.

In Pyongyang 1kg of rice is selling for 160-180 won and corn for 80-110 won as of the 17th. In Musan rice is sold at 190-210 won and corn at 80-100 won. In Hyesan rice is selling for 180-210 won and corn for 80-120, while in Shinuiju rice is selling for 170-200 won and corn costs 100-120 won.

These prices have increased over 200% on average since just one week before on the 10th of January. Compared to December 24th prices have increased at least 400%, and compared to the days before the monetary reform (average prices for rice = 20won, corn-10 won) prices rose 10-fold (1000%).

Open News reports that even among those North Koreans who were initially happy that the Great Confiscation increased their wages are now growing discontented that inflation has taken that increase away, and made goods harder to buy. Ironically, this means that the state’s last loyal workers may end up suffering more than those who depend on the markets.

Open News also corroborates AFP’s report that merchants are holding onto their stocks because they don’t know what to sell them for. But the good news is that there is food, and eventually, merchants will release it into the marketplace somehow.

How else do we know that all is not well? Because KCNA is running reports about new “up-to-date foodstuffs factories” and scientific breakthroughs in food production. North Korea tends to issue reports like these in times of public anxiety about the food situation.

Thankfully, and as I’ve noted before, North Koreans have become accomplished survivors. Here’s Marcus Noland, addressing the Korea Society in New York:

“The North Korean people have demonstrated absolutely extraordinary resilience over the last twenty years,” Noland reminded listeners, “It is unlikely that even this government could bring to bear the degree of repression that would be necessary to eliminate the market economy. So the market is going to come back. [Daily NK]

It’s already happening. The people aren’t waiting for the government to get its act together. They’re already taking matters into their own hands by smuggling food into North Korea on an unprecedented scale.

It has been reported that from early December to January 15 of this year food has been rapidly smuggled in on large and small scales throughout the Korean peninsula, from the northernmost part of Ohnsung along the Tumen and the Yalu River all the way to the city of Shinuiju in the Northern Pyong[an] province. In fact it is being reported that in a province near the banks of the Yalu River 100~120 tons of food were smuggled in in one night. However even though there are significant amounts of food entering North Korea the food prices have not been affected and are not dropping. [Open News]

And, as quoted previously:

It has been reported that from early December to January 15 of this year, food has been increasingly smuggled in on large scales throughout North Korea, from the northernmost part of Ohnsung along the Tumen and the Yalu River all the way to the city of Shinuiju in the Northern Pyong province. In fact it is being reported that in a province near the banks of the Yalu River 100~120 tons of food were smuggled in in one night.

According to news from a source inside North Korea on January 15, food began to be smuggled in last December because they needed to exceed the amount of food for their importing licenses. Also when the New Year started many food importation licenses expired and there were no legal ways to import food; many turned to illegally smuggling food in instead. In North Korea the food importation license is issued after the lunar New Year, so it is difficult to import food before then.

It is reported that in these provinces that trucks are furiously loaded with food across the frozen river in the late hours of night. On some nights over 100 tons of rice have been smuggled in. In order to operate, these companies and wholesale agents are mobilizing transportation and the means to whisk them away quickly for their profit. In fact the current rate of smuggling is on a large enough scale to create the term “public smuggling.

Even the National Security Agency and the Military National Headquarters, along with other North Korean regulators are said to be overlooking this situation. [Open News]

It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this. First, it means there probably won’t be famine in the spring, because merchants won’t wait forever for the state to set prices. Eventually, they’ll sell that food for something of value.

But the rise of large-scale food smuggling right under the noses of the Anjeonbu also portends needed economic and even political change. It means that the system is now so frayed and corrupt that smugglers can move goods of any kind into North Korea in quantity. Today, of necessity, the cargo is food. Tomorrow, the cargo will be consumer goods. But next will come information — books, bibles, pamphlets, radios, computers, flash drives, cell phone repeaters that can be lashed to remote treetops, and camera phones. It opens up the possibility for a North Korean opposition to galvanize, organize, coopt and corrupt regime officials, and effectively challenge the power of the state.

On North Korea, Obama Touts Sanctions, Not Talks

January 28, 2010 Sanctions, U.S. Politics, Washington Views One comment

Change!

Now, these diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons. That’s why North Korea now faces increased isolation, and stronger sanctions ““- sanctions that are being vigorously enforced. That’s why the international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated. And as Iran’s leaders continue to ignore their obligations, there should be no doubt: They, too, will face growing consequences. That is a promise. (Applause.)

Now, I suppose you detect sarcasm, but don’t take this as criticism. If candidate Obama’s campaign rhetoric was sincere, then I credit him with being a quick study, with an assist from Kim Jong Il. I don’t deny that President Obama’s North Korea policy leaves much to be desired — it’s really just a continuation of the same paradigm of the last 20 years, only with more sanctions. It’s ultimately headed toward an agreement that won’t make our country more secure. Still, the pressure is hastening the Kim Jong Il’s Untergang, and it’s far, far better than my initially low expectations.

Not Again: Another American Crosses Into North Korea

January 28, 2010 Robert Park 10 comments

There’s no word on who he/she is.

There’s no word on why he/she crossed.

A South Korean activist who has been the source of most information about the missionary said Thursday that he has no knowledge of the second American detainee. Jo Sung-rae of the Seoul-based group Pax Koreana said he and fellow activists sent about 150,000 leaflets by balloon across the border into North Korea on Wednesday as part of efforts to let North Koreans know about Park. Jo said the leaflets repeated Park’s demand that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il step down and dismantle camps for political prisoners.

There’s no word on whether it was all of the favorable media attention Robert Park has garnered, or some other reason, that motivated him to do cross over.

There’s no word that this person released a statement before crossing.

There’s no word on whether he brought along his own briefcase full of ransom money … you know, to save “Kim Jong Bill” Richardson the trouble.

Please, people. Stop doing this!

27 January 2010

January 27, 2010 Anju Links One comment

Some people never learn: After everything that’s happened in the last 20 years, we’re still trying to get Agreed Framework III.

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Which moment of truth is this? I lost count in 2007.
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A Kaesong Travel Advisory: Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.
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Bangkok Update: Here’s the most detailed inventory I’ve yet seen of that North Korean weapons shipment intercepted last year:

Thai police discovered 40 tons of North Korean arms including multiple rocket launchers, 40 surface-to-air missiles, and hundreds of rocket-propelled grenades worth an estimated US$18 million on an Ilyushin cargo plane operated by Air West of Georgia, which landed in Bangkok on Dec. 12.

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Interesting: “Two South Korean rights activist groups on Tuesday released a list of 254 inmates at North Korea’s notorious Yoduk prison camp. In a press conference at the Korea Press Center in Seoul, Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag and the Antihuman Crime Investigation Committee said that of the inmates on the list, 133 were confirmed recently and the other 121 around 2004. The groups compiled the new list based on testimony of four defectors who escaped from Yoduk camp between 2003 and 2005.”

Related: Kushibo links to an L.A. Times story about former inmates of Camp 15, Yodok.

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What’s behind North Korea’s demand for peace talks?
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Euna Lee tries to shift the focus back to where it belongs:

But the story the two journalists wanted to tell still gnaws at her, said Lee, 37, a producer for San Francisco-based Current TV.

“I’m glad I’m home, but the story we worked on will not get finished yet,” she said, adding: “I wanted to raise awareness about North Korean defections.”

Lee and Ling were seized March 17 by North Korea while they were near its border gathering information for a story about North Korean women who are forced into the sex trade while attempting to defect to neighboring China.

“They are sold like livestock without knowing where they’ll end up,” Lee said.

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Fears for the future of dateless Chinese men. This argument, I’ve observed, tends to really piss Chinese netizens off. Especially the single, male, dateless ones.

Bang Bang, Splash Splash

January 27, 2010 NK Military, North-South, ROK Military 2 comments

When I first heard that North Korea had declared a no-sail zone off its West Coast, I really wanted to believe that it was because they read this, but I suspected that they’d actually launch some anti-ship missiles from Cho-Do. Instead, we have this:

North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire near their disputed sea border on Wednesday, highlighting instability along a heavily armed frontier for the second time in three months. North Korea warned the South that more rounds were on the way as a part of military training, and then fired off another barrage a few hours after delivering the message in a state media report. Analysts doubt the latest clash will escalate and see it more as an attempt by Pyongyang to stress tensions on the Korean peninsula and press home its demand for a peace deal that would open the way to international aid for its ruined economy.

The shells all appear to have splashed harmlessly into the water. Cue the grave concern, etcetera, etcetera. (yawn ….)

Must-Read Book Reviews: Hassig and Myers on North Korea

January 27, 2010 Books & Films 3 comments

The New York Times has some great book reviews today. One of the titles is Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy,” and two others are of books I’ve been looking forward to reading: “The Hidden People of North Korea” by Kangdan Oh and Ralph Hassig (excerpt here) and “The Cleanest Race” by Brian Myers (excerpt here). I was astonished to read that “Katy” Hassig, a person who is deeply connected and intertwined with Korea policy-making circles in Washington, would nonetheless arrive at a conclusion this, well, sensible:

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book, “The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom,” is wonkier than Ms. Demick’s and less reader-friendly, but it covers more ground. [....] Their book is based on more than 200 interviews with defectors, and it paints a picture of a restless populace, increasingly dubious about the official propaganda. “It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the people support Kim Jong-il,” they write. “Rather, it does not occur to them to oppose him. North Koreans are too busy trying to survive, and too preoccupied by the tensions of the supposed mighty conflict with America, to be able to think about much else. [....]

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book concludes with pointed policy recommendations. They think it is nearly hopeless to negotiate with Mr. Kim and suspect that “nonproliferation agreements with the regime will simply encourage it to brandish new threats in the future. Instead of fixating on Korea’s weapons, the authors suggest bypassing the regime and reaching out to North Korea’s people, who sorely need humanitarian aid and “a new way of thinking about their government and their society. [N.Y. Times, Dwight Garner]

As you might expect, Myers also challenges the Washington groupthink about North Korea as a regime that can be disarmed through the right combination of diplomacy and “incentives.” Without having read either book yet, I can see a theme common to both of them: that the conventional, establishment analysis of the attitudes of North Korea’s regime and people deserve a serious re-think, and with that basic criticism, I couldn’t agree more.

North Korean Defects from Embassy in Ethiopia

January 27, 2010 Africa, Defectors, Sanctions No comments

Yonhap and AFP are both reporting that a 40 year-old North Korean “medic” at the embassy in Addis Ababa defected to South Korea last October. The man is now safely in Seoul.

Yonhap said the communist state’s embassy protested strongly, making a threatening call to the South Korean mission.

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.

North Korean officials used cars to stage protests outside the building where Kim stayed for up to three weeks, YTN said.

How immature. Why can’t these people just do what any normal government would do and publicly execute the defector’s entire family as a lesson to others? (Stop already — it’s not as if I’m giving these thugs ideas.)

Although Yonhap had described the defector as a “diplomat,” it’s more likely he was a member of this 31-member medical delegation dispatched from North Korea to Ethiopia last year. North Korea’s relations with Ethiopia are strong enough that Ethiopian kids have been shipped off to visit Pyongyang (a lovely time was had by all, I’m sure) and even banded together into — sit down for this — an “Ethiopian Youth Study Group of the Juche Idea,” which has to be about the oddest combination I’ve heard of since the Julia Roberts / Lyle Lovett marriage. In 2007, Kim Yong Nam even paid a visit to Addis Ababa.

By now, you’re already wondering how I’m going to find a cynical angle in the natural, fraternal warmth that has bound North Koreans and Ethiopians in comradeship since the time of King Tangun, and I suppose your suspicions are well placed, because Ethiopia is also a major North Korean arms client, or was. Recall that shortly after Chris Hill secured Peace in Our Time and signed us up for Agreed Framework II, someone did us the great disservice of catching the North Koreans red-handed selling arms, including tank parts, to Ethiopia, a flagrant violation of UNSCR 1718. No matter, said the State Department, as other matters took precedence in those times. That pretty much spelled the end of UNSCR 1718 as an effective resolution, not even six months after its passage. It took another nuclear test and UNSCR 1874 to revive it.

For years, reports have floated around that North Korean embassies were expected to be self-financing, often through illegal activity. One interesting line of speculation about this defection is that if the enforcement of UNSCR 1874 is working fairly well, the Ethiopians aren’t buying and the embassy’s commissary isn’t serving so much meat soup these days, either.

Kim Jong-il Ordered Shooting of Defectors

January 26, 2010 Human Rights, Refugees No comments

In May of 2008, this site was the first to publish reports, attributed to the NGO Helping Hands Korea, that North Korea had issued orders to its border guards to shoot fleeing refugees, notwithstanding its failure to provide them with the basic necessities of life and its draconian treatment of those who try to provide for themselves. The Times of London later picked up those reports.

Other reports suggest that the shoot-to-kill policy was hardly new. According to one previous report, for example, Chinese police found the bodies of 53 murdered North Koreans washed up along the banks of the Yalu. This BBC/Chosun Ilbo footage showing the body of a dead refugee woman suggests that she drowned while crossing, which is probably true, although a fatal bullet wound wouldn’t necessarily have been apparent on her body.

Today, the Chosun Ilbo cites “South Korean and U.S. intelligence agencies” to report that the orders to shoot fleeing North Koreans, or to imprison them for ten years in circumstances they’d not likely survive, came directly from Kim Jong Il himself:

Intelligence agencies in the two countries say Kim started tightening control in 2007, with barbed wire fences and surveillance cameras installed along the North Korea-China border and soldiers ordered to shoot defectors. Later that year separate surveillance and inspection teams were dispatched to the border.

In March 2008, Jang Song-taek, Kim’s brother-in-law and close aide who is the administration director of the Workers’ Party, personally oversaw checks of party, government and military organizations in Sinuiju, a gateway city in the border area. Several corrupt city officials were apparently executed at his orders. [Chosun Ilbo]

That would be Jang Song-Thaek, technocrat, reformer, and the great hope of Washington’s most irrationally exuberant North Korea watchers for a kinder, gentler North Korea.

I know I speak for all of you when I say that I’m eagerly awaiting Ban Ki Moon’s response.

Who Is Still Free Not to Be Muslim?

January 26, 2010 Censorship, Islam 7 comments

Let’s begin by dispensing with the moot question of whether I agree with all that Geert Wilders has said. I don’t, and I specifically disagree with statements by Wilders, such as his call for the Koran to be banned, that are themselves incompatible with the freedom of speech Wilders now defends so articulately. But almost by definition, people who become the state’s first targets for censorship have inevitably expressed views that are controversial, even indefensible.

Wilders is now facing prosecution in The Netherlands, the historic refuge of Europe’s dissidents and free-thinkers, for his words criticizing the intolerance of Islam. Wilders, who I hope has learned a more consistent view of free speech from his own experience with petty despotism, answers a Dutch court this way:

A quote:

It is not only the right, but also the duty of free people to speak out against any ideology that threatens freedom. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, was right: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” I hope with all I have in me that freedom of expression will prevail in this trial. Not only that I will be acquitted, but that freedom of expression will continue to exist…. This trial, of course, is about freedom of expression, but this trial is also about finding the truth. The statements I have made — the comparisons I have drawn — are they true, as mentioned in the summons? Because if something is true, how can it be illegal?

It would be one thing if the state’s objective was to stultify all discussion of religion and theocracy, but it isn’t. The state is simply betting that it’s easier to silence critics of extremist Islam than it would be to expect Muslim extremists to tolerate free discourse. Wilders’s argument, which I believe paints with too broad a brush, is that Islam is fascist. The state, by prosecuting Wilders for the expression of his ideas, now means to confer protected status not over all religions, but only the one whose adherents — or rather, some of them — tend to react to free speech with stabbings, fatwas, and riots.

Sure, you say, but Europe is far away. Well, Canada isn’t:

That this could happen so close to us suggests that it could happen here, too.

Looking for a Contact for Robert Park’s Family

January 26, 2010 Activism One comment

You already know that I don’t agree with Park’s methods, but I’d still like to try to help the man, and do so in accordance with Park’s own desire not to be ransomed out. If you have an e-mail address or a phone number, please forward it to onefreekorea[at]yahoo[dot]com. Thanks.

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