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Monthly Archive: July, 2010

July 31, 2010

A modest proposal for Christine Ahn: if you really want peace, maybe you should start by asking North Korea to stop attacking South Korea.

Just when it seemed that no one would, Dennis, the Anarcho-Syndicalist-sounding Congressgnome from Middle Earth, has stepped up to save North Korea from being repressed by the violence inherent in the system: “If North Korea presents some kind of a limited missile threat to any part of the United States coastline, the obvious solution would be to go to North Korea, and to negotiate with them and to talk to them, and to work with them to avoid any confrontation,”...

Categories Useful Idiocy
July 30, 2010

Free Aijalon Gomes

It should go without saying that I am in sympathy with the goals of Robert Park and Aijalon Gomes, and in complete disagreement that they advanced those goals through their quixotic walks into North Korea. Most people today only remember Park for his bizarre confession and his crypic references to the sort of sexual torture that, without knowing more, sounded like something more than a few of us have purchased for our friends at bachelor parties in our boorish youth....

Categories Aijalon Gomes
July 29, 2010

My God, how I would love to attend one of these: Around 150 people gathered at a park at Imjingak near the border to release ten giant balloons carrying some 100,000 leaflets, 300 DVDs and 1,000 one-US-dollar notes. An activist shouting ‘Down with Kim Jong Il’ ripped up a North Korean flag with a knife. Another wore a traditional Korean funeral hat with the message ‘Congratulations, Kim Jong Il’s death’. The leaflets and DVDs criticised Pyongyang’s human rights record and...

Categories Anju Links
July 29, 2010

North Korean Soccer Team Faces Criticism Session

Once again, this is why North Korea should be banned from FIFA play pending further investigation and monitoring of how it treats its players and coaches: The team and coach Kim Jong Hun were summoned to a meeting at the People’s Palace of Culture in Pyongyang on July 2, the U.S.-financed Radio Free Asia reported Monday. Sports Minister Pak Myong Chol was among some 400 government officials, athletes and others at the six-hour-long closed-door session, the report said. Team members...

Categories Sports
July 28, 2010

Plan B Watch: A Shot Across China’s Bow?

Hey, did the State Department threaten the Bank of China and the Bank of Shanghai? Or to put the question more bluntly, did someone just grow a pair? A diplomatic source here said the U.S. will blacklist more North Korean entities and individuals in the coming weeks so that international financial institutions would cut off ties with them. Any foreign banks refusing to sever business ties with the North Korean entities and individuals in question will have U.S. financial institutions...

Categories China/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law
July 28, 2010

Why There Is a Cold War in Asia

When someone escapes from North Korea and makes contact with South Koreans, and when China then repatriates that person to North Korea, the North Korean authorities typically execute that person, or send him to die in a prison camp. China has known this for years. That’s why the Chinese government is an accessory to murder when it does things like this: China has repatriated an 81-year-old former South Korean prisoner of war who had fled North Korea decades after being...

Categories China/China & Korea/Korean War/Refugees
July 27, 2010

Lifting Trade Sanctions: A Bad Idea We’ve Already Tried

This seems rather badly timed, somehow. In Forbes, grad student Koen C. Munneke argues that “[i]nstead of following the previously ineffective path of applying pressure and saber-rattling, the international community should switch to ….” Let me guess: the previously ineffective path of trying to use investment to better the lives of ordinary North Koreans and broadening the minds of their overlords, in the hope that they might again promise to disarm? If only someone had thought of that before! It’s...

Categories NK Economics
July 27, 2010

Dealing with Khmer and North Korean Killers

As the first sentence is finally handed out to a former member of the Khmer Rouge regime, it reminds us of a human rights catastrophe still in progress. Admittedly, I don’t know much about the history of Cambodia, including the nightmare under the Khmer Rouge, but this is a reminder that someday (may it be very soon), decisions made today will determine the fate of many now running the regime in North Korea. The details and issues addressed in South...

Categories History/Human Rights/Southeast Asia
July 26, 2010

Plan B Watch: Treasury Targets 100 Suspicious N. Korean Accounts Worldwide

According to multiple newspaper reports published since late last week, the Obama Administration’s new asset-freezing campaign against North Korea began in earnest in June. The Treasury Department, having identified about 200 accounts worldwide suspected of storing the proceeds of banned weapons sales, currency counterfeiting, counterfeit cigarettes and Viagra, proliferation, drug trafficking, and other things that all sovereign nations to do pay for yachts for their despotic rulers. Treasury focused on 100 accounts where its evidence was strongest and quietly persuaded...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions
July 22, 2010

Plan B Watch: Clinton Announces Tightening of N. Korea Sanctions

Well, it’s about damn time: The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it would impose further economic sanctions against North Korea, throwing legal weight behind a choreographed show of pressure on the North that included an unusual joint visit to the demilitarized zone by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The measures, announced here by Mrs. Clinton after talks with South Korean officials, focus on counterfeiting, money laundering and other dealings that she said the...

Categories An Alliance?/Cheonan Incident/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. & Korea
July 21, 2010

Will a North Korean Attack Win the Yellow Sea for China?

Is the Yellow Sea a Chinese lake? Under ordinary circumstances, I’d understand China’s complaints about a U.S. naval exercise in an inland sea near its shores. It’s not as if I’d want Chinese ships in the Gulf of Mexico, either, but these are not ordinary circumstances. This time, North Korea has sunk a South Korean warship, and China has both shielded North Korea from any consequences for that attack and continued to provide necessary financial support to the regime that...

Categories China/China & Korea
July 20, 2010

Plan B Watch: Treasury Requires “Enhanced Due Diligence” for N. Korean Banks

The Treasury Department has announced that the governments of Sao Tome and North Korea will henceforth be subject to the “enhanced due diligence” requirements of Section 312 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The measures apply to U.S. financial institutions maintaining correspondent accounts for “foreign banks operating under a banking license issued by” North Korea. By itself, this action is likely to have little effect, because it’s doubtful that any North Korean-licensed banks have U.S. correspondent accounts. The better question, however,...

Categories Uncategorized
July 20, 2010

The New Conventional Wisdom: We Have No Idea

I don’t recall ever seeing Victor Cha offer a view that was particularly original, imaginative, or likely to end in a successful result, but he is a reliable indicator of Washington conventional wisdom about North Korea, which in turn is heavily influenced by Seoul’s views about the North. And here is the new conventional wisdom: we have no idea what to do now. In Cha’s own words: North Korean behavior has gotten so bad, according to East-West Center Visiting Fellow...

Categories Washington Views
July 20, 2010

And today’s Great Purge victim is …

Kwon Ho Ung, who served as North Korea’s chief delegate to inter-Korean talks with the ATM known as Roh Moo Hyun from 2004 to 2007. Today’s winner will receive one execution, presumably by firing squad. Via Sonagi, here’s a blog post that provides a little more information about him. A lot of North Korean officials must be very, very worried right now. I suppose we’ll continue to hear reports like this right up until the big September party conference. Speaking...

Categories Kremlinology
July 20, 2010

“[W]e traveled with poison, so that if we were caught, we’d take it and kill ourselves.”

Sue Lloyd-Roberts continues her look at North Korea by interviewing refugees in Seoul and asking them about the images her minders allowed her to film. At 13:00, Lloyd-Roberts interviews Young Howard, a/k/a Ha Tae Kyung, the founder of Open Radio. She even sits in as he interviews a source by telephone. She seems to presume (incorrectly) that Ha is North Korean, but in fact, he’s a South Korean and a former leftist political prisoner. It’s both unsurprising and striking how...

Categories Inside NK/Media Criticism/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
July 19, 2010

Claudia Rosett proposes to kick North Korea out of the U.N.  This strikes me as a perfectly sound idea in theory and one that stands no chance of coming to pass in practice.  North Korea’s presence at the U.N. hasn’t contributed to peace or development; after all, U.N. membership isn’t a sine qua non for WFP aid, and most the focus of  diplomacy is on the six-party talks, an opera that alternates between long intermissions and broken crystal.  The fact...

Categories Anju Links