Archive for July 2011

Open Sources: Another nuke test coming, says John Bolton

July 16, 2011 Anju Links 6 comments

Things that Kim Jong Il is buying that you can’t eat, Part 1: As Allison Kilkenny once learned the hard way, John Bolton has a pretty good track record for predicting North Korean nuclear tests. He’s predicting another one soon, and I suppose it’s about time for one.

Along with this, Bolton criticizes President Obama for his public silence on North Korea. But as we learned from George W. Bush, strident rhetoric is no substitute for a not-half-bad policy. This isn’t to say that Obama’s policy is more than half good. It’s far below its true potential, but it’s certainly a vast improvement over Bush’s — and I know first-hand that Bolton was isolated and sidelined within the Bush Administration, whose North Korea policy was actually very soft-line when you peeled away the empty talk. If the talk isn’t backed with a tough policy, all it does is stir up controversy and expend political capital that would be better spent on an executive order. And as Bolton acknowledges, doing nothing beats the hell out of Agreed Framework III.

Where Bolton’s criticism rings true is that President Obama — like his predecessor — has failed to apply sufficient pressure on China to implement U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1718 (Bolton’s own) and 1874 (its Obama-era progeny, which Susan Rice probably found on Bolton’s old computer, marked “first draft”). If no American president has the spine to flood the border region between North Korea and China with free internet and cheap guns, or even to threaten as much, then a more subtle pressure point is Taiwan. I can see principled reasons not to formally link the two issues; after all, Taiwan’s is a legitimate, elected government with an inherent right to defend itself. But if that’s not reason enough for us to help the Taiwanese build their anti-missile defenses, build ballistic missiles of their own, and nuke up, then isn’t gaining negotiating leverage over China just as good a reason?

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Things that Kim Jong Il is buying that you can’t eat, Part 2: Presenting the new Ryugyong Hotel. Maybe in another 20 years, we’ll see pictures of the inside.

ryugyong-i.jpg ryugyong-ii.jpg

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After being sold out by President Bush, Japan tries to regain lost diplomatic ground on the abduction of its citizens by North Korea:

A delegation of Japanese officials and activists urged the Obama administration on Thursday redesignate North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism over its failure to resolve cases of missing Japanese nationals abducted by North Korean agents decades ago and taken to the Stalinist state.

Eight members of Japan’s parliament and three Japanese human rights activists spoke to reporters at the National Press Club to denounce North Korea for what they said was a 30-year record of kidnapping and illegally holding Japanese citizens in violation of international human rights norms. The group also called for halting food aid to North Korea and reimposing economic sanctions.

That’s all good, except that I wouldn’t condition food aid on anything except North Korea’s agreement to the same degree of monitoring that the WFP gets in Sudan, Zimbabwe, or anywhere else. Otherwise, the food is better send to places where it can help those who really need it.

“On this argument, we could not get a clear response from the State Department,” Mr. Matsubara said. “Senior officials told us North Korea is a difficult actor to deal with.

Do tell! Even when you accede to their demands, they’re still difficult to deal with! Perhaps even more so, judging by recent events.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is supporting the Japanese. She said in a statement: “We cannot overlook the heinous North Korean practice of abducting Japanese and South Korean citizens, and citizens of other countries. “It must be made clear to Pyongyang that its actions will not be without consequences. I believe that the U.S. must hold Pyongyang accountable,” Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said. “It’s time for U.S. to ratchet up its pressure on the regime in response to its growing laundry list of abuses.

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 to reward it for its progress toward complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament. Discuss among yourselves.

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They’re not wages if the workers can’t spend them: So North Korea has the chutzpah to demand that South Korea pay 5% more for labor costs at Kaesong just months after the shelling of Yeonpyeong, and without having so much as admitted to murdering all these South Korean sailors. Frankly, the fact that Kaesong is still running at all is an outrage and an insult to the families of the dead.

I also have a problem with the dishonesty of reporting that calls these payments “wages,” when our best information is that the workers only receive a tiny fraction of this — less than one-seventh of it, according to Barbara Demick, and that’s before you account for exchange rates (you didn’t think North Korea paid those workers in South Korean won, did you?). Most of that money is actually just bulk cash payments to Kim Jong Il, which would probably violate at least two U.N. Security Council Resolutions.

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Someone tell Margaret Chan! Obesity is Coming to North Korea! One commenter recently asked for my reaction to this report that Coke and KFC were going to start operations in North Korea. Well, from a business and a corporate image perspective, I think that would be disastrous, which means it’s probably exceedingly unlikely. But if, for whatever reason, it does happen, then I’ll be sure to drop a line to all of those packs of lawyers who are currently hunting for North Korean assets to attach and garnish.

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A Defector’s Tale: Lee Hyeon-Seo

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Here’s the latest Good Friends dispatch.

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Five Facts About Woodstock Hippies Don’t Want You to Know.

Some Fascinating-if-True Reports from North Korea

July 16, 2011 Inside NK, Kim Jong Il, Kremlinology 3 comments

Everyone knows that North Korea does a lot of things that we can’t explain without resorting to mostly groundless speculation about its internal power politics. This goes beyond cultural differences. I don’t know any South Koreans who can explain things like the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents, which imposed real (if insufficient) financial and diplomatic costs on the regime. In our conversations, not even Kim Kwang Jin claimed to understand for certain why Kim Jong Il does things that appear to harm his own interests.

Most of the speculative explanations about North Korea’s power politics also have flaws. For example, there ought to be ways that are less politically costly to elevate the reputation of Kim Jong-Eun than ways that only increase the hardships and discontent of the very people they’re supposed to be meant to influence. At some point, you have to admit that North Korea’s bigger decisions certainly look irrational. That’s the theory Andrei Lankov has inclined to for at least a year, and according to this report, North Koreans are starting to agree:

Rumors that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is suffering from dementia are spreading quickly across the isolated country. Reports say the leader is increasingly incoherent during his so-called on-the-spot guidance trips.

When Kim watched the 1960s propaganda play “Sanwoolim (Echo)” during an inspection of a military base in Kangwon Province recently, he reportedly described it as “a masterpiece that is bound to lead the revolution in the future.” Party cadres were dumbfounded to hear him praise the old show as if he had never seen it before. [Chosun Ilbo]

The report itself sounds apocryphal, but it jibes with recent events.

Our next report suggests that Sohn Hak-Kyu might have trouble finding North Koreans to help him plan his Olympic village:

North Korea has reportedly purged 30 officials who participated in inter-Korean talks or supervised bilateral dialogue via execution by firing squad or staged traffic accidents. A South Korean government source said Thursday, “Thirty people have been confirmed to have died or gone missing until recently. About 10 partners of inter-Korean talks with the South were executed by firing and about 20 others were said to have died in traffic accidents.

“As of now, the North has no partners to talk with the South. There will likely be major change in inter-Korean relations.

Seoul said all Pyongyang officials who attended secret inter-Korean contacts are being purged, which clearly demonstrates that the internal organization of the North`s communist regime is extremely unstable and fragile. The power struggle in Pyongyang is intensifying in the course of the power succession of heir apparent Kim Jong Un, and hardliners are accordingly gaining ground while those in support of dialogue are losing ground, analysts say. [Donga Ilbo]

I can believe that the North Korean regime has plenty of closet dissidents, plenty of factions, and plenty of purges, but I’ve never put much credence in any theory that holds that there are factions of hard- and soft-liners plotting against one another within the North Korean regime. Of course, no one outside of Pyongyang knows the real truth, but I’d guess that the factions fight over more practical things, like turf and money. And until recently, South Korea was North Korea’s automatic teller. To a hopeful outside observer, an interest in hauling in South Korean money might be mistaken for an ideological interest in improving inter-Korean relations, even reform. I just don’t see the evidence for it.

It also has the whiff of disinformation. Selig Harrison has been peddling a particularly fantastic variation of this hard-line/soft-line stuff for years to try to persuade American diplomats that we should give North Korea more concessions to help the soft-line faction — concessions that never seem to win us any lasting security benefits or visibly alter the regime’s character. I incline toward the view that Harrison and others are picking up on North Korean disinformation designed to extract concessions from us. But of course, this news doesn’t come from Selig Harrison, so it isn’t necessarily false.

Exclusive: Kim Jong Il Buys More Stuff You Can’t Eat!

July 15, 2011 Famine & Food Aid 2 comments

By now, it seems clear that South Korea, Japan, and the United States will all refuse to contribute food aid to the World Food Program. Contributions from the EU, Sweden, and even China are minuscule in comparison to the WFP’s appeal, and to the amounts that the United States was providing during the Clinton and Bush Administrations, before North Korea itself rejected further aid out of apparent spite. Republicans who dominate the House again are dead-set against giving aid this year, and the Obama Administration sounds dissatisfied with North Korea’s concessions to the World Food Program on monitoring.

I was inclined to agree with the latter assessment until a WFP spokesman responded to some interview questions I sent him. The responses moved me beyond mere inclination and convinced me that the WFP’s assessment and monitoring, despite some useful safeguards, are inadequate. I acknowledge how difficult these questions are, and I respect plenty of people who disagree with my view here. Advocates of food aid paint a picture of terrible suffering in North Korea. They’re not wrong about that, but they still can’t convince me that international aid would help them. And when you read things like this, you can see why donors nations think their money is better spent on people they know they can help:

A high level Pyongyang source reported June 29th, “The Mercedes Benz limousine used by Kim Jong-il during his recent China visit in May was a different model to the ones he used in his visits last year in May and August.” The new car was photographed by Yonhap news when Kim Jong-il arrived at his Jangchun hotel.

The source said that Kim Jong-il used to be conveyed to his destinations in the Maybach model of limousine but in 2009 the Benz S-600 Pullman Guard came out of production and onto the market. This new model was $100,000 more expensive than the Maybach. Given that customarily when leaders are transported there are at least two cars required to simultaneously convey protection units, at least $200,000 must have been spent on the vehicles.

Asked whether the new cars might have been provided by the Chinese authorities, the source said, “A photo confirms otherwise but also the Beijing plates that the car is carrying are just a matter of custom that the Chinese authorities usually apply in the immigration process to cars that were transported by air. It’s certain that the car was brought in from North Korea.”

Meanwhile according to figures The Korea Trade Association has derived from China-North Korea trade statistics, North Korea imported $3,100,000 of European manufactured cars through China last year. Given that a ton of corn costs about $250 dollars, Kim Jong-il splurged a quantity of money that could have bought 13,000 tons of corn for his hungry people. [Open News]

This obscene trade violates U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874‘s prohibition on the sale of “luxury goods” to North Korea, and again calls into question the seriousness of China (naturally), but also of the German and Swiss governments to enforce compliance with the resolution.

From January through May, North Korea imported 229 Swiss-made watches worth $45,000 (48.43 million won) and 9 watch components, the American network Radio Free Asia reported on the 8th. Among the Swiss watches imported by North Korea were 174 spring-wound watches and 55 battery-operated watches, worth an average of $198 each.

During the same period last year North Korea had not imported any watches at all. North Korea imported 284 Swiss watches in 2007, 449 in 2008, and 662 in 2009, an increase each year, but that fell to 339 last year. [Nathan Schwartzmann, via RFA]

Oh, and let’s not forget that nuke money paid to the Pakistani Army. Critics will note that this isn’t a revelation of recent activity, of course. It’s a revelation of activity at the very height the Great Famine, as a million or two North Koreans were starving to death, and as the American taxpayers’ generosity toward the people of North Korea reached its peak.

Not only are donors suspicious, but plenty of North Koreans probably are, too. Stephan Haggard points us to the remarkable results of a survey by NKnet of North Korean refugees in South Korea. Haggard, who advocates giving food aid despite acknowledging its limitations, boils the data down to confirm that North Koreans — at least, those North Koreans whose opinions we can access — share (and perhaps confirm) our worst suspicions:

# Some of the more interesting responses have to do with assessments of the causes of the crisis. Respondents were allowed to pick two responses, meaning that all responses total to 200%. 27% cited lack of agricultural inputs. But the vast majority of responses target the regime itself: excessive military expenditure (88%); irresponsibility and incompetence of the leadership (26%); agricultural policy (14%). Only 7% cited natural disasters. This comports with our findings that the regime’s narratives may be getting less traction than in the past (if they ever really did).

# 94% of respondents believed that the way to “fundamentally solve the food problem” was for North Korea to reform and open up; only 1.4% cited large-scale aid as a solution.

# A stunning set of responses had to do with food aid itself. 78% said that they had never received food aid, which as we note in Witness may or may not be true. But 27% said that they gave some of the food that they received from the PDS back to the government. NKNET claims that this occurred in areas where monitoring was going on. In short, food distribution was a classic Potemkin village set up, with aid distributed for the monitors and then taken back. In fairness, though, while 98 percent of the respondents said that they had never seen foreign monitors, 30 percent claimed that monitoring had at least some effect.

# With respect to who got food aid, respondents were allowed to check as many categories as they chose. The findings provide a nice weighting of the power structure:

* Military, 73%; party cadres, 69%; administrative organs, 49%, privileged classes 39%
* Children in vulnerable classes, 4%; general people, 0.2% adults in vulnerable classes, 0; pregnant women, 0. [Stephan Haggard, Witness to Transformation blog]

The latter groups being the ones that are supposed to be the WFP’s recipients. The ultimate result? Fully three-quarters of those North Korean respondents opposed the idea of South Korea giving food aid to their own homeland, where many of their loved ones are still trying to scrape by. Of course, these refugees aren’t counting on the U.N. to feed their hungry families; they’re using smugglers to send them money, which their loved ones are using to buy food in the markets, which draws food into the country and undercuts the corrupt and discriminatory food distribution system that’s to blame for this perennial crisis. Markets almost certainly feed more hungry North Koreans than the WFP can, and what’s more, they’re doing more to develop North Korea’s economy and alleviate its long-term food crisis.

This is the part where you can insert your own disclaimer about selection bias among a refugee population. Or maybe these North Koreans arrived at their views only after escaping and reading news reports in the South, but I tend to doubt that. There are now more than 20,000 North Koreans who were both willing and able to go through hell to get to South Korea, which suggests that the overwhelming consensus among this rapidly growing population represents a significant constituency at its source. The real story here isn’t that the North Korean regime is starving the people — we’ve known that for years. The real story is that the North Korean people know who’s starving them.

Just about everyone pans Sohn Hak-Kyu’s proposal to share the Olympics with N. Korea

July 15, 2011 Sports No comments

It seems that I was not alone in my reaction to Sohn Hak-Kyu’s addle-brained suggestion of sharing the 2018 Winter Olympics with North Korea. The idea has since been rejected by the Chairman of the International Olympic Commission, the government of South Korea, and 73.3% of South Koreans. So that would seem to be that. Or so we can hope.

Here, by the way, is what caused me to suspect that Sohn only proposed the idea to appease his hard-left base as he enters the presidential nomination contest.

But the comparison of North Korea’s treatment with South Africa’s is a constant source of delectable irony. Whereas the IOC enforced a boycott of South Africa, the IOC insists that Japan grant North Korea free access to Olympic events there despite North Korea’s abduction and imprisonment of Japanese citizens.

So is North Korea’s regime really less racist than South Africa’s was?

Sohn Hak-Kyu’s Olympic Folly

July 14, 2011 Korean Politics, Sports 11 comments

2011-04-19t091219z_01_sen202_rtridsp_0_korea-politics.jpgWhy did I shudder when I heard that South Korea had won the winter Olympics? Because I knew it was just a matter of time before some imbecile had an idea like this one:

Rep. Sohn Hak-kyu, chairman of the opposition Democratic Party, said Monday the party would push for “some events at the 2018 Winter Olympics to be staged in North Korea.

He said he would also bring up the issue of forming a unified team with the North in future talks with the ruling Grand National Party and the government.

“We are seriously reviewing ways of involving the North in the hosting of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics,” Sohn said during a party supreme council meeting.

“We will make the PyeongChang Olympics the turning point in Korea’s divided history. [Korea Times]

I cannot believe this man actually believes what he just said. I can believe he believes that some of his potential voters believe what he just said, which saddens me. It certainly didn’t take long for North Korea to endorse this idea. They’re all about sponging off the neighbors they periodically attack.

If you take Sohn at his word, he’s still chasing the lost dream of bribing North Korea into being nice, making up, and joining hands, which seemed to be all the South Korean left stood for during the decade it held in power in South Korea. But it’s one thing for them to want to finance Kim Jong Il as part of a novel experiment, as long as they could still theorize plausibly that financing North Korea’s regime would moderate, reform, and transform it. It’s another thing for them to want to finance North Korea’s regime after events have conclusively refuted that theory, and after Kim Jong Il opened a low-intensity conflict that killed dozens of South Koreans, terrorized thousands more, and depopulated a small but highly strategic piece of South Korean territory. The Commander of U.S. Forces in Korea doesn’t think we’ve seen the last of North Korea’s escalated provocations. Meanwhile, we’re still seeing constant reminders of the Sunshine Policy’s costly and failed legacy:

Hyundai Asan is suffering snowballing losses after tours to Mt. Kumgang in North Korea were halted in the wake of fatal shooting of a South Korean tourist in the resort. Park Wang-ja was shot dead by a North Korean soldier on July 11, 2008 and Hyundai Asan’s sales losses have accumulated to W390 billion (US$1=W1,058) over the three years, with staff dwindling from about 1,000 to just over 300, a spokesman said on Sunday. [Chosun Ilbo]

The idea behind Sunshine was to leverage South Korea’s financial advantage to buy influence in the North and thus transform its political system, but something like the opposite is closer to the truth. Plenty of South Korean money poured into the black hole of North Korea, but some South Koreans were so desperate to see results justifying that cost that North Korea ended up gaining more political influence in the South than vice versa. North Korea’s determination not to reform itself meant that even attempts to use sporting events to bridge political and cultural differences often widened them, and sometimes ended horribly for the North Koreans involved. We even saw North Koreans begin to impose their censorship on political expression on South Korean territory. North Korea’s own approach to sports has been, like everything else in North Korea, relentlessly political and defiant of the ways in which other human beings are expected to behave (possibly to include its doping rules). When it loses matches, North Korean coaches revert to unsportsmanlike excuses that their athletes were struck by lightning or poisoned by their hosts. After a decade of the Sunshine Policy, there’s more evidence that it changed South Korea’s political system than evidence that it changed the North’s.

And we can look forward to five years of that if Sohn Hak-Kyu becomes of the President of South Korea.

So how is Sohn’s theory still plausible to any thinking person? I can’t imagine that many of its supporters are attracted to it for logical reasons. Most people, regardless of intelligence, arrive at their conclusions for emotional reasons that resist evidence and logic. Their intelligence is mostly squandered on elaborate justifications for what they’ve already decided to believe. Plenty of intelligent people still do support Sunshine-like policies because they can’t see any better ideas and feel compelled to advocate for something, if only so that they appear to have answers. But on what basis can they still argue that it might work? What has North Korea done to deserve a piece of this action in any sense at all? And once again, why is North Korea allowed into the Olympics in any capacity whatsoever? After all, for years, the IOC didn’t let South Africa in, and as racist a place as South Africa was, at least they didn’t kill babies for being racially impure there. And we ought to remember that we object to racism because the basic presumption of equality is just one of many human rights. If the IOC has made the decision to stand for one such basic right, how can it justify holding an Olympic event in a place that does this to people?

The pendulum effect being what it is, I have a terrible feeling that someone like Sohn could actually win the next presidential election in South Korea. If so, I’ll probably regain my sense of urgency about getting American troops the hell out of South Korea. I suppose Sohn could be proposing this to appease the far left wing of his party. Sohn is a defector from the more conservative Grand National Party. He recently defeated the loser of the 2008 presidential election, Chung Dong-Young, as leader of the left-wing Democratic Party. Sohn isn’t from the Cheolla provinces, the DP’s base. It’s doubtful that he’ll be the DP’s presidential nominee without a challenge from within his own party, or from another left-wing party. In South Korean election years, the only thing you can rely on is that there will be frequent and dramatic shifts of party affiliation, nomenclature, and loyalty.

In the meantime, North Korea is changing — not because of any officially sanctioned cultural exchanges, joint ventures, or feel-good sports spectacles, but in 23 million small ways, and despite the regime’s desperation to stop that change. North Korea is changing anyway because even among the world’s most downtrodden people, there is an emerging market for the basic needs that the state refuses to provide, and also for knowledge, news, and entertainment from the greater world. Because of this, the metastasis of its political system is now probably too advanced for the Olympics to save:

A Chongjin source reported from North Hamgyeong province on June 26th, “People are copying and renting out South Korean dramas in Chongjin.” The source said that there are so many interested in the dramas that where previously they might gather in secret to watch them, now people are trading them as a business. The transaction method is comparable with video rental Stores in the South.

“Those trading in the CDs can’t do so legitimately and always have to be on the lookout for the authorities. But they are getting repeat customers from those who are addicted to the products,” said the source.

The CDs are produced in China and smuggled into North Korea in large quantities. In order to assure the success of the operation, it is essential for the traders to establish sound corrupt relationships with the security agencies. [Open News]

Even if the regime manages to forestall events like those in Syria and Libya for many more years, the next generation of propagandists and enforcers won’t believe in the system, and the inhibitions of the common people about hiding that disbelief are eroding steadily. There’s reason to hope that by 2018, North Korea will have undergone some dramatic change of government, or be in a state of such disarray that reality will hush this misbegotten idea.

Hans Blix Goes to the Olympics

July 12, 2011 Sports One comment

If I were pitching this as a script for a dark comedy, I describe it as combination of Boys Don’t Cry, Slapshot, and Team America:

Professor Arne Ljungqvist, chairman of the IOC’s Medical Commission, has said he will look into the matter after North Korean defenders Song Jong-Sun and Jong Pok-Sim failed doping tests at Germany 2011. [....]

Ljungqvist says he wants to know more about testing in North Korea, but is realistic about finding out more about doping checks in the Asian totalitarian state.

“I understand the mistrust of others, but I do not really know much about doping controls in this country, which has a closed society like no other in the world,” said Ljungqvist at the 123rd IOC Session in Durban, South Africa.

Which means, of course, that the doping standards that apply to other countries will have to be relaxed, just for North Korea.

Let’s just hope that IOC does a more creditable job getting to the bottom of this than FIFA did at getting to the bottom of those “criticism session” allegations. Taken to extremes, the drugging of female athletes disfigures them. You do remember what East Germany did to its female athletes, right? In one case, it turned a Heidi into an Andreas.

Kevin Dawes in Libya

July 9, 2011 Media Criticism 13 comments

Now, here’s someone who really deserves more traffic. Kevin Dawes, a “freelance battlefield journalist” from San Diego, reports from the middle of an artillery barrage east of Misrata, Libya, via his YouTube channel. Some of Dawes’s videos were uploaded as recently as two hours ago, but this was taken the day before yesterday:

This kind of micro-reporting won’t give you the war’s broader context — something that’s often inaccurately reported in any event — but following Dawes’s channel makes you feel almost as if you’re there. What impresses me most about Dawes isn’t just his physical courage, his obviously sincere sympathy for the people around him, or even the pathos in his humor, but the way he distinguishes himself from most other battlefield reporters by understanding enough about the weapons systems being fired around (and often, at) him to explain what’s actually going on.

When I read reporting from conflict zones, I find myself doubting the credibility of journalists who betray a complete technical and tactical ignorance of what they’re reporting. If you can’t see how this affects the quality of reporting from a conflict, just contrast the quality of Charles Hanley’s deceptive and inflammatory reporting from Iraq with dispatches like this, this, and this from Michael Yon. Among Yon’s many advantages over the likes of Hanley were a veteran’s understanding of his subject matter and an open mind. This isn’t to deny that Yon or Dawes are giving us their opinions with their reporting, only that they traffic in them openly, honestly, and factually.

In retrospect, whose reporting informed us better about what was going on in the ground on Iraq in 2007, as this country debated whether to abandon Iraq to terror and genocide? Contrasted with the work of most journalists in that place and time, Yon’s seems almost prescient. Who thinks that there would be anything for Dawes to cover in Libya now if we’d made a different decision in Iraq then?

Recently, many in the media have offered agonized confessions of how their industry misinformed us during the debate about invading Iraq in the first place. They did misinform us, out of a combination of laziness, ignorance, and groupthink. Had they done their job then, a majority of us might have opposed invading Iraq in 2003. Instead, a key link in our system of self-government failed us. It failed us again in 2007, when few of these journalists realized that they were already repeating the same error in Iraq for the same reasons. By 2007, they had become so obsessed with retrospective reporting about all they’d gotten wrong in 2003 that they lost touch with a new set of clear and present truths and consequences our country and our world then faced.

In war reporting, there is no substitute for knowing what you’re reporting about.

My Country, at Its Best

July 8, 2011 Regime Change 7 comments

Regimes come and regimes go, but friendship with the people of a nation endures. You earn that friendship when you stand with them in their darkest hours:

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians poured into the streets of the opposition stronghold Hama on Friday, bolstered by a gesture of support from the American and French ambassadors who visited the city where a massacre nearly 30 years ago came to symbolize the ruthlessness of the Assad dynasty.

The citizens of Hama, who supported the Muslim Brotherhood in their last great uprising, today decorated the car carrying America’s Ambassador with roses and olive branches.

The courage of the Syrians is something to behold. I hope the North Koreans will exceed it one day. They’ll have to.

Open Sources: North Korean Soccer Still a Rolling Train Wreck

July 8, 2011 Anju Links 2 comments

Defenders Song Jong Sun and Jong Pok Sim tested positive after North Korea’s first two group games and were suspended for Wednesday’s match against Colombia that ended in a 0-0 draw. Both teams were eliminated.

FIFA’s medical director Jiri Dvorak didn’t identify the substance involved. [AP]

Would it be an understatement to say that this year’s Womens’ World Cup hasn’t been a net positive for North Korea’s image? Here’s a satirical view that expresses it rather well. I’m still waiting for someone to explain why North Korea should be welcome in international sporting events at all, and this most recent spate of politically driven unsportsmanlike conduct won’t make that case any easier to make.

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Despite that rather modest contribution from the E.U., the State Department still doesn’t seem inclined to give food aid to North Korea:

The U.S. government remains cautious about giving food to North Korea because it does not want to waste taxpayers’ money on aid that ends up on the tables of the “wrong people,” a State Department official said Wednesday.

“We’re continuing to evaluate the team’s report,” said department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, faced with a barrage of questions at a press briefing on why a decision on food assistance is being delayed, more than a month after Washington sent a delegation of officials and experts to assess the reported food crisis there. [....]

“It’s very much on our minds that we cannot waste American taxpayers’ dollars by providing aid that goes to the wrong people,” she said. [Yonhap]

In this political and budget climate, the administration probably wouldn’t dare. As difficult a decision as this is, given the flaws in the WFP’s assessment and monitoring, I think it’s the right one. For its part, North Korea has taken to begging directly from the press, which probably means just what I predicted — that the regime will use that refusal to win propaganda points from feeble-minded Jimmy Carter types, even while it squanders its lunch money on palaces, yachts, and luxury cars. If you’re scoring this, that’s a win-win for about 1% of the population of North Korea, and a lose-lose for the rest of them.

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Oh, great!

Iran and North Korea are tightening their relations after a lull, defense sources have told Haaretz. Israeli defense officials are concerned about the development, saying it may reflect an expansion of North Korean aid to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. [....]

Israeli officials believe that Pyongyang is helping Iran develop its military nuclear program, saying that if Iran was only interested in nuclear energy for civilian purposes, Russia’s aid on the matter should have sufficed. [Haaretz]

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As South Korea starts work on a new hanawon facility for North Korean refugees, BBC interviews a North Korean people smuggler.

Mrs Kwon says she makes $2,000-$3,000 (£1,250-£1,875) a month, helping people escape. And she says that is nothing to be ashamed of.

“I’m not a drug-dealer. I’m not bad, I’m just bringing people out. I’m doing something the South Korean government can’t do. Yes, I make a profit from it, but it’s still saving lives,” she says.

Because of crackdowns by North Korean and China — a member in good standing of the U.N. Human Rights Council, by the way — the cost of fleeing from North Korea to South Korea has risen to $6,000, which still doesn’t guarantee that you’ll make it.

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We’ve all seen conflicting reports about North Korean’s culpability for past and recent cyber attacks on U.S. and South Korean government web sites, but MacAfee seems to think they did it.

Open Sources: The Economics of Extortion

July 6, 2011 Anju Links 4 comments

North Korea, which was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, has again threatened war against South Korea for its refusal to pay extortion money:

North Koreans gathered Monday at a massive rally in Pyongyang to denounce the conservative government of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak as a “group of unparalleled traitors.” More than 100,000 citizens, soldiers and senior government and army officials flocked to Kim Il Sung Square, according to footage from Associated Press Television News in Pyongyang. [....]

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted General Jang Jong Nam as saying that “there remains between the North and the South only physical settlement of returning fire for fire.” [AP]

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Open News reports that regime officials who can’t make ends meet on their salaries alone are branching out into loan sharking.

“Just recently in North Korea,” reports a source in Sinuiju, “an organization which charges interest on loans called Interest Money has come into being.” It has been providing large loans to illegally operating businesses. Large numbers of people are paying 10 – 20% monthly rates on the money they have borrowed.

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Inspectors charged with regulating the private markets which have sprung up around North Korea are raising the heckles [sic] of the people operating the markets. Disgruntled North Koreans say the officers are cracking down independently of officials orders in order to line their own pockets.

A Pyongyang source on a visit to relatives in China said, “Recently the inspectors have strengthened their regulation over the markets. There have been no new officials orders to come down heavily on the marketeers but individuals inspectors have taken it upon themselves to be more heavy handed as a means to boost their own livelihoods.” “The inspectors are in receipt of a fixed ration from the regime,” said the source, “but it’s evidently not enough for them.” The source added that they regulate more keenly to provide themselves with a higher standard of living. [Open News]

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Fun Reading, and Possibly Even True: The Chosun Ilbo claims that an increasing number of North Korean soldiers and officers have recently been caught watching or screening forbidden South Korean films in their homes and barracks. Given that North Korean soldiers aren’t allowed to get married during enlistments that often last ten years or more, it’s not surprising that pornography makes an appearance. (Decide for yourself whether to believe the apocryphal account of one officer starring his own productions; if true, this would mostly prove that the impulses endemic to certain men know no borders or ideology.)

I think the Chosun Ilbo overstates the significance of porn as a sign that military discipline is collapsing; after all, what makes a South Korean video subversive is backgrounds, scenery, and plot, and those aren’t exactly qualities for which porn is held in high esteem. Porn in the barracks would be considered a disciplinary problem — but hardly a sign of the apocalypse — in many armies, including our own.

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The word is “megalomanocracy:” Two fresh news reports suggest that Kim Jong-Eun has gone under the knife no less than six times to make him resemble his grandfather, and that his uncle (Kim Jong Il’s half-brother and Kim Il-Sung’s son) is under house arrest because he resembles Kim Il Sung too much. No word on whether the surgical procedures performed on Jong-Eun included liposuction.

I can’t vouch for the veracity of the reports, but in any place but North Korea, we’d reject them out of hand. The logical conclusion? North Korean agents abduct Hwang Woo-Suk and order him to clone Kim Il Sung, who is currently serving as North Korea’s Eternal President and its largest stockpile of preserved meat.

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Despite the flaws in the World Food Program’s assessment and monitoring, the E.U. has donated $14.5 million to the WFP’s emergency feeding program for North Korea. The contribution still leaves the WFP far short of its goals, and for comparison, represents less than 10% of what the United States was giving during most of the Bush Administration.

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Chris Green of the Daily NK interviews Marcus Noland about the prospects for North Korea’s special economic zones. Noland isn’t optimistic that the zones are a harbinger of economic reform. Separately, Nicholas Eberstadt reaches a similar conclusion:

“It is a safe bet that Kim Jong-il’s visit to China in May 2011 was a sort of fundraising tour aimed at securing some of the many billions of dollars envisioned by this ambitious plan,” he said in a report titled “What is wrong with the North Korean economy?” [....]

“Yet all North Korean efforts at ‘opening’ and ‘reform’ to date have been confused and half-hearted, and every one of these initiatives has ultimately ended in failure,” he said

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ABC (Australian type) profiles the North Korean guerrilla cameraman who brought out the latest images from his homeland.

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“Canada, fire this diplomat.”

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Congratulations to Jared Genser — lawyer, scholar, and long-standing activist for the human rights of the people of North Korea — who after many years with mega-firm DLA Piper, has opened his own practice. (Genser was rumored to be a possible pick for Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, and it’s hard not to think that he’d have been a more effective public advocate for the issue than Bob King has been.) These are tough times for lawyers, so Genser should have no trouble recruiting top-notch talent. I wish him well, and a little free publicity from the Washington Post can’t hurt.

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Brilliant Chinese soft-power diplomacy continues to influence the policies of nations all over Asia.

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