Sanctions

전쟁이 아닌 법으로 북한의 핵무기를 어떻게 멈출 수 있는가?

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안녕하세요, 한국의 친구들. 저는 워싱턴 DC에있는 미국 변호사입니다. 1998 년부터 2002 년까지 저는 한국에서 군인이었습니다. 저는 아름다운 문화와 사람들로 인해 한국에서의 생활을 사랑했습니다. 1999 년에, 저는 가장 정직하고, 아름다운 사람을 만났고, 그래서 저는 그녀와 결혼했습니다.  오늘 우리에게는 두 명의 자녀가 있습니다.

한국은 제가 사는 한 제 삶의 일부가 될 것입니다. 그래서 저는 북한에 대해 걱정하고 있습니다. 우리는 전쟁을 피해야만 하지만 우리는 또한 대한민국을 자유롭게 해야 합니다.

1998년 젊은 군인으로 처음 한국에 도착했을 때, 한국은 재통일에 대한 희망으로 들떠 있었습니다.

김대중이 대통령이었고, 북한의 경제를 변화시키고 개방하기 위해 원조와 북한과의 무역을 약속했었습니다.

김대중 정권아래 그리고 후에 노무현 정권에서 북한에 100억 달러를 지원했습니다. 그러나 그 누구도 북한이 그 돈을 어떻게 사용했는지 알 수 없습니다. 개성과 금강산은 단지 시작에 불과했습니다. 이제 북한은 외국 공장들로 채워 져야만 합니다.

김대중 정권이 그의 정책을 시행한 후 20년, 이제는 이 정책이 성공적인지를 알아 볼 시간이 되었다고 봅니다. 실패했다면, 햇볕정책의 목표가 달성될 가치가 있는 것일까요? 그 목표를 달성할 다른 전략은 없는 것일까요? 햇볕정책은 북한을 변화시키지 못했습니다. 남한의 원조는 핵실험이라는 그리고 남한의 영토 공격으로 그리고 남한의 장병들을 살해하

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Korean Politics, Sunshine

Moon Jae-in lied, people died

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We now revisit the curious case of a leader inside South Korea’s Blue House who sought and followed the counsel of a cult leader with no official position in the South Korean government and (let us hope!) no security clearance, regarding a highly sensitive question of government policy. By which I refer, of course, to Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-il (who else were you thinking of?). To refresh your memory:

Just before the Park Geun-hye scandal buried every other news story in Korea, Song Min-soon, who was Foreign Minister for the late left-wing ex-President Roh Moo-Hyun, revealed in his memoirs that in 2007, before a U.N. General Assembly vote condemning North Korea’s atrocities against its own people, Roh’s then-Chief of Staff, Moon Jae-in, agreed to ask the perpetrators of the greatest crimes against the Korean people in their long history how Seoul’s U.N. Ambassador should cast his vote. [Me, four months ago]

At first, Moon said he couldn’t remember what happened. Then, his memory recovered and he denied Song’s allegation. Then, he sued some of the conservative opponents who attacked him for it (but not Song himself). I’d begun to think that South Koreans had forgotten all about this until last week, when Moon and the other candidates for South Korea’s upcoming presidential election debated.

Two conservative candidates set an aggressive tone from the outset, accusing him of kowtowing to North Korea and flip-flopping on missile defense.

Yoo Seong-min of the splinter conservative Bareun Party revisited the allegation that the former presidential chief of staff consulted Pyongyang before the government abstained in a vote on U.N. resolution on North Korea’s human rights violations in 2007, an accusation that Moon denied again.

Hong Joon-pyo of the conservative Liberty Korea Party denounced Moon for lying, citing a former foreign minister’s memoirs that first sparked the controversy. Moon countered that Hong was amplifying an unverified claim. [Yonhap]

Enter Song Min-soon, who calmly rises from his counsel table with a piece of paper in his hand. He approaches the clerk of the court, asks the judge to mark Prosecution Exhibit A for identification, and enters it into the record.

The document included what appears to be the North’s opposition to a move in the South to vote for the U.N. resolution, saying that it cannot be “justified under any circumstances” and runs counter to what the then leaders of the two Koreas agreed after holding a summit.

It went on to say that the South is urged to take a “responsible” stance on the resolution issue if it wants to advance its relations with the North, adding that it will “closely” watch how the South acts. At bottom was a handwritten memo that hinted that the document was delivered from the then spy agency chief to the then national security adviser.

The disclosure is expected to create a political controversy in South Korea ahead of the presidential election as it took issue with Moon who has denied it.

The former foreign minister said in the interview that Moon has made himself a liar by strongly denying what he claimed in the memoir and that he had no choice but to make public the document to prove himself right. [Yonhap]

For a moment, I imagined that I could hear the souls of the disappeared men, women, and children of Camp 22 weeping.

This underlines again how South Korea’s libel laws, under which truth is no defense, are harming South Korea’s public discourse. In this case, a “liberal” politician and former “human rights lawyer” tried to use the courts to censor an allegation by his political opponents that Moon sacrificed the human rights of 23 million Koreans for political expediency. That allegation has immense public interest to the voters and to Korean history itself. And as it turns out, the allegation is true.

Even before Song showed Moon Jae-in to be a liar, Moon had been weakened by his flip-flopping and evasive answers on THAAD deployment, and by his statement that the Defense Ministry’s plans would not describe North Korea as the South’s “main enemy” in its defense plans. It can’t help that Pyongyang has made its support for Moon Jae-in as clear as it could without formally endorsing him.

As the Wall Street Journal‘s Jonathan Cheng informs us, national security has risen to the top of the list of issues that concern South Korean voters, and the attention to that issue hasn’t been good for Moon, whose support can’t break through a ceiling of 40 percent (less than he earned in his narrow loss in the 2012 election). It’s clear from the views of the candidates that the range of South Korea’s mainstream has shifted significantly (and perhaps, dramatically) since the days when Moon Jae-in ran Roh Moo-hyun’s campaign, and was his closest confidant in the Blue House.

How badly this hurts Moon remains to be seen. Even if Moon wins, he will not enter office with a mandate to pursue some of the more extreme policies he has advanced, such as snubbing the U.S. by visiting Pyongyang before he visits Washington,* canceling THAAD, or violating U.N. sanctions to reopen Kaesong. Almost as importantly, it marks the first time in recent South Korean history that human rights in the North has, however incidentally, become a significant issue in an election.

~   ~   ~

* Moon now says this statement was taken out of context.

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China & Korea

Make Korea China Again? Xi Jinping confirms colonial ambitions for Korea.

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As regular readers of this site know, China is opposed to unilateral sanctions, except when it isn’t. In the case of North Korea, China is also opposed to the multilateral sanctions it voted for in the U.N. Security Council; consequently, North Korean missiles ride on Chinese trucks, North Korean proliferation networks operate openly on Chinese soil and launder their money through Chinese banks, North Korea’s weapons are made from components and technology procured from or through China, and those weapons are imported or exported through Chinese ports. North Korean abduction squads kidnap refugees and murder activists on Chinese territory, and North Korean spy rings operating inside South Korea meet in safe houses on the outskirts of Beijing.

China’s answer to these charges, as near as I can make sense of them, is that it only violates the sanctions it voted for because sanctions never work and it’s afraid they’ll work and it has no influence over North Korea anyway and also, it isn’t violating them. But China’s unilateral sanctions to disarm South Korea, which are clearly calculated to leave it prostrate to Pyongyang’s (and Beijing’s) blackmail, put the lie to all of this.

Thus, two weeks ago, I drew the unavoidable conclusion and advanced the inflammatory theory that China’s failure to reign in North Korea’s nuclear program might not be a failure at all. Perhaps North Korea’s nuclear program is a proxy for China to disarm, isolate, Finlandize, and control both Koreas. After all, one could excuse a few lapses in North Korea sanctions enforcement as oversights by a fundamentally corrupt state, but it isn’t plausible that the same people, front companies, and networks could have escaped the all-seeing eye of the world’s most efficiently intrusive surveillance state for decades. And now that Xi Jinping is revealed to have spoken the words that the peoples of Asia fear most — “part of China” — Koreans’ worst fears are confirmed. For the full interview, go here. Here is the quote in context:

But we had a really good meeting [with Chinese President Xi Jinping], and it was supposed to be 10 minute session and then you go into a room with hundreds of people, you know all different representatives, and the meeting was scheduled for 10 to 15 minutes, and it lasted for 3 hours. And then the second day we had another 10 minute meetings and that lasted for 2 hours. We had a — just a very good chemistry.

He then went into the history of China and Korea. Not North Korea, Korea. And you know, you’re talking about thousands of years …and many wars. And Korea actually used to be a part of China. And after listening for 10 minutes I realized that not — it’s not so easy. You know I felt pretty strongly that they have — that they had a tremendous power over China. I actually do think they do have an economic power, and they have certainly a border power to an extent, but they also — a lot of goods come in. But it’s not what you would think. It’s not what you would think. [WSJ]

If South Koreans are worried and outraged, both sentiments are well justified. The scars left by South Korea’s occupation by a certain other predatory neighbor are still raw and painful to South Koreans, and I would argue that the legacy of China’s influence over North Korea has been far worse than the legacy of Japan’s occupation — including war, famine, gulags, smothering thought control, and exploitation of women on a scale and severity comparable to Japan’s exploitation of wartime sex slaves.

In most news outlets, this story is being reported as a Trump faux-pas, which it certainly was to the extent Trump seemed to credit Xi’s imperialist narrative. But that is not the real story, because (1) the world already discounts Trump’s words in ways that it did not discount the words of other presidents, and (2) there are men and women in the White House who are smart enough to disabuse Trump of this nonsense, clean it up, and make the appropriate assurances to South Korea, despite that damage that has been done. Those assurances are going to be very, very important when we are three weeks out from an election in South Korea, when South Koreans are already wondering if we are still a reliable ally.

But in another sense, we should silently thank Donald Trump for (however unwittingly) telling us the real story, which the media seem to be missing entirely. The real story is that Xi Jinping just tipped his hand about his colonial ambitions to control all of Korea. Xi Jinping, after all, does not tweet. He does not ramble, muse, or offer idle, half-considered thoughts. He is nothing if not deliberate and calculating. He went to Mar-a-Lago with meticulously premeditated plans to influence the President of the United States in certain directions, to achieve a certain ambition.

The historically accurate truth is that Korea was never a “part” of China, but was a tributary nation under substantial Chinese influence or control for centuries. Put another way, there is no more historical basis to Xi’s claim than there is to the Northeast Asia Project or Xi’s claim that the South China Sea is a part of China now. Who believes that Xi Jinping will let either truth or law get in his way when he senses that the time has come to make his move? If I were living in South Korea, I’d want missile defense and nuclear weapons now more than ever. I’d also want a president with the greatest possible influence over the United States, and the backbone to stand up to Xi Jinping. In other words, I’d want a choice I don’t have — so I’d pick the lesser evil who can still win.

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Sanctions

What North Korea sanctions? Busting the myths in five charts and one long essay.

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Bruce Klingner, Professor Lee, and I have a new piece out in Foreign Affairs, in which we continue to ask the question, “What North Korea sanctions?” As regular readers know, I’ve spent the last several years waging | a jihad | against junk analysis and fake expertise about North Korea and sanctions, usually from people who don’t bother to read or research them, and who often flat-out misrepresent what they are and do. These people feel compelled to argue that sanctions can’t work because the possibility | that | they | can | work undercuts the argument that we should keep trying to appease our way out of this problem. For reasons that must be more psychological than empirical, some people are just stuck on the idea that we can only seize the Holy Grail by building that Large Wooden Badger, and that sanctions are an impediment to diplomacy rather than an enabler of it.

I keep a mental tally of these people, to which I’ve added David Kang (“Given the extensive sanctions already imposed on the country, it’s hard to believe that even more pressure will somehow lead the country to choose a new direction.”), Kevin Gray (“North Korea remains one of the most heavily sanctioned states in the world today.”), and Jeffrey Lewis (“[W]e imagine that our sanctions are somehow insufficient or, more darkly, being undermined.”)

Kang and Gray are mostly polemicists anyway, so I can easily believe that neither has actually read what the U.N. Panel of Experts has published on this topic. Gray does add some useful research in his post, although (by which I mean “because”) it undercuts his conclusion that sanctions can’t work. Lewis, on the other hand, clearly has read portions of the U.N.’s reports, which is more damning, because it suggests that he’s selectively ignoring the overwhelming | evidence | that | sanctions | are | indeed | being | undermined | by | China.

Happily, we now have more data to push back this tide of misinformation. In my inbox this morning was an email from David Maxwell, pointing to a new online tool called the Enigma Sanctions Tracker, which has done something I’ve meant to do for years and never found the time to do — make a graphic, comparative representation of how North Korea sanctions stack up against other sanctions programs.  And as you can clearly see, North Korea is not the most sanctioned country … not by the range of a Taepodong II.

One important caveat here is that while the vast majority of the WMD designations are against Iran and other targets, a significant number are against North Korean targets, and a small number of third-country enablers. Note that Cuba has fallen on this list because of a large number of sanctions removals. The Zimbabwe number seems suspiciously high; I’d calculated that Zimbabwe is about on par with North Korea if you count all the North Korean ships and planes that have been designated individually. Overall, however, this looks about right to me. Here’s another graph, comparing North Korea designations (yellow) to those of other targets (light gray).

We can also see how it took a push from Congress to get the Treasury Department off the dime. The next graph notes North Korea’s third nuclear test in 2013, but doesn’t mention that shortly thereafter, Congress told the administration that it had started drafting what later passed as the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act. And just look at what happened in 2016, when that law passed — a yuuuge spike in designations.

We can also see that even today, we are still not designating North Korea targets faster than we’re designating targets in the Ukraine, Russia, or Iran. This isn’t to say that those targets don’t richly deserve to be designated, but it’s certainly not because there’s | any | shortage of North Korean targets, either.

And finally, we see that China is still getting a free ride. Again, I have a small quibble here, because I don’t see any little gray dots in Dandong. Still, this is broadly accurate.

This Reuters fact-box is also useful on the subject of U.N. sanctions.

As Enigma correctly notes, the number of designations doesn’t tell the whole story. Designating a low-level retailer doesn’t have the same impact as designating the agency he reports to, and designating Kim Jong-un means nothing if we don’t go out in search of his bank accounts and apply enough muscle to the bankers to get those funds frozen. A few pictures are worth three five thousand words, but by all means read the three five thousand words, too.

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Appeasement, Korean War II

Stop the war. Enforce sanctions.

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If Kim Jong-un’s strategy is what I think it is, it involves provoking a series of escalating security crises, with a plan to “de-escalate” each one through talks, or ideally, though an extended-yet-inconclusive “peace treaty” negotiation, in exchange for a series of pre-planned concessions that would amount to a slow-motion surrender of South Korea. I say “escalating” because Pyongyang’s provocations have escalated in recent years, and because it’s a sure bet they’ll escalate even more after Pyongyang has an effective nuclear arsenal. From that moment, it could be as little as five years before Pyongyang’s strategy achieves sufficient hegemony to exercise significant control over South Korea’s politics, media, textbooks, defense policies, and economic resources, and to effectively intimidate any noisy defectors and activists into silence.

Along the way, however, the risks are great that either a miscalculation, or a U.S. or ROK refusal to slouch passively toward surrender, would end in the most devastating war since 1945. In this post, I will argue that if North Korea cannot be disarmed without war, war is inevitable, but also that premature talk of war impedes our chances of disarming Pyongyang peacefully.

Those who invited this crisis by counseling us to indulge Pyongyang now insist that Pyongyang’s only purpose for acquiring nuclear weapons is to protect itself. But having watched Pyongyang wage the war of skirmishes it resumed in 2010 with the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong-do attacks, I cannot agree that Pyongyang’s objective is merely regime survival. Pyongyang knows that it cannot survive forever as the poorer Korea. Rather, its strategy is to coerce Seoul into a political framework that allows it to exercise and expand its political and economic control over all of Korea. Its master plan does not involve an occupation of the South for the foreseeable future; instead, it contemplates using South Korea’s own government to enforce its writ.

If this belief makes me an outlier, so be it. Just bear in mind that what you and I believe is possible matters less than what Kim Jong-un believes is possible. I also believe that Pyongyang is closer to achieving these objectives than most Americans or South Koreans suspect. Americans underestimate how many South Koreans would willingly sacrifice freedom for the sake of “peace,” or “inter-Korean relations.” Freedom, after all, is as difficult a thing to appreciate as peace unless you’ve lived without it. But if you think that sacrifice would prevent war, keep reading.

One waypoint toward Pyongyang’s objective is sanctions relief from Seoul. This is not just for the primary economic benefits of, say, reopening Kaesong. Any laxity by Seoul in enforcing U.N. sanctions would have far greater secondary benefits for Pyongyang. It would have domino effects in the capitals of North Korea’s arms clients and enablers throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, would create more diplomatic distance between Washington and Seoul, and would break up the global sanctions enforcement coalition-building strategy that had finally taken shape. It would also put Seoul in direct conflict with the Trump administration’s emerging policy, which will emphasize economic pressure. The economic benefits of unearned sanctions relief would help Pyongyang validate its “byungjin” policy by enriching its elites, by showing off its selective prosperity to its sympathizers abroad, and by underwriting its political control over its own “wavering” and “hostile” classes.

Another waypoint is to undermine political support for Seoul’s military alliance with Washington in both capitals. Pyongyang seeks to strain that alliance by raising war fears, and by getting exercises canceled and key weapons systems (read: THAAD, Patriots) withdrawn. It wants to show South Koreans and Americans that this alliance is more risk than it’s worth. If the point comes when the alliance does more to constrain U.S. options and advance them, that time may come sooner than most of us expect.

The war scare that swept through Twitter last week advanced Pyongyang toward that objective. The Pentagon quickly debunked it, and for now, the White House’s strategy is moving toward a well-thought-through list of North Korean industries and targets for sanctions. I could not have said it better than the headline over Grant Newsham’s recent piece for the Asia Times: “Before attacking North Korea, please try everything else.” The subhead to his piece was, “Try sanctions, real sanctions.” (Do read the entire piece.) War talk is not only premature and unnecessary, it’s apt to help bring Pyongyang closer to realizing its political objectives by scaring South Koreans into wanting the U.S. gone.

Maybe some of this war talk is simple disinformation or bad journalism. My fear is that the White House thinks raising the fear of war will put Pyongyang and Beijing off their game and raise our leverage. It needs to understand that a war panic could cost us the confidence of people in Japan and South Korea whose support we’ll need to prevent war. This crisis is scary enough at it is. Turning well-grounded concerns into panic serves no one’s interests but Kim Jong-un’s.

But it is also true that the anti-sanctions / talk-to-North-Korea crowd is, however unintentionally, also contributing to the risk of war. To their credit, most of them are at least honest enough to admit that they no longer believe a negotiated nuclear disarmament of North Korea is possible. They should also be honest enough to admit that accepting North Korea’s nuclear status will lead to a catastrophic war, not peace. A nuclear North Korea will not coexist with us, with South Korea, or with human civilization itself. As Anthony Ruggiero and I recently noted:

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un last month sent assassins to Malaysia to murder his half-brother in a crowded airport terminal with a chemical weapon. Pyongyang has sent assassins abroad to kidnap and kill human rights activists and dissidents, proliferated ballistic missiles, and sold weapons — including man-portable surface-to-air missiles — to terrorists and their sponsors. It attacked South Korea twice in 2010: sinking a warship and shelling a fishing village, which killed 50 of its citizens. The hermit kingdom is a state sponsor of terrorism, even in the absence of a formal designation: it has helped Syria use chemical weapons against its own people, and attacked our freedom of expression with terrorist threats against movie theaters across the United States.

Nor can the U.S. invest its hopes in talks alone. Pyongyang insists that it will neither freeze nor dismantle its nuclear and missile programs. U.S. envoys have met with their North Korean counterparts during almost every year in the last decade, yet failed to induce Pyongyang to return to disarmament talks. In 2012, President Obama finally secured Pyongyang’s agreement to freeze its nuclear and missile programs. Two weeks later, Pyongyang reneged.

I might add that in 2007, North Korea secretly built a nuclear reactor in a part of Syria now controlled by ISIS. There is no compromise, no half-surrender, no piece of paper that will secure peace and prevent war without Pyongyang’s disarmament and without fundamental humanitarian reforms. As long as Pyongyang possesses weapons of mass destruction, and as long as its model of survival is based on terror and secrecy, it will still pose an existential threat to the United States, to Americans’ freedom of speech, and to the security of the entire world. As the Sony cyber terrorist threat, the Bangladesh Bank theft, and the horrors in Syria have shown us, North Korea isn’t just a Korean problem, it is, as President Trump said recently, “a humanity problem.” If you really think the solution to this is as simple as “talk to them,” at least review the record on just how many times President Obama and his predecessors tried to do exactly that.

That’s why, in the medium term, the U.S. may well decide that it must strike first to prevent a direct North Korean nuclear threat to the American people. The more Washington trusts Seoul, the more value it sees in maintaining an alliance with Seoul to help disarm Pyongyang peacefully, and the less likely war is. The less Washington trusts Seoul, the less certain it is whose side Seoul is on, and the less certain it is that a warning to Seoul wouldn’t also be a tip-off to Pyongyang, the less likely President Trump is to warn Seoul of a preemptive strike. You don’t have to tell me the risks of this. There are people in South Korea I love. Not that it should matter; the people on both sides of the DMZ who would suffer are human beings. We should want all of them to have a chance not only to survive, but also to live.

[Korean refugees flee south, 1950. This photo, by Max Desfor, won a Pulitzer Prize.]

There are times when I suspect that it requires a Ph.D. to harbor the madness that we can ever have peace with a “responsible” nuclear North Korea. Thankfully, the first 2,000 names in the telephone directory have a firmer grasp on reality than this. Only 35 percent of them support preemptive strikes, but just 11 percent of them support the idea of accepting that North Korea will keep building nukes. Overwhelming majorities want us to enforce sanctions (80 percent) and continue our diplomatic efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program (81 percent). They hold uniformly dim views of North Korea (78 percent “unfavorable” and 61 percent “very unfavorable”). Majorities are “very concerned” about North Korea having nuclear weapons (65 percent) but would still support the use of force if an Asian ally got into a “serious conflict” with North Korea (64 percent).

Each week that passes diminishes our chances to prevent another war in Korea. There is no more time to be wasted on the palliative policies of engagement and talks that have produced no positive results, and which have done so much to bring us to the present crisis by paying Pyongyang to nuke up. For now, there is no chance that talks will achieve our key aim of disarming Pyongyang, but it would be a grave error to rule out talks entirely, because the time will come when diplomacy will be essential to preventing war. If sanctions and political subversion bring Pyongyang to the point where it fears (and Beijing also fears) that its regime will collapse — and to achieve the necessary pressure to disarm Pyongyang, they must — then we must leave Pyongyang a diplomatic escape that, while distasteful to it (and in some regards, to us) is still preferable to war. But for now, our choice increasingly comes down to making sanctions work or accepting that war is inevitable.

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Human Trafficking, Southeast Asia

Malaysia may expel North Korean miners (if it can find them)

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Kim Jong-un is getting away with murder in Malaysia, thanks to the weakness and corruption of its government. Four North Korean suspects in the assassination of Kim Jong-nam fled immediately after the fatal attack. Because the world has taught Kim Jong-un that terrorism works, the Malaysian government let three other suspects leave after North Korea took several Malaysians (including diplomats) hostage.

Malaysia has since said that it will not cut diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, which (as some | excellent  | investigation | and | journalism | have revealed) uses Malaysia as a base of operations for money | laundering on a large scale. The best one can now hope is that the exposure of these violations of U.N. sanctions and human rights abuses, hopefully backed by strong diplomacy and the threat of sanctions, will embarrass Malaysia into shutting down those commercial links.

One of those links is the use of North Korean miners in Malaysia for work so dangerous that “[n]o local or Sarawakian will dare to take up such jobs.” And of course, in the end, the workers probably don’t see more than a fraction of their own wages. The other day on Twitter, I pointed to an apparent discrepancy between an Arirang report that 140 of 176 North Korean workers in Malaysia had “gone missing,” and the Borneo Post report it apparently referenced as its source, which said that the 140 were merely overstaying their expired work permits. But if this CNN report is to be believed, Arirang might not have been so far off.

Authorities in Malaysia are looking for 117 North Koreans who have overstayed their work permits, according to the country’s Immigration Department.

Datuk Seri Mustafar Ali, director-general of Malaysia’s Immigration Department, told CNN on Tuesday that authorities are seeking the North Korean workers. [….]

That standoff ended, but it revealed that a significant number of North Koreans lived and worked in Malaysia.

All of the 117 North Koreans wanted by immigration are in the state of Sarawak, Ali said. It is the only state that employs North Korean workers, the country’s human resource minister said, according to state-run Bernama news agency.

Ali said the workers have been given one week to turn themselves in, and he said his department knows of their whereabouts.

“We will definitely go after them as their work permits have expired, and thus they are considered illegal workers,” he said. “But first we would like to give them or their employers a week’s notice to voluntarily turn them in.” [CNN]

While investigating the discrepancy between the Arirang and Borneo Post stories, I ran across another Borneo Post story in which two reporters traveling in Sarawak missed their turn and almost (but not quite) accidentally ran into one of the coal mines where the North Koreans work.

A few hundred metres into the road, we met a couple of strange looking foreigners, who happened to be North Koreans. We asked one of them, a woman maybe in her late 30s, for the location of the coal mine which is still operating. But she asked us our purpose of coming and we told her that we just wanted to have a look at the coal mine as it would be an interesting subject to write.

As journalists, we have the basic instinct of a good subject matter. And there and then, We knew we had got a good one. Then we drove to a cemented square in front of two rows of barracks. As we stopped our vehicle – the MU-X – a few strangers came charging at us. We had no clue what they were saying, but obviously they were speaking in Korean. As we tried to explain to them our purpose, more of them showed up. One of them rudely pointed to their site office.

At the office, we met a security guard and a general clerk – a pleasant Iban lady who spoke both Mandarin and English fluently. We told her of our purpose and she was very informative. It was from her that we knew that there are 49 North Koreans and a few Nepalis working at the coal mine.

While we were interviewing the Iban lady, the North Korean woman came charging and asked us to leave immediately as we did not have an authorisation letter. So we called Snowdan again and asked him to talk to the Korean woman. But she insisted that we should leave immediately and threatened to call in the police if we failed to listen to her command.

Feeling uneasy and sensing something unpleasant might happen, we decided that we should just leave.

After we had left the site, many questions popped in our minds such as ‘How is it that the locals do not know there are at least 49 North Koreans working and living in their midst?’ and ‘Why has the coal mine been operating so secretively and discreetly?’ We hope the authorities could shed some light on this. [Borneo Post]

And here is where those workers live:

One possibility is that the workers’ minders have told them to lay low for a while until the heat is off, and the appropriate officials can be “convinced” to extend their visas. The more intriguing possibility is that some of those workers have no intention of going back to North Korea at all. They couldn’t survive for long on their own, but if journalists can find North Korean miners, so can the South Korean NIS.

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Censorship, Democracy, Useful Idiocy

South Korean censors fine lawmaker $4300 for telling the truth about Minbyun (updated)

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South Korean National Assemblyman Ha Tae-Kyung invites a particular potency of venom from both the hard left and the hard right. The hard left hates him because he used to be pro-Pyongyang and they still are. Ha was imprisoned under the old right-wing dictatorship for his activism and for (by his own admission) his former pro-Pyongyang sympathies. He later turned against Pyongyang and became an activist for human rights for the North Korean people, for which he has received threats to his life and his family. The hard right hates Ha because he was viewed as a Korean Rino for being insufficiently loyal to Park Geun-hye during her impeachment.

I also disagree with Ha about some things, including sanctions, but I respect him nonetheless. I met Ha when he came to Washington for a fellowship some years ago. We have not stayed in contact, but one night, as I drove him home from an event we both attended, he recounted the time he’d spent in prison. On his return to Korea, he went on to found Open Radio for North Korea and win a seat in the National Assembly.

Today, NK News reports that the hard-left lawyers’ guild Minbyun, the incubator of former President Roh Moon-hyun and current presidential front-runner Moon Jae-in, has “won” a libel suit against Ha Tae-Kyung for accusing it — accurately, as I will argue — of “defending North Korea.” The suit originates from the slashing of U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert by a pro-North Korean fanatic in 2015, after which Ha said the assailant’s lawyer was a member of Minbyun and that Minbyun was “defending North Korea.”

Two points of order here: first, Minbyun denies that the lawyer was a member, and second, even knife-wielding Commie fanatics are entitled to the representation of counsel. But those statements were not the basis of the suit. The basis of the suit was that Ha referred to Minbyun’s members as “jongbuk,” a term used for pro-North Korean radicals.

Ha initially prevailed in the suit, but Minbyun appealed, and the higher court reversed and ordered Ha to pay them 5 million Korean won, or just over $4300. When I say that Minbyun “won” the case, I use scare quotes, because not even lawyers of Minbyun’s caliber can come cheap enough that a measly $4300 would cover the time and costs of the suit. Now, listen to the court’s reasoning.

“In South Korea, the term Jongbuk has the negative meaning of ‘following North Korea unquestioningly’ thus ‘denying constitutional ground order and the identity of the Republic of Korea (ROK),” the court ruled on Monday.

“(Lawmaker Ha Tae-kyung’s) statement was enough to give the impression that Minbyun leaned towards defending pro-North entities, deviating from its original purpose of providing legal support for the protection of human rights.” [NK News, J.H. Ahn]

This implies that under South Korean law, it’s defamation to make a political criticism solely because it’s inflammatory or hurts someone’s feelings. Really? Isn’t truth even a defense? Even parliamentary immunity (as in Europe) or “speech and debate” protections (as in the U.S.) cannot exist in South Korea if a lawmaker can be sued for a political criticism. But that turns out to be precisely the case.

A few minutes of research will quickly reveal the serious threat that South Korea’s libel laws pose to free speech and open debate. They have been used by corporations and politicians to silence both columnists and journalists. When Park Geun-hye tried to use them to silence reporters, Human Rights Watch criticized her and called for the criminal defamation law to be repealed. Worst of all, it is no defense that the “defamatory” statement is true. As long-time Korea-based lawyer Sean Hayes writes: “In South Korea, people may be held civilly liable and may be criminally punished even for a true statement.”

By now, the more clever readers among you are wondering about Minbyun’s own position on the criminal defamation law. Well, on the one hand, Minbyun’s Media Committee “supports the Act on the Press Arbitration and Damage Redemption, etc. which protects people from defamation of character.” On the other hand, Minbyun cried “freedom of speech” when the government used the defamation law against the MBC network after it published a scurrilous (and subsequently retracted) report that American beef causes mad cow disease, a report that instigated weeks of mass protests. Minbyun has written that the government should “consider” decriminalizing defamation — except in “the most serious of cases,” which may include “hate speech,” however Minbyun defines that. That is to say, South Korea’s “liberal human rights lawyers” are against the use of criminal defamation laws to censor political speech, except when they aren’t.

I’m guessing that, given what he’s been through, the $4300 means less to Ha Tae-Kyung than vindicating the truth. J.H. Ahn, the NK News reporter, does that cause no service when he airbrushes Minbyun’s involvement in a case that’s of special interest to me, the case of 12 North Korean restaurant workers who defected to the South from Ningpo, China last year. Ahn describes Minbyun’s involvment in these cases as speaking “on behalf of the North Korean parents” of the 12. This is nonsense. In any defamation case — particularly one about political speech about controversial issues with public and global interest — that a statement is true, or offered in good faith, should always be a defense.

~   ~   ~

Plenty has been written (including at this site) about the Korean right’s censorship of peaceful free expression, but most of the news media have a blind spot for censorship from Korea’s left, which I’ve also described here. Because truth is no defense to a defamation suit in Korea, both sides have repurposed the courts as their censors. South Korean society is poorer for this. Provable accusations with genuine public interest are held back. Rather than make charges they can defend, accusers plant them as anonymously sourced rumors in the newspapers or online. Instead of reading and judging the evidence, citizens drift toward whatever alternative truth suits their predispositions.

To review the truth of Ha Tae-Kyung’s charge about Minbyun, let’s begin one year ago, when 12 North Korean women and one man employed at a North Korean restaurant in Ningpo, China defected to the South, apparently with the help of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. The incident was a major embarrassment to Pyongyang, which feared that it would set a precedent for more group defections (which it did). Twelve of the 13 were promptly appointed a lawyer, Park Young-sik, who was recommended by the respected Korean Bar Association (it isn’t clear why the 13th case wasn’t litigated). They appeared before a South Korean court to claim asylum, in keeping with their rights under the Refugee Convention. Also in keeping with their internationally recognized rights, those proceedings were absolutely confidential. The reason for that confidentiality is obvious — by asking for asylum, a refugee implicitly criticizes the state she fled and exposes those she left behind to retribution.

[12 of the Ningpo 13, and 5 colleagues who stayed behind.]

To mitigate its embarrassment, Pyongyang accused South Korea’s National Intelligence Service of kidnapping the 13. Using their families as hostages, it sent a thinly veiled message to the women, and to anyone else who might be watching: “[O]ur leader Kim Jong Un is waiting for you, parents and siblings are waiting for you, please come back.” (As if that message would be persuasive to an actual kidnap victim.) Any North Korean would understand the meaning of this.

North Korea publicly executed six officials in charge of supervision of its workers overseas in May following the defection of 13 workers at a North Korean-run restaurant in China a month earlier, a local Pyongyang watcher said Friday.

“North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ordered six officials, including intelligence officials, to be executed publicly on May 5 due to their lack of control over overseas (North Korean) workers,” Choi Seong-yong, chairman of the Abductees’ Family Union, claimed, citing people familiar with the matter.

Eighty public officials and 100 people who have their family members working overseas were forced to watch the execution, he said.

In early April, a group of 12 women and one man fled from a North Korea-run restaurant in China’s eastern port city of Ningbo and defected to South Korea. In the following month, three female workers at a North Korean restaurant in the midwest city of Shanxi reportedly defected to the South.

“North Korea locked the families of the defectors up and forced them to take ideological education at a training facility in Myohyang Mountain, in the northern part of the communist country,” Choi said. [Yonhap]

Of course, the theory that the NIS had kidnapped the women was implausible on its face. Surely the Chinese authorities would have said something as the NIS hustled the women past customs, or even after their arrival in South Korea, if there were any truth to it. How could the NIS ever allow the 12 to reenter South Korea’s open society — where they would be free to talk to bloggers, reporters, and even Minbyun — if any of them might reveal that the NIS had abducted them? (All 12 were released into South Korean society eight months ago. They have since entered a South Korean university. None have come forward to say they were abducted.)

Pyongyang could not advance its strategy in a South Korean court itself, so it lawyered up. Minbyun, with its long history of defending pro-North Korean radicals, was its natural choice. Pyongyang arranged, either through an unnamed U.S. citizen in China or a Chinese journalism professor (the details still aren’t clear) to grant Minbyun power of attorney to intervene in the proceedings as representatives of the families of the women back in Pyongyang. Minbyun then filed a habeas corpus petition “to check whether the defectors moved to South Korea on a voluntary basis.”

At one point, the left-wing Hankyoreh Sinmun even reported — falsely — that the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights office in Seoul would send staff to Pyongyang to interview the family members of the 13 refugees to investigate the abduction claims, but the OHCHR later denied this.

Had Minbyun’s habeas petition been granted, everything the women said to Minbyun would surely have been relayed back to Minbyun’s clients in Pyongyang, and to the North Korean government itself (as the women surely knew). But the habeas petition was transparently cynical. After all, if Minbyun’s true purpose had been to ensure that the women had not been abducted, why not ask the court or a representative of U.N. High Commission for Refugees to question them in a closed proceeding, and to afford them the option of voluntary repatriation, before granting their asylum petitions?

Pyongyang’s obvious purposes were to sow enough public doubt to mitigate the damage to its propaganda narrative, to intimidate the women into re-defection, and to deter any other would-be defectors who might follow. To grant Minbyun’s habeas petition would have been tantamount to a South Korean withdrawal from the U.N. Refugee Convention, because no North Korean would ever seek asylum there again. As an official of the South Korean Unification Ministry observed,

“If this is how it works, whenever North Korean defectors come to South Korea, and if someone who claims that he or she has been commissioned by the defectors’ families in the North file a lawsuit, the court should determine whether those defectors voluntary defected or not. It is like conducting collective interrogation of the defectors in public before North Korea,” a South Korean government source said. “If so, we doubt whether any North Koreans will dare to defect to the South.” [Joongang Ilbo]

Thus, by establishing a right to interrogate these 12 young women and forcing them to reaffirm their asylum claims in public, Minbyun would effectively present them with a terrible choice: renounce their claims and be sent back to whatever fate awaits them in North Korea, or affirm their claims and further endanger their loved ones. That is why family members in the country of origin do not have a right to intervene in asylum proceedings. That is why any attempt to breach the confidentiality of asylum proceedings against the petitioner’s will is itself an abuse of the petitioners’ human rights, the legal process, and legal ethics.

The women opposed Minbyun’s petition and asked the court to deny it and let them stay in South Korea. They denied any interest in meeting with Minbyun and, citing a fear of “possible reprisals against their relatives in North Korea,” asked it to butt out. Eventually, they also filed a complaint with local prosecutors. As their lawyer, Park Young-sik, asked, “What’s going to happen [to] a defector’s family if the defector’s motivation and process of defection is revealed?” Park cited his clients’ fear that “their families’ lives [would] be threatened if they openly testify that they fled the North of their own free will,” and their fear of media exposure in a country where North Korean agents have repeatedly attempted to assassinate refugees in recent years.

Those fears have a firm basis. In some cases, Pyongyang’s agents in the South have been arrested for collecting information about refugees. In other cases, they have contacted refugees and used threats against their families to coerce them into returning to North Korea and giving press conferences claiming that they were abducted. I have written in detail about the North sending assassins to murder politically active refugees in the South. “In this situation,” Park argued, “forcing them to appear and testify in open court might seriously infringe [on] their human rights” — rights that are well recognized under international law.

When the judge denied Minbyun’s habeas petition, Minbyun demanded that the judge be replaced. The court refused, Minbyun appealed that decision, and an appellate court also refused to remove the judge.

[From the Ministry of Unification, via NK News]

Certainly in this case, Minbyun was “defending North Korea” with legally frivolous arguments, knowing that Pyongyang was using these terrified families as a cat’s paw. The motive for this is clear — the defection of the Ningpo 13 wasn’t just a tremendous embarrassment to Pyongyang, it’s a threat to the very stability of the regime. A group defection of a dozen vetted daughters of the Pyongyang elite is so unprecedented — so unthinkable — that it threatens to become a preference cascade by other members of the elite. It was followed by a smaller group defection from another restaurant, an astonishing mass protest by 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait, the defection of two other workers in Qatar, rumors of yet another group defection from China, a group defection of construction workers in Russia, and the defection of multiple North Korean diplomats including Thae Yong-ho. This, despite Pyongyang’s redoubling of the indoctrination of its overseas slaves and extra precautions to keep them under control.

On the other hand, at least one unconfirmed report claims that Minbyun’s habeas petition caused a senior North Korean defector to choose to flee to a third country instead of South Korea.

In its desperation to maintain the grip of terror over its people, Pyongyang’s last resort has long been to use their loved ones as hostages. What Pyongyang needs now, as if its survival depends on it, is stooges with briefcases who would discard all notions of legal ethics, human rights, or international law to terrorize other North Korean refugees away from South Korea. It looks to have found them. 

Perhaps the journalists who still refer to Minbyun as “liberal” and “human rights lawyers” have their own subjective definitions of those terms. From where I sit, you cease to be liberal when you use the law to bully and terrorize the defenseless and suppress free debate. You cease to stand for human rights when you make yourself an instrument of their violation. And in a just world, you would cease to be a lawyer when you use the courts to subvert the law and persecute the innocent. 

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Arms Trafficking, Money Laundering, Sanctions

The MKP Group’s website is a feast of mendacity, quackery, possible illegality, and web design hilarity

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The aftermath of Kim Jong-nam’s assassination, and the attention it has drawn to North Korea’s connections to Malaysia, continues to yield new revelations about Pyongyang’s illicit finances overseas. Reuters, having already exposed Glocom as a front for the Reconnaissance General Bureau, now adds to what the Wall Street Journal reported two weeks ago about the MKP Group.

To summarize Reuters’s extensive and detailed report on MKP: it was founded by a North Korean named Han Hun-il and a Malaysian named Yong Kok-yeap in 1996. According to its own promotional materials, MKP “operates in 20 countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, piling up contracts worth at least $350 million,” mostly for construction (such as building houses in Africa that Africans can’t afford). Reuters has since located a defector named Lee Chol-ho, a former employee of Han. Lee says Han is a former official in North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau and has funneled cash to Pyongyang for years — through Jang Song-thaek until his execution in 2013, and more recently, to the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party. Although Reuters and Lee couldn’t say how Pyongyang used those earnings, we can safely assume it wasn’t to buy grain or baby formula.

MKP’s website — which appears to have been designed by Borat — lists a much earlier founding date of 1964, and a diverse set of products and services it provides, many of them either sanctioned by the U.N. (luxury yachts) or having dual-use applications (machine tools). I’ve posted numerous screenshots from MKP’s site here, for reasons that will become evident later.

Given MKP’s operations in Africa and its involvement in exporting art from North Korea (see “entertainment”), it probably also has links to the Mansudae Art Studio, whose subsidiary, Mansudae Overseas Project Group, exports those grandiose statues North Korea builds in Africa and the Middle East, most infamously this one in Senegal, where half the population reportedly lives below the poverty line. Mansudae Overseas Project Group also works in collaboration with U.N.- and U.S.-designated arms dealer KOMID in Namibia, and was itself designated by the U.S. Treasury Department last December for “exportation of workers from North Korea, including exportation to generate revenue for the Government of North Korea or the Workers’ Party of Korea,” under Executive Order 13722. The U.N. Security Council banned the export of statues by North Korea last November 30th, in Resolution 2321.

MKP is also involved in North Korea’s chain of clinics in Africa, using North Korean doctors, despite North Korea’s own chronic shortage of doctors to care for its people. A report by Radio Free Asia a year ago exposed that some of those clinics in Tanzania provided quack medicines to their patients. The Tanzanian government subsequently closed two of those clinics.

[* Actual clinics may not contain white people.]

It also lists several trading companies as subsidiaries (lower left sidebar).

Fortunately, when Reuters called, MKP’s reaction wasn’t at all suspicious.

Han, also known as Dr. Edward Hahn, hung up the phone and blocked a Reuters reporter on his messaging app when contacted for comment.

MKP did not respond to requests for comment on Lee’s assertions. The company issued a statement dated March 23 saying MKP had “no reason to hide the fact” that Han is North Korean. It denied owning ICB or any other North Korean bank and said nobody from the United Nations has contacted the company. [Reuters, James Pearson, Tom Allard and Rozanna Latiff]

For reference, here’s what the U.N. Panel said in its 2014 report about the relationship between MKP and ICB:

According to Reuters, “ICB is among several banks the U.N. is currently investigating for possible breaches of various U.N. Security Council resolutions.” U.N. resolutions ban joint ventures with North Korean banks. If the U.N. designates MKP or ICB, member states would be obliged to shut them down, freeze their assets, and expel all of their representatives. The Treasury Department could (and should) designate those joint ventures, and penalize any foreign banks that provide the joint ventures or North Korean banks with the correspondent services and thus help them access the financial system.

At this point, things get really ridiculous:

In its March 23 statement, MKP said its website had been “hacked” to insert ICB under its list of service companies and place a “doctored photograph” of “MKP personnel”, including Yong, visiting ICB’s office in Pyongyang.

A search of archive.org, a database of old websites, shows ICB has been listed on MKP’s website since 2009, including under its earlier name, Sungri Hi-Fund International Bank. As of April 10, ICB was still listed on the website.

Sharp-eyed readers will recall that in this post, dated February 27th, I posted this screenshot from the MKP Group’s website:

[Diamonds are forever. So are screenshots.]

As of this morning, you can still click the “services” tab of the MKP Group’s website and see this image. So evidently, the North Koreans would have us believe that MKP’s website was hacked a month before Reuters called, and yet its website — the website of a multi-million-dollar international conglomerate — remained functional and unrepaired for the entire time until March 23rd, and even today. MKP’s website also lists another bank as a part of its group:

Click here for a summary of what we know about North Korea’s use of Malaysia as a base of operations for smuggling and money laundering, here for a summary of U.N. financial sanctions against North Korea, and here for a list of North Korean banks that are or aren’t sanctioned by the U.N. and the U.S. Treasury Department.

This report reinforces what I’ve said before: the combination of good investigative reporting and good investigative work by the U.N. Panel can expose and destroy the financial networks that fund Pyongyang. These are not fly-by-night operations, but long-established and well-capitalized groups that have put down deep roots in states where corrupt officials and ex-officials allow the North Koreans to ingratiate themselves. Uproot those networks, expel their representatives, and freeze their assets, and Pyongyang will have lost hundreds of millions of dollars and decades of work. It’s anyone’s guess why our own government has abdicated the work of investigation and coercive diplomacy to reporters and the U.N. Panel. Imagine what could be accomplished if our government devoted the political will and the resources to using the tools that Congress has given it.

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Axis of Evil, Proliferation, WMD

If Assad is the murderer of Idlib, Kim Jong-un was an accessory

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With impeccable timing, His Porcine Majesty has sent friendly greetings to one of his best customers:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has sent a congratulatory message to Syria over the founding anniversary of the country’s ruling party, Pyongyang’s media said Friday, amid global condemnation against Damascus’s suspected chemical weapon attack on civilians.

The North’s leader sent the message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the controlling Ba’ath party, according to Rodong Sinmun, North Korea’s main newspaper.

The move is seen to be aimed at showing friendly ties between Pyongyang and Damascus as about 90 people were killed by the Syrian government’s suspected uses of chemical weapons Tuesday against a rebel-held area in the northern part of the country.

“The two countries’ friendly relations will be strengthened and developed, given their fight against imperialism,” Kim was quoted as saying by the newspaper. North Korea has long been suspected of cooperating with Syria over nuclear programs. [Yonhap]

A few years ago, I noted the extensive and well-documented evidence of North Korea’s support for Syria’s chemical weapons program. Joseph Bermudez has also summarized some of that evidence, including photographs published by the U.N. Panel of Experts of some of the thousands of chemical suits, masks, and agent indicator ampules intercepted by Greece, South Korea, and Turkey while in transit from North Korea to Syria (mostly through China).

U.S. intelligence officials also believe North Korea has links to the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, which the New York Times calls Syria’s “main research center for work on biological and chemical weapons.”

Although North Korea’s support for Syria’s chemical weapons programs predates the Syrian Civil war, Bruce Bechtol has described how it increased during the war. Other reports have alleged that North Koreans have been present in Syria during the civil war, where they have advised Assad’s army in a number of ways, including by helping it operate vacuum dryers used to dry liquid chemical agents and the SCUD missiles that are sometimes used to deliver those agents.

In Idlib, the murder weapon was probably sarin, another nerve agent North Korea is believed to possess in quantity, but which Syria most likely produced domestically with North Korean technical assistance. If Assad was the murderer of Idlib, then, Kim Jong-un was likely an accessory.

In another sense, we should feel fortunate that Assad’s use of WMD against his own people is merely chemical. As Yonhap’s story also notes, North Korea built (and had nearly completed) a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert near Deir-al-Zour, in an area now under the control of ISIS, before the Israeli Air Force destroyed it. This CIA video summarizes North Korea’s involvement in the construction of that reactor here:

For now, it is good that Assad knows that he cannot use WMD with impunity, and that whatever affection existed between Trump and Putin before is over for now. The President may also think he can intimidate Xi Jinping by taking in bomb damage reports while coolly telling his dinner guest to try the veal. Still, consider the possibility that Xi will be salivating for an entirely different feast if he thinks we’re about to tie ourselves down half a world away.

Our response to the use of nerve gas against children and families — or in places crowded with them — must be more than nothing. But that response must also be less than stage-diving into the quicksand of the Middle East, and a very real risk of conflict with Russia, without a plausible plan to end the slaughter. It is wrong to say that Syria is not our problem; it is. It nearly destroyed Iraq, it’s destroying Europe, and it may yet destroy Jordan and destabilize Turkey. It could flood the world with a generation of terrorists and incubate another generation that will follow them.

It is also wrong to believe that there is any quick solution to this crisis, given the state to which things have descended today. That’s why I was skeptical of President Obama’s abortive, too-little, too-late intervention in 2013. Those same questions remain relevant today.

The only permanent solution to the horrors in Syria will be to arm, train, and equip enough moderate and secular Syrians to retake most their country, stabilize the front lines, raise the political and financial costs for Russia and Iran, and negotiate either a peace or a sustainable division of the country. Do any moderate or secular Syrian forces still survive between the hammers of ISIS and Al Qaeda, and the anvils of Assad, Hezbollah, and Putin? The history of how Obama allowed these people to be slaughtered — even as he allowed a morbidly obese high school dropout who tortures small animals and masturbates to bondage porn get a nuclear arsenal — ought to fill the main lobby of his presidential library.

Which brings me to my final question. Who still remembers yesterday, when North Korea was our greatest national security threat? Even in light of what happened in Idlib, isn’t that still the case? Wasn’t North Korea supposed to be the topic of tonight’s dinner conversation? Can we pressure, contain, and deter Kim Jong-un if our forces and our national will are invested half a world away? Do our plans for Syria and North Korea involve being prepared to fight two wars on different sides of the world if necessary? Must North Korea always be the crisis that builds while America is distracted on other continents? Could we have at least taken the modest step of putting North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism before we bombed Syria? There may be good answers to all of those questions. Now is the time to ask them.

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Terrorism (NK), U.S. Politics, Useful Idiocy

Thomas Massie: useful idiot for Assad & Kim Jong-un, embarrassment to us all

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Last year, Massie, along with fellow Republican isolationist Justin Amash of Michigan, was just one of two members of the entire U.S. Congress to vote against sanctioning Kim Jong-un (as noted yesterday, even Bernie Sanders sent a statement of support from the campaign trail in New Hampshire).

This week, Massie was one of three votes against a resolution condemning North Korea’s ballistic missile launch (the others being Amash and Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones). He was the only vote against a bill that would push the State Department to re-add North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism, following the nerve agent attack at the Kuala Lumpur Airport that killed Kim Jong-nam, and for more acts of terrorism before this than I need repeat here. Now, following the Syrian government’s horrific nerve gas attack on its own people, and for the third time this week, Massie has again made himself an embarrassment to his party, to the Congress, to his country, and to history:

Massie’s words had the remarkable effect of uniting Twitchy and Salon in outrage against him. Had he stopped at asking questions about the purpose and strategy behind direct U.S. intervention, I’d have no quarrel with him (I still have questions of my own). It is Massie’s denialism and apologetics for crimes against humanity, and for those who perpetrate them, that disqualify him. Republicans should disown and primary him. Democrats should tell me where to mail my check to their nominee to unseat him.

[link]

But at least give Massie credit for consistency. Amash and Freedom Fries voted against the resolution condemning North Korea’s missile launch, but for the bill calling for North Korea to be re-added to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. If you can see any consistency between those two votes — much less with Amash’s 2016 vote against sanctions — my comments are open.

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Class Warfare, Famine & Food Aid, Inside NK, Propaganda, Resistance, Subversion

When North Korean agitprop backfires: A film about a peasant uprising is sowing dangerous ideas

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What passes for a feel-good story in one of the world’s bleakest corners? Evidence that the seeds of class warfare are sprouting within a state that has fooled so many gullible leftists into believing that it’s a paradise of socialism. The Daily NK reports that an old agitprop film is inspiring exactly the kind of revolutionary consciousness that Kim Jong-un sees in his cognac-sodden nightmares. The film, “Im Kkoek Jung,” reminds North Koreans that their society has become the very thing the state’s propaganda once told them to rise against, if only they could arm themselves and organize.

North Korean residents are reflecting on inequality in their society for which the regime [is] responsible, thanks to the renewed popularity of a historical movie called Im Kkeok Jung. The movie depicts a 1559 peasant rebellion by a band of thieves who set up camp in an egalitarian mountain village called Chongsokgol.

Although ordinary residents struggle through the annual food shortages associated with the ‘agricultural hardship period,’ North Korea’s political cadres live in luxury apartments packed with South Korean televisions and other expensive items. The situation is in stark contrast to the fictional town of Chongsokgol, where people are shown living in equality regardless of their social status or family history. The comparison between the ideal society presented in Im Kkeok Jung and the very different reality that ordinary North Koreans face is stirring resentment towards North Korea’s ruling elite. [Daily NK]

How could it be otherwise in Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, where 70 percent of the people go hungry and a few | live in | Bacchanalian | luxury, and where class divisions are mostly fixed and hereditary?

“There are many families in the surrounding area that lack food security,” said an inside source from Ryanggang Province, located in the country’s northwest region along the border with China, during a telephone call with Daily NK on March 31. “I think the number is over 60%. The problem is particularly severe in Kimjongsuk County and Samsu County. It’s becoming common for residents to quip to one another, ‘I want to find Chongsokgol and live there.’”

“People are weary and exhausted from the struggle of everyday life,” she added. “They’re saying that it would be better to live together with other poor people in an equal society like the one depicted in Im Kkeok Jung.”

Im Kkeok Jung is a five-part movie created by the Korean Film Studio and directed by Jang Yong Bok. In the film, the character Im Kkeok Jung defies aristocratic bureaucrats and sets out to abolish the oppressive social ranking system. To do so, he sets up camp at Chongsokgol. The mountainside village’s name has become synonymous with egalitarianism and is presented as a utopia. [Daily NK]

You can watch the entire film on YouTube — complete with English subtitles — although production-wise, it’s not exactly “Descendants of the Sun.” Just imagine if South Korea’s film industry did a remake of this. No, forget I said that. South Korea’s right is too binary and paranoid to see the potential of it, and most of South Korea’s film industry would rather lionize Kim Jong-un than dethrone him.

“When people are alone with their family members, it has become a regular occurrence to ridicule Kim Jong Un. People call him immature, citing his lack of personal life experience as the reason for his inability to understand the needs of the common person. Residents ask, ‘How can any political leader succeed when they enter politics at such a young age?’” a source in North Hamgyong Province said.

“These days, residents complain directly to party cadres, saying, ‘Are you trying to starve us all to death?’ All the cadres can do is grin sheepishly in response.”

“Residents are doing everything within their power to simply survive and try to better their lives, but nothing has meaningfully improved,” said an additional Ryanggang-based source. “Looking at the lifestyles of the cadres today, they remark that, ‘Life today is exactly the same as it was during the time of Im Kkeok Jung.’ Quite a few people regularly talk about going to extreme lengths to live in a place like Chongsokgol.” [Daily NK]

Amid this widespread hunger, it isn’t lost among North Korea’s poor that the state has higher priorities than feeding them.

“There are an increasing number of people who are suffering from malnutrition in agricultural regions such as Pochon County, Kapsan County, and Samsoo County. People in these rural areas resent the fact that there aren’t enough potatoes to feed the people, yet the government is obsessed with missiles. What difference in our lives will launching a missile make?” a source in Ryanggang Province told Daily NK on March 21.

“Even ordinary people understand that the price of a missile is enough to feed the whole population for several months. So every time the regime conducts a nuclear test or missile launch, many become infuriated at the waste of money, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of tons of food.”

“The residents were especially outraged to see Kim Jong Un beaming while watching the test (on March 18). He seems to be satisfied even though he spent money that could have been used to save starving people,” noted a separate source in Ryanggang Province. [Daily NK]

Even Kim Jong-un himself may have implicitly acknowledged this discontent. But if inequality is the greatest threat to the stability of the regime, corruption may be a close second. Historically, it has always been individual injustices that have inflamed the underprivileged. Here is one such story that is “brewing discontent among locals regarding the pervasive injustice in North Korean society,” but could have inflamed an entire province — or the entire nation — if North Koreans could have texted it to each other:

“At the end of October last year, Song Ju, a third-year student at Kim Jong Suk Senior High School, stabbed his classmate to death following a quarrel over a female. He was sentenced to one year’s detention at a re-education camp,” a source in Ryanggang Province told Daily NK on March 27.

“However, he was released earlier this month, after just four months in the camp. People are saying that someone must have pulled strings behind the scenes.”

The student is said to belong to a well-known and powerful family in Kim Jong Suk County, Ryanggang Province. His father is a director of the county forest management center, while his mother is head of a district office with influence over broad issues in the region. Using their positions, both parents have reportedly bribed law enforcement agencies, including the provincial Ministry of State Security unit, and applied pressure to shorten their son’s prison term. [Daily NK]

Every now and then, discontent over these injustices breaks out into acts of resistance against the state.

A North Korean man in his 40s angered by the human rights violations he was subjected to some weeks ago during an investigation has attacked the officer responsible and evaded capture.

“The incident took place at a Ministry of People’s Security (MPS) unit in Pyongsong, South Pyongan Province on March 16. Soon after, all MPS units in the region were put on a state of emergency,” a source in South Pyongan told Daily NK on March 22.

The MPS official was badly injured and is currently in a hospital in Pyongsong. The authorities are reportedly considering relieving him of duty not only due to the attack but also because he let the suspect escape.

The Ministry of People’s Security has distributed photos of the fugitive to security departments in the border areas under the assumption that he may attempt to defect. Thorough restrictions have also been placed on all residents who are moving around at nighttime, the source added. [Daily NK]

As is usually the case, the grievance that led to the act of resistance was economic — the struggle by the lower classes to survive in a society that refuses to provide for them.

Offering details of the case, he explained that the suspect was accused of economic crimes and had been under investigation for a month by the local MPS unit. During the preliminary trial, the prosecutor reportedly hurled invective like, “You should be grateful you can still eat,” and, “Dishonest people like you deserve to die.”

“Pyongsong residents are siding squarely with the victim and assuming that the abuse must have been severe for an innocent man to attack an officer. Everyone is hoping he escapes,” he said. [Daily NK]

The report lends further support to my speculation that the purge of Minister of State Security Kim Won-hong, and of the internal security agency he once led, is a reaction to the regime’s fears that the MSS’s corruption and brutality are viewed in Pyongyang as a threat to regime stability. It knows the MSS are hated, so it’s making scapegoats of them. But if the state can’t pay the MSS cadres a decent wage or earn their loyalty by other means, a purge risks alienating the very people it relies on to keep everyone else in terror.

For now, however, those acts of resistance remain localized and easily contained. It will remain that way as long as North Koreans believe that challenging the state would be suicidal. That, in turn, will not change until North Koreans can talk, conspire, and organize with one another in confidence, but when they can, revolutionary | things | happen.

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China, Propaganda

Dear Korea: Let’s talk about China’s plans for you in its new co-prosperity sphere

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Ever since China embarked on its retaliatory campaign against South Korea, of state-orchestrated protests, business closures, and boycotts, I’ve often tweeted that China is opposed to unilateral sanctions, except when it isn’t. Recently, the Asan Institute released the results of a survey showing that this campaign has done the unthinkable — it has made China even more unpopular than Japan in the eyes of South Koreans.

For anyone who has lived in South Korea, it’s hard to overstate the significance of this. And if China’s goal was to depress South Korean support for THAAD, its strategy has been a failure.

With the caveat that coincidence isn’t the same as causation, the South China Morning Post reasonably concludes that China’s sanctions against South Korea have backfired and increased public support for THAAD:

“Even more surprising is that Koreans are now more favourable toward Japan (3.33) than China (3.21),” it said, noting Japan had consistently been Koreans’ least favoured country after the North.

The survey also showed the ratings of US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe all declining, but Xi’s falling the most, plunging from 4.25 in January to 3.01 in March.

“The only good news for President Xi was that his rating remained higher than Prime Minister Abe’s,” Asan said.

The survey, of 1000 adults carried out from March 6-8, also showed increasing support for THAAD, with 50.6 per cent in favour, up from 46.3 per cent in November, with opposition falling from 45.7 per cent to 37.9 per cent. [SCMP]

Despite a small and temporary drop in pro-American sentiment after Donald Trump’s election, reports of a Trump Shock (such as this one, from Putinprop outfit Sputnik) turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. All of this is bad news for the Chinese foreign policy and security establishments, which (as I argued here) see themselves as in a zero-sum competition with the U.S. for influence in Asia. The fact that they believe this makes it mostly true, no matter how much pro-China scholars may wish it were not. It’s increasingly undeniable that the little gray men pulling the levers in the Forbidden City are profoundly anti-American, and are waging a propaganda war against us. I’m old enough to remember the Tienanmen Massacre, when all the smart people said that the correct response was to increase trade with China, because capitalism would make China friendly and free (sound familiar?). It’s not working out that way.

Behind this propaganda are both offensive and defensive aspects. One clearly senses that Beijing is on the defensive and sees itself as besieged by our ideas — mostly, as expressed in private speech by journalists and NGOs. (China, like North Korea, makes no distinction between speech by the state, the press, movie studios, and private individuals; it sees censorship as a “responsible” state’s right and duty.) But there is also a more offensive agenda behind what China is sowing here.

It’s worth recalling that Xi Jinping’s ham-handed reaction is to the stationing of a purely defensive missile system in South Korea, to protect South Korean cities from a nuclear threat that China | has | done | so | much | to | create in the first place. If you actually click those links and read those posts, what’s now undeniable is that China’s support for North Korea isn’t just economic support that incidentally aids its nuclear and missile programs. Rather, China is willfully hosting Pyongyang’s proliferation networks, laundering money for entities that are designated by both the U.S. and the U.N. for proliferation, and selling Pyongyang the materiel it uses in its missile programs, including the trucks its missiles ride on.

In other words, China is using North Korea to menace and intimidate South Korea, and when South Korea tries to protect itself, China is using its economic power to bully South Korea into submission and unilateral disarmament. As South Korea’s ally, we must not stand for this. I expect that when President Trump meets with “President” Xi (as China calls its unelected tyrants), he will tell Xi to knock it off. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson previously told the Chinese that its bullying of South Korea was “uncalled-for.” But it was Defense Secretary James Mattis who really nailed it when he said this:

“In the South China Sea, we see China shredding trust as they adopt a tribute-nation kind of approach where all other nations have to pay tribute or acquiescence to the more powerful nation, the larger nation,” Mattis said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.

Mattis also accused China of “seeking veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of nations on their periphery.” He did not elaborate, but one such case is Beijing’s retaliatory measures against South Korea for hosting the U.S. THAAD missile defense system. [Yonhap]

Also spot-on was Congressman Ted Yoho, who accused China of “sanctioning the wrong Korea.” Then, yesterday, 26 senators from both parties released this letter:


All of this is exactly right, for now. The U.S. is sending a clear and united message against China’s ham-handed imperial overreach, and that message is being heard in Seoul. It’s a message we can sharpen further: I’m convinced that China means nothing less than to disarm South Korea, suppress its sovereignty, decide what its newspapers can print, and control its resources. Its ambitions for Korea aren’t materially different than Japan’s ambitions for Korea in 1905. For now, Seoul is defiant. But in the long term, China means to impose its own Eulsa Treaty on Korea, and it probably thinks it has found just the man to sign it.

I’ve argued that Xi Jinping’s economic warfare against a close U.S. ally calls for economic deterrence against China in concert with China’s two other largest trading partners, Japan and South Korea. I say this despite acknowledging that finishing the trade war that China started will have costs for everyone. My hope is that a strong and focused response that targets banks, businesses, and the port in, say, Dandong, would cause enough political trouble for Xi to end the war quickly and prevent a recurrence. If Trump is feeling protectionist anyway, why not use a protectionist counter-attack to damage North Korea’s finances and Xi Jinping’s domestic political support, and increase the confidence of our allies that we’ll stand behind them?

But of course, our response doesn’t have to be symmetrical. Other tools at our disposal will do us less harm. One of those is to strike harder in the political war that China is already waging against us. It’s time to speak clearly to the peoples of Asia about Xi Jinping’s plans for a grand new Co-Prosperity Sphere in which they will be China’s tributaries. As in the past, the tributaries’ share of that prosperity will be highly unequal. China’s conduct is both a threat and an opportunity to drive home what is now manifest. Xi Jinping means to bully his way into economic, naval, and (ultimately) political hegemony over all of East Asia. He isn’t building those islands in the South China Sea just to protect Chinese trade routes. He isn’t even building them because he wants the fish and the oil in those waters. As the THAAD episode clearly illustrates, he wants to be in a position to dominate his neighbors. If we mean to prevent that outcome, we will all have to unite against it.

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Sanctions, U.S. Law, U.S. Politics

Sens. Gardner & Markey call on Trump administration to enforce North Korea sanctions law

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Here’s the kind of story you hear too seldom in Washington today: A conservative Republican (Cory Gardner of Colorado) has joined forces with a liberal Democrat (Ed Markey of Massachusetts) to write a letter to the new secretaries of State and Treasury, asking them to fully enforce the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act (NKSPEA), which passed Congress with the overwhelming support of both parties last year. (Even Bernie Sanders would have voted for it had he not been campaigning in New Hampshire at the time.)

Gardner emerged as the Senate’s leader on North Korea policy just under two years ago, and went on to lead the Senate’s efforts to pass the NKSPEA. Markey, arguably the Foreign Relations Committee’s most liberal member, has also been keenly interested in North Korea for some time, particularly on human rights and the risk that loose talk about preemptive strikes might lead to miscalculation and war. His decision to become more vocal on sanctions enforcement is welcome, particularly for those of us who believe that human rights must be at the core of our policy.

The senators’ letter drives directly at the very issue I raised in last Friday’s post — it’s no use for Congress to pass new laws unless the President puts enough cops, lawyers, and intelligence analysts on the job to enforce them. The letter asks the new secretaries for detailed reports on how many people they’ve assigned to North Korea sanctions investigations and enforcement, how many investigations they’re currently conducting, how much money they’ve asked Congress for to staff up, and whether they agree that the government should form an interagency task force to enforce the NKSPEA.

I know a few people who’d love to answer those questions. I’ll take a shot at the last one myself: yes, if Trump wants to avoid the paralysis-by-analysis that consumed all eight years of the Obama administration. For years, cabinet departments tripped over one another on North Korea policy for the same reason different parts of the Chinese government are also imperfectly aligned — they deal with different people and prioritize different interests. The difference is that China has exploited our differences skillfully, while we’ve mostly failed to exploit China’s conflicts of interest.

It’s old news that State has taken a deferential approach to China. Treasury is (somewhat understandably) keen to guard its authorities, avoid litigation, and maintain good relations with the banking industry. The enforcement agencies are frustrated that too often, after a great deal of hard work, they aren’t allowed to clean and fry the big fish they think they’ve hooked.

I also suspect that other agencies aren’t taking full advantage of the data the intelligence agencies could add to a shared map of North Korea’s finances. It’s too easy for DNI, CIA, and NSA to become victims of the tyranny of small distances. They’re sited out in northern Virginia or Maryland, which makes it logistically burdensome for them to share classified information with State, Treasury, Justice, and FBI, despite the fact that each may hold the missing pieces that the other might need to perfect cases they’re working on. A task force, as contemplated in NKSPEA 102, isn’t just needed to coordinate priorities at the cabinet and executive levels; smaller inter-agency strike teams are also needed to coordinate possibilities at the working, civil servant level.

When we drafted the NKSPEA, we knew that a fire-and-forget approach wouldn’t work. We knew that Congress’s aggressive oversight would be essential to overcoming bureaucratic resistance and prioritizing enforcement. That’s why it’s gratifying to see Chairman Gardner and his Ranking Member, Sen. Markey, make good use of the law’s oversight provisions.

Read their letter in full below the fold (click “continue reading” –>).

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Money Laundering, Sanctions, U.S. Law

What the Trump administration’s first North Korea sanctions designations tell us

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Last Friday’s designations of 11 individuals and one company by the Treasury Department are the first North Korea designations of the new Trump administration. So what do they tell us about the direction of the administration’s North Korea policy?

On the positive side, the designation of a North Korean coal company affiliated with the military should, in theory, send a strong message to its Chinese clients, although they don’t seem to have taken the last hint. Also on the positive side, the designated individuals are mostly front-men for North Korean banks, trading companies, arms dealers, and shippers in Russia, China, and Vietnam. It’s good that North Korean operatives in China — and Russia — aren’t off-limits. As I explained here, those governments are already obligated to expel most of these people by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

These are the kinds of targets we should be focused on to uproot His Porcine Majesty’s proliferation and money laundering networks, particularly in China. The designations will send a strong message to Russia and China to kick them out. They’ll also fill the Treasury Department’s SDN database — and consequently, the anti-money laundering compliance software the banking industry uses — with the names and addresses of North Korean agents and front companies. That will help make it harder for those agents’ bankers to defend their due diligence and compliance later, if and when Treasury files civil penalty cases against them.

On the not-so-positive side, this still isn’t what needs to be done — holding the Chinese banking industry accountable for breaking our laws and laundering North Korea’s money through our financial system. For a critical reaction to the new designations, see Anthony Ruggiero’s tweetstorm. As Anthony notes, all 12 entities designated last Friday are North Korean, so these are not the secondary sanctions we need to make North Korea sanctions effective.

Maybe it was too much to expect that some of North Korea’s Chinese front-men would be designated right before Xi Jinping arrives at Mar-a-Lago. I’ll be very interested in seeing what happens after Xi departs. If Trump really is the corrupt empty suit his harshest critics say he is, Xi Jinping will come to Mar-a-Lago, offer to turn a few Lotte stores into Trump hotels, and do what China always does when under sufficient pressure about North Korea — lie like a cheap rug until our national case of Attention Deficit Disorder sets in again.

Overall, however, I may be slightly less pessimistic than Anthony. For one thing, there is this report on the outcome of the administration’s policy review, which sounds like what I’d expected. For another, I interpret Trump’s statement that he’ll act against North Korea with or without China’s help as a threat to act against Kim Jong-un’s Chinese bankers and freeze his accounts. For another, although I might have expected Treasury to sanction Chinese enablers and trading companies now, I would not expect it to start nuking banks just yet. Instead, Trump’s message to Xi should be that the Bank of China is under investigation by the Treasury Department, soon to be followed by the Bank of Dandong and the 12 other banks that held accounts for Dandong Hongxiang and its many front companies and shell companies.

Finally, Trump can drop a veiled hint that ports that don’t inspect North Korean cargo, as U.N. Security Council resolutions require, can expect to be targeted with extra customs inspections. That could drive shippers away from those ports and damage the economies of those cities. Then, Trump would have someone leak that to the press and watch for signs like this.

As of today, however, it’s possible that none of those banks are under investigation because the investigative agencies simply don’t have enough staff to do it all. We’ll turn to that topic, and to this letter from senators Cory Gardner and Ed Markey, in tomorrow’s post. A full list of those designated last Friday below the fold (“continue reading” –>).

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Sanctions, U.S. Law

Congress is marking up North Korea bills faster than I can write about them

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Congress’s sentiment about Pyongyang today equates roughly to Cato the Elder’s sentiment about Carthage. (I mean this figuratively, for now, although I increasingly fear that sanctions are our last plausible strategy to prevent war.) It’s now moving more North Korea legislation than it has in the entire decade leading up to the passage of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act just over one year ago. I can no longer keep up with all of the bills, amendments, markups, and resolutions in what little spare time I still have.

  • H.R. 1644: The Foreign Affairs Committee has moved very quickly in marking up H.R. 1644, the KIMS Act, which toughens the NKSPEA to match or exceed new U.N. sanctions under UNSCR 2270 and UNSCR 2321. It would impose tough new secondary sanctions on foreign ports that fail to inspect North Korean cargo, foreign banks that discreetly connect North Korean banks to the financial system, governments that allow the use of North Korean slave labor, and states that reflag North Korean ships. The Committee Chair, Ed Royce, amended the bill at an action-packed Committee markup earlier this week. I haven’t had a chance to do a line-by-line comparison, although I noticed that the newer version expands a humanitarian exception for North Korean imports of gasoline and diesel fuel.
  • H.R. 479: Ted Poe and Brad Sherman’s bipartisan bill to force the Secretary of State to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism was amended to look like Ted Cruz and Cory Gardner’s bill. That means the House and Senate are coordinating their efforts and are serious about putting that bill on the President’s desk. I continue to predict that the Secretary of State will act on his own before that happens, but only because that legislation is advancing toward the President’s desk at such a deliberate pace. Frankly, I’m surprised the Secretary of State hasn’t already acted. This bill may be a necessary incentive to focus the administration’s priorities.
  • H. Res. 223: Ted Yoho, the new Asia Subcommittee Chairman, says China has been sanctioning the wrong Korea, and has introduced a new resolution calling for Xi Jinping to knock it off. (China’s escalation of this crisis, by waging economic war on South Korea, may call for a deterrent escalation of our own. The closure of a South Korean factory in China gives me the idea that our secondary sanctions against North Korea should focus their impact on regions in China that already have higher rates of unemployment. By joining forces with Japan and South Korea to concentrate the effect of sanctions on those regions, we can raise the political pressure on Xi Jinping. As with Kim Jong-un, it may take a threat to Xi’s political control to influence his behavior, or the behavior of those around him.)
  • H. Res. 92: Another bipartisan House resolution condemns North Korea’s missile tests, calls for the quick deployment of THAAD and the improvement of our missile defenses, and calls for the full enforcement of the new sanctions authorities that the U.N. and the U.S. have approved over the last year.
  • S. Res. 92: By a striking numerical coincidence, S. Res. 92, introduced by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, is also North Korea-related. It calls on the government to investigate the disappearance of David Sneddon. Members of Sneddon’s family have raised suspicions that North Korea may have been behind his disappearance in China in 2004.
  • What’s still missing is a reauthorization of the North Korean Human Rights Act, which has to happen this year or the law will expire. Expect to see that effort begin in the Senate and work its way back to the House later.

If there’s another nuke test in North Korea, you can expect to see a flood of member amendments and resolutions. There is, of course, still more that Congress can do, including:

  • tourist travel ban authority,
  • provisions that would require the public disclosure of which companies have investments in North Korea,
  • immunity and encouragement for fund managers to divest from those companies,
  • requiring the public disclosure of any North Korea-related beneficial ownership interests,
  • a flat-out ban on access to the dollar system by any bank or person that transacts with North Korea, and
  • perhaps most importantly for now, a comprehensive transaction licensing requirement for North Korea, although this loophole would be closed by putting North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Congress could also name and shame more of the banks and other entities that were dishonorably mentioned by the U.N. Panel of Experts. It could also make its voice heard on Kaesong, which Moon Jae-in has promised to reopen, despite the fact that this would violate multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. If South Korea violates U.N. sanctions, China, Malaysia, and Africa will draw the conclusion that the world isn’t serious, and a global enforcement coalition will never coalesce.

As with the U.N. resolutions, although there is still more Congress can do to create legal authorities for sanctions, Congress is approaching the point where it will have completed its to-do list, and the focus must shift to enforcement and implementation of the existing laws. Making sanctions work is increasingly about putting enough of the right people into the right positions to make an enforcement program effective. The slow pace of political appointments isn’t encouraging. Many of the necessary improvements to our North Korea policy await those key appointments: how we award grants, what we broadcast to the North Korean people, which refugees we admit, how we exploit the intelligence they provide, who coordinates the broader policy among squabbling agencies, and what we do about foreign governments that violate sanctions, use North Korean slave labor, or repatriate refugees to North Korea.

The vast majority of federal employees, of course, aren’t political; they’re career civil servants appointed under Subchapter I of Title 5. They’re the technocrats and experts who faithfully execute the laws and the President’s policies, regardless of who the president is. Although President Trump’s hiring freeze may be affecting their numbers to some degree, the freeze has broad exemptions for national security and public safety, which most eligible agencies have already invoked. The key enforcement agencies are badly understaffed with the career employees needed to enforce sanctions, but not because of the new hiring freeze. Many are working late nights and weekends out of dedication alone. The simple truth is that North Korea investigations, sanctions, and prosecutions just weren’t a priority for previous administrations, so most career employees were assigned to other duties. If personnel is policy, the new administration hasn’t yet changed that policy. Let’s hope it does soon. The administration says North Korea is a top priority, but so far, I’ve seen little evidence that its actions have matched its words.

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"United" Nations, Human Rights

The U.N. Human Rights Council needs reform (again)

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Again, the idea of a U.S. withdrawal from the U.N. Human Rights Council is under consideration. Americans, especially American conservatives, tend to fixate on the Council’s fixation with Israel. For reasons I’ll make clear enough below, that fixation is not just silly, it’s cynical. Still, I think leaving the HRC just yet would be a big mistake. I might have answered that question differently ten years ago, before the U.N. Commission of Inquiry proved that the HRC is capable of doing good and altering the global consensus in ways that not only have the potential to help the people of North Korea, but to do so in ways that also align with our own interests (a point I’ll return to below). Before that, I couldn’t have argued that the HRC’s influence was, on the whole, positive, or even potentially positive. Institutions like the HRC require careful tending. Without it, they become worse than useless. If you wonder what I mean, read this resolution. Once I’d read about it, I was glad we had at least threatened to leave:

In a resolution (A/HRC/34/L.14) on human rights and unilateral coercive measures, adopted by a vote of 32 in favour, 14 against and zero abstentions, the Council calls upon all States to stop adopting, maintaining or implementing unilateral coercive measures not in accordance with international law, international humanitarian law, the Charter of the United Nations and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States; and rejects all attempts to introduce unilateral coercive measures, as well as the increasing trend in this direction, including through the enactment of laws with extraterritorial application. The Council requests the High Commissioner, in discharging his functions in relation to the promotion and protection of human rights, to pay due attention and to give urgent consideration to the present resolution; and also requests the High Commissioner to organize for the thirty-sixth session of the Council the biennial panel discussion on the issue of unilateral coercive measures and human rights, and prepare a report on the panel discussion for submission and presentation to the Council at its thirty-seventh session.

In English, that means that governments should not sanction other governments for human rights abuses unless all members of the Security Council (including China and Russia) agree. The votes:

In favour (32): Bangladesh, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Burundi, China, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Nigeria, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.

Against (14): Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and United States of America.

The HRC’s fixation with Israel is only a symptom of the deeper problem. This vote is much more probative of what the deeper problem is — the Council’s (lack of) membership standards, and the hostility of many of its members to the very idea of holding abusers accountable. In many cases, sanctions are the only way despots can be held accountable in the short term. That hostility isn’t hard to explain when you realize that the HRC’s current members include Bolivia, China, Congo, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and numerous other states that should never pass a Universal Periodic Review. As they taught us to say in lawyer school at such moments, res ipsa loquitur.

Liberals who value the U.N. as an institution must acknowledge this for what it is: a cynical takeover of a human rights institution by some of the world’s most despotic states, which seek to sit in judgment over their betters. The issue that underlies all of the HRC’s troubling votes is who is allowed to sit on the HRC at all. Beneath that issue, in turn, must be the establishment of basic standards for membership. After all, the despot’s favorite strategy against his critics is moral equivalence — to obliterate the meaning of human rights standards by equating every sin with every other sin. If all sins are equal, and if all states commit sins, then China and Saudi Arabia are qualified to fill the HRC’s agenda with resolutions condemning Switzerland for conditions in its immigration detention centers, or Israel for walling out bus bombers. Then, the HRC becomes a parody of itself. Such an institution is not only not worth having, it’s worse than nothing. When we reach that point, it’s time for some careful tending and hard bargaining, including threats to withdraw.

In America, there is a long-standing argument between so-called “realists” and Wilsonians over the proper role of human rights in our foreign policy. So-called “realists” tend to advocate for the U.S. doing whatever supports its immediate, short-term interest, but when that involves supporting despotic regimes, “realism” comes with long-term costs. Anyone who has lived in South Korea knows how anti-Americans have fetishized every difficult or flat-out wrong choice the U.S. has made during its long (and overwhelmingly beneficent) involvement there. But the opposite can also be true.

I believe that it is usually in our long-term interest to take the side of persecuted peoples, because people tend to have long memories about who supported them in their darkest days. A case in point here is one of the states that voted against the cynical resolution I cited above, and one we seldom hear about: Albania. (Our successes are seldom as well-publicized as our failures.) Once one of the world’s most despotic states, Albania now enjoys friendly relations with the United States. Pro-American sentiment is strong, largely because its people remember the U.S. role in ending the slaughter in Kosovo. It can’t hurt, either, that former dictator Enver Hoxha often demonized the United States. As a partial consequence of this favorable publicity, Albania has become a valuable ally. While not a perfect democracy, it has evolved rapidly into a representative government with regular free elections. Its human development index has risen steadily in recent years, to the point where it is now considered a middle-income country. Albania is an example of a nation whose favorable memories of U.S. intervention paid long-term dividends by creating a friendly government that pursues friendly policies, and whose people are far better off than they were under a previous hostile and oppressive regime.

How we use our influence at institutions like the HRC and the Security Council can be an important instrument of our national power to advance those interests. Time has convinced me that there is no universally correct answer to the argument between self-described realists and Wilsonians. Not every society (case in point, Egypt) is presently capable of self-government. In such places, forcing an immediate transition to Jeffersonian democracy can only end in one form of despotism or another. Yet even in those places, our objective should be to use whatever influence we have to catalyze the evolution of a society, to prepare it for self-government as quickly as its economic, educational, and cultural conditions allow.

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Money Laundering, Sanctions

Investigative journalists expose North Korean front companies in Malaysia

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The coincidence of the Panel of Experts report’s release and the assassination of Kim Jong-nam continues to focus some of the finest investigative journalism I’ve seen in years on North Korea’s front companies in Malaysia. First up, the MKP Group, a Malaysian-North Korean joint venture that earned “tens of millions of dollars” through construction projects in Zambia, Angola, and elsewhere in Africa. To further reinforce Bill Newcomb’s comments about the links between slave labor, money laundering, and proliferation, MKP often uses North Korean laborers, who “typically must give most of their earnings to the regime as a condition of going abroad, according to human rights groups.”

The Panel of Experts is now investigating MKP and its affiliates in Malaysia, including at least one bank, for sanctions violations. So are the Malaysian authorities, who recently shut down another large North Korean front company, Glocom after the U.N. Panel and Reuters exposed it:

Malaysia is specifically trying to determine whether North Korea used the Southeast Asian nation as a hub for earning foreign exchange in violation of the U.N. sanctions, which were designed to cut Pyongyang off from global financial flows, according to a person familiar with the inquiries. [Wall Street Journal]

A specific focus is International Consortium Bank, which I wrote about earlier this week, as a likely violation of U.N. prohibitions against joint ventures and correspondent relationships with North Korean banks, and of new requirements that member states close foreign branches of North Korean banks and expel their representatives. The key to MKP’s welcome until now appears to have been close ties to local politicians:

MKP is now the main focus of Malaysia’s inquiries, though other companies are also in the mix, according to the person familiar with the Malaysian investigations. MKP lists former Malaysian government officials, including a former senior member of parliament, as shareholders or directors in corporate registration documents. [….]

In the late 2000s, MKP built 5,000 low-cost houses in Angola’s capital, Luanda, using North Korean workers, and later sold them to the government for $50,000 each, a total of $250 million, the person familiar with MKP’s business activities said. Angola’s government didn’t reply to requests for comment.

In Zambia, the chief executive of a private joint venture between MKP and the state-run National Housing Authority said it had built 428 houses there and was constructing another 253, sometimes with North Korean workers.

“We don’t really have a problem with” using the workers because MKP is a Malaysian-registered entity, said the chief executive, Charles Holland. He said he last met Mr. Han, the MKP director, about five years ago.

Two Zambian government officials said that Mr. Han, also known as Han Hun Il, has been an influential businessman in the copper-rich African nation for almost two decades. MKP implemented $50 million in contracts in Zambia between 2006 and 2015, according to a foreign ministry official.

But in the end, few Zambians could afford the houses, most of which are empty now.

In Malaysia, MKP sought to hire or award ownership stakes to politically connected Malaysians to build local support and win contracts, including a road-building deal, another person familiar with the company’s activities said.

The person said people awarded stakes included Malaysia’s former navy chief, Adm. Mohd. Ramly bin Abu Bakar, a shareholder of an MKP subsidiary, according to corporate records, and a senior retired Malaysian member of parliament, Karnail Singh Nijhar, who is a director of the subsidiary.

Other information I’d heard about MKP is that they may have a history of not necessarily building the things they contract to build. One possible explanation for that is that African client was really paying for some other good or service, and the construction contact was a sham. Or, maybe the financing just fell through. When the Panel has completed its investigation of ICB, it should look into CCCL Bank and other MKP companies next.

Then, there is this report, via a site I hadn’t heard of before now, that North Korea was running a sham IT start-up in Kuala Lumpur, which raises strong suspicions about links to hacking:

From the heart of the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur as well as the nearby financial center of Singapore, North Korean spies covertly ran a technology business that, until last year, publicly sold a wide array of products including iPhone apps, web development apps and even cybersecurity tools. Virtually nobody knew who really controlled the company until recently. Even today, nobody is entirely sure how it worked.

Now, CyberScoop has learned that United Nations officials are currently looking into the business as part of larger inquiries into sanctions violations by North Korea.

The connection between Adnet and the network of front companies was first uncovered by Reuters journalists who, alongside U.N. officials, began last year looking into the individuals and entities connected to North Korean companies in Malaysia. Many of the companies were said to be directed by the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), the North Korean intelligence agency responsible for clandestine operations and cyber activity. Over the course of the investigation and publication of the U.N. report, most of the companies stopped operations. [Cyberscoop]

In most cases, these operations either involve blocked North Korean entities like the RGB, which member states are obligated to seize and shut down, or whose continued operation violates other provisions of the U.N. sanctions. There will be no excuse for the Malaysian (and Zambian, and Angolan) governments to let these companies continue operating, and no excuse for our own Treasury Department to allow them continued access to our banking system.

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Human Rights

Why human rights must be a part of the Trump administration’s North Korea policy

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Yesterday, the State Department hailed the U.N. Human Rights Council’s adoption of a resolution condemning North Korea’s human rights abuses and recommending that member states help identify perpetrators for possible prosecution. The U.N.’s progress has been agonizingly slow, and I won’t argue against those who say that the HRC’s membership standards are Exhibit A in the case for reforming it. Still, for an administration that has not emphasized human rights, that’s an encouraging sign.

By now, it’s fairly clear that the Trump administration’s North Korea policy review will not recommend that we chase Kim Jong-un for talks he doesn’t want, to plead for a freeze or disarmament he won’t give, or (in the unlikely event he does agree, when under pressure) long keep. That is for the best. There may yet be a time for talks with North Korea, but that time will be after progressive diplomacy aligns the rest of the world behind denying the regime the choice to survive as a nuclear state, and after pressure begins to threaten the regime’s survival.

By now, it’s also fairly clear that to build that pressure, the Trump administration won’t spare the Chinese banks whose money laundering has been essential to Kim Jong-un’s consolidation of power, despite the discontent that this consolidation has sown among the elites. That is also good.

What I have been watching for, and what I have not yet seen much of, is evidence that the policy will include another essential ingredient: pressure on Pyongyang over its denial of human rights to its people (and on Beijing, for its support for that denial). Yesterday, I took the afternoon off to attend this event at the American Enterprise Institute, commemorating the third anniversary of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry report, where Justice Michael Kirby attended and spoke (starting at 2:43:00 of this video). My panel started at 3:50:00 and focused on the links between security issues (which often crowd out and sideline other issues) and human rights. Watch all of the presentations — they’re all excellent. In fact, when I have the time to watch it, I’m sure I’ll say the same of all of the day’s speeches and panels. At 4:29:00, I make my case that one cannot build or sustain an international or domestic consensus on North Korea policy without making human rights a central issue in that policy. Here’s why:

1. Congress will not unite around a policy that excludes human rights. Human rights is the issue that unites liberals and conservatives in Congress more than any other. Neither will stand for its exclusion, and neither will stop talking about it.

2. The world will not unite around a policy that excludes human rights. In recent years, we’ve seen Europe, Japan, and even such far-flung nations as Botswana mobilize around human rights as a central issue in their own approaches to North Korea.

3. North Korea’s denial of human rights explains why we should care about its missiles, VX, and nukes. I lose no sleep over the fact that France, Israel, or India have nukes. No other nuclear state — not even China — shows nearly the reckless disregard for human life that North Korea does. North Korea can’t be trusted with small arms, much less nukes. We know that because of how North Korea treats its people.

4. It’s a source of surprising leverage over North Korea. I won’t say it’s exactly kryptonite to them, but they’re showing signs of being much more vulnerable to it than even I had suspected.

5. It will be a source of leverage over South Korea. It will be a way to pressure Moon Jae-in if he tries to reopen Kaesong or make similar arrangements that violate and undermine U.N. sanctions by using the slave labor of fellow Koreans. It will be a way to pin the shame of history on him if he again advocates abstaining from U.N. resolutions condemning North Korea’s crimes against humanity, or permitting the sort of outrageous and unethical harassment of North Korean refugees that Minbyun used against the Ningpo 13. So let South Korea engage in cultural and sports exchanges if it thinks this will lower tensions or improve relations, as long as money does not change hands, and as long as South Korea does not legitimize the crimes that the world should instead unite to demand that it end.

6. Human rights is a test of whether diplomacy is even possible. Given North Korea’s negotiating history, we’d be fools to trust it as it is. Why should we trust it when it tells flagrant lies about the most basic conditions of life within its borders or denies that its political prison camps even exist? Or when it hides vast areas of its territory from the world, including a prison camp, Camp 16, that’s directly adjacent to its nuclear test site? Or when every scientist, soldier, or resident who tells the truth to a weapons inspector fears being sent to one of those camps? Engagement advocates insist that North Korea wants diplomatic and trade relations with us. But in the end, we will never have — and should never have — a normal relationship with a county that commits crimes against humanity. Engagement advocates laugh when I suggest that North Korea should allow food aid workers to freely monitor how their aid is distributed, or let Red Cross workers set up clinic or feeding stations in prison camps (like we’d expect any other government to do). What does that tell you about the prospects for an enduring disarmament or a peace treaty?

Finally, if the Trump administration eventually accepts that the defense of human rights is a source of American strength — not just against North Korea, but against Iran, China, and (yes) Russia — it will realize that it cannot adopt policies that render its own advocacy of human rights a punchline. That does not mean that it must yield to every naive or extreme demand that we open our borders to all comers, but it does mean that some of the more practical minds in the new administration will have stronger arguments against candidate Trump’s less practical and more extreme ideas about fighting terrorism that would deny us moral authority ourselves. That, too, would be to the betterment of the world.

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