Archive for Appeasement

The Reaper Comes for Cho Myong Rok

November 7, 2010 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Media Criticism, Six-Party Talks 3 comments

cho-myong-rok.jpg

Top North Korean military official Jo Myong Rok, a longtime confidant of leader Kim Jong Il who traveled to Washington in 2000 on a then-unprecedented goodwill mission, has died. He was 82. Jo, who was vice marshal of the Korean People’s Army and held the No. 2 post on the powerful National Defense Commission behind Kim, died Saturday of heart disease, the official Korean Central News Agency reported from Pyongyang. [AP, Hyun Jin Kim]

Other experienced Asia hands will tell you that this “unprecedented goodwill mission” could also be seen as a calculated snub of President Clinton, by which Kim Jong Il showed his higher “place” by sending a lower-ranking official to meet with him as an apparent equal, afforded a status many heads of state don’t get. The matter of just who was showing the good will here is only the first inaccuracy in the AP’s report.

It was later that day, at a banquet in his honor hosted by Albright, that Jo invited the secretary of state to visit Pyongyang, and, in her return toast, Albright accepted. However, the reconciliatory mood between the wartime foes shifted dramatically after former President George W. Bush took office, taking a tougher line against North Korea. Relations have also been strained over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and Pyongyang and Washington still do not have formal diplomatic ties.

But the report’s description of the meeting’s diplomatic context is skewed and riddled with half-truths. In fact, the meeting came as North Korea’s cheating on the first Agreed Framework became so impossible for even President Clinton to deny that he couldn’t certify to the Congress that North Korea was in compliance with the agreement. Consequently, Congress wouldn’t appropriate funds to finish building the light water reactors that were also part of the agreement. In due course, this became a suitable excuse for North Korea to stop even pretending to abide by the agreement, though the North Korean custom is to repudiate diplomatic agreements early in American presidencies and then string each administration along for its full duration.

Reading the AP report and knowing little else, you could be forgiven for thinking we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now if only we’d had superior Manbearpig Awareness in 2000. But there’s a hole in this narrative that can be measured in kilotons. By 2007, a weary President Bush finally gave in and signed the second Agreed Framework. It wasn’t much different from Clinton’s deal, and the results weren’t much different, either. Two years later, four months after President Obama’s inauguration, and five months after Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize, North Korea took us right back at Square Zero, though it now says it wants to return to the six-party talks for the right price. Today, the uranium enrichment program that supporters of Clinton’s North Korea policy spent a decade in denial about is progressing as fast as the centrifuges can spin.

Anyway, as a small public service, I thought I’d step in to mention what Hyun Jin Kim didn’t think you really needed to know. Granted, I don’t necessarily expect the wire service that gave us Charles J. Hanley to describe the predictable sequence of North Korea’s playbook in an obit for some bloody-handed apparatchik, but wouldn’t the AP have written a more accurate report if it didn’t feel compelled to shoehorn in so many excess adjectives and half-truths?

Hat tip: Theresa

Good Riddance, Chris Hill

August 19, 2010 Appeasement, Six-Party Talks No comments

Regular readers already know that Christopher Hill is one of the few career civil servants I write about here whom I loathe almost unreservedly. The first job of an American diplomat is to represent American interests and values. Hill did neither. In his parting remarks before heading off into obscurity — if history is kind to him — Hill encapsulates in one statement what made him the best diplomat North Korea ever had:

“We know the Iraqis don’t have nuclear weapons,” Hill said. “It’s a good thing. Probably Iraq is easier because at the end of the day what can you say about North Korea? You really can’t ask them to reform because asking them to reform is asking them to be destroyed. So what will be the future there? Whereas, in Iraq, I can see the future.” [Yonhap]

And by “reform,” he might as well mean “disarmament.” Indeed, it’s pretty evident he did mean disarmament, if you recount Hill’s oily salesmanship of Agreed Framework II even as the North Koreans steadily reneged on it. Hill’s belated concession that he “can’t see” North Korea’s future is really a concession that he has no vision of a North Korea that ceases to brutalize its people, attack its neighbors, and arm terrorists. But this is the vision that Hill was ostensibly charged with realizing, and it’s the vision he aggressively sold to President Bush in accumulating his power to give away so much in his negotiations with North Korea.

Of course, Hill is absolutely correct when he says that North Korea doesn’t dare to reform … or disarm. I don’t fault him for perceiving the truth. I fault him for concealing it from everyone from President Bush down to his adoring media harem who were largely too stupid to grasp that on their own. Was Hill’s perception of North Korea’s interests that much more acute than his perception of America’s interests, or did Hill simply conclude that appeasing North Korea’s interests aligned more closely with his own than advancing America’s interests? I’ll leave that question to others. What’s evident to me is that for Chris Hill, having a deal — any deal — was the object that eclipsed all others. Stated differently, Chris Hill’s diplomacy certainly seemed to be all about Chris Hill’s ambition. I’ve met plenty of people who would say the same in private, but Senator Sam Brownback was the only person with the spine to act on it.

Despite the lack of any competent reporting on why Hill left Baghdad barely a year after a difficult confirmation, I can’t bring myself to believe that someone this ambitious would be retiring to an academic job in the outer provinces if he’d been seen as an effective ambassador in Iraq. In the end, the best service Hill gave to his country was to demonstrate the futility and dishonesty of everything he advocated.

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Kaesong Syndrome

June 7, 2010 Appeasement, North-South, Sunshine One comment

It is much like that other psychological syndrome we sometimes observe in hostages who paradoxically express feelings of sympathy and adulation for their captors. The particular phenomenon I call the Kaesong Syndrome occurs when businesses become economic hostages of a despotic regime, and later begin to mimic its despotic exploitation of their workers, and finally, to parrot its demands in both substance and manner.

The South Korean companies operating at the Kaesong Industrial Complex yesterday demanded that the South Korean government ensure the safety of their workers in the North and come up with measures to minimize their losses in case the complex shuts down.

In a meeting with Unification Ministry officials yesterday, some business owners at the inter-Korean complex asked the government to increase the 7 billion won ($ 5.87 million) cap on insurance payouts they could expect to receive if the industrial park shuts down.

Other business owners pleaded with the ministry to refrain from resuming psychological operations against Pyongyang.

The requests follow North Korea’s threats on Thursday that it would shut down traffic at Kaesong if South Korea does not abandon its plan to resume psychological operations as part of punitive measures for the March 26 torpedo attack that sank the Navy warship Cheonan, killing 46 sailors. [Joongang Ilbo]

The idea of Sunshine was that interaction between North and South Korea would reform and liberalize the North. But really, who changed who here?

I cannot conceive of a less worthy group for a bailout. Just let the exploitive bastards go bankrupt.

Mike Chinoy: Kim Jong Il Sank a South Korean Warship, Ergo We Should Negotiate With Him Now

May 26, 2010 Appeasement, Diplomacy 2 comments

Mike Chinoy was an absolutely, positively objective CNN reporter until he wrote a book accusing the Bush Administration of sexing up evidence of North Korean uranium enrichment to wriggle out of the first Agreed Framework. Poor Chinoy. Before his book even went to print, samples submitted by North Korea to the State Department began to test positive for highly enriched uranium, and in due course, Meltdown wasn’t just Chinoy’s title, it became a fitting description for his central thesis.

But because people like Chinoy are even harder to deter than Kim Jong Il, he now argues that the right response to the premeditated sinking of a South Korean warship is to sit down with them, presumably to ask them what it will cost to make them keep quiet for six more months. Because it worked so well before, right? Of course, this assumes that the North Koreans even want to sit down with us, except for their demand for access to the wreck of the Cheonan to do their own “independent” investigation. Chinoy, with his characteristic talent for finding hope in unlikely places, takes this demand seriously.

It is at moments like this that we should all pour out libations to Zeus for a president who, thus far, has not taken the counsel of men like Mike Chinoy. It’s why I feel a need to defend President Obama’s North Korea policy, for all of its flaws, from conservative critics who assume that Obama appeases Kim Jong Il (and that George W. Bush did not). They ought to be more careful in their criticisms. If this President sees no point in pursuing a tough policy anyway, he might just opt for a weak one.

North Korea Saves Lee Myung Bak the Trouble of Closing Kaesong

May 26, 2010 Appeasement, NK Economics 4 comments

[Update: So did they mean it or not? Damn Kim Jong Il never keeps a promise ....]

President Lee can heave a mighty sigh of relief. Not only will the Kaesong Industrial Park be closed after all, but also, Chung Dong-Young, the Hankyoreh, and the usual suspects among Korea’s nationalist left can’t possibly criticize him for it without abandoning all pretense of logic.

Oh, wait ….

In any event, this is all proceeding very much like I’ve been predicting for years now, and better than I’d feared: the South Korean workers at Kaesong are being expelled rather than taken hostage, so far. You will recall that President Lee has been planning his response to a North Korean closure of Kaesong for at least a year now, but don’t ask me how.

Here’s the North Koreans’ statement:

“1. All relations with the puppet authorities will be severed.

“2. There will be neither dialogue nor contact between the authorities during (South Korean President) Lee Myung Bak’s tenure of office.

“3. The work of the Panmunjom Red Cross liaison representatives will be completely suspended.

“4. All communication links between the north and the south will be cut off.

“5. The Consultative Office for North-South Economic Cooperation in the Kaesong Industrial Zone will be frozen and dismantled and all the personnel concerned of the south side will be expelled without delay.

“6. We will start all-out counterattack against the puppet group’s ‘psychological warfare against the north.’

“7. The passage of south Korean ships and airliners through the territorial waters and air of our side will be totally banned.

“8. All the issues arising in the inter-Korean relations will be handled under a wartime law.

“There is no need to show any mercy or patience for such confrontation maniacs, sycophants and traitors and wicked warmongers as the (South Korean President) Lee Myung Bak group.” [Reuters]

The closure of Kaesong is good news for many reasons. First, it ends South Korea’s “material support for a rogue government, its nuclear ambitions, and its human rights atrocities.” Second, it removes a tremendous credibility problem from President Lee’s argument that other nations should isolate North Korea economically. Third, it crushes the dreams of billions of hippies.

Of course the Hankyoreh will find some way to blame President Lee for the North Koreans’ closure of Kaesong. I’m sure they’re writing the editorials as I write this. But what we should remember is that the North Koreans have their own reasons for shutting Kaesong down — the same reasons why they stalled the expansion of Kaesong that Roh Moo Hyun wanted so much. Kaesong workers probably never received any actual wages and depended on their ability to move South Korean consumer goods onto the black market to earn a profit. Kaesong’s fate was sealed once the North Korean generals saw the subversive power of ChocoPies, and there’s nothing any South Korean president could have done to change that.

Rumor: Chris Hill to Retire

May 14, 2010 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Terrorism/Iraq No comments

Just a year after the Senate confirmed failed North Korea negotiator Chris Hill as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, NHK is reporting that Hill plans to retire this summer. There has been occasional grumbling about Hill’s performance in office in Baghdad, though nothing approaching the criticism of his performance as a negotiator with North Korea. One of those who apparently didn’t much care for Hill was Gen. Ray Odierno, one of the architects of the military strategy that stabilized Iraq in 2007-2008. I presume that Hill would not have left a position he’d occupied for such a short period of time, after such a difficult confirmation, if the Obama Administration had been completely pleased by his performance there.

Hill’s retirement is some consolation for the fact that Senator Sam Brownback, who held up Hill’s nomination for several weeks, will retire from the Senate this fall to run for governor of Kansas.

So Christine Ahn Was Right After All: Kaesong Really Has Brought the Koreas Together!

May 2, 2010 Appeasement, Cheonan Incident, Useful Idiocy 2 comments

Here is our latest edition of the Kaesong Death Watch:

Last week, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak met with two former presidents, Chun Doo-hwan and Kim Young-sam, who reportedly suggested shutting down Kaesong in response to North Korea’s suspected role in the March 26 sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean warship. [....]

In a statement released in early April through the official Korean Central News Agency, the North said it would “entirely re-evaluate” its involvement in the Kaesong Industrial Complex if relations continue along a confrontational path.

Last week, South Korean media reports — citing an unnamed South Korean Unification Ministry official — said North Korean military officials who inspected the complex expressed concerns the South could use high-rises there to spy on the North or sneak troops into the country through the complex’s water system. The inspection intensified speculation the North might end or suspend its participation in the complex.

Some background here.

“I’ll never forget the touching moment of seeing South Koreans and North Koreans working together, side by side “¦ when my factory first opened,” he said. “Cultivating and spreading the spirit of freedom to the Kaesong people is very inspiring.

… he said as he pressed an electric cattle prod into the back of an insolent North Korea’s worker’s neck. Please. I smell something spreading all right, but it isn’t freedom, or wages.

North Korea and China Feast Amid Famine

April 9, 2010 Appeasement, China & Korea, Famine & Food Aid, Six-Party Talks 3 comments

As the food situation in North Korea continues to deteriorate for its most vulnerable, a South Korean NGO is sending 300 tons of flour and other supplies to help feed 12,000 “marginalized” people, including kids in 50 orphanages. The article mentions nothing about monitoring or nutritional surveys, so pray to a God they can’t that there will be a few dollops of gruel left for their begging bowls after all of the theft, diversion, and corruption.

Note, by the way, this seemingly significant fact near the bottom of AFP’s article: “Pyongyang has also rejected some aid.” It’s too bad the reporter doesn’t tell her readers whose aid was rejected (America’s), why the regime rejected it (its aversion to monitoring), and how many kids it might have fed.

Still, the leader of the world’s most egalitarian society can’t let a little famine interrupt his feast, so he’s throwing a banquet for the Chinese Ambassador to thank his government for helping him undermine U.N. proliferation sanctions. China is not only doing this by funding Kim Jong Il’s regime directly; it is also using its considerable influence in Washington, asking that “sanctions enforcement be dropped as a precondition for their return to multilateral talks.” If past experience is any guide, the State Department and the Washington think tank chorus would be ebullient about this, since few of them see any higher purpose than talking, even if North Korea sees no higher purpose than stalling and obfuscation. Kim Jong Il finds talks to be just one useful vehicle to achieve this.

Unfortunately, China might get its way even as the sanctions start to put real pressure on the regime. Amid North Korea’s obscene coexistence of feast and famine, President Obama may be preparing to offer North Korea an aid-for-talks deal, that is, food aid in exchange for simply returning to six-party talks. Marcus Noland, who is more concerned about feeding the hungry, doesn’t like where this is headed:

Noland warned such deals to bring the North back to the table could have a negative effect in the long run and that rejoining the talks may simply be aimed at securing external support in order to control the shaky internal situation.

“Unfortunately, this kind of linkage is likely to degrade the humanitarian aid program as well as provide North Korea an opportunity to parlay self-created disputes in one arena into concessions in another, as well as undercutting (South Korea, which has) acted with admirable restraint,” he said. [Korea Times]

Not only do I share Noland’s distaste for linking humanitarian aid to nuclear diplomacy, the more time passes, the more I doubt that the humanitarian benefit of food aid is really doing much good for the North Korean people. Having watched North Korea’s food situation closely for the last six years, I’ve seen far more linkage between the food situation for ordinary North Koreans and the functioning of markets than to the arrival of food aid, which we’ve always suspected the regime of diverting, whether at the macro or the micro level. Not only do I have little confidence that aid would feed those who really need it, I have little confidence that the State Department would demand effective monitoring, such as nutritional surveys that ensure that the recipients are regaining health and weight as the aid program continues. North Korea has always rejected effective forms of monitoring as a condition of U.N. or U.S. food aid programs. Why should we think that North Korea will be more flexible when we’re also linking this negotiation to our demands for talks and disarmament?

If we accept that food aid has receded as a significant part of North Korea’s food supply, Open News delivers some rare good news: North Korea’s resilient markets have largely recovered from the Great Confiscation, and for the time being, the price of rice is even falling. I tend to suspect that these reports are more reflective of local and temporary conditions, they’re still a very good sign that Kim Jong Eun won’t repeat his father’s performance by causing an inaugural famine.

For what it’s worth, at least some in the Administration continue to signal their intent to adhere to a hard line on sanctioning the regime that has created all of this misery:

The United States will continue to take a tough line on North Korea at a time when the latter is a “broken state,” John Hamre, former U.S. deputy secretary of defense and now leader of a Washington-based think tank, said Wednesday.

“The posture (of the United States) is we’re happy to negotiate with North Korea if North Korea agrees that its current strategy is wrong,” said Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), at a forum in Seoul. “It continues to rely on nuclear intimidation and that’s not a solution, it’s not a strategy and we will not accept it.” [....]

“We do not need to beg the North to work with us. We need to just be very confident,” he said, adding that perhaps the best tactic would be to hold up South Korea’s success for those in the North to see. [Korea Times]

It would be unfortunate if Noland is right that the Administration will let State seize defeat from the jaws of victory again. It’s probably too soon to assess the deal or its full significance unless and until we see the details and scale. Still, I often suspect that the East Asia Bureau is so obsessed with making a deal with Kim Jong Il and redeeming all of the effort it has invested in failure that it can’t stand the thought of North Korea simply ceasing to exist.

Karmic Justice for Kumgang Investors

March 25, 2010 Appeasement, North-South, Sunshine No comments

North Korea’s threats to confiscate South Korean property at Kumgang are having predictable consequences for its investment climate:

In an interview with The Dong-A Ilbo yesterday, Ahn said the head of a conference member company recently died of a heart attack due to severe stress from his business in North Korea.

The suspension of the inter-Korean tours caused the late chairman’s company to teeter on the verge of bankruptcy, causing his death at age 55, Ahn said.

Ilyeon’s prospects are no better. Ahn has invested 14.7 billion won (12.9 million U.S. dollars) in his North Korea venture, including 13.4 billion won (11.8 million dollars) to build the hotel and additional facilities.

His company is six billion won (5.3 million dollars) in the red due to the suspension of the Kumgang tour. Its deficit slightly decreased in early 2007, but the killing of a South Korean tourist at Mount Kumgang in July 2008 by a North Korean soldier dealt another serious blow. [Donga Ilbo]

I suppose I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the family of someone who vapor locks at 55, but all in all, I have a lot more sympathy for Park Wang Ja and her family. Yes, enabling the repression and the occasional murder of other people can be risky, especially when your business partners turn out to behave just as unscrupulously toward you. Hat tip: Curtis.

Meet Roh Jeong-Ho: Ex-Millionaire, Symbol of a Failed Policy, and Asshole

March 15, 2010 Appeasement, NK Economics, Sunshine 15 comments

Chosun Ilbo photo.jpgPlease allow me to introduce Roh Jeong-Ho, ex-millionaire, former role model for the Sunshine Policy, and asshole. How does one achieve such distinction in life? In Roh’s case, this way:

Roh was once touted by the South Korean media as one of the young leaders in his early 30s who were expected to lead the post-unification era when he exported 44 km of barbed-wire fences to Rajin-Sonbong in 1995. North Korea had asked Roh to supply the fences to isolate the area from ordinary North Koreans. In return, the North offered him the use of 33,000 sq. m of land in the free zone for 50 years. [Chosun Ilbo]

Roh was willing to make what we’ll call certain compromises for the greater good of reform and liberalization:

At first, the North threatened to scrap the barbed-wire order, complaining that the deal was revealed to South Korean media. Roh managed to calm the North Koreans, but then they started making new demands. They even told Roh to supply equipment to guards who were posted along the fence, including tazers and high-voltage current generators.

The North Koreans were apparently quite serious about what the New York Times called “barbed-wire capitalism:”

But to let in the air of foreign currency without also letting in the mosquitoes of democracy, North Korea wants to confine capitalism to the Rajin-Sonbong Free Economic and Trade Zone in the isolated northeast corner of the country, near the borders with Russia and China.

A barbed wire fence, electrified in places, separates the 288-square-mile zone from the rest of North Korea. This despite the fact that a brochure prepared by North Korea’s Committee for Promotion of External Economic Cooperation touts that the zone will become ”a crossroad of human transport and traffic.” [N.Y. Times, Sept. 15, 1996]

Although not much else came of the Rajin-Sonbong zone, the North Koreans did put up the fence, at least. Curtis identified it in satellite imagery. What is not stated is how, exactly, one isolates an area from “ordinary North Koreans” if some of them are allowed to live inside the electric fence. Indeed, I recall having read (but cannot currently find) news reports that the indigenous population inside the zone would have been forcibly relocated. North Korea’s failed plans for a similar trade zone at Sinuiju involved the forcible expulsion of “several hundred thousand local residents.”

Whether this monstrous mass relocation actually came to pass, I cannot say, because thankfully, by 2002 the regime’s ambitious plans were generally acknowledged as a failure. It is always so: this is a regime whose ruthlessness is limited only by its incompetence, and its subjects’ best hope is often that the latter will triumph over the former.

I ask you: is there a better living symbol of the Sunshine Policy than Roh Jeong-Ho, the man wanted to get rich — and naturally, do his part to liberalize and open up North Korea — by selling it barbed wire? North Korea got its barbed wire and stiffed Roh (the barbed-wire salesman, not the dead president), who is now bankrupt, bitter, and lacking in any apparent pity for anyone but himself.

“North Korean government workers operate under a bizarre, performance-based system,” Roh said. “Their performance is gauged based on how much they are able to extort from South Korean businesses.” [....]

“If you’re not careful, you could end up losing everything,” he warned. He added that the business prospects are riddled with traps. “We tend to believe that the North Koreans would be accommodating since we are ‘compatriots,’ but that’s a big mistake,” Roh said. “North Korea extends its invitation to South Korean businesses in order to use them as window dressing to attract Chinese and Russian investors.”

As is inevitably the case with investors in North Korea, a fool and his money — in his case, $1.5 million — are soon parted. This may be one of those rare occasions to celebrate a small victory for karmic justice that precedes the afterlife.

It’s hard to figure out the exact status of the Rajin zone today, as North Korea makes a fresh effort to revive it. Some reports in late 2008 suggested that North Korea had evicted some or all of the Chinese companies that originally bought into Rajin. This is a curious thing; after all, the Chinese thought that they’d purchased an exclusive 50-year lease for the port as recently as 2005.

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