Welcome Back, Washington Post Readers

May 9, 2012 Anju Links, The Camps 2 comments

Chico Harlan of The Washington Post has written a story about that lengthy new report from South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission, and graciously threw me a couple of nice, fat links in the story (thanks, Chico!).  This is a good thing for the North Korean people if more of us learn of their suffering.  It’s also great for this blog, although it’s a bit like having a distinguished visitor stop by when you’re unpacking from a big move.

This site is unpacking — from a big move last weekend, when I finally overcame my fears and upgraded from (don’t laugh, I’m very sensitive) Word Press 2.0.4 to 3.2.2, which also made this sa-weet new template possible.  Unfortunately, some of my Google Earth screen grabs didn’t survive the migration, so if I can’t work some FTP magic, I’ll have to reload them this weekend.

If any reader in Korea can get his hands on a translation of the NHRC report and send it my way, I’ll be eternally grateful.  The substance of Harlan’s description, like the other excepts I’ve written about here, is horrific.  For years, our foreign policy establishment, including presidents of both parties, have tried to isolate any discussion of these atrocities from our diplomacy with North Korea, believing that it would blow up negotiations over “higher” priorities.  It didn’t work that way when we raised human rights with, say, Burma, of course, or in our years of disarmament talks with the U.S.S.R.  In those cases, we understood that atrocity and mendacity spring from a common pathology, and that advocating for the people of those countries helped build friendships that endured (or will endure) longer than their oppressors.  Until we persuade this regime that its present pathology equates to its own extinction — not by war, but by economic constriction and political subversion — negotiations will continue to achieve nothing.

Anju, May 9, 2012

May 9, 2012 Anju Links No comments

OH KIL NAM’S WIFE, Shin Suk Ja, has died after reportedly being imprisoned in Camp 15 with her daughter. It was Oh’s idea to defect to North Korea, and it’s a grievous moral (and Darwinian) injustice that Shin, who opposed the idea from the start, died for Oh’s stupidity.

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DELECTABLE IRONY OF THE YEAR: A Japanese human rights activist searches his country’s archives and finds evidence that one of Kim Jong-Un’s grandparents was a collaborator.

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HUMAN RIGHTS WITHOUT FRONTIERS publishes this brief report on North Korea’s rental of laborers to work in exploitative conditions in other countries. (Hat tip.)

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NORTH KOREA THREATENS defector for practicing journalism. North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.

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I’M NO EXPERT, but this story just has to be bulls**t. This is just too horrible to be true, even in a place like China.

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THE ELECTION IS OVER, so I’ll say it: I’m glad Senator Dick Lugar was not reelected. I’ve met Lugar, and it’s true what everyone says about him — he’s nice, but having Lugar as the Senate GOP’s foreign policy dean was tantamount to harmonious one-party rule. That may be why so many Democrats had so much affection for him. But our political system is an adversarial one, which sometimes means that good ideas go to Washington to die, and hopefully, that plenty of terrible ideas also die here. Under Lugar’s leadership, the GOP failed to play its adversarial role on North Korea policy, including those times when it ought to have opposed President Bush. It offered no effective opposition to the agreed frameworks, State’s failure to implement the North Korean Human Rights Act, or the confirmation of Chris Hill. Nor could it advance its own agenda, such as the North Korean Freedom Act and the confirmation of John Bolton.

The Two Minutes’ Hate

May 9, 2012 North-South, Sunshine, WTF? 2 comments

North Korean state TV shows us how to treat an effigy of a neighboring country’s elected president.

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

Discuss among yourselves.

Nobel Prize Winning President Ignores World’s Worst Human Rights Violations

May 8, 2012 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Human Rights 2 comments

Most of the people reading this blog probably have no idea who Robert King is, and that is a sad comment in itself.  King’s title is Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, a position that was created back in 2004, under a mostly forgotten and disregarded law called the North Korean Human Rights Act. In the Bush Administration, the office was initially filled by Jay Lefkowitz, a well-meaning man who initially came to Bush’s attention for his opposition to stem cell research. Lefkowitz came to the job with little subject matter expertise, no political juice, and a part-time portfolio.  Yet Lefkowitz was a quicker study and more perceptive of North Korea’s pathology than the State Department had expected.  When he spoke cogently about that pathology, including its effect on the diplomacy to which human rights was made a subordinate priority, Lefkowitz was publicly humiliated by Condi Rice and rolled by Christopher Hill.  Lefkowitz nearly resigned, and should have.  He might have made a real impact with a very public resignation, but instead, he served out his term in obscurity as Rice’s (and Bush’s) diplomatic initiative to North Korea ended, predictably, in a fiasco.

Here are King’s bio and the web page the State Department set up for him. But what you really want to read about is how King is carrying out the mandate Congress has given him — his policy initiatives and plans to mobilize the consciousness of the world to ease the suffering of the North Korean people. I suppose that would be at the link called “releases,” where we find the evidence of all that Ambassador King has accomplished in his three years in office:

Jesus wept.  Where are the plans to mobilize global opinion, bring Twitter to North Korea, sanction the leaders of North Korea’s internal security forces, or bring Chapter VII sanctions at the Security Council over the matter of North Korea’s concentration camps?  There isn’t even a schedule of the conferences King attends to strike a sagacious pose and avoid saying anything controversial or newsworthy.  At one of these recently, I asked King to demonstrate or defend the effectiveness of his tenure.  What accomplishments, or alternatively, what specific initiatives, can King point to?  He couldn’t.

I suppose it’s unfair to lay all of this at King’s feet.  Back when he was a diplomat working European issues, King had a solid reputation as an advocate for human rights in diplomacy.  Like all diplomats, King is a civil servant who answers to a bureaucracy, which answers to the President.  Clearly, this president has made a strategic decision to downplay human rights as an issue with North Korea.  His State Department believes that to raise human rights would hinder nuclear negotiations with North Korea, but that wasn’t true in the case of the U.S.S.R., China, or Burma, because negotiations work best when the people negotiating with us feel pressure to change, and believe that we mean what we say.

Instead, what we’re left with is a policy that is functionally indistinguishable from — and almost as unsuccessful as — the North Korea policy of our last president.  In fact, the only difference I see between Bush and Obama on their approach to the world’s worst human rights violations is that when one of them was inaugurated, he was awarded a preemptive Nobel Peace Prize and a preemptive pardon by the Human Rights Industry.

Refugees: Thousands Die at Jeungsan Prison, N. Korea

May 7, 2012 Human Rights, The Camps One comment

It’s been about a month since I attended an event here in Washington for the publication of the new edition of The Hidden Gulag, a report that documents North Korea’s prison camp system in agonizing detail with witness testimony and satellite imagery. The report added many pages of valuable testimony and data to our knowledge of these camps, which are probably the worst human rights violation anywhere in this world today. Yet almost as soon as the report was published, it was superseded. New satellite imagery becomes available faster than Curtis and I can analyze it. New witnesses beat the odds and arrive in South Korea faster than NGOs like Database Center for North Korean Human Rights can catalog their testimony. This week, the National Human Rights Commission of South Korea added more information to this still-incomplete picture, with a statistical analysis of the “crimes” that get people sent to prison camps in North Korea:

According to the report on North Korean human rights based on interviews with 800 North Korean defectors, the most common reason for imprisonment accounting for 23.7 percent of 278 inmates was escaping in search of food and work.

People who aided and abetted defectors were also imprisoned. Some were sent to the camps for receiving money sent from a family member who had defected to South Korea. About 16.2 percent had made critical comments about the regime or praised South Korea and the West.

Of these, some were imprisoned for criticizing dead leader Kim Jong-il or speaking truthfully about the poor quality of hospitals in the North. Even a comment like “I want to live in another country” can get people sent to the camps.

Another 15.8 percent were in the camps through guilt by association. One inmate was there because his father forgot to refer to nation founder Kim Il-sung by the honorific “Great Leader.”

There are five confirmed cases of people being imprisoned for Christian worship. Only 64 cases or 23 percent involved people accepting bribes, amassing slush funds, engaging in espionage or committing other serious offenses, according to the report. [Chosun Ilbo]

More here.  For those who are irresponsible enough to visit North Korea at all, here’s a reminder not to compound your irresponsibility by endangering people you meet there:

Other offences were even more trivial, it says: one female former student was serving a term for having a western-style dance with a foreigner, another student was incarcerated for singing a South Korean song. [AFP]

Here’s a news tip for the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau — by the way, has anyone heard from them lately?  In any event, this seems very newsworthy, merits further investigation by professional journalists, and is alleged to have happened within convenient driving distance of Pyongyang. Granted, the report is a few years old, but I keep hearing reports from my NGO contacts that the camp is still there, and still a horrible place to end up:

Last month a group called the International Coalition to Stop Crimes against Humanity in North Korea estimated that 400,000 inmates of the camps have died in the past few decades from starvation, overwork or execution.

The South Korean report quotes one woman as saying 3,721 inmates died from January to June in 2005 at the Jeungsan prison in South Pyongan province.

The South Korean Human Rights Commission was a global laughingstock not too many years ago. Today, it is doing work worthy of its name. I wish I could say the same of our own government’s Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea.

Anju, May 4, 2012

May 4, 2012 Anju Links No comments

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? Our U.N. Ambassador’s proposed response to North Korea’s missile launch was to add 42 companies to the sanctions list. China proposed two, and we compromised at … three. All of those entities — Green Pine, Amroggang Development Bank, and Tanchon Commercial Bank were already sanctioned by Treasury for their involvement in WMD proliferation.

Back when John Bolton was at the U.N., the Security Council was passing tough and potentially effective resolutions against North Korea. People bitched that Bolton said mean things and hurt people’s feelings, but none of those people bother to mention that Bolton wrote — and got the Security Council to pass — the same resolutions that Susan Rice is trying — and failing — to get China to comply with today, six years later. The irony here is that Bolton showed us that the U.N. might have moments of effectiveness. Nothing John Bolton said has denigrated the U.N. quite so effectively as what Susan Rice can’t get the U.N. to do.

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REP. ED ROYCE: Our North Korea policy has become a blind trust. After a not-terrible start, the Obama Administration seems to have had no North Korea policy at all for the last year.

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NORTH KOREA, WHICH WAS REMOVED from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, is now jamming the GPS civilian airliners use to find their way to Incheon International Airport.

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AN INTERESTING PIECE on hiking Bukak-san in Seoul.

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MUST READ: Well, I didn’t think anyone could top Walter Russell Mead, but Prof. Minxin Pei has written the most interesting thing I’ve read about China in the last five years. Don’t miss it.

The Chen Guangcheng Disgrace

May 3, 2012 Anju Links, China 14 comments

By all accounts, Wang Lijun, who was Bo Xilai’s police in Chongqing, was also a thug. Under the right circumstances, he might have been eligible for relief under the Convention Against Torture, but as a persecutor of others, he would have had a difficult job proving his eligibility for asylum. It was disturbing to see our consulate in Chengdu seem to snooker Wang back into the loving arms of the ChiComs, but it wasn’t tragic. Wang might have provided valuable intelligence, but his was not the cause on which to expend too much diplomatic capital. The Chinese people must sense that his cause is little more than an internecine struggle with other thugs.

Still, one could not help feeling some pride that even a neo-Maoist nationalist would turn to America for safety when the Black Maria came for him. It speaks volumes about how Chinese really feel — or felt, rather — about America in the privacy of their minds that they still turn to us in times of need, despite all of the anti-American propaganda men like Wang and Bo have produced of late.

Chen Guangcheng’s case is a tragedy. Chen is a hero to many Chinese, and rightfully so.

Chen’s predicament — his improbable flight to hoped-for freedom — has thrilled the many Chinese who are savvy enough to get around Internet censorship to learn about it. And it has reaffirmed for his supporters the qualities they have long admired: Chen displays a determination for upholding the law while exuding a charisma that reassures those around him.

“He’s just the most extraordinary person,” activist blogger He Peirong said Friday, four days after she picked up a bloodied Chen outside his village and sped toward Beijing and shortly before she was detained by police for helping him.

“He never gives up. He’s very spirited, willful and optimistic,” she said.

His principled steeliness was on display in a video statement recorded while he was in hiding last week. In it, he calmly catalogs the mistreatment of him, his wife, his 6-year-old daughter and his mother while under house arrest. He names the officials who took part in the abuse and then demands an investigation and the protection of his family members, whose whereabouts are not known.

“I also ask that the Chinese government safeguard the dignity of law and the interests of the people, as well as guarantee the safety of my family members,” Chen said.

The 40-year-old Chen is emblematic of a new breed of activists that the Communist Party finds threatening. Often from rural and working-class families, these “rights defenders,” as they are called, are unlike the students and intellectuals from the elite academies and major cities who led the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

The backgrounds of these new activists have helped them tap into the simmering grievances about a rich-poor gap, farmland expropriations, corruption and unbridled official power that are fueling the 180,000 protests that experts estimate rock China every year. [Washington Post]

It’s still unclear what, exactly, Chen told our diplomats in Beijing. It’s even less clear what our diplomats told Chen, and on what basis they told him. What investigation did they do of how Chen had been treated by the police goons who invaded and surrounded his home, and who abused his wife and daughter? Did we encourage Chen to return to the Chinese government’s custody, knowing full well that Chen and his family were under severe duress? Did our diplomats pressure Chen to leave the embassy, as his lawyers allege? Could the stupidity, incompetence, and cynicism of our diplomats possibly be as breathtaking as they seem? Have we become, as John Bolton puts it, China’s “well-bred doormat?”

My sense is that it’s too early to be certain, so let’s establish as much certainty as we can. That’s why Congress has the power to issue subpoenas and compel testimony. When Hillary Clinton returns from Beijing, she should be given enough time to unpack and freshen up before being summoned to testify. She should bring Ambassador Locke with her. It is just possible — but difficult — to imagine a circumstance in which his resignation does not become an imperative.

For the Chinese people to view our nation as a refuge and a political model for their own society is of inestimable value. Today, they must be swelling with cynicism and resentment. The Fifty-Cent Army, whose stock in trade is to argue that we are no better than them, will have a field day with this. Rightly or wrongly, it will be marketed and perceived as a capitulation of everything we stand for. It will also be a terrible setback for Chen Guangcheng, for his innocent wife and child, and for all of the other Chen Guangchengs who are fighting and suffering against terrible odds to moderate the brutality of their rulers.

Kim Jong Il’s Testament Leaked?

May 2, 2012 Anju Links, Kremlinology One comment

Say it with me: this report could not be verified independently. This document could easily be as fake as the Hitler diaries, but it does make for interesting reading:

These instructions casually referred to Kim family business, indicating that ‘the teachings should be executed by Kim Kyong-Hui’ (Kim Jong-Il’s sister), that ‘Kim Kyong-Hui and Kim Jong-Un should take care of the family,’ and that ‘Kim Kyong-Hui should handle management of all assets inside and outside the country.’

Foreign media often focus on Kim Kyong-Hui’s role as the wife of regime insider Jang Sung-Taek, but, as Kim Jong-Il’s sister, she has been firmly in control of personnel changes since her brother’s death. Of the 232 members on Kim Jong-Il’s funeral committee, she was listed 14th; her husband was 19th. She is routinely ranked higher than her husband in terms of protocol. Indeed, Jang Sung-Taek’s promotion to General was her decision.

The problem is that Kim Kyong-Hui is in poor health, owing to years of alcohol abuse. Moreover, she is so capricious and self-centered that even Kim Jong-Il had trouble keeping her in check. Due to her poor health, it is unclear how long she will be able to continue advising Kim Jong-Un, now surrounded by military personnel in their seventies and eighties who supported past generations. He needs advisers closer to his own age, but none is at hand. [Yuriko Koike, Singapore Straits Times]

Koike, incidentally, is Japan’s former Defense Minister and National Security Advisor. The idea of Kim Kyong Hui being the real power-broker is more plausible than the idea of Kim Jong Un holding real power. I have heard this theory before, from a well-connected South Korean source whose information has been spot-on at times, when it could be confirmed. He tells me that the relationship between Mrs. Kim and her husband, Jang Song Thaek, is of a Clintonian character — they’re romantically estranged, but the closest of frenemies on political matters.

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BRETT STEPHENS IN THE WSJ: Anyone but Condi. She has a wonderful personal history, and she’s probably a perfectly nice person, but she was an awful National Security Advisor, and an awful Secretary of State, and she should not return to a prominent role in making foreign policy.

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U.N. UPDATE: The U.S., Japan, Europe, and South Korea are pushing to add 40 North Korean entities to the sanctions list. China, so far, agrees to only two of them. I’m not sure why we’re bothering with this. It accomplishes nothing to bargain with China over a list it will ignore anyway, when unilateral action by Treasury would be easier, more effective, and far more likely to coerce compliance by Chinese banks and companies. It would also enjoy broad international support by those nations with the most global financial influence.

Anju, May 1, 2012

May 1, 2012 Anju Links One comment

PRESIDENT OBAMA, in a joint news conference with the visiting Prime Minister of Japan, says North Korea’s provocation are a sign of weakness, and this:

“The old pattern of provocation that then gets attention and somehow insists on the world purchasing good behavior from them, that pattern is broken,” Obama said in a joint news conference with Noda at the White House.

Let’s check back on that after November, when Wendy Sherman runs to the Oval Office with the blueprint for Agreed Framework III. In any event, the President is right that North Korea’s pattern isn’t so much a function of what we do; it’s a more a function of China’s pattern of supporting new sanctions one minute, and then violating them to arm and prop up North Korea the next minute. The relative bargaining power should shift as the U.S. economy continues is sluggish recovery and the indications about China’s economy grow increasingly alarming. But will we leverage that?

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I CERTAINLY DON’T DEPRECATE the importance of mobilizing popular opposition to China’s brutal treatment of North Korean refugees. The modest-yet-impressive protests at the Chinese Embassy in Seoul inserted those issues into South Korea’s public consciousness, and may constrain future Chinese actions, if only slightly, because China doesn’t want this movement to grow, or to influence the South’s next election. But to claim victory because four refugees were saved while dozens of others were shipped to the slaughterhouse is claiming too much. Don’t confuse this with advocacy — because it isn’t — but China won’t be swayed by any form of protest or resistance until it becomes violent, by which I mean at least as violent as the protests the Chinese government organized in Seoul in 2008.

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FIGHTERS FOR A FREE NORTH KOREA commemorates North Korea Freedom Week with a balloon launch condemning rule by “family dynasty:”

A group of former North Korean refugees on Saturday released 200,000 leaflets along with 1,000 U.S. one-dollar bills by air balloons toward North Korea from a northwestern South Korean border town. [....]

The organizers released the balloons from Imjingak, a “freedom” park built on the banks of the Imjin river in the border city of Paju close to the demilitarized zone dividing the North and the South. The balloons also carried 300 DVDs calling for an improvement of human rights in North Korea.

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SOUTH KOREA’S HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION has come a long way from the days when it was a playground for the hard left and a global laughingstock:

The Commission’s report contains testimony from a woman who transported the bodies of massacre victims in Jeunggsan camp in South Pyongan Province. She testified that 3,721 people were killed from January to June of 2005, seeing the tag “No. 3,721″ on a body being shipped off on an ox cart in June. The number tags for dead bodies start from Jan. 1 of each year.

I’ve been looking for that camp for about two years now.

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PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN: The Chosun Ilbo says that Jang Song Thaek now controls Kim Jong Un’s bodyguard corps. Say it with me: this report could not be verified independently.

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MARCUS NOLAND PREDICTS that nothing good will come of North Korea’s efforts to put more domestically produced products on the shelves where its elite go shopping.

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THIS POST FROM WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is the most interesting thing I’ve read about China and U.S. policy toward it all year. No, this isn’t a China blog, but don’t miss this one.

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GREAT MOMENTS IN SOFT POWER: Geez. Did you really have to beat up the blind dissident’s wife and daughter, too? I have to wonder if Tom Friedman would still write this column today, even if he could edit out the passages about China’s bullet trains. (Dropped calls are still far better than dropped trains.)

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LiNK HAS A BLOG, and it looks good. The layout in particular makes me envious, as I grow tired of my own. Guys, get yourselves an RSS and I’ll put a feed on my sidebar.

In Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, China Helps a Few Get Richer

April 30, 2012 China, Sanctions One comment

Who would have thought that a reporter could go to Pyongyang and bring home some news in spite of the minders?

The economy of the isolated North — where famine killed hundreds of thousands in the 1990s — is widely believed to be battered and stuttering, but the luxury shops of the showcase capital tell a different story.

According to expatriates living in the city, there are ever more cars on the roads and traffic in the centre is increasingly busy.

Many vehicles are old, but the number of newer Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, Toyota and Land Rover models is on the rise.

The international community imposed a strict embargo on all luxury goods for North Korea and its ruling elite in 2009, but it is ignored by supply networks running through Pyongyang’s key ally China, said South Korean MP Yoon Sang-Hyun. [AFP, Gilles Campion]

According to a March 2011 assessment by the World Food Program, over six million North Koreans need emergency food aid. According to Article 25 of the North Korean Constitution, “The State shall provide all the working people with every condition for obtaining food, clothing and housing.” In U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1718 and 1874, China voted to ban the export of luxury goods to North Korea. Discuss among yourselves.

One of these days, a smart news service is going to sign a distribution agreement with Rimjingang or one of the other guerrilla news services. The service will provide training and equipment for more guerrilla reporters, including satellite phones that would allow the reporters to send their stories out without crossing borders. In return, Rimjingang will give that wire service an exclusive on the news it brings out. The wire service may, in a fit of candor, note that the reports cannot be verified independently, but if the AP isn’t saying that about what it produces with KCNA, it must not be mandatory.

In somewhat related news, is apparently desperate enough for cash that it’s sending more workers abroad to earn hard currency. I say “desperate” because the Libyan example shows us that this is a risky venture for North Korea. (Does anyone know if they were ever allowed to go back to North Korea?)

[W]hen package tours to Mt. Kumgang for South Koreans came to a halt in July 2008, it lost a steady source of some $50 million a year. North Korea’s arms export industry suffered hugely from sanctions imposed by the international community after its nuclear and missile tests in 2009, and the fatal blow came when South Korea halted all trade after the sinking of the Navy corvette Cheonan in 2009. Room 39′s annual income has reportedly dropped to $200 million.

Say it with me: this report could not be verified independently.

Incidentally, I’ve made the editorial decision to start writing “Kim Jong Un” instead of “Kim Jong Eun.” There aren’t many matters on which I consider KCNA to be authoritative; this may be the first.

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