OFK vs. Ambassador Donald Gregg on the Beeb

Just finished debating former Ambassador Donald Gregg on the BBC. The subject was engagement with North Korea, where I laid out my views here long ago. The specific topic was the revelation that British-American Tobacco has been producing cigarettes in North Korea–strictly for the domestic market, so we’re told. That has apparently caused great outrage among the presumably left-leaning audience (host Steve Richards is just to the left of Arthur Scargill), although it’s hard to isolate the audience’s outrage from its broader distaste for the tobacco industry as a whole. I think Ambassador Gregg, who favors engagement, tried to take refuge in this moral ground clutter to avoid a direct response to the questions this raises about the ethics of investment in North Korea, particularly those hidden from world scrutiny. On human rights, Amb. Gregg conceded that the North Koreans “could certainly treat their people better,” which is akin to describing Tuol Sleng as “uncomfortable.” The points I made:

• I tried to draw a distinction between trade with the regime and true engagement with the people, which I see as two very different things. The backgrounder leading into the discussion mentioned the proliferation of South Korean videotapes, which of course are banned by the government.
• It’s fair to ask where North Korea got the tobacco. Either they dedicated some of their best farmland to growing it, as opposed to growing food, or they imported it, thus proving that Marcus Noland was right about the fact that North Korea treats food aid as a way to increase “commercial” imports. [Left unsaid: BAT now claims that its North Korean employees have better working conditions than members of the Dutch Florists’ Union, which makes me wonder why they kept their multimillion-dollar investment so damn secret from most of their shareholders. Sure, they say: if asked directly, they would have answered truthfully. Good point. And if asked directly, I might tell my wife about my lifelong, still-unrequited fetish for jacuzzis full of soapy, naked, nubile young geisha girls-in-training who feed me sliced papaya with long toothpicks. Thankfully, my wife has never asked. Not directly, anyhoo.]
• Outside trade with North Korea has gone nowhere since the U.S. lifted most sanctions in 1997. Why not? Maybe because the North ruined its credit rating decades ago and still insists on trying to buy and build more arms rather than repaying the bad debts that limit its trade potential.
• The North Koreans are onto Ambassador Gregg: “It is the imperialist’s old trick to carry out ideological and cultural infiltration prior to their launching of an aggression openly.” Read the rest here. The whole quote is very telling.
• Ambassador Gregg responded that two universities, one American and one North Korean, have a cooperative venture on information technology. He cited this as evidence of North Korea’s desire to open itself to the world (as opposed, perhaps, to this). If this can in any way be seen as a precursor toward ordinary North Koreans getting reasonably free Internet access, I’ll be absolutely bowled over. I’ll see what I can find out.

The BAT story gets more interesting by virtue of the timing with which it was leaked, which brings us to two depressing realizations: how low the Tories have sunk since the days of Margaret Thatcher, and how much more intellectually consistent the British left–sans Gallowags–is about human rights in North Korea than the American left.

Broadcast date? “Never,” I’m told. It was only a pilot, but I saw some benefit in doing a dry run if I’m to ever agree to do this again. Will try to get a transcript . . . .

Update: 10/19: The Korea Society’s site hosts this paper (pdf) describing the program Amb. Gregg mentioned during the BBC program (the Society later responded to my e-mail inquiry and also pointed to this). No, it’s not leading to North Koreans having Internet access in the reasonably foreseeable future. The goals are indeed amorphous, but I found this part both amusing and, frankly, disturbing:

Areas of particular [North Korean] interested included a secure fax program (this is now being marketed through a Japanese company), machine translation programs, digital copyright and watermarking programs, and graphics communication via personal digital assistants.

Sorry, but helping the North Koreans to keep their faxes secure from prying eyes doesn’t seem calculated to promote openness, and I can certainly see a downside to teaching the world’s most prolific counterfeiters how to print better watermarks(!). Further down, we learn that the North Korean U.N. mission insisted on being the middleman in any communications between the two universities, so direct and unimpeded contact proved impossible. Color me unpersuaded.

Update 10/21: In the course of researching this further, I found this explanation of digital watermarking, which isn’t quite like the kind useful for counterfeiting money (although it could be useful for counterfeiting digital intellectual property). Given the quality of North Korea’s films and other intellectual property, the potential of this technology to open up North Korea is dubious.