Monthly Archive: October, 2005

On September 21st, I said this: The jockeying for the South Korean presidential race has started. Like mercurial gobs, parties split into factions and clump together again. The Joongang Ilbo has an interesting article that suggests potential splits in both the Grand National and Uri parties. . . . I’m actually hoping for splits and ferocious ideological power struggles in both parties, particularly the GNP. The Uri’s fresh ideas are all wrung out, and the GNP’s fresh ideas are all...

Busted! A U.N. inquiry has found evidence that Syria and its Lebanese puppets plotted the murder of Rafiq Hariri. In related news, the United Nations finally makes a judgment about a crime (but not an ongoing one).

Kenneth Clarke, the BAT official and U.K. Tory leader who knew about the company’s factory in North Korea, came in a miserable fourth in the race to lead his party, which lost its political relevance when Margaret Thatcher stood down. I can’t say to what extent the N. Korea relevations played a part, but it’s interesting how much traction the story got in the British press, which has done a much better job covering North Korean human rights than the...

Iron Ajumma Update: Kim Jong Il, flushed with his successes in agriculture, industry, economics, film-making, corrections, printing, pharmaceuticals, basketball, and golf, takes on corporate personnel management. SEOUL, Oct. 20 (Yonhap) — North Korea warned Thursday that it may have to cancel its exclusive business deals with the Hyundai Group unless the South Korean conglomerate restores the honor of an executive who was ousted this month on allegations of corruption.” (The expulsion) threw cold water on Hyundai’s relations with us, and...

The newest addition to my blogroll is Korean Mediator, written by milblogger Sergeant Joshua C. Ray. Sgt. Ray and I struck up an e-mail friendship just a few days ago, at which time he mentioned that he recently returned from a tour in Iraq, is studying Korean at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and that he was an eyewitness to the horrific accident in 2002 that cost two girls their lives, and which was subsequently so shamelessly exploited...

I’ve been anticipating the Flying Yangban’s full report on this event, only to have Andy e-mail me and show that I’ve been looking in the wrong place. I’ll borrow just one quote before encouraging you to go off and read the whole thing yourself. “[The South Korean Government] should have asked for transparency in return for the food aid,” Kang said in a speech to a crowd comprised largely of foreigners living in Seoul. “That kind of attitude is extending...

Here’s a very balanced, well-written response to some of Stalinist revisionism on the Korean War. Even this dignifies what would best be described as “a hallucination,” but the real blame for that is with those who decided to set a few prosecutors (and a hoarde of reporters) upon Kang Jeong-Koo. Men like Kang and Jang Shi-Ki fear a rational debate based on objective truths more than they fear any prison cell. Indeed, to men like these, a prison cell may...

The Chosun Ilbo: [W]hen the president was trying to woo the GNP into a grand coalition in July, he said, “Given the actual composition of the two parties, differences in policy can’t be said to be that big.” A mere three months after stalking it so persistently, he suddenly feels the object of his attentions is a bunch of culprits and accomplices of dictators rooted in the age of barbarism. Cheong Wa Dae suggested that the GNP rechristen itself the...

This just came in from Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, an extremely effective and proactive group based in Japan. This one may be life-or-death: October 19, 2005 PETITION To: President Roh Moo-hyun Chongwadae Presidential Palace 1 Jongno-gu, Seoul Special City Republic of Korea Your help with the following case is respectfully requested by Life Funds for North Korean Refugees (LFNKR), a Japanese nonprofit organization. Request for your intervention in the rescue of Kang Song-hee (female, born Feb. 5, 1979),...

James Lileks: “On one level, you can’t be in favor of the Iraqi vote and opposed to the war. On another level, you can, but it’s a happy chocolate land where the fountains spout fudge and the bunnies are edible and Saddam relinquishes power, ashamed, because Kofi Annan drafted a stern letter promising Serious Consequences, and some Iraqi Gandhi not only showed he was morally superior to the Tikriti gang, but had a titanium-hulled body that made him impervious to...

This article on YaleGlobal is a very good, hard-hitting analysis of what’s happening with food aid in North Korea, despite one significant error. It’s partially premised on North Korea’s alleged willingness to accept South Korean-recommended agricultural reforms, despite Andrei Lankov’s recent reports that North Korea is doing just the opposite. Still, passages like this one redeem the entire article with their clarity and honesty: By limiting the source of food assistance to China and South Korea, a more reliable partner...

Although I don’t agree with the ultimate conclusion of this article, on the economics of North Korean refugees, I can’t say that its reasoning is unsound. As even Nicholas Eberstadt admits, sanctions against North Korea are a risky venture, standing against a solid body of evidence that sanctions–particularly absent other, more positive pressures–don’t work. I happen to think that North Korea is a special case because its poorest are already unnaturally deprived of the benefits of trade, and because those...

OFK friend Don Kirk has a new piece in the Christian Science Monitor, in which he reports on his latest visit to the North, beginning with a non-visit to the Kaesong Industrial Complex: The tour bus stops on a bridge amid fallow fields, and the North Korean guide points to a cluster of small factories nearly a mile away. “That’s the Kaesong industrial zone,” says Choe Kyong Jin, an official in this historic city several miles north of the line...

Bush and Roh will meet in Kyongju on November 17th. High-level meetings are usually a prerequisite to major changes in the diplomatic relationships between nations, although not every high-level meeting necessarily signals a major change. I’m equally interested in the fact that Bush will visit the President of Mongolia in Ulaan Bator. Despite its lack of an air corridor not controlled by Russia or China, Mongolia could become a important diplomatic and trading partner in the region if it can...

Whose Interests Were Served by the politically motivated–and mostly fraudulent–controversy that forced the closure of the Koon-Ni Range? Certainly not the interest of readiness, according to the pilots who are now complaining. I’ve been an advocate of keeping air and naval power in South Korea, but if those forces can’t maintain readiness if based in South Korea, they’ll also have to find new basing.

South Korean Citizens are now forced to attempt private diplomacy with Kim Jong-Il because their own government won’t demand the return of their loved ones, abducted by North Korea.

There are fresh reminders that the Living, Breathing Document North Korea signed last month can only be described as a “breakthrough” if that description is prominently labelled as journalistic high burlesque. The V-word (no, not the one with its own monologue) looms before us: U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says any agreement with North Korea on providing technology and other incentives in return for giving up its nuclear weapons programs will need a strong verification system. The secretary made the...

Score another one for counterspeech. The discrediting of South Korean academia’s Stalinist wing proceeds apace despite the Old Right’s inadvertent deification of them into the pantheon of respected dissidents: [I]t was revealed that a large number of Kang [Jeong-Koo]’s theses and columns on the Korean War and the character of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) were posted on a North Korean propaganda group’s website. . . . [A] string of Kang’s remarks and actions coincided with guidelines advocated by the...