State Dep’t Applies the Term ‘Forced Labor’ to Kaesong

This new State Department report looks very bad for Kaesong products even getting into the United States, much less getting FTA status:

The North Korean government may be pocketing most of the pay foreign employers pay North Korean workers, a U.S. report on human trafficking asserted. The report was released Monday by the State Department in Washington.
….
Seoul wants, and Washington opposes, the designation of goods made there as domestic South Korean products. U.S. officials have criticized the labor standards at the complex and questioned whether laborers there are actually receiving any wages.

The report says, “There are concerns that this labor may be exploitative, with the [North Korean] government keeping most or all of the foreign exchange paid and then paying workers in local, non-convertible currency.”
….
“They lack freedom,” [Ambassador John J. Miller] said at a news conference. “It’s not clear that they get any money, whether the money goes to them or the North Korean government. We are talking about forced labor.”

You can’t understate the significance of those words. As I’ve noted before, U.S. law bars goods made with forced labor from landing in U.S. ports. That, not FTA negotiations, will ultimately be dispositive. That said, Amb. Miller is not representative of more typical State Department thinking; he gave an excellent address at Freedom House’s first North Korean human rights conference in Washington last July.

Some post-scripts:

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The Flying Yangban gives his final take on LiNK’s Operation Sunshine, about which I’ve put up several posts previously. Great pictures, too:

From what I have been able to gather, the LiNK lectures and symposiums were successful and the street actions a little less so. I also heard that there was a bit of nastiness at one lecture when some pro-Kim Jong-il students raided it (I certainly hope to hear more on that.

I don’t agree with the assessment on the street actions, which from my American perspective were a great success at getting prominent coverage in the Korean media immediately before an election. To what extent LiNK’s actions precipitated this indingenous South Korean human rights movement, I can’t say. I spoke to Adrian Hong about LiNK’s expectations before this campaign started. Generally, I think they were met.

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Kathreb attended a lecture by U.S. diplomat James Kelley at Brookings in Washington recently. Kelly is the diplomat to whom the North Koreans infamously admitted having a banned uranium enrichment program. His post here. This quote caught my attention, and not just because of the bold red type:

South Korea is understandably reluctant to have tensions rise, if only for the blow that that would be to its life and economy. But it needs to be firm and patient with North Korea. Sometimes it seems that Seoul lets its desire for peaceful comity get a little ahead of the situation the ground.

Diplomacy — the art of understatement.