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Monthly Archive: February, 2008

February 4, 2008

Kaesong Workers Recoup Stolen Wages on the Black Market

With all the questions about how much pay  Kaesong workers actually collect, we’ve always  suspected that their earnings  must be  far  more than most of their North Korean neighbors.  For one thing, the workers are hand-picked loyalists; the regime  must want to keep them relatively content.   Yet no one really believed that the workers received the “official” wage of around $60 a month, after “voluntary” deductions and the bite of the inflated official exchange rate. I figured it was just...

Categories Human Trafficking/NK Economics
February 4, 2008

U.S., ROK Forces Will Draw up Contingency Plans for N. Korea Unrest

It’s about time: The Defense Ministry is planning to create a joint plan with the United States to cope with possible internal unrest in North Korea after the Lee Myung-bak administration comes into office.   According to military sources, the ministry reported last month a US-Korea joint plan to the transition committee in preparation for possible contingencies in North Korea from March to the end of this year. [….]   “The current administration was too conscious of North Korea to...

Categories An Alliance?/Reconstruction/Uncategorized
February 4, 2008

N. Korea Demands Japan Drop Abductions Issue

Does this sound like a nation that has renounced terrorism? North Korea-Japan relations will never improve if Japan continues to link their improvement with a bilateral dispute over North Korea’s past abductions of Japanese nationals, North Korea’s state-run media said Thursday. In a lengthy commentary, the Korean Central News Agency said that North Korea has not forgiven Japan for forcing many Korean women into sexual slavery and taking many Korean men to Japan during World War II, and that it...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan & Korea/Terrorism (NK)
February 3, 2008

Advantage, Lefkowitz?

The latest Bush Administration official to return from Pyongyang empty-handed is Sung Kim, who spent three days in Pyongyang and got no nuclear declaration for his trouble.  It’s a well known fact of diplomacy that even when no translation is necessary, it can take 72 hours to comprehend the utterance of the word “no. The latest Bush Administration alumnus to denounce its failing last-ditch appeasement of North Korea is former speechwriter Michael Gerson, who writes in the Washington Post about...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/U.S. Politics
February 1, 2008

Anju Links: Food Woes, A Lefkowitz Resignation Rumor, OPCON, and Reforming the HRC

HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE WEATHER IN CHINA? Dozens are dead and thousands of travelers have been stranded. It’s severe enough that the Chinese government is worried about its own food supply later this year. “The impact of the snow disaster in southern China on winter crop production is extremely serious,” said Chen Xiwen, the government’s leading expert on the agricultural economy. “The impact on fresh vegetables and on fruit in some places has been catastrophic.” [Daily Telegraph] Add this...

Categories Anju Links
February 1, 2008

KCTU Declares Jihad Against Lee M.B., Scores Meeting With Nancy Pelosi

On Tuesday, I wrote that President-Elect Lee was about to meet with the leaders of South Korea’s largest, most radical, and most violent labor organization — the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. There was, however, the matter of KCTU Chairman Lee Sok-Haeng’s outstanding arrest warrant for an “illegal” rally last October. President-Elect Lee, showing more interest in public order than his predecessor, was not willing to let this slide or grant Chairman Lee the special privilege of being questioned at...

Categories Anti-Americanism/U.S. Politics