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Monthly Archive: March, 2008

March 10, 2008

Video: The Vice Guide to North Korea

I know, I know, you’ve seen a thousand permutations of this same tour circuit, but this one is so much edgier and funner than the rest of them. We take for granted that we can satize anything (well, except for Ohmmad-May and the Oran-Kay) without consequences, and occasionally describe ourselves as brave for it. You want brave? These guys smuggled videocameras into North Korea for the express purpose of making a satirical documentary. Now that’s brave: The culture shock is...

Categories Humor/Satire/Inside NK
March 10, 2008

The Forked Tongue of Lee Jong-Seok, Part 4

You’ve probably already forgotten him, but the man who once sustained Kim Jong Il’s centrifuge fund the North Korean people with trainloads of cash so recently is now trying to make the transition to scholar and elder statesman. In the course of doing so, he reveals a rather obvious fact -that North Korea’s per capita annual income is fact much lower than the official Bank of Korea estimate, $1,100. The real figure is probably closer to $400, putting North Korea...

Categories Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid
March 10, 2008

Wall Street Journal Video on the N.Y. Phil Visit

The reporter, Evan Ramstad, covers Korea regularly and does a good, balanced report in his narration. Bonus points for anyone who can identify the background music. Update: Keep pedalling! Their plane hasn’t taken off yet! We were feted with multi-course dinners of salmon, crab gratin, lamb and pheasant. Our breakfast buffet was decorated with ice sculptures and included foods meant to cater to American palates. OK, some of it was a little weird, like the banana and tomato sandwich. But...

Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming
March 9, 2008

N. Korean Freedom Coalition Writes to Lee Myung Bak, Demands Inquiry into Massacre of 22 Refugees

If you haven’t heard of this yet, the background is here, here, and here. Now, the North Korean Freedom Coalition has written to South Korea’s new President to ask him to look into why this happened. I should say that I had nothing to do with the writing of their excellent letter. Not to be confused with this more recent massacre, in case you’re keeping track. If you’d like to join or contribute to the North Korean Freedom Coalition —...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
March 8, 2008

Who Would Let This Child Die?

The Chosun Ilbo’s Korean edition is reporting on the heartbreaking and maddening story of Kim Seong-Ryong, a 7 year-old* boy who finds himself caught between the gears of four governments that don’t care if he lives or dies. The story began as a rare exception to the terrible fate most North Korean women suffer in China. Most find themselves raped and enslaved, or end up like this woman did. (I’ll note here that most of their South Korean sisters know...

Categories Refugees
March 8, 2008

Need me to translate that for you?

Top U.S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill said Thursday it is important for North Korea to submit a full and complete declaration of its nuclear activity as required under a six-party deal by the end of this month.   ”It’s important we’ll get through this declaration in March. There is no drop-dead deadline, but it is important to try to get through this in March because we’re running out of time,” Hill said, referring to the change in the U.S. administration next...

Categories Six-Party Talks
March 8, 2008

Hill: Gas Chambers, Concentration Camps, and Refugee Massacres No Impediment to Full Diplomatic Relations After All

Last February, just after Chris Hill rolled out that  landmark achievement called Agreed Framework 2.0 — how is that working out, by the way? —  he went to Congress to defend  his amorphous  cloud of ether  against some obvious questions about how the North Koreans might interpret it and  what laws the agreement might actually break in its application.  You mentioned certain laws of ours that reflect human rights issues and humanitarian law. I can assure you that any agreement...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Six-Party Talks
March 8, 2008

That’s funny. I thought they were building a baby milk factory.

North Korea admitted to sending engineers to military-related and other facilities in Syria during its recent talks with the United States over its nuclear program, diplomatic sources in New York said Friday.  Pyongyang, however, denied its involvement in Syrian nuclear development, according to the sources.  [Kyodo News] If you say so.  Could this be the beginning of a half-assed “declaration,” no doubt scrawled out on the back of a bar napkin? (Hat tip to a friend.) Update:   Andy Jackson...

Categories Proliferation
March 7, 2008

Can Kim Jong Il Outlive “Military First?”

In the last two months, I’ve come to believe that the decay of Kim Jong Il’s control of North Korea is accelerating. I’m not quite on board with Jane’s, which predicts imminent collapse, because regime collapse is not proceeding at equal rates in all areas of North Korea, and history tells us that there’s been plenty of dissent in North Korea that the regime was able to contain, localize, and suppress. There are, however, clear signs that chaos is taking...

Categories Kremlinology/Regime Change
March 7, 2008

Another Bleak Report on North Korea’s Food Crisis

In a recent newsletter, the Good Friends, a South Korean aid group, said that only those people in North Korea with relatively good living conditions have managed to live on daily meals, while poorer people have been on the verge of starvation in advance of spring, typically a season in which food shortages are at their most severe. [Hankyoreh] The Hanky, overlooking the impact of the North Korean regime’s own rejection of most international food aid, cites three factors in...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
March 7, 2008

State Dep’t Airbrushes Its N. Korea Human Rights Report

Back during law school,  I  took the Foreign Service exam, passed on the first try,  and interviewed for a job in the State  Department.   Today, I’d be less ashamed if I’d auditioned for La  Cage Aux Folles, so this isn’t easy for me to admit.  I flew all the way down to Dallas for  the interview phase,  only to come face-to-face with a bunch of pony-tailed hippies in suits.  If there’s one thing I cannot pretend not to despise, it’s...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights
March 6, 2008

We’re screwing up the U.S.-Japanese alliance … but what for?

On the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, Kyoko Nakayama, a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan, tries”>tries to keep America’s attention on  an issue the Bush Administration wants you to forget.  If South Korea care about its abductees as much as Japan does about its abductees, a lot more of them  might be free.  Of course, if the United States cared as much about Japan’s abductees as it once pretended to, it would not have done such lasting...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Japan
March 6, 2008

Anju Links for 6 March 2008

COST-SHARING ISN’T GOING AWAY as an issue between the United States and South Korea. Ambassador Vershbow continues to make an issue of it even after President Lee’s inauguration. LEAST FAVORED NATION STATUS: North Korea may have the world’s worst dictatorship, but it’s only the second least liked nation in America. Iran, always a strong and deserving contender, is liked the least. A HUMAN RIGHTS DEPARTMENT in the Unification Ministry? I GUESS YOU COULD CALL THAT AN IMPROVEMENT: North Korea, which...

Categories Anju Links
March 6, 2008

Just Seven Months to Go: Kim Jong Il Stalls, We Let Him

All signs point to North Korea viewing last week’s New York Phil concert as a substituting for denuclearization, rather than complimenting it. We are no closer to a North Korea presenting its declaration. To the extent North Korea believes that the Clapton Gambit has shifted our public conversation to superficial gestures, or that stalling will earn more concessions, we’re further from it. Evans Revere’s “16-inch broadside of soft power” impressed Kim Jong Il approximately as much as three inches of...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Russian Far East
March 5, 2008

Chosun Ilbo Produces Four-Part Documentary on N. Korean Refugees

[Update: OK, that TBS network that’s showing this series turns out not to be this one, but a Japanese network. I’ll let you know about U.S. broadcast times when I hear more.] Yesterday, I wrote about a disturbing economic trend in North Korea that I hadn’t known previously — the regime’s practice of lending food at usurious interest rates. The original report from Good Friends doesn’t specifically say what the penalty for non-payment is, but it must be starvation or...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Human Trafficking/Refugees
March 5, 2008

North Korea Has a Meth Problem, Part 2

After I wrote here recently about North Korea’s growing meth problem, it occurred to me that I never talked about how, as a prosecutor, I learned how awful meth really is. I spent just shy of two years of my Army time assigned to Ft. Irwin, California, home of the OPFOR. During most of that time, I was the prosecutor, or Trial Counsel. Irwin is a great place to drive a T-72, shoot AK’s, or go out on field exercises...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Korean Society/UCMJ & SOFA