Anju Links for 2 October 2008

AS FAMINE STALKS NORTH KOREA, A BUILDING BOOM hits Pyongyang.  So where is the money is coming from, and why are pastel pink apartment blocks and skyscrapers built on mud the best use for it in such times?

What is mysterious is that North Korea appears to be as broke as ever. The country’s economy went into a free fall in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and other communist allies, and it has barely recovered. The United Nations’ World Food Program is warning that the country could be careening toward a famine similar to that of the mid-1990s, in which as many as 2 million people died.

North Korean officials insist that they’re funding the building spree on their own, in keeping with an underlying ideology that emphasizes self-reliance.

“If we rely on others, our dreams won’t be realized by 2012. It is all built with our own technology, our own material, our own labor, our own strength,” Choe said.

But analysts are skeptical of such claims, given the nation’s economy and the regime’s secretive nature and often deceptive pronouncements.

“This is a puzzle,” said Yoon Deok-ryong, a South Korean economist who recently visited Pyongyang. “The North Koreans are trying to show the outside world that they are not starving, that they are strong, but we know it is not true, so we wonder where the money is coming from.”

Many believe it’s trickling in from South Korea, China or the Middle East.  [L.A. Times, Barbara Demick]

You have to wonder why we’re pleading for the privilege of feeding people Kim Jong Il won’t.  It’s clear that he has other priorities.

SUCH AS UPRGRADING HIS newest missile testing facility.

NOT A GOOD SIGN:  Chris Hill extends his visit to Pyongyang.  Hill will reportedly offer the North Koreans immediate, pre-verification de-listing as a state sponsor of terrorism, as long as the North agrees to a someday, somehow verification protocol.  Best of all, we’d subcontract the actual verification of North Korea’s mostly illusory “disarmament” out … to the Chinese.  Yes, I’m serious.

THE PERVERSE GENIUS OF CHRIS HILL is something other than diplomacy.  It’s the art of concealing differences without really narrowing them.  When the differences become impossible to conceal, Hill makes concessions to save an “agreement” that’s really nothing of the kind.  He couldn’t do it without a lot of help from the media, of course.  They do occasionally ask hard questions, but the telling lack of straight answers seldom draws much skeptical coverage in the news people actually read.  You won’t see them raising some obvious questions about China’s good faith, for example, or contrasting the reported compromise terms against State’s claims that no new substance — just “choreography” — will be offered the North Koreans (think: La Cage Aux Folles).  More comments from Hill here.  As they say, if you want a deal badly enough, a bad deal is just what you’ll get.  All of which leaves sensible observers in the odd position of investing their hopes in the North Koreans themselves overplaying their hand.

NORTH KOREA REACTS TO THE N.K. HUMAN RIGHTS REAUTHORIZATION ACT:  “There can be no ‘human rights issue’ under the popular masses-centered Korean-style socialist system and it has never existed in the DPRK.”  Apparently, I must have mistaken this folk village for something else.

ANOTHER NORTH KOREAN SOLDIER, FOUND DEAD in the Imjin River.  I can’t believe morale, fitness, or readiness can be very good in most of their units by now.

ONE OF THEM ESCAPED FROM NORTH KOREA in 2004, but that wasn’t enough for them to be recognized as North Korean abductees during Roh Moo Hyun’s term.  That has now been rectified.