20 March 2009

WHEREVER THEY ARE NOW, LAURA LING AND EUNA LEE are having a rough day, and that’s about all we know for certain. Although it’s not much more than speculation, the L.A. Times’s Barbara Demick suggests that Ling and Lee might have strayed into North Korean territory. Underground railroad hero Chun Ki Won doesn’t think the North Koreans would have crossed into China:

“They must have gone in too close, where it was dangerous. I don’t think the North Koreans would have dared to come out into China to kidnap Americans.”

Unless the North Koreans knew who these two women were, they would not have assumed that two Asian women in Asia were Americans. The soldiers would most likely have assumed that two well-dressed women with cameras lingering near the border were South Korean or Japanese.

South Korea’s YTN Television today quoted an unnamed source saying that the women might have crossed onto the North side unwittingly because recent drought had left river levels so low it was difficult to see the border. Another South Korean report said they were arrested after they refused to stop filming. [L.A. Times, Barbara Demick]

Chun is wrong about that. As Sonagi points out, North Korean troops have a history of crossing into Chinese territory to kidnap refugees … and the occasional American, something that could not happen without China’s complicity. They killed Rev. Kim Dong Shik, so their fate is far from assured. Laura Ling and Euna Lee took a big risk to tell us the truth, so please keep them in your thoughts.

COUNTERFEITING UPDATE: G.I. Korea points to a fascinating article by a man who claims to have gone undercover to catch the gang that conspired to smuggle North Korean supernotes into America.

Liu was a major player in a criminal conspiracy in which I purchased $2 million of the counterfeit bills. I was told by a co-conspirator with whom I negotiated that I was soon to be the exclusive distributor of the bills in the United States. I would be limited to a mere $40 million annually, purchasing the bills for about 30 cents on the dollar. [The Economic Reader, via GI Korea]

I’ve been told by a knowledgeable source that about five years ago, an indictment against the North Koreans was all ready to be filed, naming all of those who were involved in the conspiracy. Then, at the last minute, political interference got the indictment stopped. Three guesses where that interference came from.

AUSTRALIA IS HOSTING a conference on human rights in North Korea, and the surprisingly (for the U.N.) effective Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn will speak there.

WHOA, YOU MEAN THERE REALLY IS AN AXIS OF EVIL? “An Iranian defector told the West that Iran was financing North Korean moves to transform Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to the Israeli airstrike that destroyed a secret reactor, a report said Thursday. The report, written by Hans Ruehle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry, details an Iranian connection and fills in gaps about Israel’s Sept. 6, 2007, raid that knocked out Syria’s nearly completed Al Kabir reactor.” [link]

CHINESE SOLDIER KILLED, MACHINE GUN STOLEN. Maybe I shouldn’t make too much of one incident, given that we don’t even know who did this, but it seems to me that if a government doesn’t permit the peaceful resolution of grievances, then people will continue finding violent ways to resolve them.