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Monthly Archive: July, 2009

July 21, 2009

An Inside Look at Hanawon

It is rare to be granted a look inside Hanawon, the first stop for North Korean defectors arriving in the South, but this summer the center opened its doors to international media in recognition of its 10 year anniversary, allowing journalists (and readers/viewers) a rare glimpse into the facility. As a result of the media invite, the L.A. Times ran a story about the rehabilitation center earlier this month and just recently VOA released a video story about Hanawon and...

Categories Defectors/Refugees
July 21, 2009

Absolute Must Read: Washington Post on North Korea’s Concentration Camps

At last.  The Washington Post has done a truly detailed, comprehensive, well-researched story on North Korea’s concentration camps.  It’s a story that the Post wouldn’t have done had Anthony Faiola or Glenn Kessler been doing the reporting; Blaine Harden deserves much credit for writing what deserves to become a major exhibit in the indictment of our State Department for its culpable complicity.  The satellite imagery of the camps features prominently in the story. (Disclosure:  I provided Mr. Harden and one...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
July 20, 2009

Sanctions Upates

The big headline this week is the U.N.’s agreement on a list of entities to be sanctioned under UNSCR 1718 and 1874 (see links on my sidebar for the texts).  Frankly, I think that’s a story that’s getting a great deal more attention than it merits.  The sanctioned entities have largely been sanctioned under Executive Order 13,382 for years.  I doubt that the U.N. imprimatur is going to fend off many of North Korea’s WMD clients that the Treasury Department’s...

Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/China/Missiles/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
July 20, 2009

Gates’s Advice to Kim Jong Il: “Don’t Do Anything Stupid.”

On a visit to lovely Fort Drum, New York, last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates discounted the threat of a conventional North Korean attack: “Frankly, this is an army that’s starving. The average North Korea, at this point, is seven inches shorter than his South Korean counterpart. This is a country where the famine of the mid-1990s has affected the physical and even intellectual development of those that are now coming into the zone who would be eligible for...

Categories NK Military/U.S. Military
July 20, 2009

Seoul Should Join in Constricting North Korea’s Palace Economy

OFK favorite Sung-Yoon Lee, writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review, presses a point that the South Korean government ought to be ready to hear by now. After a sophisticated recitation of the U.S. Treasury Department’s own constriction of the North, he argues: The current ROK government now has its own chance to play a crucial role in determining the future of the Korean nation. As the self-professed sole legitimate government representative of the Korean people, Seoul must pursue a...

Categories An Alliance?/Sanctions/U.S. & Korea
July 18, 2009

The Iranian Revolution: On Again

Two weeks ago, I had resigned myself to the view that it was all over except for the show trials. But the discontent just won’t go away. After the sermon, downtown Tehran erupted in violence. Security forces attacked demonstrators, older and grayer than recent gatherings, who were chanting “Death to the dictator!” and “God is great.” Tear gas filled streets as protesters sought to enter the gates of the university, which riot police had locked. The crowds swarmed through downtown,...

Categories Iran
July 17, 2009

Kim Jong Il Death Watch

Here at OFK, many posts and comments have ruminated about whether the North Korean regime really cares about how it’s portrayed in the foreign media.  That may be a silly question to ask in light of South Korea’s unnatural obsession with its image:  the ridiculous Tokdo evangelizing, the many Chosun Ilbo stories about the popularity of Korean food overseas, or the mischaracterization as a “Korean Wave” of Korea carving out its own proportionate market share of global culture.  An obsessive...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
July 17, 2009

Was North Korea Really Behind the Cyber Attacks?

The London Times reports that a Vietnamese computer forensic company has traced the attacks from computers in North Korea back to UK, causing some papers’ headlines to strongly suggest that North Korea has been absolved.  Reading further into the Times’s piece, one reads that the attack was traced back to a “master computer” operating from a Brighton, UK ISP, but makes no conclusions as to who was controlling that computer. The New York Times explains why it can be so...

Categories Technology
July 16, 2009

Still Having Trouble Reading this Site With Firefox?

Firefox has been all I ever use since shortly after I got a computer pre-infected with Vista.  Vista causes IE to crash and ate several of my posts.  With Firefox, there are far fewer crashes, but if there is one, I can usually restart and the half-finished post will still be there in WordPress. So with that said, try going to your upper toolbar under Tools/Clear Private Data and then check all of the boxes except “Saved Passwords” and “Offline...

Categories Blogs & Blogging
July 15, 2009

A Glimpse at the Growing Pains Connected with Reunification

While living in Korea, I was always surprised at some South Korean citizens’ belief that reunification, whenever it should happen, will be smooth sailing. Indeed, one would think that is the message the ROK government is trying to sell. Has anyone seen the video they play at the DMZ? I’m not sure if they’ve since changed it, but when I saw it, they had smiling, well-fed, healthy children running around a grassy field with butterflies and flowers and a little...

Categories Korean Law/North-South
July 15, 2009

Gary Samore on North Korea Policy

In addition to his comments on North Korea’s HEU program, Gary Samore talked about President Obama’s North Korea policy.  As someone who found Bush’s North Korea policy to be incoherent and disappointing, but who didn’t have high expectations for Samore’s boss, either, I could not be more pleased to read things like this: I think we have to create, in the case of both North Korea and Iran, a narrative by which, if the big powers work together, and if...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Sanctions/Six-Party Talks/Uncategorized
July 14, 2009

Suzanne Scholte: A War Crimes Tribunal for North Korea

With the mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il won’t burden this world for long, the civilized world faces the prospect of inheriting jurisdiction over people who’ve done some pretty awful things: On a recent trip to Seoul, a North Korean mother told me she and her 14-year-old daughter fled North Korea but were separated in China. The mother waited in China to reunite with her daughter only to discover that Chinese security agents had forced the girl back to North...

Categories Human Rights/Reconstruction
July 14, 2009

On Second Thought, Let’s Not Talk to Our Enemies Without Preconditions!

As someone who openly seeks the violent overthrow of the regime by cultivating and arming an internal opposition, I never thought I’d see the day when the Obama Administration moved to in a diplomatic direction at least as extreme as mine, and possibly more so: American diplomatic efforts on North Korea are coming under fire within the Obama administration from officials who consider talks futile and instead want to focus on halting the regime’s trade in nuclear weapons and missile...

Categories Diplomacy/Uncategorized/Washington Views
July 14, 2009

China Agrees to Sanction North Korea

Not much time to comment on this as I’m running late, but it seems China has agreed to sanction the DPRK over its nuclear test conducted earlier this year. From Bloomberg: China agreed for the first time to punish senior North Korean government officials for defying United Nations resolutions barring nuclear and missile tests, China’s deputy ambassador said. Ambassador Liu Zhenmin said his government would support imposing a travel ban and asset freeze on a “large percentage” of 15 North...

Categories China/Uncategorized
July 14, 2009

The HEU Debate Is Officially Over

From December 2002 until March 2009, it was the shared narrative of the shrill left, mainstream Democrats, and much of the spin circus in tow behind them that Kim Jong Il’s successful development of nuclear weapons was really George W. Bush’s fault.  This narrative held as infallible dogma that Agreed Framework I was successfully containing Kim Jong Il’s nuclear programs until Bush showed up to wreck it with suspect claims about WMD programs — specifically, the accusation that North Korea...

Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/WMD
July 13, 2009

Treasury Should Block “Arirang” Funds

I think it’s now fair to say that guiding groups of tourists through exhibitions of soul-crushing North Korean mind control has lost most of the arguments that justified its existence.  Rather than changing the character of the North Korean regime, it’s reenforcing it by making a profitable industry of it.  It’s become a source of hard currency to the regime, something that the world has collectively decided to cut off in the interest of the world’s security.  And finally, there’s...

Categories Propaganda/Sanctions/Sunshine
July 13, 2009

S. Korean Sources Claim Kim Jong Il Has “Serious Disorder” of the Pancreas (Updated, Bumped: Pancreatic Cancer?)

This report comes from “a South Korean intelligence official” to “a Japanese television network” to AFP, and contains no detail about the alleged condition, so the uncertainties about the accuracy of this should be obvious: The TBS network reported that Kim has been resting and is being treated at his villa in the southeasten area of Wonsan by a team specialists.  The unidentified official told TBS Kim would be aware of the disorder which was made known to US and...

Categories Kim Jong Il