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Monthly Archive: February, 2010

February 11, 2010

China: We Have No Dissidents!

CHINA declared on Thursday it had ‘no dissidents’, just hours after a Beijing court upheld an 11-year jail term for one of the country’s top pro-democracy voices. ‘There are no dissidents in China,’ foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters at a regular news briefing. [AFP, via Singapore Straits Times] Either they just strayed into Alejandro Cao de Benos’s alternative reality, or I just didn’t know they’d been there all along.

Categories China/WTF?
February 11, 2010

Help LiNK Win $250,000

[Update: Thanks to all of you who voted, to Sonagi for posting at The Marmot’s Hole, and to the Marmot readers who have now voted LiNK into 6th place. To vote, click the clever logo on the sidebar.] One of the worthiest organizations trying to help the people of North Korea is Liberty in North Korea, or LiNK, whose President Hannah Song, sends the following request: LiNK is currently up for a grant from Pepsi for $250,000! In a little...

Categories Activism/Refugees
February 11, 2010

11 February 2010

The folks at Slate (and one reader, thanks) e-mailed me this review of Nothing to Envy, which contemplates the problem of breaking down North Korea’s isolation: The answer is one that policy-makers from Washington to Seoul often overlook, fixated as they are on two stark options as they confront North Korea’s nuclear threat: either impose harsh sanctions or promise a “grand bargain” of complete normalization and massive financial assistance in return for denuclearization. Either put a stone slab on top...

Categories Anju Links
February 11, 2010

North Korean Premier Apologizes for Great Confiscation

If absolute power is never having to say you’re sorry, what could this possibly mean? On Friday, Premier Kim Yong Il apologized for the aftermath in a meeting with government officials and local village leaders, the mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported, citing an unidentified source in North Korea. “Regarding the currency reform, I sincerely apologize as we pushed ahead with it without a sufficient preparation so that it caused a big pain to the people,” Kim read a statement during...

Categories Kremlinology/NK Economics/Resistance
February 10, 2010

10 February 2010

Some perspective for those of you in Washington now: the weather right now in Verkhoyansk (55 below, as I write this). As a native of South Dakota, I never thought I’d see this place get a respectable blizzard._____________ An interview with Ha Tae Keung, a/k/a Young Howard, of Open News._____________ North Korea tries to keep the lid on dissent, which Alejandro Cao de Benos assures us does not exist._____________ The Korea Herald interviews Todd Zitin, the creator of Korean News...

Categories Anju Links
February 10, 2010

North Korean Harvest Output Declines Again

Reports of short harvests have been perennial in North Korea since 1993, but the worst of the famine probably ended in 2000. Some credit the end of the famine to international food aid, but North Korea’s own restrictions on international food aid have kept most of it out since late 2005. That year, I predicted — wrongly — that the result would be another famine. Although the regime’s severe cutback on food aid certainly must have caused hardship for many...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
February 9, 2010

Kim Jong Il Death Watch

You should read any report about Kim Jong Il’s health with skepticism. News of Great Fishwife’s health is surely among the most closely guarded of state secrets, the unguarded discussion of which must be punishable in some very harsh ways. The most obvious examples of nonsense stories of this kind were the reports that Kim Jong Il’s brain scan was intercepted by South Korean intelligence, or that after the stroke, Kim Jong Il had recovered to the point where he...

Categories Kim Jong Il
February 8, 2010

8 February 2010: I’m Sure It Depends on How You Define “Deal.”

State Department denies deal for Park’s release; also, Larry Craig still isn’t gay. If by some miracle the truth actually leaked out, State would probably say that President Obama’s announcement — the day before North Korea announced Park’s release — that he would not to re-add North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism was a mere “goodwill gesture,” or an “understanding,” but not really a quid-pro-quo. When the transcript of the State Department news conference for February...

Categories Anju Links
February 8, 2010

North Korean Gulag Survivors Tell Their Survival Stories to Bored South Korean Soldiers

As it turns out, inviting a North Korean gulag survivor to speak to South Korean troops is a lot like inviting Elie Wiesel to speak at a Pat Buchanan rally: After speaking recently to a group of young South Korean soldiers about North Korea’s harsh labor camps, former prisoner Jung Gyoung Il — himself once a soldier in North Korea’s massive army — was stunned by the questions from the audience. One soldier asked how many days of leave North...

Categories Human Rights/Korean Society/ROK Military/The Camps
February 8, 2010

Will North Korea’s Failure to Control Markets Mean the End of the Regime?

Reuters has a long round-up on the failure of the Great Confiscation, with this being the bottom line: “The collapse of the market system brought about by the currency revaluation produced rare civil uprisings. But the violence appears to have been sporadic and should fade as long as the North allows market activity to return.” Marcus Noland, catching up on the latest reports for the BBC, wonders if the failure of the Great Confiscation has damaged Kim Jong-Eun’s succession prospects....

Categories NK Economics/Regime Change
February 7, 2010

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 2

Following Part 1, here’s Part 2 of Enzo Reale’s interview with Cao. This week, Cao informs us that North Korea’s public distribution system is in perfect working order, that there are no concentration camps in North Korea, that Kim Jong Il eats the simple peasant fare as everyone else and does not in fact live in a palace, and that every single North Korean agrees with every decision the government makes. Surely I exaggerate, you say. No, Cao actually says,...

Categories Interviews/Useful Idiocy
February 7, 2010

Great Confiscation Updates and Aftermath; Demonstration Reported in Dancheon

It’s still premature to say that the North Korean regime has retreated in its attack on the system of markets, known as jangmadang, on which the majority of the people had come to depend since the collapse of the state distribution system in the 1990’s. The best available information — and the qualifiers to the aforementioned phrase should be obvious — suggests that the regime has decided against pressing the attack in certain specific places for now. For the time...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
February 6, 2010

Tonight Is the Night for Kim Jong Il to Take a Satellite Photo of Washington, D.C.

Like about 200,000 of our neighbors, we’re all freezing in the dark here. The roads probably won’t be clear by Monday, and more snow is forecast for Tuesday. Our governor says it’s breaking all previous records. We’re shivering in good spirits and have plenty to eat — my son has now beaten me in three straight games of Monopoly — but this may be the last post for a while until power is restored, meaning the unfortunate delay of Part...

Categories Blogs & Blogging/Miscellaneous
February 5, 2010

5 February 2010

I’ve mostly ignored the speculation that the Koreas will hold a summit because I think the chances of it actually happening are still pretty vaporous. One thing I will observe is that South Korea is saying that it won’t reward North Korea just for showing up, but I don’t see any chance that Kim Jong Il would attend without a payoff. Really, I think Kim Jong Il’s dispositive motivation is that payoff, while Lee’s is to look like he’s open...

Categories Anju Links
February 5, 2010

Your Arabic Word of the Day: “Zeb”

A high-ranking Pakistani diplomat reportedly cannot be appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia because in Arabic his name translates into a phrase more appropriate for a porn star, referring to the size of male genitals, Foreign Policy reported. The Arabic translation of Akbar Zeb to “biggest d**k” has overwhelmed Saudi officials who have refused to allow his post there. Zeb has run into this problem before when Pakistan tried to appoint him as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain,...

Categories WTF?