Open Sources: Agreed Framework III Watch
On asylum for North Korean refugees, America leads from behind:
Some 581 North Korean defectors have been given asylum in the United Kingdom, making them the largest group of all defectors in countries other than South Korea…. The U.K. was followed by Germany with 146, the Netherlands with 32, Australia and the U.S. with 25 each and Canada with 23.
I suppose the State Department is worried that if we provoke Kim Jong Il, he might boycott disarmament talks, pursue a uranium enrichment program, or even attack South Korea. Well, thank goodness someone is working tirelessly to those hard-won gains!
The recent meetings between U.S. and North Korean diplomats have given me a sense of unease that this Administration is desperate for an opening that would eventually get us Agreed Framework III. And given the almost universal agreement about what talks and bribes can accomplish, we’re entitled to wonder why they bother:
No one expects North Korea is serious about denuclearization and Pyongyang has done nothing during Obama’s tenure to demonstrate otherwise. At the same time, however, no one wants another North Korean provocation. [Evan Ramstad, Korea Real Time]
In other words, we’re still trying to manage the problem out of the headlines, which not only puts us at the mercy of Kim Jong Il’s temper, it positively incentivizes provocative behavior. It means that no one in our government dares to make make difficult decisions to put the kind of pressure on Kim Jong Il that’s needed for diplomacy to really work, or to alter the North Korean regime enough to make effective diplomacy possible.
At the same time, South Korea shows more signs of dropping its demands for North Korea to apologize for sinking one of its warships and shelling one of its villages. I could only speculate as to whether the State Department applied pressure for South Korea to drop those demands, and you can speculate as well as I can.
It’s as if we invite them to play us. Writing in the L.A. Times, Sung Yoon Lee describes how this all runs on an endless loop.
The Chosun Ilbo has a hit piece on Kim Yong Chol, who heads up the Reconnaissance Bureau, which handles foreign intelligence operations. Kim is called the mastermind of last year’s attacks on South Korea. If you wonder why I’m skeptical about reporting that falls into the kremlinology category, it’s because the very same Chosun Ilbo just reported that Kim Jong Eun was the mastermind of those attacks, and even printed a purported North Korean document to support that theory!
Some good news, for a change: Joshua Pollock argues that North Korea’s missile trade has declined substantially since the 1990’s, in part because the customer nations have all gone into business manufacturing their SCUD-C’s and Nodongs. North Korea still sells parts and technical assistance, but the enforcement of UNSCR 1874 has hurt that trade.
When the New York Times decided to reprint the extraordinarily gullible reporting of the AP’s Jean Lee from Pyongyang, I worried that the readers of the New York Times might be gullible enough to take Lee at her word. I need not have worried. The comment section there is as harsh as anything you can see here.
Eventually, we’ll be rid of them all. For now, Kim Jong Il’s sister and rumored power-broker Kim Kyong Hui is getting medical treatment in Russia.
Missing stamp-collecting Dutch tourist shows up with op-ed in North Korean newspaper praising their election system: http://gawker.com/5829770/missing-tourist-shows-up-with-column-in-north-korean-newspaper
We? Whom?
Yes Joshua “We” here know you are reffering to his family, however ask anyone outside of Korea about the “DPRK”, or concerning DPRK affairs, “We” do not know anything about them.
yes I agree with you in terms only that China must not keep turning a brown eye to DPRK offenses. If anyone thinks that the American stock market is Volatile as of recent, let hem speak when it is revealed that the PRC failed to stop the DPRK from an above ground Nuke test by Fall Sep-Nov this year.
You seem to be insinuating that the lack of North Korean refugees in the United States is the product of a failed State Department policy of mollifying the DPRK regime so as to encourage it to behave nicely. Do you actually have evidence that the number of North Korean refugees in the U.S. is connected to such a policy, or is this just something you’ve imagined?
It’s a bit silly to expect publicly available direct evidence of precisely why State is stalling here, but there’s ample circumstantial evidence of its motives. I didn’t imagine the fact that the United States has settled a mere 120 North Korean refugees in the seven years since passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004. I did not imagine the Willie Lowman mentality of some in our State Department, or their long-standing desperation to avoid offending this regime “for the cause” of their next big deal. I did not imagine the near-total silence of our current Special Envoy on Human Rights on the topic of human rights in North Korea, or the fact that we only seem to hear from him when he’s called to Congress to explain why NKHRA implementation has been so pathetically slow. Or that the same cast of Chris Hill proteges, notably Sung Kim, has been running our Korea policy since the days when it dreamed up Agreed Framework II. You’re entitled to draw no inferences from any of this, just as you’re entitled to believe that the earth is flat because it looks that way from where you stand.
“It’s a bit silly to expect publicly available direct evidence of precisely why State is stalling here … .”
I wouldn’t necessarily expect for there to be publicly-available direct evidence of why there are fewer North Korean refugees in the U.S. than in the U.K. or Canada. I know of no such evidence myself. Which is why I was curious about the basis for your theory. Was it speculation, or did you have some evidence that you didn’t cite?
“You’re entitled to draw no inferences from any of this, just as you’re entitled to believe that the earth is flat because it looks that way from where you stand.”
I now understand the basis for your statement. You do not, in fact, have any direct evidence. Instead, you’re assuming that because State has pursued a number of policies you don’t like in the past, that the lack of North Korean refugees in the U.S. today must be a product of another such policy.
You may indeed be correct: State could be stalling in order to appease Kim Jong-il. But in order to demonstrate that this is the case, you’d need to show not only that such a policy would be consistent with other State Department policies — which I’ll assume, arguendo, that you’ve now done — but that there are no other plausible explanations for the phenomenon. And neither your original post nor your response address this question.
Also, as a stylistic matter, I don’t think your heavy reliance on sarcasm is effective. But I guess that’s a matter of taste. That said, I appreciate that you responded to my question.