Open Sources, 13 June 2012

COMMS CHECK:  Some of you are reporting difficulty accessing this site, particularly from South Korea, and my visitors’ log agrees.  I suspect shenanigans, and I’ve been in contact with my ISP, but I’ve just been too busy to pursue the problem.  If you’re reading anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region, I’d be interested in hearing whether you can access this site.

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THIS TIME, THE WOLF IS REAL — HONEST!  I don’t doubt that this is an exceptionally dry year in both Koreas, or that domestic food production is way down, or that plenty of North Koreans are going to go hungry this year.  Unfortunately, I suspect most of them will go hungry whether we give food aid or not, assuming you can get the North Korean regime to even accept food aid at all.  Maybe at the local level, there are officials who care how many North Koreans starve.  After all, they’re out there, watching it happen.  In Pyongyang, which might as well be another country, all evidence suggests that the regime’s attitude is a combination of humanitarian apathy and economic opportunism, but only to the extent they can manipulate foreign sympathy — with the help of foreign accomplices — to get aid they can control and channel.

If we really want to get food aid to those North Koreans who need it most, there is a better way:

[S]uch is the flow of funds from defectors that it has created a new class in the North, one that is no longer dependent on the Kim family and its clans or on paychecks from the country’s moribund state-owned enterprises, which in many cases have stopped.

“They are the new rich. I think those who left North Korea and now live in South Korea outnumber the established wealthy class in the North,” a third defector surnamed Im told Reuters.

“They are the invisible rich. Everyone knows who receives money from South Korea but no one openly talks about it,” said Im, who also requested to be known by one name so she and her family could not be identified.  She said she sent about 3 million won ($2,600) last year to her parents.

While South Korea requires its citizens to get government permission to visit the North, which is rarely granted, there is little it can do to staunch the money flows.  Some of the money is used to buy off North Korean officials, many of whom are no better off than their civilian counterparts.  [Reuters]

There’s probably no way to quantify just how much of the food in North Korean markets — on which 80% of North Koreans now rely for their food supply — is smuggled, but it’s probably a substantial amount.  If so, the conditions now exist to channel this stream of funding through clandestine NGOs that would distribute food and medicine according to need, rather than party loyalty.  Those NGOs could smuggle small amounts of food in themselves, or they could pay off border guards to let shipments pass.  This not only addresses the humanitarian issue, at least in part, but it also builds a clandestine political and human intelligence network inside North Korea, and weakens the regime’s grip on the economy and food supply.

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IS IT THAT NORTH KOREANS REALLY CHANGE their minds so quickly after making their escape, or it is we didn’t really know their true views beforehand?  I’d say it’s both, in roughly equal proportions.

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NEWS FLASH!  China still undermining U.N. sanctions against North Korea; Generalissimo Mao still dead.

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YET ANOTHER U.N. SCANDAL IN NORTH KOREA:

The U.S. State Department is investigating allegations of United Nations sanctions violations relating to transfers of technology to North Korea by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which is actually a part of the UN.

In a departmental press briefing on July 5th, State Department spokesperson Patrick Ventrell explained that the U.S. is engaged in an ongoing review of WIPO development projects “for both Iran and the DPRK”.  [….]

According to the original story broken by Fox News on April 3rd this year, WIPO circumvented the United Nations’ own security provisions when it made shipments to the North Korean government through China. The shipments under investigation include advanced computer technology and data-storage servers financed through the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) office in Beijing.  [Daily NK]

Previous U.N. scandals in North Korea have involved carbon credits and development aid, and let’s not forget the antics of W.H.O head Margaret Chan, or the greater debate about whether U.N. food aid is doing more harm than good.  Overall, the U.N.’s record in North Korea has been a pretty dubious affair since approximately July 1953.

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WHY CHINA PROPS UP NORTH KOREA:  For all the reasons I’ve been articulating for the last eight years, as Andrei Lankov further explains.  Pretty much everything Andrei says here makes sense to me, except when he says that sanctions won’t solve this problem.  The real truth is that sanctions alone won’t solve this problem, at least until we start sanctioning the Chinese entities that prop up North Korea.

To extend the point, I see no hope whatsoever of a diplomatic or political solution until China concludes that the status quo is a greater financial and security liability than whatever would follow a cutoff of Chinese assistance to North Korea.  What would create those conditions?  First, the existence of a robust, disciplined, and well-trained South Korean occupation force to pacify the country as quickly as possible; second, a rise of a clandestine North Korean political organization that’s prepared to assist it (and deter Chinese intervention); and third, a steady supply of anti-tank weapons, which have certainly had quite an impact in Syria.

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I EAGERLY AWAIT BRIAN MYERS’ EXPLANATION FOR North Korea’s creepy and unauthorized Disney show:

In addition, Kim had a young woman seated next to him–girlfriend, relative?–whose presence is inspiring much head-scratching about their relationship, if any. Is she actually his adviser on cultural affairs?

Throughout, much speculation has also centered on Kim’s education in Switzerland, which is said to suggest that he might be more open to Western mores. But this is probably a misreading. Switzerland, a dour and thrifty nation, prides itself on its self-reliance, precisely the qualities that North Korea’s leaders have sought to inculcate in its population in a much, much more extreme version. Nevertheless, North Korea’s foray into Disney should not be interpreted as a sign of a suddenly mellowing regime but, rather, the mercurial proclivities of a tyrannical leader who presides over a gulag. Like the Soviet Union, North Korea is a country where yesterday’s weather can be altered by decree. North Korea, in other words, is not Mickey Mouse.  [The Atlantic]

That makes more sense to me than the strained efforts of the AP to suggest that this is the latest sign of reform.  There are much stronger contraindications of that, though you won’t catch the AP reporting them these days.

So how do I explain something so irrationally bizarre?  No explanation seems to fit better than one individual’s hedonism, which is likely to be the only field in which Jong Un enjoys real power anyway.  Still, you’d think his myth-makers and handlers would prevent him from such conspicuously Bacchanalian behavior less than eight months into his “reign.”  This hardly fits the image of a dour, incorruptible statesman-philosopher, sacrificing his earthly comforts for the good of his subjects.  In case his heft didn’t already tell you that.

Could anything make this display even more perfect for a subversive propagandist?  Yes!  In a society where proximity of pose means everything, Jong Un is seen standing next to a well-fed ex-entertainer, who was (or is) married to an Army officer.  It’s hard to be certain whether Jong Un, like his father before him, simply expropriated a favored entertainer from her husband or whether she was already divorced when the relationship began.  I only hope that our intelligence services are hard at work spreading pictures of the couple throughout North Korea, along with the all the information about her background and marital history they can find.

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IS PARK GEUN HYE’S SUNSHINE LITE POLICY really as incoherent as it seems, or is she concealing the true nature of her policy for strategic reasons?  To sum up this incisive criticism in the Daily NK, Park wants to build trust with North Korea, which (as even she implicitly acknowledges) can’t be trusted, and hints at unspecified alternatives in the apparently unforeseen event that North Korea continues to behave as it has for the last 60 years.  One thing you can say about Park here is that she’s been advocating pretty much the same policy for nearly a decade.

I’d caution anyone against projecting policies onto candidates that the reader would prefer, but which the candidate hasn’t advocated.  A candidate who won’t sell a policy before an election isn’t likely to sell it later, absent some unexpected provocation.  To believe otherwise is usually a case of projection.