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Monthly Archive: March, 2013

March 30, 2013

Joel Wit: Agreed Frameworks “Worked Very Well”

Fortunately, Sung Yoon Lee is there to remind us of the reality of Mr. Wit’s sterling record. Depending on your perspective, you may wish to avert your eyes: Watch Kim Jong-un Orders Rockets Ready to Strike United States on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour. Some viewers may judge Wit a bit too boastful about the length of his experience dealing with the North Koreans, but on closer examination, he understates his experience almost as much as he overstates his...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
March 29, 2013

Open Sources, March 29, 2013

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR PROFILES Alejandro Cao de Benos, who was interviewed for OFK by our friend Enzo in 2010. For a starving country, North Korea certainly does a brisk trade in size 52 extra-fat uniforms. What’s most striking about Cao’s claims that North Korea has no hunger or human rights violations isn’t their blatant mendacity, really. It’s the fact that a KCNAP consumer could easily believe every word of it. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~...

Categories Anju Links
March 28, 2013

Power Hungry: 40.179N, 126.350E

You really can’t see any hint of it in this image, but this is the Huichon Number Two Power Station, the one that allegedly caused Kim Jong Il’s fatal vapor lock because the crappy concrete used to build it cracked when the reservoir was filled.  Or so the unverified rumor holds. You can see video of the dam here, a KNCAP report here that makes no reference to the dam’s problems, some cool pictures here (see #36), and more interesting stuff from Curtis here. I’m...

Categories Google Earth
March 27, 2013

New Focus on North Korea’s changing economy

They paint a vivid picture of an economy in a halting transition: * For better or for worse, loan sharks who trade in currency and their connections to the regime have become an important part of the new economy. * How businessmen make donations to regime projects to buy indulgences — letters of appreciation — from the regime, and use them as amulets against its enforcers of dependency. * The decay of the Public Distribution System (PDS) continues to progress....

Categories Drugs & N Korea/NK Economics
March 25, 2013

Open Sources, March 25, 2013

MUST SEE: Marcus Noland, speaking to the Lowy Institute in Australia, thinks that North Korea is slipping back into famine.  He thinks that the North Korea people have adapted enough that a 1990s-scale famine can be avoided, but consider this in the context of Noland’s finding that the regime itself has probably had a current account surplus since 2011. On the other hand, Kim Jong Un loves Mickey Mouse, amusement parks, the NBA, and dolphins, so reform, prosperity, and perestroika are...

Categories Anju Links
March 21, 2013

Open Sources, March 21, 2013

THE PIANIST KIM CHEOL WOONG, whom Melanie Kirkpatrick wrote about in “Escape from North Korea,” will be here in the D.C. area to play two performances this weekend.  One will be at the “home theater” of conductor Lorin Maazel, of all people, in Castleton, Virginia, on Saturday evening.  The other will be on Sunday, March 24th, and will be sponsored by a new group, NKUS (site in Korean only).  Henry Song of the North Korean Freedom Coalition calls them the...

Categories Anju Links
March 20, 2013

Follow the money. All of it.

Marcus Noland has published two fascinating charts on recent changes in North Korea’s palace economy. According to one, North Korea has begun posting a current account surplus by squeezing its poor, and by taking in foreign exchange from mysterious (but probably Chinese) sources.  That would certainly explain some of its recent, more aggressive behavior — a well-funded North Korea is menacing; an underfunded North Korea is relatively, if temporarily, conciliatory.  Judging by North Korea’s aggressive WMD development and investment in white elephants (gray...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 19, 2013

Open Sources, March 17, 2013: Plan B Watch Edition

WHACK-A-MOLE:  The news that Treasury has designated North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank under Executive Order 13382 leaves me underwhelmed.  This executive order provides for the blocking of assets of entities involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and restricts transactions with those entities, assuming we can reach them.  I’m dubious about how many assets or transactions are within our reach, but the pin-pricky targeting suggests that this approach is far less comprehensive than what’s needed to defang North Korea....

Categories Anju Links/Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 18, 2013

You’re gonna need a bigger boat.

So the news today is that North Korea–which President Bush removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 for agreeing to give up its nuclear weapons programs–has warned the civilian populations of Baengnyeong-do, Yeonpyeong-do, and other islands in the Yellow Sea to evacuate now. The instrument this time is the quasi-official Uriminzokkiri, which is hosted in China, a nation that embraces the sacred principle that all speech, no matter how threatening or objectionable, has a...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Korean War II/Terrorism (NK)/Unfortunate photo ops
March 15, 2013

North Korea’s cash-for-summit demands put 2010 attacks in a new light

WERE THE 2010 ATTACKS North Korea’s way of making good on extortion?  Stephan Haggard, not widely know for his hard-line views, cites an article in the Chosun Ilbo revealing that Kim Jong Il wanted a summit with Lee Myung Bak, but at a price. The sticking point was money. How much? According to the Chosun Ilbo, $500-600 million in rice and fertilizer aid, which had effectively been cut from the first of the year, and perhaps some cash too; that was...

Categories Appeasement/Cheonan Incident/North-South/Sunshine/Terrorism (NK)/Yeonpyeong Attack
March 14, 2013

What will a U.N. inquiry on N. Korean human rights actually mean?

The U.N. Human Rights Council is set to approve an inquiry into human rights conditions in North Korea, conditions that a U.N. investigator says “may” be crimes against humanity: Marzuki Darusman, an investigator for the United Nations, is expected to present a report to the council urging the creation of an international commission of inquiry to follow up on the abuses recorded in the eight years that a United Nations official has monitored human rights in the North.  [N.Y. Times] So,...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
March 13, 2013

Why rising rice prices probably don’t mean that China is enforcing U.N. sanctions.

Hope springs eternal.  I said recently that it wouldn’t surprise me to see China temporarily restrict trade with / aid to North Korea to mislead us into thinking that it’s really pressuring North Korea to disarm, thereby slowing the momentum here to legislate what Glyn Davies calls “national” sanctions.  This trick works so well because so many of us so desperately want to believe that China will give us an easy out.  Witness this report, via Korea Real Time, that...

Categories China & Korea
March 12, 2013

Last week’s Senate hearings on N. Korea marked by skepticism and ambivalence

Last Thursday, two days after the hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee also held a hearing (on video here). This time, consensus was much less evident than ambivalence, and the views of the State Department were much more in evidence. Most of the oxygen was consumed by the first witness, Special Envoy Glyn Davies. Our Special Envoy’s testimony, by the way, was sponsored by Deer Park Bottled Water (written statement here). Chairman Bob Menendez...

Categories U.S. Politics/Washington Views