Open Sources, January 22, 2014

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PARK GEUN HYE, WHO HAS a (ruthlessly) capable intelligence agency to inform her, sounds quite convinced that North Korea is about to “provoke” the South, and at least publicly, some U.S. officials say they’re worried, too.

President Park Geun-hye called for an “airtight” security posture against North Korea from South Korean soldiers and other officials on Saturday, viewing the North’s recent charm offensives as a possible prelude to imminent military provocations.

“In India, Park ordered the (South Korean) defense minister and other security-related ministers to make more efforts to keep an airtight security posture against (potential) provocations at a time North Korea is conducting a flurry of propaganda offensives,” a presidential official told reporters in New Delhi, India, asking not to be named. [….]

The official said that North has shown a pattern of issuing pronouncements for peace followed by military provocations, indicating that the latest proposal may be part of the same pattern. [Yonhap]

I don’t have an intelligence agency informing me, but I see some worrying indications that she may be right. First, the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong attacks of 2010 followed a wave of domestic discontent arising from North Korea’s December 2009 currency “reform,” which was really a currency confiscation. With signs that North Koreans are again frustrated by the regime’s oppression and market restrictions, Kim Jong Un may need a distraction to focus that anger outward. He may also calculate that a conflict could be used to elevate his personal stature, something he needs to build while carrying out a purge.

My other, more specific concern has to do with North Korea’s recent demands that North and South cease their cross-border “slander” of each other (even as the North calls for “anti-‘government’ struggle” in the South). The North’s demand that could effectively extend the North’s thought control beyond its own borders.

Of course, strictly speaking, are an attack on thought control inside North Korea itself, and I can’t help thinking that these are just the activities that North Korea has in mind, almost as if it’s trying to lay the foundation for a post-hoc justification for an attack against a balloon launch. The North Koreans have attempted to assassinate the instigator of these launches, Park Sang-Hak, before, and anti-anti-North Korean counter-protestors have shadowed these launches. I’d like Park to live to see the liberation of his homeland. That’s why I wish he’d stop announcing his launch locations and adopt flash-mob tactics instead.

Or, then again, maybe the North Koreans are talking about the disinformation campaign that I’ve also suspected the NIS of carrying out (first item), mostly with respect to lurid stories about sex that could be true, but which no one in a position to know them would ever tell.

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GREAT CONFISCATION 2.0? The Daily NK is reporting that the regime has ordered residents of Pyongyang to turn in their dollars and Renminbi and convert them to North Korean won, a process that would (a) expose the owners to confiscatory official exchange rates, and (b) put the holders of the converted North Korean currency at the mercy of the regime’s taxation, or its next currency “reform.”

The order was accompanied by the threat of forcible expropriation if the process is not complete within a month. However, the source reported little expectation that the policy will continue for long, much less that it has a chance of succeeding. [….]

“It emphasized that there is a grace period of one month in place, and therefore people should go to currency exchange locations and get it changed,” the source went on. “They intimidated people by saying they know all the ways people keep their hard currency ownership hidden and threatening serious punishment for anyone who defies state policy. There has been more fear around since the execution of the aunt’s husband [Jang Song Taek], and some people with dollars do seem to be changing them.” [Daily NK]

The Daily NK reports that people are avoiding the restriction by selling their foreign currency to private traders at more favorable market rates. Naturally, however, market rates fell significantly when the new policy was announced, so presumably elite residents of Pyongyang must have taken significant financial losses, especially on larger volumes of foreign currency that traders may be unwilling to accept.

It seems difficult to imagine that the regime can enforce this new order (regarding currencies it doesn’t control) as easily as it enforced the 2009 confiscation. The effect of this measure, however, will be focused on people with status and privilege, and maybe one day we’ll know if the effect proves to be destabilizing.

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THAT’S HOW NORTH KOREA USUALLY NEGOTIATES WITH US: North Korea agrees to pay Panama the delectably appropriate sum of $666,666 to get its arms-smuggling ship and most of its crew out of hock. I don’t think men should be held in detention if the authorities don’t intend to charge them, even if their captivity does sound far more comfortable than their normal working conditions.

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STOP ACCUSING US OF COERCING CONFESSIONS OR THE HOSTAGE GETS IT: North Korea parades Ken Bae, who is ailing in captivity, before the cameras for a “press conference,” where he’s coerced into denouncing everyone from Merrill Newman to Joe Biden, to his own sister. The AP’s coverage of the event is appropriately skeptical, to about the same extent as UPI’s report.

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DENNIS RODMAN ENTERS REHAB: This is how public figures shift blame and excuse the inexcusable today. But it certainly is the perfect ending to a journey that did so much to advance North Korea’s progression toward global pariah status. Although Rodman’s behavior isn’t so easily excused, those who actually cared knew that Rodman had an alcohol problem, and the rest of us knew that he partook during his visits to Kim Jong Un’s palaces and yachts. But it’s his life to throw away.

Rodman isn’t the only one whose conduct isn’t easily excused. I wonder if this revelation about (at least one) source of Rodman’s troubled conduct gives any pause to those who, largely because of their political views, their financial interests, or their misguided vanity were egging Rodman on as he sprinted down his awkward path toward self-destruction.

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HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: NO IMPROVEMENT UNDER KIM JONG UN: “‘Kim Jong Un has picked up where his father and grandfather left off, by overseeing a system of public executions, extensive political prison camps, and brutal forced labor,’ Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Tuesday from Thailand.” In fact, HRW’s original report actually says that Kim Jong Un has “deepen[ed]” his father’s “abusive rule.”

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I wonder if these hipster libertarian types who are treating a Bitcoin transaction from Pyongyang like a victory for their economic liberation theology have considered the extreme money laundering risk presented by putting an unregulated currency into the hands of one of the world’s most notorious money launderers. This is not a breakthrough for global economic freedom. What it is, is a threat to the legitimacy and integrity of Bitcoin, and potentially, a justification to regulate it.

There’s also a deeper fallacy at work here. The premise of all reform-through-commerce theories about North Korea is that North Korea is a socialist state whose system is incompatible with commerce. In fact, the state is incompatible with commerce that it doesn’t control — after all, economic freedom is still freedom — but it has long depended on commerce it does control to pay its police, feed its army, commingle and conceal the proceeds of its illicit activity, and sustain the increasingly affluent lifestyles of the elites. If you really believe trade on Kim Jong Un’s terms will change the system, you don’t understand the system.