Open Sources, March 27, 2014

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CONSEQUENCES: The State Department sends a strong hint that it’s mulling more sanctions on North Korea in response to the North’s recent missile tests, including two medium-range missiles fired toward Japan, but offered no details on the type of sanction or whether they would be unilateral or at the U.N. This separate report, however, says that our U.N. ambassador is talking with other members of the Security Council.

If State does press for U.N. sanctions, that would almost inevitably involve the U.S. in efforts to sanction North Korea (and refer its officials for prosecution) for its crimes against humanity. It would also mean, contra my speculation here, that no diplomatic deal is on the near horizon.

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DENNIS HALPIN CALLS CHINA OUT FOR HYPOCRISY on North Korean human rights:

If Mr. Xi is concerned over the sexual exploitation of women and children, he does not need to visit the new Comfort Women museum in Nanjing commemorating human rights atrocities from over seventy years ago. The tragedy of North Korean women being sexually trafficked in China is not history — it is happening today. And it is a situation, unlike Nanjing, where Mr. Xi could take immediate action.  The best way to pay homage to the Korean Comfort Women would be to assure that their North Korean sisters in China today are not sexually exploited.   

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TREASURY ISSUES ANOTHER ADVISORY about money laundering risks emanating from North Korea. These are a fairly regular occurrence now. They certainly pressure the regime’s finances, but they don’t cut them off, either.

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YESTERDAY WAS THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY of the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan, a sneak attack the killed 46 South Korean sailors.

In the immediate aftermath of the sinking, the South Korean public reacted with confusion and denial, but much of that seems to have dissipated when North Korea shelled Yeonpyeong Island eight months later. Yesterday, both of South Korea’s major political parties demanded a North Korean apology for the attack, which tells you at lot about where the consensus has landed.

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I WISH ADMIRAL AKBAR HAD BEEN IN THE ROOM when Park Geun-Hye was briefed on the idea of that anti-“slander” agreement with North Korea, because in retrospect, because it was pretty obvious that Park was about to be trapped by North Korea’s double standards of interpretation:

North Korea has made a blistering verbal attack on South Korean President Park Geun-hye, calling her a “faithful servant and stooge” of the U.S. and comparing her to a “blabbering” peasant woman. [….]

The North’s attack was in response to Park’s speech this week at a nuclear summit at The Hague, where she warned Pyongyang’s nuclear material could wind up in the hands of terrorists or spark a colossal nuclear accident.

A North Korean government spokesman called the speech “dumb,” saying Park should stop “rambling recklessly” if she wants improved relations. He also said the comments “violently trample” an agreement that the two Koreas to stop slandering each other. [Voice of America]

More here. Any agreement between a free society and a totalitarian society to control speech is necessarily to the disadvantage of the free society.

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NORTH KOREA, WHICH WAS REMOVED FROM THE LIST of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, has “threatened … to ‘deal merciless sledgehammer blows’ to South Korea for allegedly disseminating leaflets critical of” its regime. I suppose they’re referring to the leaflets that were actually disseminated for Park Sang-Hak and Fighters for a Free North Korea.

If North Korea is stretching to implicate South Korea for something South Korea didn’t actually do, it suggests that the entire agreement was created as a pretext for some planned provocation.    

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THE ASAHI SHIMBUN HAS RUN A SERIES of excellent reports on human rights in North Korea, in the wake of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry report and in light of Japan’s co-leadership of the effort to get the Security Council to act on it.

The articles cover the vulnerability of North Korean refugee women to human traffickers, the ubiquity (and disintegration) of the state’s thought control, the plight of ethnic Koreans who moved from Japan to North Korea, and a report, in cooperation with the Dong-a Ilbo, offering more refugee testimonials about atrocities in the North. One of those testimonials really stuck with me:

A man in his 60s who was mobilized to demolish a camp for political prisoners said: “The bones of children were dug up from the ground. There were also tools designed for children, so it appears they were forced into labor.”

Could this have been Camp 22?

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I HAVE TO AGREE WITH THOSE who say this Kim Jong Un haircut story sounds like bullshit.

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I’M BEGINNING TO THINK THAT YONGSAN GARRISON is going to be there forever.

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EWW. Rimjingang looks at North Korea’s “artificial meat.”

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OF COURSE IT IS. In addition to those statues of Joshua Nkomo, North Korea is also building statues of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Recall that the U.N. POE report cast suspicion on those projects as schemes to conceal payment for weapons and other prohibited items.

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THE WONDERFUL ROBERT KAPLAN has written a very insightful piece in The Atlantic on the balance between isolationism (and its hidden costs) and interventionism (and its more obvious costs). I don’t want to discourage you from reading this in the least, because it’s well worth reading in full, but as is so often the case, Monty Python summarized the argument quite nicely, years ago. (This entry is dedicated to Bruce Klingner.)

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HOW CHINA CENSORS YOUR NEWS: By pressuring corporate leadership and shareholders of news organizations, which caused at least one news service, Bloomberg, to pull a major story.