Open Sources, March 20, 2014

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SO U.S. NAVY SEALS HAVE BOARDED that North Korean-flagged tanker in Libya, and we may soon find out if the ship was connected to North Korea after all, Pyongyang’s denials notwithstanding. If North Korea was up to something fishy, disavowing it wasn’t a smart move. That gave us grounds to call the vessel stateless and board it.

Update: Marcus Noland has a possible explanation, but my intuition says this isn’t the whole story.

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IF YOU’D LIKE TO READ a Chinese translation or a Korean mistranslation of our New York Times piece, have at it. The Korean-language piece incorrectly states that in 2012, North Korea spent $1.3 billion on its nuclear and missile programs. That’s actually what it spent on missile programs alone, according to South Korean intelligence sources.

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CNN HAS A VIDEO INTERVIEW of Ahn Myong Chol describing the deaths of five children who were attacked by dogs in a prison camp where he was a guard. There are also a few snippets of clandestine video of the camps I hadn’t seen before.

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DID YOU KNOW THAT South Korea appoints shadow governors of North Korean provinces? Neither did I.

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THE SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST calls for China to “reign in” North Korea. The call isn’t prompted by North Korea’s crimes against humanity, but by shelling that crossed the path of a Chinese airliner. Instead, China calls for “all relevant parties will do more that is conducive to peace and stability” after China’s puppet fires off a couple dozen rockets that appear to be based on a Chinese design.

What would actually be conductive to peace and stability would be for China to stop proliferating weapons technology to North Korea, and to cut off Pyongyang’s funds until it disarms.

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THE LEGACY OF NORTH KOREA’S CURRENCY “REFORM” is that North Koreans have stopped accepting the North Korean won:

According to internal North Korean sources, in recent times transactions have started to take place entirely in Chinese Yuan (RMB). When 100 Yuan is presented in payment, the transaction is computed at the daily black market exchange rate and change is then provided in 10 and 1 Yuan bills. This is a new development; previously, it was the absence of small denomination bills and coins that precluded completing transactions in hard currency.

The dollar is also widely circulated. But other than making it harder for Pyongyang to confiscate wealth from the people, I’m not sure what the impact of this will be.

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ENTERPRISING NORTH KOREANS have gone into the inter-city bus business, something that’s only possible because the owners and passengers pay hefty bribes to bypass checkpoints and travel pass regulations.

A source from North Hamkyung Province told Daily NK on the 11th, “Trains only run about once a week, and you’d be a fool if you believed that they would run on time. Demand has risen thanks to this state of affairs, so people are making good money from running servi-cha.”

“If you want to ride a servi-cha you can’t use Chosun currency, you have to use Chinese or American money,” the source went on to claim. “You can get anywhere in the country that you want for 200 Yuan.”

The source said that people in Hyesan opt to travel by servi-cha in part because the journey can take up to a week by train but only takes a day by servi-cha. The route from Pyongsung to Chongjin costs 100 Yuan, and a similar amount is required for the trip from the North Hamkyung Province county of Kilju to the border near Hyesan. 

If this experiment prospers, it will further erode the regime’s control over the movement of people, information, and goods from region to region, city to city. As always, these roots of change grow from the bottom up, and have to push their way through a stifling pavement of oppression.

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THIS IS WHY I HAVE MIXED FEELINGS about those so-called family reunions:  “North Korea’s pre-eminent mathematician Cho Ju-kyong reportedly committed suicide a decade ago after severe criticism from authorities for weeping in front of his long-lost mother during a reunion of families separated by the Korean War.” (Hat tip to a reader.)

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SENATOR MARCO RUBIO (R, FL) has called for more sanctions on both Cuba and North Korea over the Chong Chon Gang seizure. And South Korea answers North Korean fireworks by threatening to call for more U.N. sanctions, although it sounds like an empty threat to me.

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SOME KOREAN LANGUAGE NEWS COVERAGE about H.R. 1771, from Radio Free Asia, the Dongpo News, and the Overseas Koreans Times, along with some English language coverage in the Christian Post.

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I HAVE PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED KIM JONG UN’S North Korea as functionally fascist, and that view gains some support here, in the pages of Foreign Policy (hat tip: Marcus Noland).

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THIS MUST BE THE MOST INTERESTING AND ORIGINAL OP-ED about North Korea I’ve read (excluding those I’ve helped write) in a very long time — James Romm, a professor of Classics at Bard College, compares Kim Jong Un to Nero in the pages of the L.A. Times. I don’t suppose the analogy can have that much predictive value in an age of global finance, when mass media penetrate to the world’s darkest places eventually, but the psychologies of the two rulers seem remarkably similar. (Hat tip: Sung-Yoon Lee)

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PEGGY NOONAN: “Not being George W. Bush is not a foreign policy. Not invading countries is not a foreign policy. Wishing to demonstrate your sophistication by announcing you are unencumbered by the false historical narratives of the past is not a foreign policy. Assuming the world will be nice if we’re not militarist is not a foreign policy. What is our foreign policy? Disliking global warming?”

Yes, the President’s foreign policy has seemed particularly inattentive and passive recently. I’ve often expressed my appreciation that at least President Obama hasn’t repeated the errors of his predecessors to make bad deals with North Korea out of a blind urge to “do something,” but doing nothing isn’t acceptable when North Korea may already have a nuclear weapon and the effective means to deliver it.