Open Sources, July 3, 2014

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AP’S JEAN LEE WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE that she became a target for lifting the curtain on North Korea, but Jean Lee really became a target for trying to tell us that the curtain was North Korea. Also, I can’t believe she keeps saying things like this:

“People often assume that our work is censored, but the North Koreans know that that’s a red line, that the AP would never tolerate censorship. So none of our material is looked at before it goes out – it goes straight to our editors at the AP and goes straight out on the wire.”

Would those be these guardians of AP’s uncomprising editorial standards, or the ones who were responsible for this? Follow what Lee is saying to its logical conclusion: if it’s true, Lee never reported on kkotjaebi, starvation, gulags, and public executions not because she couldn’t, but because she never wanted to. That Lee was in sympathy with Pyongyang’s propagandists is a harder thing to explain than the alternative than that she merely made some unsavory compromises with them.

You’ll never read an interview where anyone calls Lee on dubious claims like this, because Lee won’t do interviews with reporters who insists on questioning them. (Hat tip to a reader.)

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HOORAY FOR HIM: “An unarmed North Korean man presumed to be a civilian expressed his will to defect to South Korea early this morning near Baengnyeong Island.”

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HOORAY FOR THEM: In Hong Kong, five hundred thousand people marched for democracy this week. In the rain.

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N. KOREA PERESTROIKA WATCH: The Washington Post’s Terrence McCoy has more on North Korea’s ChocoPie ban, the enforcement of which naturally centers on their source, the Kaesong Industrial Park.

The popularity of ChocoPies is the best evidence Kaesong’s defenders can offer of its transformative impact on North Korea. You may question the deeper significance of that, but ever since I’ve frequented that Ethiopian restaurant, I’ve had an irresistible compulsion to expropriate my neighbors’ land and forcibly relocate them to teff-farming communes in Nevada.

Kaesong is responsible for other changes, of course. It poured billions of dollars into Pyongyang’s nuke fund, and it helped South Korean corporations perfect the exploitative labor-management relations that have since endeared them to thousands of Vietnamese, Chinese and Cambodian workers. As I’ve said before, you don’t change North Korea; North Korea changes you.

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FOOD AID TO N. KOREA DECLINES BY 45%:

Citing the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Washington-based Voice of America said North Korea received US$19.6 million of humanitarian aid in the January-June period, down 45 percent from the same period last year.

Maybe that has something to do with the fact that Kim Jong Un has enough cash in his sofa cushions to fund those feeding programs for years.

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NK NEWS INTERVIEWS A NIGERIAN North Korea sympathizer, who says that KCNA’s racist attack on President Obama, first reported here at OFK, was “propaganda to smear the KCNA” that was “taken out of context.” Sure, I guess that worked well enough for Donald Sterling.

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DID NORTH KOREA USE ITS RELATIONSHIPS with the Japanese media to strong-arm them into blacklisting its critics? That’s the charge from Japan-based scholar Park Doo-Jin. Also allegedly blacklisted: Ishimaro Jiro of Rimjin-gang. Kyodo News, which has had a bureau in Pyongyang since 2006, is accused of going along with the North’s demands. They should answer the charge.

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NK NEWS has a brief report about Matthew Todd Miller. I wish it had helped us understand whether (or why) he might have tried to “defect” to North Korea. Maybe more reporting will explain that.

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THE STATE DEPARTMENT SAYS North Korea won’t get what it wants by launching missiles. You know what would work better? If the Treasury Department said that North Korea will get what it doesn’t want by launching missiles.

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WHY AM I SO HAPPY? There are many reasons, of course, but one of them is that I just had my first visitor from Greenland, and that filled a pretty big empty spot in my map. You’re next, Mongolia. I’ve also had visits from the U.S. military in Afghanistan, but I’m not sure that counts. Judges?