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Monthly Archive: July, 2014

July 23, 2014

29 N. Koreans arrested in China at risk of repatriation and execution

Via the Chosun Ilbo: Twenty-nine North Korean defectors and five of their South Korean helpers were arrested in China on July 15-17. They were nabbed in Qingdao, Shandong Province, and Kunming, Yunnan Province, on an established escape route to Southeast Asia, and face deportation, possible torture and execution in North Korea. Kwon Na-hyun of an activist group for defectors on Tuesday said 20 defectors were arrested in Qingdao and nine others in Kunming. One of the helpers who were arrested is...

Categories Refugees
July 23, 2014

APG needs N. Korea like the Vienna Boys’ Choir needs Jerry Sandusky

The Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering describes itself as “an autonomous and collaborative international organisation … consisting of 41 members and a number of international and regional observers [who] are committed to the effective implementation and enforcement of internationally accepted standards against money laundering and the financing of terrorism, in particular the Forty Recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF).” APG has an Associate Membership in FATF, the world’s primary international organization dedicated to fighting money...

Categories Money Laundering
July 22, 2014

Test something louder, Dear Leader. John Kerry still can’t hear you.

With the world erupting in the greatest cascade of escalating conflicts since 1975 and President Obama’s approval rating on foreign policy at negative 21.2% – 11% lower than his overall (dis)approval rating — John Kerry eked out some time over the weekend to tempt fate with a dubious boast: I just came back from China, where we are engaged with the Chinese in dealing with North Korea. And you will notice, since the visit last year, North Korea has been...

Categories Diplomacy/Missiles/NK Military
July 21, 2014

FBME Bank denies money laundering allegations

FBME Bank, whose correspondent accounts were ordered closed by a Treasury Department action under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act last week, has responded to Treasury’s allegations of money laundering: FBME said it was “shocked” by the content of the US Department of the Treasury notice “that sets out unexplained allegations of weak AML controls,” which, the bank said, it had not been given any opportunity to comment on or refute. The bank denied the allegations, saying it had...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
July 21, 2014

U.S. should ask Mexico to search the M/V Mu Du Bong

Last week, I linked to a piece by investigative journalist Claudia Rosett (third item), noting the travels of the North Korean freighter Mu Du Bong from Cuba into points unknown in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, thanks to intrepid Miami Herald reporter Juan Tamayo, we learn that the Mu Du Bong has run aground in the Mexican Gulf Coast port of Tuxpan, not far from Veracruz. The ship is said to be empty, but there are a number of suspicious aspects of its behavior....

Categories NK Military/Sanctions
July 18, 2014

Open Sources, July 18, 2014

~ 1 ~ THAT’LL SHOW ‘EM: The State Department is sending the International Civil Aviation Organization a strongly worded complaint about North Korea’s rocket launches. Oh, and the U.N. Security Council issued a press release of disapproval: [You can change the puppets, but the strings still move the same way.] Somewhere in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un is asking his generals how many divisions the ICAO has, and Park Geun-Hye is asking her Foreign Minister whether she should send him to...

Categories Anju Links
July 17, 2014

Treasury nukes bank with possible North Korea links (updated)

The Treasury Department has gone full Banco Delta on Cyprus-based, Tanzanian-chartered FBME Bank for money laundering, terrorist financing, and possibly even Syrian WMD proliferation — proliferation that is closely linked to North Korea. According to Treasury’s press release, FBME promoted itself as a provider of no-questions-asked banking services with loose anti-money laundering controls, although I saw no evidence of this at FBME’s Web site. But according to Treasury’s more detailed Notice of Finding, FBME was laundering money for Hezbollah, illegal...

Categories Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions
July 17, 2014

Polls show Asians are increasingly fearful of China

There is much interesting news this week about how China’s bullying of its neighbors is perceived in other Asian nations, including South Korea. An AP report describes how China’s predatory hegemony in the Pacific has (as I suspected it would) alienated other Asian nations and isolated China itself. A more interesting item, noted in The Washington Post, is a graphic of Pew Research polling data from Asian countries showing that majorities (or strong majorities) throughout the region are afraid of China’s bad touch. In all,...

Categories China
July 16, 2014

Is Orascom facilitating crimes against humanity in North Korea?

New Focus International is reporting that North Korea has distributed cell phones to its secret police, and that the secret police are using them to hunt down potential refugees: The distributions of cell-phones are being made as part of efforts to aid agents of the Ministry of State Security and Ministry of People’s Security in preventing people escaping the country. As part of the process of organising an escape, North Koreans intending to flee the country often make contact through...

Categories Anju Links
July 16, 2014

Suzanne Scholte takes her case to Northern Virginia’s Korean-Americans

Last Saturday, Suzanne Scholte and I appeared at a panel sponsored by the Korean-American Association of the Washington Metropolitan Area and the Korean Freedom Alliance. Scholte, who is now running to represent Virginia’s 11th District in Congress, addressed the group and made an impassioned case for why Korean-Americans should lead their fellow Americans and the world in opposing North Korea’s crimes against humanity. WKTV, northern Virginia’s Korean-language TV channel, was also there. Video of Suzanne starts at about 4 minutes...

Categories U.S. Politics
July 16, 2014

Cracked on growing up in, and escaping from, North Korea

When I was a kid, I considered Cracked to be the Phantom Menace of humor magazines, a lame knockoff of Mad that could never be as good as the original. In the online age, Cracked matured into something funny and intelligent, and often seems to be better researched than many news sites. The other day, commenter “kcr” pointed me to this piece about North Korea in Cracked, co-authored by Michael Malice, and I was favorably impressed. In my recent interview on the CBC, I talked about the...

Categories Humor/Satire
July 15, 2014

You’d be surprised how much tougher our Zimbabwe and Belarus sanctions are than our North Korea sanctions.

The Treasury Department has just tightened its sanctions regulations on … Zimbabwe, more than doubling the number of Zimbabwean entities on Treasury’s List of Specially Designated Nationals (called the SDN List) from 77 to 161, including “President” Robert Mugabe, his wife, and his son. The sanctions are largely directed at the Mugabe regime’s human rights violations, corruption, and subversion of the democratic process. Here, from Treasury’s Federal Register notice, is a summary of what those sanctions do: Section 1(a) of...

Categories Human Rights/Sanctions
July 15, 2014

Kim Jong Un’s limp

OK, I’m convinced. The rheumy-eyed, snaggletoothed old Trotskyites at The Guardian didn’t enable the embed feature — hypocrites! — but you can watch Reuters’s video here. No official word yet on whether Kim acquired the limp by stumbling over a starving orphan on the doorstep of one of his palaces. Hat tip to a valued reader. You could also characterize this slight limp as a waddle, the kind that would be cute if a penguin walked with it; less so when...

Categories Kim Jong Un
July 14, 2014

Open Sources, July 14, 2014

~   1   ~ NORTH KOREA FIRED A MASSIVE BARRAGE OF ROCKETS over the weekend, this time in the Sea of Japan,* near the disputed inter-Korean maritime border. “North Korea fired off about 100 artillery shells in a northeast direction into the East Sea for about 30 minutes from 11:43 a.m. from a place hundreds of meters away from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in Goseong, Gangwon Province,” JCS spokesman Um Hyo-sik said. “They landed in the sea, some 1 to 8...

Categories Anju Links
July 11, 2014

Open Sources, July 11, 2014

~   1   ~ I SUSPECT THAT SOMEONE LIKE KURT CAMPBELL would have been a better man for the job, but I wish John Kerry the best of luck in his discussions with the Chinese: “China shares the same strategic goal, and we discussed the importance of enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions that impose sanctions on North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile program,” Kerry said. However, Kerry said China needs to do more in reining in its...

Categories Anju Links
July 10, 2014

Obama administration sanctions everyone except Kim Jong Un

The boys at Treasury have been busy sanctioning nasty people lately … just not nasty North Korean people. In the last 30 days, they’ve imposed sanctions on new targets in Syria, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Ukraine, and put a shiny new Executive Order on the President’s desk blocking the assets of human rights violators in Democratic Republic of Congo. Really? We do that sort of thing? Yes, we do that sort of thing — just not...

Categories Sanctions
July 9, 2014

Keeping China’s Cold War cold: The case for PATO

As our alliance diplomacy fails in Asia, “Pentagon officials,” no doubt with some prodding from the White House, say that if the Senate confirms Mark Lippert as Ambassador to South Korea, he would redouble U.S. efforts to rebuild a trilateral alliance with Japan and South Korea. “Trilateral” would be a very good start toward “multilateral,” and I wish the administration success. I don’t know much about Mr. Lippert, but a diplomatic vacuum now could mean war and chaos for us all, while...

Categories Asia/China/China & Korea