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August 26, 2006

Lefkowitz: N.Korean Refugees Welcome in America

Updates: This chatroom for English-speaking expats in Thailand has pictures of the refugees and pages of outraged, sympathic comments. One of them points to this BBC story. The Thai government’s reaction is to increase patrols on the Mekong to keep the refugees out. Look at this baby’s face. Then try to comprehend what will happen to her if she is sent back to North Korea. . . ====== (original post follows) ====== With somewhere around 175 North Korean refugees in...

Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Human Rights/Refugees/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
August 22, 2006

NK Freedom Watch, No. 5

Courtesy of Freedom House (with a hat tip to the staff there), here. Portions of this issue read like an indictment, which mainly makes it painfully obvious how far away we are from seeing a real one. The same methods of execution are applied to political criminals and economic criminals. When the death warrant is issued for a criminal, he is immediately cut off from all food supplies and his arms and legs are broken at the joints so that...

Categories Activism/Europe/Human Rights/Washington Views
August 21, 2006

Kaesong Update

[Correction: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A reader (thanks!) notes that Ms. Schwab is the U.S. Trade Representative. As it happens, the USTR has been independent from the State Department since 1962! My apologies to the State Department for the unintended defamation.] This may be the most unequivocal thing I’ve ever heard anyone in our State Department say, ever. And it pertains to including (North Korean) Kaesong products in a possible FTA with South...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
August 19, 2006

Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 4: Smoke ‘em While You’ve Got ‘em.

Several months ago, some misguided BBC staffer asked me to fight above my weight and debate former Ambassador Donald Gregg about the allegation that British American Tobacco was secretly making cigarettes in North Korea. (The debate was for a pilot program and never aired.) At the time, I argued that the decision to grow or import tobacco should also be viewed as a decision not to grow or import food. Amb. Gregg, now president of the Korea Society, is a...

Categories Axis of Evil/Counterfeiting/Drugs & N Korea/Japan/NK Economics/Washington Views
August 10, 2006

TKL Exclusive: What Hyde Will Tell Roh

Via a reliable source I can’t name, I now have some specifics on just how pretty this won’t be. Among Hyde’s expected talking points for his visit to Korea this week are the following. Disclaimer — this is a paraphrase of a paraphrase: * You want operational control of all forces during wartime. How is that going to work? Will there be a U.S. general and a Korean general commanding the entire force jointly or two forces separately? Either way,...

Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/China & Korea/Human Rights/Korean Society/NK Economics/Refugees/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
August 9, 2006

Republican Congressmen to Visit S. Korea

Regular readers of this blog and OFK before it have seen some very direct expressions of displeasure coming from Representative Henry Hyde to the South Korean government, or whizzing past its ears on the way to North Korea, often scanned in in their original and complete form (here, here, here, here, here, here). So when Yonhap reports that Hyde, the outgoing Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, is on his way to Seoul to visit President Roh Moo Hyun,...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
July 28, 2006

Kim Jong Il, Unplugged

“You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone.” — Al Capone In an interview with Radio Free Asia (Korean only), Raphael Perl of the Congressional Research Service suggests exactly what I suspected about polite requests from U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey to crack down on North Korean money laundering — the polite requests are backed by some powerful veiled threats: One option available to the US government, although this is...

Categories Counterfeiting/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
July 27, 2006

V.P. Cheney Speaks at Korean War Memorial

[Thanks to a reader for forwarding; this is an excerpt.] In the course of the struggle, our good ally, South Korea, sustained horrendous losses, both military and civilian, at the hands of the communist forces. Yet so much of the suffering that came to South Koreans in that period of war has been the daily experience of their brothers and sisters in the North for the more than 50 years since. North Korea is a scene of merciless repression, chronic...

Categories Human Rights/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
July 25, 2006

Race for Chairmanship of House Int’l Relations Committee Heats Up

Whoever replaces retiring Rep. Henry Hyde as Chairman will have big shoes to fill, particularly when it comes to Hyde’s blunt moral clarity on North Korea and those who would appease its regime, as well as on Japan’s need to come to terms with its own past. Five candidates are said to be seeking the Chairmanship, presuming that the Republicans hold the House in November. I will express strong opinions on just those of whom I know through the (admittedly...

Categories Washington Views
July 23, 2006

MUST READ: NYT on NK Counterfeiting

The New York Times has a very extensive article on North Korea’s counterfeiting operations: By 1984, as North Korea’s planned economy began to fall apart, Kim Jong Il, who by that time was effectively running much of the government, issued another directive, according to the North Korean specialist, who told me he has obtained a copy of the document. It explained that “producing and using counterfeit U.S. dollars” was a means, in part, for “overcoming economic crisis. The economic crisis...

Categories Counterfeiting/NK Economics/Washington Views
July 19, 2006

An Image I’ll Never Shake

… the head of a murdered child, laid out in a field in a North Korean village, with residents brought down to see if anyone knew whose child this had been. Like twelve other wandering, homeless children before him, he had been lured into one of the last remaining restaurants in the starving district. Once the owner lured the children in, she would bathe them, and then strangle them. And butcher them. And then, she would sell their flesh to...

Categories Activism/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Washington Views
July 6, 2006

Statement from Rep. Henry Hyde

This just in. Many thanks to the reader who forwarded this. Today, North Korea acknowledged that it fired seven missiles, including an intercontinental missile, the Taepodong 2, as a “routine military exercise.” The long range missile, which is designed to have the capability to reach the United States, failed within a minute of its launch and therefore represents no immediate threat to the United States. However, the successful short range missile firings constitute a direct threat to our troops in...

Categories "United" Nations/Washington Views/WMD
June 28, 2006

Balbina Hwang Nominated to Key Post at State

Balbina Y. Hwang was nominated as a special assistant to Christopher Hill, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. …. On issues pertaining to North Korea, the analyst made clear that a hardline stance would continue to be be taken. She said diplomacy would stand at the forefront of dealings with the North, but the North Korean nuclear issue could only be resolved through pressure on Pyongyang. She said Washington’s open criticism of the North’s human rights...

Categories Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
May 19, 2006

Bush’s Old “New” Approach

[Update 2, 5/18: On the other hand, the “Kim Jong Hill” plan looks great next to the Richard Lugar plan, which is nothing more than a shiny new formula for buying lies with bribes. Lugar is a very nice person to meet and has his heart in the right place, but diplomatically, this is not the thing to be proposing when our financial crackdown and our political offensive are both showing some promising signs of success. When dealing with gangsters,...

Categories Appeasement/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Human Rights/NK Economics/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized/Washington Views/WMD
May 15, 2006

Growing U.S.-Japanese Fracas Over Yasukuni Visits

Yesterday, I added the following “Link of Interest:” Rep. Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, has a message for President Junichiro Koizumi. Hyde, a veteran of the Pacific Theater of World War II and no fan of Japan’s revisionist view of history, suggests that Koizumi won’t be invited to address the House during his upcoming state visit if he intends to visit the Yasukuni Shrine this summer. . . . I swear there must be a clock...

Categories Diplomacy/History/Japan/Japan & Korea/Uncategorized/Washington Views