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Category: Diplomacy

November 9, 2006

The Czech Republic’s ‘Peculiar Institution’

“If someone calls it slavery …, I’m not the person responsible for that.” The IHT looks at the conditions in which North Korean women labor in the Czech Republic.  Some will  say  — and I will agree —  that the women certainly look better fed and clothed than their counterparts at home.  One could say the same for workers at Kaesong, to  a lesser extent,  who probably also eat better than their peers.  Like those meeting the classical definition of...

Categories Appeasement/Europe/Human Rights
November 8, 2006

The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard

“Our interest is a stable North Korea.” — Bill Richardson They sell uranium to Libya, sell  missiles to Iran and Syria, renounce or violate every agreement they make, kill “impure” babies, gas kids, put the handicapped in concentration camps, and intentionally starve millions of their people.  And we want  them to be able  to go on doing that?  My idea of our interests obviously differs from Bill Richardson’s.  The North Koreans have fooled him so many times, he’s obviously beyond...

Categories Diplomacy/Washington Views/WTF?
November 8, 2006

Wobble Watch: Robert Gates on North Korea

A few links that may interest (or depress) you.  In 2004, Gates teamed up with Zbigniew Brzezinski to call for direct bilateral talks with Iran.  Procedurally, you can’t say that we gain much by letting the Europeans do it for us, since we certainly don’t share a common set of interests or base beliefs with Europe.  Substantively, I don’t see what you can gain by talking to a man as hell-bent as Ahmedinejad.  Especially if we show weakness in Iraq,...

Categories Diplomacy/U.S. Military/Washington Views
November 7, 2006

S. Korean Defense of Kaesong Raises More Questions Than Answers

Last spring, the U.S. Special Envoy on Human Rights in North Korea and some  NGO’s first raised concerns about the rights of workers at North Korea’s Kaesong Industrial Park, which  hosts just  over a dozen South  Korean factories.   The  Unification Ministry initially tried to allay those concerns by bringing journalists and some foreign dignitaries up to Kaesong for guided tours.  This did not work  as planned.  The U.S. Ambassador wandered around and snapped pictures of all the U.S.-made machine tools that...

Categories Appeasement/Money Laundering/WMD
November 6, 2006

A (Blue) House Divided Against Itself

Kim Jong Il can count dividing the U.S.-Korea alliance as one of his recent successes, but in the process, he’s also divided his friends in South Korea. The left finds itself split among accomodators, appeasers, and outright agents, and those factions are going into an election year at war with each other. One of the most divisive of the internecine struggles is Seoul’s to-join-or-not-to-join agony over the Proliferation Security Initiative. Today, Yonhap has a long story on the subject. President...

Categories "United" Nations/An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
November 6, 2006

What’s Joe Di Trani doing these days?

You may recall that  before he resigned from the six-party  negotiations  team,  Di Trani was one half of the New York Channel, along with Han Song Ryol (Han, who is a real bastard, has also moved  on).  Those were the bilateral talks that the State Department was pretending not to have while the Democrats and some Republicans were demanding we have them.  Di Trani, who was at the CIA previously, went to the Directorate of National Intelligence.  Now (via Richardson)...

Categories Diplomacy/North Korea/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
November 6, 2006

Why Talk?

Some people are wondering just what we expect to get from talking to the North Koreans. But Ms. Rice is coming under increased fire inside and outside the administration from officials and experts who are skeptical about what diplomacy can achieve in this case, and who argue that there is no chance a new round of nuclear talks with North Korea will succeed. “What’s a good description? Fantasy? Dreamworld?” said Nicholas Eberstadt [OFK interview here], a North Korea expert with...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
November 6, 2006

Got Meth?

Recently,  Robert Koehler  blogged about the North Korean drug ship that was repeatedly caught in Busan, only to be left to go and make the same haul again.  It’s only the latest example of the South Korean government putting the interests of Bureau 39 ahead of the interests of ordinary Korean citizens in either the North or the South.  Now, however, media exposure has embarrassed Roh’s government into the most limp-wristed  action  they could get away with — actually inspecting...

Categories Appeasement/Drugs & N Korea
November 5, 2006

Wobble Watch: Treasury Won’t Lift Sanctions on Kim Jong Il’s Macau Accounts

New press reports link the bank accounts that mean so much to Kim Jong Il with  his nuclear and other  WMD programs.  North Korea used its accounts at a Macau-based bank, suspected of having served as a base for the North’s alleged illicit activities, to pay for devices that could be used in manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons, a Japanese daily reported Saturday. Quoting unidentified sources, Yomiuri Shimbun said China froze North Korean accounts worth US$24 million...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
November 4, 2006

Great Moments in Diplomacy: N. Korea Wants Japan Kicked Out of Six-Party Talks

Something tells me that we haven’t reached a fundamental change in North Korea’s negotiating attitude. North Korea said Saturday it wants Japan out of six-party disarmament talks, calling officials in Tokyo “political imbeciles” for saying they will not accept Pyongyang as a nuclear power. …. A statement from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday said “there is no need for Japan to participate in (the talks) as a local delegate because it is no more than a state of the...

Categories Diplomacy/Japan/Japan & Korea/Six-Party Talks/Unintended Humor/WTF?
November 4, 2006

‘Crimes Against Humanity:’ DLA Piper’s Report Is the Ultimate Must-Read on North Korean Human Rights

You may recall my recent post on the New York Times Op-Ed by Vaclav Havel, Elie Wiesel, and Kjell Magne Bondevik to treat the North Korean crisis as a human rights issue. One of the founding beliefs that inspired me to start OFK is that the issues are inseparable. Only a regime with so little regard for human life and dignity would allow its people to starve by the millions and divert those resources to weapons of mass murder. That...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
November 3, 2006

Wobble Watch: Condi Rice Talks Tough, the Pentagon Talks Scary Tough

The Administration is trying to sound tough with the North Koreans, but I’m inherently distrustful of tough talk that comes the week before an election: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday the United States wanted “concrete action” when six-party talks resume on North Korea’s nuclear program. Rice said the starting point for the talks, which North Korea has boycotted since last November in protest at U.S. financial restrictions, would be to seek implementation of an agreement signed with...

Categories An Alliance?/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/Washington Views/WMD
November 3, 2006

Someone Please Staple Kim Geun-Tae’s Lips Together

This is an act that damages our national pride and is not appropriate for the South Korea-U.S. alliance.” — Kim Geun Tae, head of S. Korea’s ruling party and North Korea’s favorite dancing piggy, on hearing that the United States actually intends to implement U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718. When I worried aloud that the United States would ease sanctions on North Korea during the pendency of the next round of endless, pointless six-party extortion denuclearization talks, I based my...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Money Laundering/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized/Unintended Humor/WMD/WTF?
November 2, 2006

The Song Min-Soon Dossier (The Death of an Alliance, Part 59)

We all know that Song Min-Soon is going to be South Korea’s next Minister of Foreign Affairs and trade, but if you think that a man who talks this kind of trash  about his friends couldn’t possibly be a career diplomat, think again. [ ]Mr Song, 58, is a 30-year career diplomat who served as ambassador to Poland while Christopher Hill was US ambassador there. The two then became their respective countries’ chief negotiators in the six-party talks on North...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Korean Politics
November 2, 2006

Next UniFiction Minister Was Convicted in 2002 Bribery Scheme; Still Under Suspended Prison Sentence Later Pardoned by Roh

Update:   According to this, Roh pardoned  Lee last year —  which, of course, changes everything except the appeanance of cronyism, whitewashing, back-scratching, and corruption. Funny, I don’t recall anyone mentioning that Lee Jae-Joung is a con. Lee taught at the Sung Kong Hoe University in Seoul and served as the university president from 1994 to 2000 when he joined the then-ruling Millennium Democratic Party to become a member of the 16th National Assembly. He helped found the governing Uri...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Law/Korean Politics
November 2, 2006

North Korea Wants Its Drug Money Back

[Update:  A senior Korean official suggests that the U.S. will do just that right after the talks resume.  Scroll down.] [Update 2:  The Washington Post post also suspects that North Korea’s announcement is merely an effort to foil the American economic pressure: We hope Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, who conducted lengthy talks with his North Korean counterpart in recent days, is justified in expecting “substantial progress” from the new round. But history suggests that both North Korea...

Categories "United" Nations/Counterfeiting/Drugs & N Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks
October 31, 2006

N. Korea Agrees to Return to Six-Party Talks

[Update:   According to this Korean language link, the South Koreans were the last of the six parties to know that the talks would begin again.  You’d think that after getting seven billion dollars from South Korean taxpayers, they’d have enough left over to afford a phone call.  I guess they spent it somewhere else.] News coming off the wires claims that the North Koreans have agreed to return to six-party talks. Chinese, U.S. and North Korean envoys to the...

Categories China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks