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Category: Diplomacy

October 16, 2014

Christian Whiton: “[W]e need a policy of truth for North Korea.”

At CNN.com, Whiton registers the signs of Agreed Framework 3, and writes: There is another way to handle North Korea, which involves putting sustained pressure on the regime. China always says it is willing to take this step, but in fact never does — and never will as long as China itself is run by a cabal that is terrified of the will of its own people.  [….] Help North Koreans get the truth. Grasp the truth that China will...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/Six-Party Talks
October 9, 2014

Chris Hill’s North Korea legacy in three concise paragraphs

Here, via Yonhap, where Hill takes credit for the idea of blowing up the cooling tower at Yongbyon. The North’s destruction of the cooling tower briefly raised hopes for real progress in the six-party talks aimed at ending the North’s nuclear program, but the negotiating process later reached a deadlock over how to verify the North’s declaration of nuclear materials, facilities and activities. In exchange for blowing up the tower, the North was removed from the U.S. list of states sponsoring...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
October 6, 2014

Resign, Margaret Chan

Chan, the head of the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO), probably owes her job to her pedigree as a Communist Party quisling in Hong Kong‘s public health bureaucracy.* As Hong Kong’s Director of Health during the SARS outbreak, Chan’s public statements made her the object of widespread derision and ridicule. Later, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council commissioned a Select Committee to conduct an exhaustive study on the response of the government and its officials. The Select Committee’s Findings about Dr. Chan’s performance, which begin on...

Categories "United" Nations/China
September 30, 2014

Kurt Campbell: We need tougher sanctions on North Korea.

Kurt Campbell, President Obama’s former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs and now CEO of The Asia Group, continues to debunk the pair of academic urban legends that North Korea sanctions (a) are maxed out, and (b) therefore, not a promising policy alternative. At a forum in Seoul last week, Campbell called on his former boss to “further toughen financial sanctions against North Korea” if it continues to refuse to give up its nuclear program and continues its military...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions/Six-Party Talks
September 29, 2014

U.N.’s Seoul field office to collect evidence of human rights violations in North Korea.

South Korea will soon begin working-level talks with the United Nations to discuss the specifics of establishing a U.N. field office in Seoul on North Korean human rights, officials said Wednesday. [….] The U.N. has later proposed setting up the field office in South Korea to collect evidence and testimonies on the North Korean regime’s human rights violations, which the South Korean government has accepted. [….] North Korea has also warned it will launch “merciless punishment” on those involved in...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
September 25, 2014

Seoul to Pyongyang: Let’s talk about human rights.

“Not only in high-level talks but also in any occasions of inter-Korean dialogue in the future, (Seoul) expects to have comprehensive discussion on all sorts of humanitarian issues including human rights,” unification ministry spokesman Lim Byeong-cheol said in a briefing. “If high-level talks are held (between Seoul and Pyongyang), I think it is desirable that they discuss all the issues they want to discuss including this (human rights) issue,” Lim said. [Yonhap] I’m not terribly impressed with Park Geun-Hye’s attention...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/North-South/Sunshine
September 24, 2014

Kerry to North Korea: “[C]lose those camps … shut this evil system down.”

It’s no secret to readers of this site that I’ve never been an admirer of John Kerry. His tenure has been a rolling catastrophe for our national security, in a way that even a rank amateur could have predicted years ago. It’s often difficult to see that he has a North Korea policy at all. Not so long ago, I criticized Kerry for showing no sign of pressing for action on the U.N. Commission of Inquiry report on human rights in North Korea. But...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
September 21, 2014

Whether or not this is true of President Obama, it’s an insightful analysis.

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal: His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment. And we don’t say this because he’s so famously bright—academically credentialed, smooth, facile with words, quick with concepts. (That’s the sort of intelligence the press and popular historians most prize and celebrate, because it’s exactly the sort they possess.) But brightness is not the same as judgment, which has to do with discernment, instinct, the ability to see the big picture, wisdom...

Categories Anju Links/Diplomacy
September 18, 2014

What Bob King should have said about travel to North Korea.

Ambassador Robert King, whose title is Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, has written to The Washington Post in response to Anna Fifield’s reporting on North Korea’s efforts to market itself as a tourist destination (which may be more accurately described as the efforts of foreign collaborators to sell North Korea as a fine place to go slumming). King wishes that Fifield had given more emphasis to what should be obvious to anyone with good sense — that “[t]ravel to...

Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Foreigners in N. Korea
September 9, 2014

Former Obama Admin. official: Our N. Korea sanctions are weak and our policy is stuck

The Obama Administration’s North Korea team is stuck. Its thirst for fresh blood is so dire that it recently asked Keith Richards whether he still has the number of that secret clinic in Switzerland.* Don’t take my word for it. Last Friday, former Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as a friend and spy of mine was sitting in the audience (thank you). Campbell’s remarks are worth listening to in full, but the...

Categories Anju Links/Media Criticism/Sanctions/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
September 8, 2014

U.N. Panel of Experts to investigate M/V Mu Du Mong

A U.N. panel that upholds sanctions against North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is sending personnel to investigate a North Korean cargo ship moored at a Mexican port, U.N. diplomatic sources familiar with the matter told Kyodo News. [Yonhap] “Sending personnel” suggests that the POE will inspect the ship. The POE also sent personnel to inspect the M/V Chong Chon Gang after Panamanian authorities found it smuggling weapons last year. The travels of the M/V Mu Du Bong were first brought...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
September 1, 2014

Only terrorists make hostage videos, and North Korea just made a hostage video

… of three Americans it is holding for “crimes” that wouldn’t be cognizable as such anywhere else on earth.  All three men said they hope the U.S. government will send an envoy to North Korea to help get them out of their situations, similar to how former President Bill Clinton helped secure the release of two journalists in 2009. [CNN] At which point, Pyongyang will present its demands. Former President George W. Bush removed North Korea from the list of state...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)
August 25, 2014

Is Obama’s North Korea policy at a tipping point?

Following of Congress’s resounding, bipartisan vote of no confidence in the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy last month, Secretary of State John Kerry has been traveling around the Pacific. In Australia, while meeting with that country’s Foreign Minister and Defense Minister, he traversed his gargantuan mandible toward Pyongyang and threatened to tighten sanctions “if it ‘chooses the path of confrontation.” If? If? “The United States — I want to make this clear — is absolutely prepared to improve relations with...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
August 20, 2014

John Kerry was right about North Korea (and so was John Bolton)

More than six months after a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found Kim Jong Un responsible for crimes against humanity, our State Department has offered no credible or coherent policy response to that report. At least it hadn’t until last week, when our Secretary of State, John Kerry — no doubt, after much agonizing deliberation — finally authorized the deployment of precision-guided tactical ballistic words: “But make no mistake, we are also speaking out about the horrific human rights situation,” Kerry...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/Media Criticism
August 13, 2014

First as tragedy, then as farce

The story I linked Monday about Michael Kirby’s comments spurring the U.N. to action in North Korea eventually grew into two posts, because in the same story, Kirby also warned against trivializing what’s happening in North Korea. The Commission of Inquiry, which reported to the UN in March, detailed horrific abuses of human rights in North Korea, including starving political prisoners reduced to eating grass and rodents in secret gulags, schoolchildren made to watch firing squad executions, and women forced...

Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Books & Films/Censorship