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November 13, 2014

Incompetent translation could cost N. Korean teen his life

The Swedish government has denied the asylum claim of a teenager who claims to be a North Korean from North Hamgyeong Province. The denial is based on a report by a contractor, Sprakab, that failed to identify the teen’s dialect, or the places he named in his interview. A Korean expert hired by Sprakab now claims that the company misquoted her. An appeal is all that stands between the young man’s life and deportation to China, repatriation to North Korea, and almost...

Categories Europe/Refugees
October 28, 2014

On Europe, the U.N., luxury goods, and the ethical limits of engagement.

The latest rant from Professor Lee and me is published here, on CNN International, in the hope that it will catch the eyes of European audiences (and maybe even give Felix Abt a migraine). Mind you, I think the EU’s leadership of the U.N. response to the Commission of Inquiry report has been commendable, but Europe has to do a better job of enforcing U.N. sanctions, and curbing the actions of unethical profiteers who would sell Kim Jong Un cigarette-making...

Categories Europe/Luxury Goods
October 20, 2014

Yeonmi Park appeals to the conscience of Europe

It is her first time in Ireland and, indeed, Europe. But at the age of just 21, this sweetly-confident, intelligent and tiny-framed young woman, who managed to flee the famine-torn country at the age of 13, is already a global spokesperson for her own people – a people terrorised into submission and silence while the wider world ignores what she describes as a “holocaust”. [Irish Independent] Miss Park’s life went from latent terror to a living hell when her parents...

Categories Activism/Europe/Refugees
October 16, 2014

Swiss sold N. Korea $180K in cigarette-making machinery as aid agencies begged for donations

The communist country’s imports of Swiss tobacco machinery components reached US$180,000 in the January-June period, far more than the $24,000 worth of imports recorded for all of 2013, according to the report by the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA). [….] The country imported $65.28 million of tobacco in 2013, about 77.8 times what the country sold overseas, the report showed. [Yonhap] On the plus side, the trade statistics also show that during the first six months of this year, North Korea...

Categories Europe/Famine & Food Aid
September 26, 2014

Blessed are the cheesemakers: His Porcine Majesty Kim Jong Un has eaten himself sick, possibly on Swiss cheese.

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, is “not feeling well,” a state-run television station reported this week, in a rare revelation about his health. In a documentary broadcast on Thursday, the North’s Central TV showed Mr. Kim, who has not been seen in public in recent weeks, walking with a limp while visiting a factory in Nampo, a provincial town southwest of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, last month. A narrator intoned about the tireless work of Mr. Kim, “our...

Categories Europe/Kim Jong Un
September 26, 2014

U.N. should fund its aid programs from Kim Jong Un’s Swiss accounts.

The Wall Street Journal updates us on the dire financial state of the U.N. World Food Program’s operations in North Korea. The United Nations aid program for malnourished North Koreans may close after raising only a fraction of the money it needs to operate in the country, a senior U.N. official said in a call for donations. “We may need to scale down or think about closing altogether,” Dierk Stegen, the Pyongyang-based North Korea head for the U.N. World Food...

Categories Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
September 23, 2014

North Korean Gulag survivors call on Switzerland to freeze Kim Jong Un’s slush funds (Alternate title: Cursed are the Cheesemakers).

Switzerland has always been there for North Korea. When North Koreans were starving to death in heaps, Switzerland was there to receive Kim Jong Il’s personal shopper and sell him millions of dollars’ worth of its finest timepieces. When North Korea needed creative new ways to make money – literally! – Switzerland sold it the very same intaglio presses and optically variable ink our Bureau of Engraving and Printing uses to make money. When Kim Jong Un needed a place...

Categories Activism/Anju Links/Europe/Money Laundering/Refugees/Sanctions
October 24, 2013

Ambassador Gifford’s Trojan Rabbit

Just in time for North Korea’s latest nuke test scare, Mike Gifford, the British Ambassador to North Korea, takes to the pages of the L.A. Times to urge readers to support “engagement” with North Korea, although not very convincingly. Gifford begins with a litany of reasons why we either shouldn’t, or can’t — human rights (reason enough to isolate South Africa and Sudan, but not North Korea, apparently); WMD proliferation, attacks, and threats (followed by U.N. sanctions that impose financial transparency requirements North Korea...

Categories Anju Links/Europe/Sunshine
August 27, 2013

European NGOs protest enforcement of U.N. sanctions, but not the millions Kim Jong Un wastes on European luxuries

Last week, the Swiss government announced that it had blocked an attempt by North Korea to buy $7.24 million worth of ski lifts, plus “golf, horseback riding and water sports” gear. That this transaction was beneath even the Swiss is saying something. Switzerland is near the top of any list of countries suspected of hosting North Korean slush funds that are variously estimated to be worth between $1 billion and $4 billion. Throughout the duration of a famine that, according for former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, killed...

Categories "United" Nations/Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
December 11, 2009

Did I Just Get the President I Voted For?

[Update: OK, this is just wrong.] The award of a Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was as good a reason as any to ridicule Europeans, but I can’t help thinking, with malicious delight, how much the shallow, vapid, cynical pacifists in attendance must have hated his acceptance speech — for the award itself was a cynical act, as Obama probably knows. I’ve made no secret of my skepticism that President Obama was prepared for the office he has since...

Categories America/Europe
November 11, 2009

At the New Ledger: Thoughts on the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Sorry for forgetting to link this yesterday. Speaking of Europe, can anyone name one great and positive European contribution to global culture since the end of World War I? After weeks of thought, I’ve come up with just two: the Soviet composers of the 20th Century, and Legos. Sure, I guess it depends on your standards for artistic and cultural merit, but I’ve spent the last month mulling that over and coming up with a nearly blank slate. What also...

Categories Europe/Geopolitics/History
October 9, 2009

But What Has He Actually Done?

OK, Europe, we get it already: you love Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. But what has Barack Obama has done to justify the award of a Nobel Peace Prize? I hope President Obama is sensible enough to be embarrassed by this. I see no reason to believe — and hope that I never will — that President Obama campaigned for this. As such, the award says nothing about Obama himself, something perhaps about a segment of his supporters who will...

Categories Europe
August 12, 2009

Mary Robinson Is Not Worthy

President Obama, for God-knows-what reason, has decided to award former U.N. bureaucrat Mary Robinson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor.  Years ago, I expressed my intense distaste for Mary Robinson: Mary Robinson was the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2001, during the height of the Great North Korean Famine, while China flagrantly violated the U.N. Convention on Refugees to keep the starving millions outside its borders. While millions more died in a...

Categories "United" Nations/Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
February 10, 2009

Being Loved Is Overrated

Good morning, America — the world hates you slightly less! They took a poll shortly after Obama’s election: Views of the US showed improvements in Canada, Egypt, Ghana, India, Italy and Japan. But far more countries have predominantly negative views of America (12), than predominantly positive views (6). Most Europeans show little change and views of the US in Russia and China have grown more negative. On average, positive views have risen from 35 per cent to 40 per cent,...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Europe/Geopolitics
August 22, 2008

Die, Swedish Imperialists!

The blog is writing itself again: The Communist North Korean government has declared Sweden their enemy and a US war puppet.  […]   According to information from the Swedish Armed Forces, this brusque message was first conveyed in a North Korean radio broadcast, then printed as an official document and distributed to the United Nations. The North Koreans’ attack is not directed against the Swedish government as such, but against Sweden’s and other neutral countries’ military observation missions on the...

Categories Europe/Unintended Humor/WTF?