March 17, 2010

We Regret to Inform You That Your One-Way Ticket to Paradise is Non-Refundable

Back in late January, North Korea claimed that an American who feared becoming “cannon fodder in the capitalist [all-volunteer] military” had crossed over to the loving embrace of the relevant organ. Despite my own growing doubts about the story, the fact that the Swedes have since had two consular visits with him does suggest that he exists after all. The U.S. State Department says North Korea has allowed Swedish diplomats to meet a U.S. citizen who has been detained for...

Categories Defectors/WTF?
March 16, 2010

North Korea, Human Rights, and Diplomacy: When Hell Freezes Over

A series of bleak new reports shows that after more than a decade of attempts by the United States and South Korea to liberalize North Korea though aid and engagement, life is as cheap as ever between the Yalu and the Imjin. The system is less closed than it once was, although this is mostly the result of the fraying of the regime’s control over its borders, economy, and the flow of information. Yet these changes have occurred in defiance...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
March 15, 2010

Meet Roh Jeong-Ho: Ex-Millionaire, Symbol of a Failed Policy, and Asshole

Please allow me to introduce Roh Jeong-Ho, ex-millionaire, former role model for the Sunshine Policy, and asshole. How does one achieve such distinction in life? In Roh’s case, this way: Roh was once touted by the South Korean media as one of the young leaders in his early 30s who were expected to lead the post-unification era when he exported 44 km of barbed-wire fences to Rajin-Sonbong in 1995. North Korea had asked Roh to supply the fences to isolate...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics/Sunshine
March 14, 2010

14 March 2010: Here We Go Again

Whoop-dee-doo: Rumor has it that North Korea will return to six-party talks next month, and if that’s true, it will only be under the duress of sanctions, and for the sole purposes of demanding that the sanctions be loosened and to issue a new list of demands that are mostly designed to prevent us from ever getting to the matter of its nuclear disarmament. The good news is that the sanctions must be working. The bad news is that our...

Categories Anju Links
March 14, 2010

Succession Watch

Yonhap is reporting that North Korea is busily printing portraits of the new emperor-in-waiting. If this is true, it would be the story I’ve been waiting for to convince me that Kim Jong-Eun is indeed being groomed as the spiritual successor to Kim Jong-Il, and it would also strongly suggest that Kim Jong-Il’s health is terrible. Jong-Eun is clearly unready to take real power, and probably is a net negative even as a spiritual figurehead. To elevate him is a...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
March 12, 2010

12 March 2010: On the Potential for Social Unrest, Arms Trafficking, and Kim Dong Shik’s Widow Brother and Son Sue North Korea

Here’s a very long, and very interesting report on the potential for social unrest in North Korea, from a North Korean’s perspective. ________________________ The story on how North Korea exports arms is worth a longer post than I have time to write today. ________________________ Kim Jong Il’s banker Ambassador to Switzerland is retiring. Hmmm. ________________________ A U.S. District Court has issued a summons for the Foreign Minister of North Korea. I’ll have much more to say about this another day,...

Categories Anju Links
March 12, 2010

North Korea Sanctions Itself

Reuters, citing a study by the Korea Development Institute (KDI), reports that “North Korea’s international trade dropped last year for the first time in more than a decade.” The report suggests that this was mostly the consequence of sanctions, but a closer look at the evidence it was The Great Confiscation that really brought trade across the Chinese border to a standstill by paralyzing the economy, markets, and trade, and banning the use of foreign currency in the final months...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
March 12, 2010

Your Feel-Good Story of the Year, So Far

Korean-American Richard Cho has been hailed as a hero for helping subdue a terrorist and putting out a fire aboard a U.S. airliner heading for Detroit last Christmas. Cho, 40, immigrated with his family to the U.S. at age seven, and went to high school in Chicago. He majored in political science and sociology at Iowa State University, and since graduation has been working as a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines. On Dec. 25, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old...

Categories Terrorism/Iraq
March 11, 2010

Kang Chol Hwan on Hamhung

Kang Chol Hwan thinks that Kim Jong Il’s address to a mass rally in Hamhung — that is, if you’re convinced he really did address that rally –means that His Withering Majesty is determined to resist any reform of the system. That part of what Kang says is obvious enough and therefore less interesting than his description of Hamhung, which sounds post-apocalyptic: Hooligans clustering at the railroad station glared at the goods carried by pedestrians and provoked quarrels if they...

Categories Inside NK
March 11, 2010

Claudia Rosett on North Korean Loggers in Russia

The defection of those two loggers at the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok inspires further thought from Claudia Rosett: I’ve seen those North Korean lumberjacks–or at least their predecessors. In 1994 I was working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Moscow when a story turned up in the Russian press, saying that North Korea was running lumber camps in remote areas of Russia. In Moscow, Russian officials confirmed to me that they had two big logging operations...

Categories Defectors/Russia/Russia & Korea
March 10, 2010

Newly Released Soviet Report Details Atrocities in North Korea

Something tells me the Putinjugend Nashi web site isn’t going to feature, by popular demand, this newly released 1945 report by a Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who drove through Hwanghae and North and South Pyongyan provinces just after the war’s end. The officer’s detailed, 13-page report on the behavior of Russian soldiers in North Korea makes drunk G.I.’s in Itaewon look like Mormon missionaries by comparison: The handwritten document in Russian was discovered by the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a U.S....

Categories History/Korean History/Russia/Russia & Korea
March 10, 2010

Bleak Signs for North Korea’s Food Situation (Updated)

Original Post, 10 March 2010: This week’s papers have several disturbing indicators suggesting that a sudden deterioration of the food situation is in the works. First was this report that even shops and hotels for foreigners in Pyongyang had run out of food; then, Robert linked to a report that kids can now seen begging even in Pyongyang. Depending on what you choose to believe, however, this may not be an entirely new development. Our friend Christine Ahn, no less,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
March 10, 2010

Yet Another Lawsuit Against North Korea in a U.S. Court

Thirty American victims of Hezbollah terror attacks have filed civil action in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., against the government of North Korea. The plaintiffs, injured by Hezbollah rockets fired into northern Israel during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, allege that North Korea aided the militant group by training senior Hezbollah leaders and by providing networks of underground storage bunkers meant to house Katyusha rocket launchers. [Ha’aretz] This would be the third recent civil suit against North...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
March 9, 2010

Blasphemy in the Temple: Thoughts on Ramstad, Kirk, and the Finance Ministry

I’m going to add just one small bit to the fracas between the Korean Finance Ministry and two reporters with whose work I’m familiar — Don Kirk and Evan Ramstad. As to the questions themselves, sometimes, the function of a good reporter is to challenge official groupthink and corruption, especially in a place where groupthink is as prevalent as it is in Korea. I do not think that a country that aspires to be a hub of international business can...

Categories Korean Society/Media Criticism
March 8, 2010

8 March 2010

The fact that Japan has its own Roh Moo Hyun now is both more and less troubling than Roh’s own presidency. On the one hand, Hatoyama wasn’t elected on a wave of anti-Americanism, but because voters were understandably tired of one-party rule. If Hatoyama doesn’t improve conditions in Japan, he may not hold power for long. On the other hand, we have much more air and naval power in Japan than in Korea, and whereas Korea is strategically expendable to...

Categories Miscellaneous