Search Results for: luxury

June 30, 2009

Plan B Watch

A year ago, who would have suspected that we’d be celebrating the replacement of a liberal accommodationist named George W. Bush with a hard line neocon named Barack Obama, who would finally show signs of grasping not just the reality of North Korea’s bad faith, but some of the very best tools for breaking it? Christine Ahn’s misery (and Selig Harrison’s, and Leon Sigal’s) is my pleasure: The Treasury Department’s 2005 blacklisting of Macau’s Banco Delta Asia, which held a...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Washington Views
June 26, 2009

Nothing Says “Democratic Peoples’ Republic” Like a New S-Class

A recent report claims that even as North Korea was preparing missile and nuclear tests, China helped North Korea flout a U.N. Security Council Resolution for which it voted and which it has promised to implement in good faith.  UNSCR 1718, in effect since October 2006, bans the export of luxury goods to North Korea.  It has since been reinforced by UNSCR 1874: North Korean leader Kim Jong Il doled out foreign-made cars to senior intelligence officials to ensure their...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Kremlinology
June 18, 2009

Breaking News: Treasury Issues Money Laundering Alert Against North Korea

This is going to be a big deal.  By the time I have time to update this post, the world financial system will have started purging itself of its links to North Korea.  More later. Update:   Call it Plan B light, and quite possibly a prelude to better things, but this by itself will have a significant effect. Why, you ask?  After all, this alert doesn’t freeze anything.  It’s merely a warning: The U.N. Security Council’s adoption of specific...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Sanctions
June 17, 2009

Take the Money and Run

Like I said:  the North Koreans snore though all those threats from Perry, Gingrich, and Eagleburger, but Stuart Levey scares the bejeezus out of them: North Korea is rushing to withdraw money from its overseas bank accounts after the United Nations imposed financial and other sanctions for its nuclear test, a report said. South Korea’s Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, quoting sources in Beijing, said the North had begun withdrawing funds from accounts in Macau and elsewhere for fear they would be...

Categories Japan/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 12, 2009

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874 (Updated with Analysis)

For better or for worse, they passed it. As with UNSCR 1695 and 1718 before it, this will be as effective as the implementation. Much has been said about how China undermined both of those resolutions, and that is true, but too little has been said about how much the U.S. State Department also did to undermine them for the sake of a failure called Agreed Framework II. The good news is that this time, there are some early and...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
June 10, 2009

S. Korea and Japan Join Sanctions Effort Against North Korea

Kyodo News and Yonhap are reporting that we’re close to announcing a deal on sanctions at the U.N. Security Council.  I’m hopeful that the length of the negotiation means that we’ve insisted on something reasonably tough on paper; less so that the Chinese and the Russians will cooperate in practice.  I tend to view claims that China has lost patience with North Korea at last as so much Chinese disinformation, meant to mask China’s premeditated enabling of North Korea’s misdeeds...

Categories "United" Nations/China/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 5, 2009

Obama Gears Up for “Plan B;” John Kerry Blocks Terror Re-Listing

I really don’t know what to make of this.  A young, inexperienced president, one whom the North Koreans arguably endorsed, comes into office showing every sign of being easier meat than Lance Bass in Riker’s Island.  The North Koreans, true to Joe Biden’s prophetic gaffe, and with their exquisite sensitivity to American weakness, don’t even let the man get inaugurated before they begin the noisy repudiation of every agreed framework, U.N. resolution, and armistice they can stuff into a shredder....

Categories "United" Nations/China/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Crime/NK Economics/Proliferation/Sanctions/U.S. Politics
June 3, 2009

Must Read: New Details Leaked on North Korea’s Counterfeiting

Say it with me: thank goodness Christopher Hill got the North Koreans promise never, ever to counterfeit our currency ever again — cross my heart and hope to be executed before a crowd of bused-in schoolchildren! A North Korean general who is a confidant of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, has been identified by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies as a key figure in the covert production and distribution of high-quality counterfeit $100 bills called supernotes, according to documents and...

Categories Counterfeiting/Kremlinology/Media Criticism/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 2, 2009

Updated: China Steps It Up

Updated: Got my hopes up too soon, I see. China says its relations with North Korea remain normal after last week’s nuclear test. Original: Finally, we are hearing news of China taking an initiative in North Korea’s nuclear issue. This surely is a significant development (from yesterday’s headlines): China suspended government exchanges with North Korea after Kim Jong-Il’s regime last week tested a nuclear device and fired short-range missiles, Yonhap News said. China has halted plans to send officials to...

Categories China
May 28, 2009

Memories of an African Student Forced to Study in North Korea During the 1980s

Aliou Niane was born in Guinea West Africa, but due to decisions he had no control over, he found himself in North Korea from 1982-87. He is currently writing his memoir in French about the years he spent there and generously agreed to an email interview. Niane’s story is interesting, if not for the insider’s look he can give into what life was like for a foreigner living in North Korea during the 1980s, but also for the information he...

Categories Africa/Inside NK
May 26, 2009

And Now, the Fallout

Kim Jong Il has followed yesterday’s nuke test by firing two more short-range missiles, as a rudderless world tries to decide how to respond.  When you consider each of these developments, ask yourself whether Kim Jong Il could reasonably have anticipated that it would happen.  So far, everything I see happening fits within the range of Kim Jong Il’s calculation of “acceptable consequences.” FOR ONE THING, KIM JONG IL IS PROBABLY BETTING that John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi don’t possess...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Proliferation/WMD
April 3, 2009

3 April 2009

THE WIFE AND CHILDREN OF NORTH KOREA’S TRADE REPRESENTATIVE in Shanghai have defected to the South: The woman, identified only as Ri, arrived in Seoul in early March through the South Korean Embassy in Singapore and is now going though questioning like other North Korean defectors, North Korean sources said. Ri reportedly sought protection at the embassy in Singapore in January while her husband was in Pyongyang for a meeting. She decided to defect to South Korea after a troubling...

Categories Anju Links
February 20, 2009

Sanctions? Yes We Can! (But Without the U.N.)

The power to tax is the power to destroy — Daniel Webster As the Obama Administration inherits an intractable, non-compliant, bellicose, and terroristic North Korea, the administration’s great challenge is to see beyond a strategy based on concessions alone. Via GI Korea, the new administration appears to be polarizing into factions, just as the Bush Administration did eight years ago. One of the factions advocates “normalization of relations with North Korea as soon as possible,” in other words, giving even...

Categories NK Economics
January 7, 2009

Pueblo Crew Gives North Korea the Middle Finger Again

In these times, terrorists, whose training manuals teach them to fabricate claims of torture, can sue law enforcement officers for damages in our courts for having the temerity to interrupt their plans. If we’ve dispensed with the idea of keeping disputes between individuals and states out of the courts, it’s at least just to allow American victims of torture to seek compensation against those — including foreign states — who wronged them. A few years ago, Congress removed an impediment...

Categories Uncategorized
August 17, 2008

What Ranch Country Thinks of Korea’s Beef Protests

Update, 12/08: Here’s how history will record this whole ridiculous episode. As Korea heaves a meek “never mind” to a national crisis based on exposed falsehoods and manipulated by an  anti-democratic fifth column, American Korea-watchers may be tempted to  assume that the episode passed without being noticed by most Americans.  That’s not a safe thing to assume for my part of the country, the part that produces most of that beef.  If you’re not from that part of the country,...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea
July 20, 2008

The End of Sunshine

Don Kirk has some straightforward observations about scholars in Washington, who, remarkably enough, are  still  debating how North might reform its economy, as though the  decade-long Sunshine experiment had never happened.  Kirk saves his most acerbic observation for one of the participants in a recent seminar: Probably no Washington think-tanker has been quite so divorced from reality of late, at least in public utterances, as Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. In a recent commentary he held up Vietnam as...

Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming/NK Economics
June 18, 2008

Some Good Friends Updates

With busy times in recent days, I’ve fallen behind on posting Good Friends updates.  I’ll try to catch these up a few at a time, and I’m just going to post the summaries Good Friends sends as well, without having had time to read the bulletins themselves.  Here’s number 139, dated June 9th:  good-friends-139.pdf * Senior Officials at Gimchaek Steel Mill Meet Over Absentee Workers * Difficulties at Gimchaek Caused by the Bankruptcy of the Jangsaeng Company * Workers and...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
June 9, 2008

Good Friends: NK Soldiers Ordered to Send Wives, Children to Home Provinces

Good Friends Newsletter Number 138 is here: nkt138-eng1.pdf   Highlights: Skyrocketing rice prices top W4,500/kG in South Hwanghae, W4,200 in North Hwanghae.  Corn at approx. W2,000/kG;   Starving North Koreans dying from eating grass, spoiled food; Middle-class North Koreans selling luxury possessions for a fraction of their former value (VCR’s, refrigerators, TV’s); Regime allows some food-seekers into China; This won’t be good for military morale: The 4th corps headquarters of Hwanghae Province fell far short in military food supplies this...

Categories Famine & Food Aid