June 13, 2009

Change Has Come to North Korea!

How much hope do you suppose the sullen masses in Hamhung feel at the prospect of another generation of this? The youngest son of North Korea’s leader has been given the title of Brilliant Comrade, a newspaper reported on Friday, another sign that the Communist regime is preparing to name him as successor to its leader, Kim Jong-il. Intelligence authorities from the United States and South Korea disclosed this week that Kim Jong-un, 26, is now being referred to in...

Categories Kremlinology/Propaganda
June 13, 2009

Impossible! They Don’t Have a Uranium Enrichment Program, No Matter What They Say!

North Korea vowed on Saturday to embark on a uranium enrichment program and “weaponize” all the plutonium in its possession as it rejected the new U.N. sanctions meant to punish the communist nation for its recent nuclear test. North Korea also said it would not abandon its nuclear programs, saying it was an inevitable decision to defend itself from what it says is a hostile U.S. policy and its nuclear threat against the North.  [AP, via WSJ] Selig Harrison and...

Categories Proliferation/WMD
June 12, 2009

Sentencing of Laura Ling and Euna Lee Brings Wave of Bad Press for N. Korea

By holding two journalists as hostages (it’s now pretty much beyond denying) and sentencing them to 12 years of “reform through labor,” North Korea has managed to inflame the media in a way that starving 2 million people and putting 200,000 others in concentration camps never quite did.  With the attention to Ling and Lee comes a delayed epiphany:  maybe North Korea’s regime really is evil: Washington Post, Blaine Harden:  N. Korean Women Who Flee to China Suffer in Stateless...

Categories Ling/Lee Incident
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 12, 2009

Obama Muzzles Gore, Richardson

Apparently, Secretary of State Clinton thinks one Special Envoy is plenty: The New Mexico governor, who negotiated the return of Americans from North Korea in the 1990s, was a ubiquitous presence in the early days of the crisis, but on Monday, he abruptly went dark and is now refusing all media requests, Caitlin Kelleher, a spokeswoman, said. His silence, people following the situation closely said, is part of a broader administration strategy to handle the delicate situation with immense care...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/U.S. Politics/Uncategorized
June 12, 2009

Plan C: Disarm Kim Jong Il Just by Pissing Him Off!

U.S. intelligence officials have warned President Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the looming passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution this week — condemning the communist country for its recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests — with another nuclear test, FOX  News has learned.  [Fox News] Could we be just six U.N. resolutions away from the complete nuclear disarmament of North Korea?  And you say the U.N. is worthless! If only it...

Categories Missiles/Proliferation/WMD
June 12, 2009

Behold … the Awesome Moral Authority of John Kerry! (Updated)

Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on North Korea to release the women “promptly and unconditionally.” While he said the release should be a humanitarian gesture not linked to the nuclear showdown, Kerry said that North Korea had an opportunity to reach out. “We hope that common sense is going to prevail and that North Korea will see this not as an opportunity to further dig a hole but as an opportunity to open up and...

Categories Diplomacy/Ling/Lee Incident/U.S. Politics
June 11, 2009

House Dems Block Bill Demanding Release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, Re-Listing N. Korea as a Terror-Sponsor

Almost everywhere in Washington, one can sense a seismic shift in the consensus about dealing with North Korea.  Gone are the gauzy fantasies that North Korea’s disarmament is just one more (American) concession away.  You can see this in the Obama Administration’s emerging policy, and you can see it in the think tanks that supply the media much of their analysis.  At an event yesterday, I heard Victor Cha and Jack Pritchard broadly agree on the need for tough sanctions...

Categories Appeasement/U.S. Politics
June 10, 2009

Sun Rises, Flowers Bloom, U.N. Fails to Pass Effective N. Korea Resolution

[Update:   I should clarify that this isn’t final and passed by the Security Council. This is leaked draft language from the agreed text.] My hopes that a long negotiation would mean tougher language were not realized.  China was more determined to shield North Korea from consequences than we were determined to impose them. Excerpts below the fold, with many thanks to a reader and friend. How is this weak?  In a nutshell, the language on sanctions and interdiction is...

Categories Missiles/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
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 10, 2009

Kaesong Investors Want $24 Million Bailout

Yesterday, I passed along reassurances by the head of the trade association for Kaesong investors that there was no reason to worry about a southward exodus.  What a difference a day makes: South Korean firms at a jointly-run industrial estate in North Korea will ask Seoul for emergency funds as business slumps amid tensions between the two governments, an official has said. On Tuesday a clothing firm became the first to announce it would quit the Kaesong estate, which opened...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
June 10, 2009

N. Korea: CIA and Lee Killed Roh

Did I or did I not call it? The Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea Tuesday released a detailed report on the truth about the death of Roh Moo Hyun, former “president” of south Korea.  According to the detailed report, Roh’s death was not a suicide but a politically motivated, premeditated and deliberate terror and murder orchestrated by the United States and the pro-American conservative forces of south Korea.  [KCNA] So he didn’t kill himself?

Categories Propaganda
June 9, 2009

Kaesong Death Watch

For new readers, I am not a fan of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a zone in North Korea that uses South Korean management and capital, and North Korean laborers that aren’t actually paid wages, so to speak, as much as they’re given food rations as compensation.  The idea was that Kaesong would change North Korea’s society and economy — in the original German, that’s “arbeit macht frei” — but at the first hint of that, the North Korean government predictably...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics/North-South/Sunshine
June 9, 2009

North Korea’s “Business as Usual” Publicity Tactic

John McCreary made an interesting – and I think spot-on – observation about North Korea’s current publicity tactic in his most recent NightWatch email bulletin: Whatever internal instability might be going on inside North Korea with regard to succession issues or increased tensions with the outside world, the DPRK is taking a “business as usual” approach when it comes to how it presents itself to public eyes. For example, when announcing the sentence of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the...

Categories Inside NK
June 9, 2009

North Korea’s Nuclear Tests and Camp 16

I had previously speculated that the proximity of Camp 16 to North Korea’s main nuclear test site was probably more than mere coincidence (you can see Google Earth images of both at this link; click the images).  The Chosun Ilbo has now published the first indirect evidence — really, a gathering of rumors — to support my speculation, despite the regime’s extraordinary secrecy: How were even the locals kept in the dark? The terrain around Mt. Mantap in Kilju, North...

Categories Human Rights/Refugees/The Camps/WMD
June 9, 2009

Ling, Lee Sentences Raise Interest in North Korean Labor, Concentration Camps (Updated)

Again, the North Koreans demonstrate their talent for attracting the wrong kind of attention.  Following the conviction of U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, news outlets have begin publishing sidebar stories and printing background quotes about what life is really like in a North Korean labor camp.  The L.A. Times has a full length story about it, complete with a quote by David Hawk and a diagram of what appears to be Kyo-Hwa-So Number 1, near the city of...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps
June 9, 2009

Another Day, Another North Korean Nuclear Threat

“Our nuclear deterrence capability is a powerful defensive measure to secure the peace and stability of the Joseon (Korean) peninsula and nearby regions. It will become a vehicle for merciless attacks on those who even slightly infringe upon our sovereignty,” said Minju Joson, North Korea’s Cabinet newspaper, through a commentary. [Yonhap] President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 to reward its regime for promising to give up its nuclear weapons....

Categories Terrorism (NK)