June 1, 2008

Pyongyang Soju Story Takes a Strange Twist

There’s more news about Steve Park, a/k/a Park Il Woo, the importer of the foul-tasting  Pyongyang Soju, who was charged with acting as an unregistered agent for South Korea by giving its agents off-line intel about his business trips to Nouth Korea. Park has since pled guilty to lying to FBI agents.  When FBI agents asked Park whether he’d had any contact with South Korean officials Park not only denied it, but denied that he’d had any contact within the...

Categories NK Economics/U.S. Law
June 1, 2008

LiNK: S. Korea Is Speeding Up Admissions of Refugees in Thailand

This came to me  by e-mail a few days ago,  not from LiNK, but from Human Rights Without Frontiers,  another NGO that works with them  to assist North Korean refugees: Dear Friends, Thank you all for stepping up and voicing your concern for the welfare of North Korean refugees in Thailand. Last month, on April 23, I traveled to Bangkok and met with officials at the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, expressing all of our concern over the treatment and...

Categories Refugees/Southeast Asia
June 1, 2008

N. Korean Famine Spurs Broad Discontent But Little Resistance So Far

Several new reports inform us that the famine in North Korea continues to worsen, and to claim ever larger numbers of victims. Reports from Good Friends and the Daily NK suggest that discontent is spreading among all generations and political strata of North Korean society.  Dissent is expressed more openly than in the past, but aside from some isolated protests over market restrictions, it has not yet translated into active resistance. Andrew Natsios suggests that it may: “The North Korean...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change
June 1, 2008

Two More Japanese Escape from N. Korea

The Asahi Shimbun reported on the 26th that a Japanese woman and her 40-year-old son, both of whom defected from North Korea, are being sheltered by the authorities in Jilin, China. The 73-year-old woman, from Sendai in Japan, migrated to North Korea after her husband joined the Chongryon (General Association of North Korean Residents in Japan) in 1967, and defected from North Korea, reportedly due to the famine, across the Tumen River this spring. According to the Japanese newspaper, while...

Categories Abductions/Japan & Korea
May 31, 2008

MUST SEE: BBC / Chosun Ilbo Video on North Korean Refugees in China

In the brilliant sunlight of an icy February day, the camera takes us onto the frozen river.  A female figure lies, face down, hip raised in the classic pose of a reclining beauty, a North Korean woman – fully dressed – who fell while crossing. Like a sculpture cast in bronze, nameless, iconic, she is a monument to all the fallen who went unfilmed, their deaths unremarked. The Chinese guide who has brought the crew to see her has seen...

Categories China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees
May 31, 2008

North Korea Tests Another Missile in the Yellow Sea

At about the same time it was given out that Napoleon had arranged to sell the pile of timber to Mr. Pilkington; he was also going to enter into a regular agreement for the exchange of certain products between Animal Farm and Foxwood. The relations between Napoleon and Pilkington, though they were only conducted through Whymper, were now almost friendly. The animals distrusted Pilkington, as a human being, but greatly preferred him to Frederick, whom they both feared and hated....

Categories Google Earth/NK Military
May 31, 2008

Kathleen Stephens Nomination Woes Deepen

In  March, I explained why I believe that Kathleen Stephens is the wrong person to be our next ambassador to South Korea.  In  April, I  explained why  Senator Sam Brownback had placed a hold on Stephens’s nomination, effectively blocking it.  Brownback announced his opposition  by going to the Senate floor to deliver an impassioned speech — “Google Earth has made witnesses of us all” — that made use of my own satellite image grabs  of Camp 22.  State had applied...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
May 31, 2008

N. Korea to Jack Pritchard: We Won’t Disarm

The U.S. State Department on Friday bashed its former envoy to North Korea, who a day before said Pyongyang is not going to meet Washington’s requirements on denuclearization despite laborious negotiations underway.  [Yonhap] No one should be surprised by anything about  this revelation except the name of the prophet.  This has started a delicious  red-on-red, Mick-on-Keith slap fight  between Pritchard and  the State Department.  Pritchard, of course, was a Clinton holdover, an early defector from the Bush Administration, and a...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
May 30, 2008

Documentary: Secret Victims

[Update: The link was bad before; fixed now.]This is the second of two documentaries by Journeyman Productions I’m featuring here. This one, an Australian production, deals with South Koreans who are abducted to the North and the unconscionable way various South Korean governments through the years have treated them and their families — either as presumptive spies (under rightist regimes) or as irritants to the Unifiction (under leftist ones). Although the docu was made in 2003, it nonetheless features plenty...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement
May 29, 2008

Barack Obama’s First Broken Promise

I’ve finally obtained a  scan of the original letter in which Senator Barack  Obama and 19 other members of the Illinois congressional delegation promised not to support  de-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism  absent a full  accounting  for the fate of  Reverend Kim Dong Shik.  Rev. Kim,  a U.S. lawful permanent resident, was  kidnapped by North Korean agents in China in 2000, while trying to help North Korean refugees fleeing starvation and oppression in their homeland.   The...

Categories Appeasement/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics
May 29, 2008

NK Hints More Japanese Abductees May Be Freed

The Japanese NGO ReACH, which advocates on behalf of the families of Japanese abducted by the North Korean regime, is active in Washington D.C. and sometimes sends me e-mails with interesting information.  Today, they inform me that the award-winning “Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story” will air on the PBS program Independent Lens on Tuesday, June 19th, at 10 p.m. Eastern.  (If anyone can find links for listings in their local areas, I’d appreciate it if you’d post them in the...

Categories Abductions/Japan & Korea
May 28, 2008

U.S. Food Aid to North Korea: Two Steps Back, One Step Forward

For those of you who do not know him, Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics is  a leading expert and author  on the North Korean economy and  food crisis.  Noland writes in to  report that he has learned some details of the U.S. government’s negotiations with the North Koreans on food aid.  The  negotiations have resulted in an agreement (for now) on food aid to the North, something I personally support for overriding humanitarian reasons notwithstanding my...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 28, 2008

Chinese Foreign Ministry Calls US-ROK Alliance a “Historical Relic”

“[T]he Korean-U.S. alliance is a historical relic. The times have changed and Northeast Asian countries are going through many changes and transformations. We should not approach current security issues with military alliances left over from the past Cold War era.”   [Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman, quoted in the Korea Times] … and there was much backpedalling. Not that I necessarily disagree with Comrade Spokesman; indeed,  permit me to  expand on his line of thought:  if matters left over from the...

Categories China/China & Korea
May 28, 2008

Equality, Fraternity, Atrocity

A group of lawmakers plans to submit a bill to the Diet mandating government financial compensation for Korean and Taiwanese former Class B and Class C war criminals and their surviving families.  The move, led by Kenta Izumi, a Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan) Lower House member, could come as early as the current Diet session. At issue are those who worked as guards of POWs for the Imperial Japanese military during World War II. The non-Japanese were later denied...

Categories History/Japan/Japan & Korea
May 27, 2008

Guest Post: Dan Bielefeld Goes to a Screening of “Crossing” at the National Assembly

[Update: Apologies — I had Dan’s name misspelled before.] I met Dan Bielefeld at a LiNK event in Washington two years ago, and he has been living in Seoul since shortly thereafter. After Dan’s excellent photography of the Chinese riot in Seoul last month, I invited him to guest-post here. He was recently invited to a screening of “Crossing” at the Korean National Assembly, and here is review. Since this is Dan’s first post, I’ll introduce him this time. =============...

Categories Korean Society/Refugees
May 27, 2008

Documentary: Escape from North Korea

This will be the first of two documentaries from Journeyman Pictures I’ll be featuring this week. “Escape from North Korea” follows an entire North Korean family all the way from their relatively privileged life in Pyongyang to the end of their long journey to escape the North, starting with clandestine camera phone images. For both of these documentaries, a big hat tip to commenter and blogger usinkorea.

Categories Activism/Defectors/Refugees
May 27, 2008

“China Hand” Owes Me a Retraction

[Update, 31 May 08: China Hand publishes a retraction: In a comment on Arms Control Wonk in 2007, I made the statement that the website Onefreekorea had apparently received an advance copy of a government ruling concerning Banco Delta Asia. I inferred this from my reading of the timestamp on the OFK post, which I believed indicated that the post had been put up the day before the ruling was officially announced and publicly available. OFK’s proprietor has advised me...

Categories Blogs & Blogging
May 26, 2008

Good Friends: As Famine Worsens, Soldiers Go Hungry, Disease Spreads

Good Friends has released two more newsletters, numbered 129 and 130. No. 129 is partially made up of material I had passed along here yesterday, but picks up from there with some interesting reports about the food supply to the military. The reports are from Kangwan Province, which lies just north of the DMZ’s eastern sector. According to one soldier in Keumkang County, the soldiers in this county are experiencing a food shortage as well. They are fed with less...

Categories Famine & Food Aid