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August 1, 2016

In the debate over N. Korea’s overseas workers, listen to the workers

As of January, two EU nations — Poland and Malta — were its principal consumers of North Korean labor. As the Leiden Asia Center has shown us, those North Korean workers labor under harsh and unsafe conditions, the North Korean government steals most of their wages, and the state’s per capita wage theft is far more profitable in Europe, where prevailing wages are higher, than it is in Africa or Asia where most North Korean laborers work. That’s why the...

Human Trafficking

July 29, 2016

Latest N. Korea defections: 6 soldiers, 3 workers, a top student, a general & slush fund manager

It has been three months since 12 young women and a man defected from that North Korean restaurant in Ningpo, China, and since 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait staged a mass protest against their minders. I’d begun to wonder if the regime had cauterized the wounded cohesion of the very people it needs most desperately to pay its bills and seal its borders, but the drops of fresh blood on the floor tell another story. Let’s begin with the most...

Border Control/Defectors/Human Trafficking/NK Military/Sanctions

July 28, 2016

At Cheongo-ri, one or two prisoners die of hunger or disease each day*

The Korea Institute for National Unification, or KINU, has produced a number of thorough and detailed reports on human rights in North Korea. Recently, KINU released a new report by research fellow Lee Sang-sin on torture in North Korean’s political prison camps. There’s no English translation of the report posted on KINU’s web site yet, but two news reports give us a preview of some of its findings. Not surprisingly, despite the fact that North Korea has a law against torture,...

The Camps

July 27, 2016

What Pyongyang Must Do to Get Sanctions Lifted

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower In yesterday’s post, I confronted two unwelcome facts: first, that Kim Jong-un almost certainly will not give up his nuclear arsenal voluntarily; and second, that we cannot learn to live with a nuclear North Korea (or more accurately, it will not learn to live with us). To these, I’ll add a third: things in Korea will certainly get much scarier over the next few years. Pyongyang is blaming...

Sanctions/U.S. Law

July 26, 2016

If Pyongyang won’t disarm, what’s the point of talks?

Two think-pieces published last week, one by Sahand Moaref in The Diplomat and one by Patrick Cronin in Beyond Parallel, have encouraged me to write down some thoughts in response the best questions about North Korea sanctions, which have to do with our ultimate objectives, and how we can use sanctions relief as a diplomatic inducement without throwing away our leverage (today’s post is the first installment of those thoughts). There are also legitimate questions about our objectives. Is it...

Diplomacy

July 25, 2016

Tom Malinowski talks to the North Korean people

History should remember Tom Malinowski, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy and Human Rights, as one of the heroes of the Obama Administration’s otherwise deferential and ineffective North Korea policy. Before his confirmation, Malinowski worked for liberal lion Daniel Patrick Moynihan and was Washington Director of Human Rights Watch. Recently, he sat down for an interview with the Unification Media Group, which is staffed in part by North Korean exiles, publishes the Daily NK, and broadcasts into North Korea....

Subversion

July 23, 2016

Air Koryo Flight 151, as microcosm and metaphor (updated)

We now have at least one first-person account of what happened aboard that Air Koryo flight that filled with smoke and made an emergency landing at Shenyang earlier this week. I said in my original post that “I’m sure the experience wasn’t pleasant,” with deliberate understatement. In fact, many of the passengers aboard the half-empty flight thought they were about to die, and at least one began to rethink the purpose of his life (something we should all do more often,...

AP Watch/Miscellaneous

July 22, 2016

Air Koryo plane that made emergency landing was one of its newer aircraft

An Air Koryo flight has had to make an emergency landing in Shenyang after the cabin filled with smoke. The plane, belonging to the North’s national carrier, was flying to Beijing from Pyongyang when it made a forced landing because of the smoke, the airport said in a short statement on its microblog. The aircraft made a safe emergency landing, and “nothing abnormal” was found in its condition, although an investigation was underway, it added. Xinhua, which had initially reported...

Miscellaneous

July 19, 2016

Andrei Lankov doesn’t really know if North Korea sanctions are working

It’s no secret that I’ve been a skeptic of “engagement” with Pyongyang from the very beginning, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Andrei Lankov. His Korea Times columns, his book, and his other writings on social, historical, and political matters have been so useful that I often cite them, despite his unrealized predictions or the silly things he occasionally writes. His view of engagement isn’t just the conventional approach of wheeling a catapult up the DMZ and flinging bundles of unmarked...

Appeasement/Sanctions

July 15, 2016

When Kim Jong-un nukes off — and he will — here’s how we should respond (updated)

The U.N. Security Council was already meeting about how to respond to North Korea’s latest missile tests when Pyongyang drew the curtain on its next act of satellite theater at Punggye-ri. Even without the latest sanctions, His Corpulency would probably have carried out another nuke test within the next year, if only to help consolidate his rule, and because the U.S. and South Korea are holding presidential elections. (North Korean dictators prefer to nuke off as new administrations assemble their...

Sanctions

July 13, 2016

China’s next maritime conflict could be with North Korea

This week, the eyes of the world are on arbitrators’ rejection of China’s made-up claims to the South China Sea. Further north, however, Pyongyang’s lease of fishing rights to Beijing threatens to instigate violent brawls between North Korean and Chinese fishermen. Earlier this year, China stopped accepting imports of North Korean seafood. The reasons for this still aren’t clear, but one possibility arises from a report that much of North Korea’s fishing fleet is controlled by the Reconnaissance General Bureau,...

China & Korea

July 12, 2016

Prisoners of the People: N. Korea’s guerrilla society has political implications (updated)

Over the last year, I’ve become convinced that if technology can break the electronic barriers between North Korea and the Outer Earth, it would be possible to keep the broken promises of the Sunshine Policy by bypassing Pyongyang and engaging directly with the North Korean people. Governments, churches, and NGOs could harness markets, smuggling networks, and private agriculture to help North Koreans feed the hungry, heal the sick, share information and ideas, begin to rebuild their broken civil society, and...

Capitalism/Health & Disease/Resistance/Subversion

July 11, 2016

U.S. joins diplomatic squeeze on North Korean labor exports

Last week, the Leiden Asia Centre made headlines around the world with the release of its exhaustive, 115-page report, “Slaves to the System,” on North Korea’s overseas labor arrangements and how those laborers are treated. The Leiden report coincides with new diplomatic efforts by the U.S., South Korea, and now, the International Labor Organization to bring those arrangements to an end. The Chosun Ilbo reports that the U.S. government “is preparing a series of reports on the abuse of North Koreans...

Diplomacy/Human Trafficking/Sanctions

July 8, 2016

A blanket trade embargo won’t help us disarm or reform North Korea

In Wednesday’s post, I wrote about Beyond Parallel’s imagery analysis pointing to a decline in cross-border trade between China and North Korea, along with the limitations of that analysis and its great potential if expanded and focused. But I also alluded to a broader policy concern about the error of equating trade volume with sanctions enforcement: that while China’s under-enforcement of sanctions has historically been the greatest impediment to our North Korea policy, sanctions over-enforcement is an equal danger. Recently, I’ve heard...

Border Control/Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

July 7, 2016

The designation of His Corpulency for human rights abuses is symbolic. Powerfully symbolic.

About a week later than my prediction in this post and a full decade after it should have done so, the Treasury Department has finally designated His Porcine Majesty, ten of his worst henchmen, and nine government agencies for human rights abuses. “Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” said Adam J. Szubin, Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence....

Human Rights/Sanctions

July 6, 2016

The evidence of China’s compliance with North Korea sanctions is still mixed.

This week, there has been much talk and excitement about a new study, by the new blog Beyond Parallel, analyzing satellite imagery of six select sites along the Chinese-North Korean border, and finding evidence of a recent decline in bilateral trade. From this, the study concludes that China may be (as Josh Rogin paraphrases it for The Washington Post) “Beijing has been quietly punishing Kim by cutting off the flow of funds to his regime.” Here are the study’s two main...

China & Korea/Sanctions

July 5, 2016

Minbyun’s frivolous lawfare terrorizes 12 young N. Korean refugees & endangers lives.

The western association of “left” with “liberal” does not hold up well in South Korea, whose political spectrum is dominated by warring factions of nationalists. These factions wield the law as an authoritarian sword against their rivals, and as a (sometimes flimsy) shield against their rivals’ authoritarian assaults. Historically, the worst authoritarianism was on the political right before the transition to democracy in 1987. The left still fuels its moral propulsion from the nostalgia of dissent dating back to this...

Defectors/Human Trafficking/Korean Politics/Refugees/Useful Idiocy

July 1, 2016

Sanctions Diplomacy: Yesterday Uganda, today Namibia, tomorrow Cambodia

Earlier this week, when a senior Namibian official who had defended her government’s military cooperation with North Korea showed up in Pyongyang, I conceded that she could be there to terminate that cooperation, but didn’t assess that possibility as very likely. But yesterday, the Namibian government announced it was ending its joint projects with North Korea, including a North Korean-run arms factory, to comply with new U.N. sanctions: “The Government of the Republic of Namibia, in fulfilling her international obligations...

Africa/Sanctions/Southeast Asia