January 17, 2007

Sorry ‘Bout That: How a South Korean Consulate Helped Doom Nine Family Members of Its POWs

[Scroll down for updates.]   Thirty-one years after the North Koreans kidnapped him from his fishing boat, 67 year-old Choi Uk Il is back in South Korea with the wife who never lost faith in him, and after his own government’s Shenyang consulate nearly turned him away.  You can’t help but admire the ferocious loyalty of his wife, who raised their children on a cleaning lady’s salary, kept faith with her husband, and then cowed the faithless Ministry of Foreign...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/China/China & Korea/Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees
January 17, 2007

Kumgang Update

Update:   More here.   Whenever you read about the Kumgang Tourism Project, which South Korea likes to tout as an initiative to reduce tensions,  consider those assertions in the context of  well-sourced suspicions that North Korea uses the proceeds for its WMD programs.  Thus, we should celebrate stories like this one from Yonhap, documenting its failure in extensive detail.  The best news is that enough people have a conscience to impede the project’s success.

Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea
January 17, 2007

NGO: No New Year’s Rations in N. Korea This Year, Except in Pyongyang

More evidence that things are worse this year than they were last year.  North Korea has failed to deliver on its promise to distribute food rations across the communist country on the occasion of the New Year, a civic aid group said Wednesday. “Except for Pyongyang, no special New Year food rations were issued,” Good Friends, a Seoul-based civic relief organization, said in its latest monthly newsletter. The group said that North Korean authorities had planned to provide food rations...

Categories Deprogramming/Famine & Food Aid
January 17, 2007

Wendy Cutler for President

At this point, I oppose the FTA  because Korea does not seem to be serious about opening its markets fundamentally.  Nor do  I  believe that  Korea should be rewarded for  doing so much to demagogue anti-Americanism, or to  undermine U.S. national security interests or  the humanitarian imperatives of the North Korean people.  Those are the reasons I don’t buy things made in Korea these days, and I know that the FTA would  instead reward Korea’s worst politicians and labor unions...

Categories An Alliance?/Diplomacy/Korean Politics/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea
January 17, 2007

Ministry of Empty Promises

Ban Ki Moon tells us how he’ll make the United Nations relevant again: “I pledge my best efforts to help the Iraqi people in their quest for a more stable and prosperous Iraq,” he said. “On North Korea, I will try my best to facilitate the smooth process of the six-party process, and encourage in any way I can the work for a denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” He said he wanted to see substantive progress on the Millennium Development...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/WMD
January 16, 2007

Dispulitzated

Holy Mother of Pearl — GI Korea’s dismantling of AP Reporter Charles Hanley (Part 2,  Part 1)  is one  for the ages.  Please remind me to learn from the pile of cinders that was once Charles Hanley and never mess with GI Korea.  On the other hand, Hanley’s own comment on GI Korea’s blog may be the most damning condemnation of his objectivity and professionalism.  I responded directly to Hanley there.

Categories Blogs & Blogging/Korean War/Media Criticism
January 16, 2007

Few Donors Contribute to N. Korean Army Mess Halls

A tally as of Sunday showed the relief agency received slightly more than US$16.25 million in assistance from donor nations, up from $12.7 million in November. But the total accounts for only 15.9 percent of the $102 million the WFP says it needs for its protracted relief and recovery operation (PRRO) in North Korea. [link] The missing context here is that the World Food Program had already dramatically scaled back its feeding operations from 6.5 million recipients, to just 1.9...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
January 16, 2007

China Calls on North Korea to Return Abductees

Some interesting statements emerged from a trilateral summit in Cebu: The leaders of Japan, China and South Korea urged North Korea Sunday to scrap its nuclear weapons and to respond to international humanitarian concerns. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun made the plea in a joint statement after the first summit between the three nations in two years. It is rare for China publicly to raise humanitarian concerns about North Korea....

Categories Abductions/China/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Human Rights/WMD
January 16, 2007

Eum, Yang, and Korean Diplomatic Courtesy

A few days ago, Occidentalism posted this absolutely priceless flowchart that is too telling by half about how some Koreans tend to scapegoat their way through real problems. I suppose the temptation to pin blame on others is human nature; that temptation is at its greatest when a solution to the underlying problem seems beyond reach. Witness the finger-pointing that followed last October’s nuke test (and the notable absence of constructive proposals accompanying it). I shouldn’t miss this opportunity to...

Categories Anti-Americanism/China & Korea/Diplomacy/History/Japan & Korea/Korean Politics/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
January 16, 2007

Pandemic Strikes Chongjin, North Korea’s Fourth-Largest City

Previous posts on the spreading pandemic here, beginning last October.  Yonhap, quoting unnamed sources and the NGO Good Friends, tells us that things have gotten worse, and that the largest city in North Korea’s northeast faces outbreaks of several deadly diseases: Four infectious diseases have stricken a North Korean city on the east coast, affecting up to 4,000 people, a source claimed Monday. “Chongjin is overrun by scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus and paratyphoid. About 3,000 to 4,000 are suffering from...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
January 16, 2007

Segye Ilbo: Goh Kun Will Not Run

At a press conference tomorrow, Goh will supposedly make it official.  [Update:  he made it official.] First, Goh was Korea’s too-short vacation in what seemed a lot like reality.  Later, for exactly 15 minutes, Goh was the Paris Hilton of Korean politics:  arousing to a desperate, lonely few, whose adoration couldn’t quite mask the fact that he was just more of the same talentless, plasticky pap  we’ve seen so many times before.  As with Hilton, a merciful God will allow...

Categories Korean Politics
January 16, 2007

Sounds Like a Job for ‘The Dog’

But this time, they mean business: An international energy consortium has asked impoverished North Korea for nearly US$1.9 billion in compensation for its defunct project to build two nuclear power plants in the North under the 1994 nuclear agreement on the North’s freezing of its nuclear activities, diplomatic sources here said Tuesday. North Korea, however, has yet to respond to the claim, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Analysts also said the North is unlikely to respond favorably,...

Categories Diplomacy/NK Economics/WMD
January 15, 2007

The China Veto

[Updated below]   For those who still doubt that the South Korean government would bow to another government’s sensitivities to cancel an artistic performance — witness the debate and denial over the censorship of “Yoduk Story” — I suppose we can now put those doubts to rest. On January 7, several major South Korean media published editorials that criticized the Korean government for kowtowing to the Chinese communist regime by canceling the New Tang Dynasty’s (NTDTV) New Year Spectacular in...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Censorship/China & Korea/Korean Law/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea
January 14, 2007

China’s Latest Pandemic: The Clap

The Economist has a very interesting report on the subject: In China the chance of catching it is now more than 28 times greater than it was in 1993. Syphilis cases are increasing in many countries but the extent of China’s rise, in relative and absolute terms, dwarfs figures from America, Canada and Europe. That is the conclusion of a study by Zhi-Qiang Chen and his colleagues at China’s National Centre for STD and Leprosy Control published in the latest...

Categories China
January 13, 2007

Shenyang Six Update

From LiNK: We know how agonizing it is to think of the possible fate of the Shenyang Six if things do not go well in negotiations with People’s Republic of China. Please rest assured that we are doing all that we can. The instant there is a role for us all in the grassroots to play, you will hear about it, and we will mobilize internationally for the six. At the moment, we are waiting on high-level discussions and working...

Categories Activism/China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees
January 12, 2007

UniFiction Ministry Plans ‘Peace Education’ and ‘Unification Education’ in Public Schools

From the Ministry’s own Web site: Minister Lee said, “The inter-Korean relations have improved from confrontation and tension to reconciliation and cooperation. Excuse me????   In order to match such improvement, peace education needs to be introduced into the curriculum of school and unification education. I want to promote the peace education in a future-oriented way so that the people can foster their ability to keep peace firmly and it can contribute to the peace in Northeast Asia as well...

Categories Appeasement
January 12, 2007

What Unites These Nations?

ASEAN says it wants to become a more robust organization with more “teeth.”   Think they can do it?  Maybe this is a clue: The 10 leaders, whose members range from an absolute monarchy and military juntas to parliamentary democracies and one-party communist states, have agreed to start drafting a charter that would give ASEAN a legal basis for the first time since it was founded at the height of the Vietnam war nearly 40 years ago. I wonder what...

Categories Southeast Asia