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November 8, 2006

Thoughts (and Yours?) on the Mid-Term Elections

[Update: An Instalanche is always some consolation. Thanks, Glenn, and welcome to everyone.] [Update 2: On the other hand, Rumsfeld’s resignation may have a significant effect, less so if Richard Lawless stays on.] [Update 3: Of course, I could be wrong. Bill Richardson has a long history of dealing with the North Koreans going back to the Clinton era, and we’re all familiar with how that worked out. And as I’ve said again and again, we’ve only...

America

November 7, 2006

Richardson and I Read the Papers in Japanese?

The Korea Times is never wrong, you know. Nor did I know that Jodi added an “e” to her name, or that GI Korea had mustered out, which didn’t seem to be the case a few weeks ago, when we’d last exchanged e-mails. Nit. Pick. (I did like being called indispensable, I do post a lot of think tank stuff, and it’s always nice to know someone is reading.) h/t: The Big Hominid

Blogs & Blogging

November 7, 2006

Kang Chol Hwan Selected as One of Time’s ‘Asian Heroes’

In person, Kang is unimpressive. Like all of the North Koreans I’ve met, he’s strikingly small, frail, reserved, and downcast. One fears that some loud noise might frighten him off. He makes a deeper impression through the written word: At 10, Kang and his family had already spent a year in Yodok, a North Korean labor camp, sent there because his grandfather, a manager at a state-owned agency, had been accused of disloyalty to the regime of the late dictator...

Activism/Human Rights

November 7, 2006

S. Korean Defense of Kaesong Raises More Questions Than Answers

Last spring, the U.S. Special Envoy on Human Rights in North Korea and some NGO’s first raised concerns about the rights of workers at North Korea’s Kaesong Industrial Park, which hosts just over a dozen South Korean factories. The Unification Ministry initially tried to allay those concerns by bringing journalists and some foreign dignitaries up to Kaesong for guided tours. This did not work as planned. The U.S. Ambassador wandered around and snapped pictures of all the U.S.-made machine tools that...

Appeasement/Money Laundering/WMD

November 7, 2006

Oil-for-Slaves

This was in my in-box from Human Rights Without Frontiers today: The North Korean government is paying for oil imported from Russia by dispatching forced labour at zero cost since it has no other way to pay in goods or services. This was confirmed by the investigations of independent journalists, a professor of the Far Eastern Research Centre of Vladivostok and members of the Russian government. According to statistics of the local administration of Primorsky city, Pyongyang’s oil imports increased...

Human Rights/Russia/Russia & Korea

November 6, 2006

A (Blue) House Divided Against Itself

Kim Jong Il can count dividing the U.S.-Korea alliance as one of his recent successes, but in the process, he’s also divided his friends in South Korea. The left finds itself split among accomodators, appeasers, and outright agents, and those factions are going into an election year at war with each other. One of the most divisive of the internecine struggles is Seoul’s to-join-or-not-to-join agony over the Proliferation Security Initiative. Today, Yonhap has a long story on the subject. President...

"United" Nations/An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea/WMD

November 6, 2006

What’s Joe Di Trani doing these days?

You may recall that before he resigned from the six-party negotiations team, Di Trani was one half of the New York Channel, along with Han Song Ryol (Han, who is a real bastard, has also moved on). Those were the bilateral talks that the State Department was pretending not to have while the Democrats and some Republicans were demanding we have them. Di Trani, who was at the CIA previously, went to the Directorate of National Intelligence. Now (via Richardson)...

Diplomacy/North Korea/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD

November 6, 2006

Iran Tests North Korean-Made Missiles

Mingi Hyun has cool pics and a YouTube of Iran’s latest missile test. The clarity of the photographs is remarkable as the zaniness of the Iranians. If you observe, you will note something that looks almost like an Mil Mi-8/14/17 flying around, but the dorsal area looks different. Does anyone know just what the heck that thing is? It’s unidentified, it’s flying, and it’s an object.

Axis of Evil/Iran/Technology/WMD

November 6, 2006

New Human Rights Chair: ‘I Can No Longer Remain Silent’ on N. Korean Abuses

Bloggers are moths to the flame of irony, and South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission has been a reliable beacon for K-bloggers in need of prime material. For at least the last two years, we’ve cringed and laughed our way through its pickayune inquiries into adolescent hairstyles and dairies while 23 million other Korean citizens’ mass starvation, suffocating oppression, and mass enslavement went pretty much unmentioned. The HRC is nominally independent of the elected goverment, but pretty clearly, politics was...

Human Rights/Korean Law/Korean Politics

November 6, 2006

Hereinafter, Democratic Peoples’ Labor Party

What’s a little spy scandal to kill the spirit of Mangyondae? The Democratic Labor Party’s delegation, led by its chairman Moon Sung-hyun, arrived at Pyongyang on Tuesday. That day, the South Koreans visited Mangyongdae, the birthplace of Kim Il Sung. However, the Democratic Labor Party made no mention of the stop when it briefed journalists the next day about the delegates’ activities. Illustrating why it’s hard to be North Korea’s friend, the North Koreans thanked their guests by replaying the...

Korean Law/Korean Politics/The Fifth Column

November 6, 2006

Why Talk?

Some people are wondering just what we expect to get from talking to the North Koreans. But Ms. Rice is coming under increased fire inside and outside the administration from officials and experts who are skeptical about what diplomacy can achieve in this case, and who argue that there is no chance a new round of nuclear talks with North Korea will succeed. “What’s a good description? Fantasy? Dreamworld?”Â said Nicholas Eberstadt [OFK interview here], a North Korea expert with...

Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views

November 6, 2006

Got Meth?

Recently, Robert Koehler blogged about the North Korean drug ship that was repeatedly caught in Busan, only to be left to go and make the same haul again. It’s only the latest example of the South Korean government putting the interests of Bureau 39 ahead of the interests of ordinary Korean citizens in either the North or the South. Now, however, media exposure has embarrassed Roh’s government into the most limp-wristed action they could get away with — actually inspecting...

Appeasement/Drugs & N Korea

November 6, 2006

They Will Follow Us Home

It’s about time. Saddam Hussein was convicted Sunday and sentenced to hang for crimes against humanity in the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single Shiite town. The ousted leader, trembling and defiant, shouted “God is great!” as the judge handed down the verdict. Saddam, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal in one of the most highly publicized war crimes trials since the Nuremberg...

Terrorism/Iraq

November 5, 2006

Wobble Watch: Treasury Won’t Lift Sanctions on Kim Jong Il’s Macau Accounts

New press reports link the bank accounts that mean so much to Kim Jong Il with his nuclear and other WMD programs. North Korea used its accounts at a Macau-based bank, suspected of having served as a base for the North’s alleged illicit activities, to pay for devices that could be used in manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons, a Japanese daily reported Saturday. Quoting unidentified sources, Yomiuri Shimbun said China froze North Korean accounts worth US$24 million...

Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD

November 4, 2006

Great Moments in Diplomacy: N. Korea Wants Japan Kicked Out of Six-Party Talks

Something tells me that we haven’t reached a fundamental change in North Korea’s negotiating attitude. North Korea said Saturday it wants Japan out of six-party disarmament talks, calling officials in Tokyo “political imbeciles” for saying they will not accept Pyongyang as a nuclear power. …. A statement from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday said “there is no need for Japan to participate in (the talks) as a local delegate because it is no more than a state of the...

Diplomacy/Japan/Japan & Korea/Six-Party Talks/Unintended Humor/WTF?

November 4, 2006

‘Crimes Against Humanity:’ DLA Piper’s Report Is the Ultimate Must-Read on North Korean Human Rights

You may recall my recent post on the New York Times Op-Ed by Vaclav Havel, Elie Wiesel, and Kjell Magne Bondevik to treat the North Korean crisis as a human rights issue. One of the founding beliefs that inspired me to start OFK is that the issues are inseparable. Only a regime with so little regard for human life and dignity would allow its people to starve by the millions and divert those resources to weapons of mass murder. That...

"United" Nations/Human Rights

November 4, 2006

Kerry’s Website: ‘Right Either Way’

Screenshot here. This, to me, is the money quote: Although there are plenty of well-educated people in our armed forces — Kerry was one of them — military service has long been an opportunity for those with less education and fewer skills than they need to work in the private sector. Indeed, the military sells itself as a place to garner skills and to help pay for higher education. Ah shore m glad i kud git out of souf dakota...

U.S. Military/WTF?

November 4, 2006

Plugins Bleg

As you’ve seen recently, I’m still getting cozy over here at OFK 2.0, with many adjustments to the template, etc. Since the last template didn’t get the best reviews, I’m almost afraid to ask for your comments on this one … but I must, because the site is for you. The one technical problem I can’t solve how to put up headline and blogs feeds, beginning with my friends at DPRK Studies. I tried installing codes from feedroll into this...

Blogs & Blogging