This just came in from Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, an extremely effective and proactive group based in Japan. This one may be life-or-death: October 19, 2005 PETITION To: President Roh Moo-hyun Chongwadae Presidential Palace 1 Jongno-gu, Seoul Special City Republic of Korea Your help with the following case is respectfully requested by Life Funds for North Korean Refugees (LFNKR), a Japanese nonprofit organization. Request for your intervention in the rescue of Kang Song-hee (female, born Feb. 5, 1979),...

James Lileks: “On one level, you can’t be in favor of the Iraqi vote and opposed to the war. On another level, you can, but it’s a happy chocolate land where the fountains spout fudge and the bunnies are edible and Saddam relinquishes power, ashamed, because Kofi Annan drafted a stern letter promising Serious Consequences, and some Iraqi Gandhi not only showed he was morally superior to the Tikriti gang, but had a titanium-hulled body that made him impervious to...

This article on YaleGlobal is a very good, hard-hitting analysis of what’s happening with food aid in North Korea, despite one significant error. It’s partially premised on North Korea’s alleged willingness to accept South Korean-recommended agricultural reforms, despite Andrei Lankov’s recent reports that North Korea is doing just the opposite. Still, passages like this one redeem the entire article with their clarity and honesty: By limiting the source of food assistance to China and South Korea, a more reliable partner...

Although I don’t agree with the ultimate conclusion of this article, on the economics of North Korean refugees, I can’t say that its reasoning is unsound. As even Nicholas Eberstadt admits, sanctions against North Korea are a risky venture, standing against a solid body of evidence that sanctions–particularly absent other, more positive pressures–don’t work. I happen to think that North Korea is a special case because its poorest are already unnaturally deprived of the benefits of trade, and because those...

OFK friend Don Kirk has a new piece in the Christian Science Monitor, in which he reports on his latest visit to the North, beginning with a non-visit to the Kaesong Industrial Complex: The tour bus stops on a bridge amid fallow fields, and the North Korean guide points to a cluster of small factories nearly a mile away. “That’s the Kaesong industrial zone,” says Choe Kyong Jin, an official in this historic city several miles north of the line...

Bush and Roh will meet in Kyongju on November 17th. High-level meetings are usually a prerequisite to major changes in the diplomatic relationships between nations, although not every high-level meeting necessarily signals a major change. I’m equally interested in the fact that Bush will visit the President of Mongolia in Ulaan Bator. Despite its lack of an air corridor not controlled by Russia or China, Mongolia could become a important diplomatic and trading partner in the region if it can...

Whose Interests Were Served by the politically motivated–and mostly fraudulent–controversy that forced the closure of the Koon-Ni Range? Certainly not the interest of readiness, according to the pilots who are now complaining. I’ve been an advocate of keeping air and naval power in South Korea, but if those forces can’t maintain readiness if based in South Korea, they’ll also have to find new basing.

South Korean Citizens are now forced to attempt private diplomacy with Kim Jong-Il because their own government won’t demand the return of their loved ones, abducted by North Korea.

There are fresh reminders that the Living, Breathing Document North Korea signed last month can only be described as a “breakthrough” if that description is prominently labelled as journalistic high burlesque. The V-word (no, not the one with its own monologue) looms before us: U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says any agreement with North Korea on providing technology and other incentives in return for giving up its nuclear weapons programs will need a strong verification system. The secretary made the...

Score another one for counterspeech. The discrediting of South Korean academia’s Stalinist wing proceeds apace despite the Old Right’s inadvertent deification of them into the pantheon of respected dissidents: [I]t was revealed that a large number of Kang [Jeong-Koo]’s theses and columns on the Korean War and the character of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) were posted on a North Korean propaganda group’s website. . . . [A] string of Kang’s remarks and actions coincided with guidelines advocated by the...

Journey’s End: A North Korean woman who had her feet amputated due to torture by North Korean authorities arrived in the South with her son last weekend. She made her way to a camp in Thailand after escaping from the North. You have to marvel at the sheer will to survive that drives some people.

South Africa, the beautiful country that was my home for three glorious and historic months as apartheid crumbled all around me in the year 1990, still has a few things to teach us about how much more effective discourse is than censorship in defanging a venomous lie. While the GNP fulminates with demands to arrest extremists like Professor Jang Shi-Ki for proclaiming Kim Il Sung to be Kim Il Sung’s gift to the lesser races of the world, the South...

Just finished debating former Ambassador Donald Gregg on the BBC. The subject was engagement with North Korea, where I laid out my views here long ago. The specific topic was the revelation that British-American Tobacco has been producing cigarettes in North Korea–strictly for the domestic market, so we’re told. That has apparently caused great outrage among the presumably left-leaning audience (host Steve Richards is just to the left of Arthur Scargill), although it’s hard to isolate the audience’s outrage from...

A month after the fact, the Heritage Foundation’s Peter Brookes has written about the 9/11 riot in the New York Post: THIS time, South Korea’s anti-American crowd has gone too far. Uncle Sam-bashing is, unfortunately, quite popular these days among South Korea’s left, teachers and youth–burning the Stars and Stripes and massive anti-U.S. street protests are all too common. But now South Korean radicals–many of them de facto North Korean pawns–are threatening to tear down the 15-foot tall statue of...

Donald Rumsfeld is on his way to Asia to talk to China and South Korea, among others. South Korea’s main goal is to get back something that the United States seems less interested than ever in keeping: On Friday, Defense Minister Yoon signaled his intent to tackle the issue during his meeting with Rumsfeld. “The issue of wartime command transfer will become one of the main issues to be discussed at SCM,” he told reporters. Yoon said it is the...

BEIJING, Oct. 17 KYODO The Japanese Embassy in Beijing issued a warning Monday to Japanese nationals in China about possible ”strong reactions” from the Chinese public following Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to the war-linked Yasukuni Shrine. The warning, issued through e-mail to registered Japanese nationals, follows violent anti-Japan demonstrations in Chinese cities in April, in which the embassy was pelted with stones and water bottles. __________ In response to Koizumi’s fifth visit to the shrine since he took...

This millenium’s Brass Balls Award will go to these people, if there’s any truth to this story: A group of human rights activists will attempt to stage a protest in North Korea after gaining access to the Stalinist country ostensibly to make up audience numbers for the “Arirang” mass calisthenics performance. The maverick human rights advocate Norbert Vollertsen said during a conference on North Korea’s human rights violations at the National Assembly the same day that the protest was planned...

Ambassador Alexander Vershbow has arrived: Acting as America’s face, another task for the new ambassador will be to interact with the South Korean public, particularly the younger generation that did not experience the Korean War. This is important because Seoul has increasingly been making clear in recent years that it wants to be treated as an equal partner in the bilateral relationship. Mr. Vershbow is also expected to push Seoul more on North Korean human rights, but exactly how much...