Page 33

July 16, 2015

Does the Iran deal make a North Korea deal more likely? Here are six reasons why it doesn’t.

The Korean press today is filled with analysis of how the Iran deal could affect North Korea policy. China, which has long sought what would amount to de facto recognition of North Korea as a nuclear state, thinks the Iran deal is a swell model for a deal with North Korea, which almost certainly means that China sees the Iran deal as a capitulation. State itself is saying it’s ready for “authentic, credible” negotiations with Pyongyang, although State’s operational definitions...

Appeasement/Diplomacy

July 13, 2015

The Korea Development Institute wants to help companies “bypass” U.N. sanctions against N. Korea

Pyongyang’s latest business model for accessing hard currency despite U.N. sanctions is to rent out tens of thousands of its workers to Chinese factory owners. Those workers then labor in exploitative conditions, while Pyongyang steals most of their wages. Now, the Korea Development Institute—an “independent” think tank created under South Korean law in 1970, and “partnered” with several U.N. bodies and at least one South Korean government ministry—is urging small and medium-sized South Korean firms to join these exploitative arrangements. I’ve often argued...

Sanctions/Sunshine

July 10, 2015

Senators Graham, Menendez introduce companion to N. Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act

Senators Lindsey Graham (R, SC) and Robert Menendez (D, NJ) introduced the bill, numbered S. 1747, last night. I haven’t had a chance to read the full text yet, but from my initial read, it looks similar to S. 3012, which Senator Menendez introduced in the 113th Congress. Like S. 3012, S. 1747 makes the designations in Section 104(a) discretionary, rather than mandatory. The problem with that approach is that so far, President Obama has exercised his discretion to sanction North Korea as little as possible. The State...

Sanctions/U.S. Law

July 9, 2015

The summer of their discontent: Is Kim Jong Un losing the elite classes?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a spate of reports about defections from North Korea. Broadly, this is nothing new. The defection, for example, of three crew members of a fishing vessel is life-changing for three men, but is no more likely to rend the fabric of Kim Jong-Un’s regime than 27,000 other defections, almost all of them of people the regime had written off as expendable. Recently, however, we’ve seen multiple reports suggesting something very different, and vastly more consequential...

Defectors/Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology

July 8, 2015

Four federal court opinions* say N. Korea sponsors terrorism, yet the State Dep’t still denies it.

In case you missed it on my Twitter feed yesterday: Americans are rightfully concerned about ISIS’s rampage across the Middle East. But one thing that even ISIS has not yet accomplished is what the president, the director of the FBI, and the director of the NSA all insist Kim Jong-un’s hackers did last year — suppress the release of a major motion picture by threatening terrorist attacks on movie theaters across America. And yet, incomprehensibly—and two months overdue—the State Department’s...

Terrorism (NK)

July 7, 2015

Can the UNHCR address North Korea’s human rights crisis, despite Ban Ki-Moon?

At long last, the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights has opened its new field office in Seoul. Its mandates will be as follows: Strengthen monitoring and documentation of the situation of human rights as steps towards establishing accountability in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Enhance engagement and capacity-building with the Governments of all States concerned, civil society and other stakeholders Maintain visibility of the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea including through sustained...

"United" Nations/Appeasement/Human Rights

July 6, 2015

EU blocking of Korea National Insurance Corp. hints at key shift in N. Korea sanctions enforcement

The European Union’s administrative body, the European Commission or EC, has added seven additional designations to its regulation on “restrictive measures” against North Korea. The new designees include the Korea National Insurance Corporation, or KNIC, and six of its officials. There are several good reasons why the EC could have designated KNIC, but didn’t (the reason it did use is more interesting, but we’ll get to that later). First, KNIC has been linked to Pyongyang’s luxury goods imports, which have been banned since...

Europe/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions

July 2, 2015

N. Korean biowar researcher defects, will testify about human experimentation

[Update, 4 Aug 2015: I inquired with well-connected friends in Europe about when this testimony was likely to take place. Those friends instead questioned the accuracy of Yonhap’s report. Last week, I wrote to a Yonhap correspondent, and asked whether Yonhap stands by the story. Although the correspondent passed my question along to the author of this report, I have not heard back from Yonhap. The lack of a response is further reason to question the accuracy of Yonhap’s story.]...

Europe/Human Rights/The Camps/WMD

July 1, 2015

Daily NK: Massive brawl in Musan market after traders resist confiscations

This may be the most significant known incident of anti-regime resistance by North Korean civilians since the Ajumma Rebellion that followed the 2009 currency confiscation: A massive brawl between Ministry of People’s Security [MPS] agents and vendors at a marketplace in Musan County last Friday has led to an urgent dispatch of county security and safety agents along with the complete shuttering of the market. The clash occurred after angry vendors tried to resist the confiscation of their goods by market...

Capitalism/Resistance

June 27, 2015

South Korea’s new unilateral sanctions point to a multilateral sanctions strategy

South Korea has imposed unilateral financial sanctions “on six Taiwanese individuals and entities for their alleged arms trade with North Korea,” and on the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center. The Taiwanese entities include Global Interface Company, Trans Merits, Trans Multi Mechanics, Tsai Hsein Tai, Su Lu-Chi and Chang Wen-Fu. None of the entities are currently designated by the U.N. Security Council, whose designation process has historically been slow and subject to Chinese and Russian obfuscation. It is the first time that the government has...

Proliferation/Sanctions

June 25, 2015

Stephens didn’t call for isolation, he called for objectivity and full disclosure (updated).

The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield has written an opinion piece in response to Bret Stephen’s column yesterday, on which I commented in yesterday’s post: If we can’t report from the gulag without a guide, by Stephens’s logic, then we shouldn’t be reporting from North Korea at all. Or from Iran, or Syria, or Gaddafi’s Libya or probably present-day China, where journalists are closely monitored. Certainly not from the Soviet Union before the Iron Curtain came down. Whenever we journalists go...

AP Watch/Media Criticism

June 24, 2015

WSJ’s Bret Stephens, on the latest rare glimpse of N. Korea: “Whatever that is, it isn’t journalism.”

Stephens isn’t favorably impressed with David Guttenfelder’s latest “rare glimpse” through a soda straw clenched within the fists of Pyongyang’s KCNA propagandists, as published in The New York Times. Most of it is more of the same only-beautiful-please imagery we’ve come to expect from Guttenfelder–a flag factory, tiny children performing like circus animals, well-fed factory workers. Stephens observes: “It’s a potent reminder that nothing is so blinding as the illusion of seeing.” Because the Times‘s own coverage of North Korea...

AP Watch/Media Criticism

June 20, 2015

Friday news dump! State Dep’t releases terrorism report, and it’s the same old crap (updated)

The threats against “The Interview,” the sundry assassination and kidnapping plots against defectors and activists, the weapons shipments to Hezbollah, the U.S. and South Korean court decisions finding North Korea responsible for acts of terrorism, all go unmentioned once again. There’s not even a suggestion that North Korea is being considered for re-listing. Overview: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987. In October 2008,...

Terrorism (NK)

June 19, 2015

Is the North Korean military falling apart?

Last week, a 19 year-old North Korean army private fled “repeated physical abuse at the hands of his superiors” and “the realities of his impoverished country,” walked and rode for a week as a fugitive, crossed the heavily mined DMZ, and fell asleep next to a South Korean guard post.* Surely this young soldier knows that his family will now face terrible retribution for what he has done. We can even speculate that others have tried, and failed, at similar attempts that...

Anju Links/Border Control/NK Military/Resistance

June 16, 2015

What we learned from the Koryo Hotel fire: AP Pyongyang is not a news bureau (updated)

If one place in North Korea is the vortex of “engagement” with Kim Jong Un’s regime, and of every tendentious argument that this engagement will coax him into glasnost and perestroika, Pyongyang’s Koryo Hotel is that place. By North Korean standards, it’s luxurious, with a casino, a revolving restaurant, a hard-currency gift shop, and a lovely selection of listening devices. For years, it had been the favored venue for diplomats, tourists, investors, aid workers, and the occasional imbecile with more...

AP Watch

June 8, 2015

Guerrilla Engagement: A strategy for regime replacement and reconstruction in North Korea

~ 1 ~ One day, either this President or the next one will awaken to the realization that the regime in Pyongyang is collapsing, and that he has just inherited the costliest, messiest, and riskiest nation-building project since the Marshall Plan. The collapse of North Korea will present South Korea – and by extension, its principal treaty ally, the United States – with a nation-building challenge unlike any in recent history. After all, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria all had some...

Capitalism/Reconstruction/Regime Change/Resistance/Subversion

June 8, 2015

Here comes the crazy train!

Jason Unruhe, who looks like an overripe ripe kiwi fruit decorated with a Mister Potato Head set, goes by the Twitter handle “Maoist Rebel News” and calls himself the “No. 1 Marxist on YouTube,” and yes, that is like being the “No. 1” sommelier under the 395 overpass. It’s my privilege to report that Mr. Unruhe is upset with me, after he provoked a Twitter fracas by raging against “imperialist” sanctions against North Korea. At this point, I explained to...

Useful Idiocy

June 5, 2015

PBS Frontline: The Tank Man

China