Search Results for: KIMS

May 31, 2008

N. Korea to Jack Pritchard: We Won’t Disarm

The U.S. State Department on Friday bashed its former envoy to North Korea, who a day before said Pyongyang is not going to meet Washington’s requirements on denuclearization despite laborious negotiations underway.  [Yonhap] No one should be surprised by anything about  this revelation except the name of the prophet.  This has started a delicious  red-on-red, Mick-on-Keith slap fight  between Pritchard and  the State Department.  Pritchard, of course, was a Clinton holdover, an early defector from the Bush Administration, and a...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
March 24, 2008

North Korea Cancels Christmas?

Christmas as  North Koreans have  known it for decades has been the nativity of Kim Il Sung, the dead god-king, eternal president, founder of the state, and  father of Kim Jong Il.   His conception marked The Year Zero on North Korea’s juche calendar.   He  is idolized in statues; in portraits in every home, office, and classroom; and on the money.  Citizens must wear his likeness on pins that they can be punished for losing, and which  sometimes indicate the wearer’s...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Regime Change
February 16, 2008

Anju Links for 16 Feb 08

MAY IT BE HIS LAST: It’s Kim Jong Il’s birthday: The North’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper ran a lengthy editorial full of praise for Kim for making the communist nation an “undefeatable strong country” by strengthening its “political and military force.” “We have to unite and unite again around the leadership, upholding the slogan ‘Let’s safeguard the revolutionary leadership led by Comrade Kim Jong Il with our lives!’” the paper said, according to the North’s Korean Central News Agency. It...

Categories Anju Links
November 9, 2007

Walking the Road to Hell With the Eugene Bell Foundation

I want to begin this post with a correction.   On  October 29th, commenter  Marion Spina, referring to the  seventh “See Also” item in this post,  said: Question on your post: “I’m suspicious of the Eugene Bell foundation, because it recently received a “frienship” medal from the North Korean government, and because you don’t win Kim Jong Il’s friendship by asking hard questions and without paying for it. Based on this document, I infer that the Bell foundation is having some...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
August 17, 2007

Who Changed Who?

There must be something contagious in Korea. The South  Korean Embassy has put out the  text of the agreed  “rules” for the upcoming delivery of new instructions to southern cadres North-South summit, which a friend graciously sent me.  It’s good fodder for reflecting on the Sunshine Policy, the legacy of which leftist President Roh Moo Hyun and tyrant Kim Jong Il would have us celebrate with them.  So what is there to celebrate? If there’s a new spirit of openness...

Categories Appeasement
August 14, 2007

For Whom Do They Speak?

It’s not assured that the South Korean public will see President Roh’s going-out-of-business summit for what it is, but if it does not, it won’t be because South Koreans didn’t hear from enough cooler heads about  it.  Richardson presents a broad sampling of reaction from the  (mostly conservative) Korean papers that dominate their country’s market.   Most  share a  skeptical  view and agree on that this is an obvious,  cynical election-year  ploy.  There isn’t anything Roh is proposing to do in...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
March 6, 2007

Can They Do It? A Brief History of Resistance to the North Korean Regime

[Updated March 2007; See new incidents and survey stats at the bottom of the post.]   According to the  image of the North Korean people that their rulers carefully cultivate, North Koreans are brainwashed automatons.  Regime minders, who closely follow foreign camera crews inside North Korea, seldom permit outsiders to see any alternative.  That image  is probably a combination of fear, stage management, brainwashing, and a degree of truth:  few North Koreans have ever known anything else, and extreme nationalism...

Categories Resistance
February 22, 2007

Richardson on David Albright: Put Me Down for “C”

Update: Albright has published his views here in slightly more detail, and I’m even less persuaded than I was before. Albright completely mischaracterizes the HEU evidence by ingoring evidence he can’t refute (North Korea’s admissions, Musharraf’s admissions, Libya) and arguing as if all of our evidence consisted of a receipt for aluminum tubes we’d found in A.Q. Khan’s lint filter. The key point about aluminum tubes is that they’re used to make gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. I’ve never seen...

Categories Appeasement/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks/WMD
August 15, 2006

You’re Welcome.

Today is Liberation Day, at least for those of us on this side of the International Date Line. And because we’ve recently been on the subject of things that happened at Incheon, I thought I’d mention that the Incheon landing pictured here took place on September 8, 1945, when the United States Army arrived to liberate South Korea for the first time … from Japanese rule. You did hear that, right? Funny how no one ever talks about it. If...

Categories Anti-Americanism/History/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
November 26, 2005

Defining Genocide Down

The president of the Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, is calling for a historical reappraisal of one of the last century’s darkest events: Yushchenko was addressing a candlelight ceremony marking the 1932-33 famine induced by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s orders to requisition grain and break the spirit of Ukraine’s “kurkuly” farmers who resisted his drive to collectivise agriculture. The day had been chosen as the official commemoration day for the famine that was never recognised by the Soviet Union. The president told...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
October 15, 2005

Joining the Debate

[Updated] Now this is what I’m talking about when I say that the South Korean right needs to join the public debate about North Korea instead of hiding behind morally and intellectually lazy censorship. Here is the full text of the letter, followed by Rep. Hwang’s press release: Letter of Protest To Mr. Li Zhaoxing, the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of China [OFK Update: A wel-informed source tells me Mr. Li is actually the Foreign Minister. Oops.]: In August...

Categories Uncategorized
June 21, 2005

THE UNFORTUNATE RESULT OF THE SUNSHINE POLICY

Since its inception with former President Kim Dae-jung, the Sunshine Policy has evolved to complicate U.S. Policy efforts in North Korea, but also to hurt the North Korean people. At first the unprecedented policy was acclaimed on all sides, since it had never actually been tried, and resulted in the historic June 2000 summit (which earned Kim Dae-jung his Nobel Peace Prize). But long after its uselessness has been demonstrated, South Korean politicians still pursue the Sunshine Policy, doing anything...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics
May 19, 2005

What Are(n’t) We Learning from Kwangju?

Here’s how I’m commemorating Kwangju this week. I’m going to talk about people we can still save, like these people, just to name a few million: The head of the World Food Programme’s North Korea mission told the BBC that without new contributions famine-like conditions would be likely to reappear. How dare I? For starters, South Korea is already a democracy, and like every case where the good guys won, there’s seldom anywhere to go from there but down. Not...

Categories Uncategorized
May 19, 2005

What Are(n’t) We Learning from Kwangju?

Here’s how I’m commemorating Kwangju this week. I’m going to talk about people we can still save, like these people, just to name a few million: The head of the World Food Programme’s North Korea mission told the BBC that without new contributions famine-like conditions would be likely to reappear. How dare I? For starters, South Korea is already a democracy, and like every case where the good guys won, there’s seldom anywhere to go from there but down. Not...

Categories Uncategorized
May 19, 2005

What Are(n’t) We Learning from Kwangju?

Here’s how I’m commemorating Kwangju this week. I’m going to talk about people we can still save, like these people, just to name a few million: The head of the World Food Programme’s North Korea mission told the BBC that without new contributions famine-like conditions would be likely to reappear. How dare I? For starters, South Korea is already a democracy, and like every case where the good guys won, there’s seldom anywhere to go from there but down. Not...

Categories Uncategorized
April 6, 2005

The Death of an Alliance, Part X

The first item in today’s installment has to do with an alleged “stealth” reduction in the Korean military presence in Iraq from 3,700 to 3,200. I’m not sure how strong my reaction is here– first, because I was under the impression that there were only 3,000 Korean troops there, so 3,200 represents a net gain of one company over my own expectations. Second and more importantly, the military value of the Korean contingent was already negligible, at least according to...

Categories Uncategorized
April 6, 2005

The Death of an Alliance, Part X

The first item in today’s installment has to do with an alleged “stealth” reduction in the Korean military presence in Iraq from 3,700 to 3,200. I’m not sure how strong my reaction is here– first, because I was under the impression that there were only 3,000 Korean troops there, so 3,200 represents a net gain of one company over my own expectations. Second and more importantly, the military value of the Korean contingent was already negligible, at least according to...

Categories Uncategorized