Search Results for “frag”

January 26, 2009

Eberstadt: What Went Wrong

So over the weekend, I finally had a chance to read Nicholas Eberstadt’s fine summary of the Bush Administration’s eight years of drift and indecision on North Korea (hat tip to Robert Koehler). It’s hard to pick a favorite passage, but this one certainly struck a chord: In the absence of a coherent policy, though, the imperative of “success” in talks with North Korea suddenly took on a life of its own for the Bush team. (After all, there was...

Money Laundering/NK Economics/Washington Views

January 21, 2009

39.91 N, 127.55 E: Hamhung, Haunted City

In 1997, Washington Post correspondent Keith Richburg was allowed into the city of Hamhung, just inland from North Korea’s east coast, to try to find the truth behind fragmentary rumors of a famine inside the world’s most isolated country. Although Hamhung is North Korea’s second-largest city and a key industrial center, it was an isolated place with few foreign visitors, little commerce with the outside world, and at a great distance from any international border. This is what Hamhung looks...

Famine & Food Aid/Google Earth

November 24, 2008

Calling Jay Lefkowitz

According to some fragmentary reports passed along by Human Rights Frontiers, Son Jung Nam — or rather, what’s left of Son Jung Nam after more than a year of torture in a dungeon in Pyongyang — is about to be stood up against a firing squad … if he still lives, that is. (No link on the latest report, which come to me via e-mail). I previously posted on Son’s case here. In China, a group of 11 refugees between...

Appeasement/Human Rights/Refugees

September 22, 2008

Grim Vindication: Predictably, Appeasement Fails to Disarm North Korea … Again

[Update: Now they’re asking the IAEA to remove the seals and cameras. More here.] There are some who can look back on decades of failure and learn nothing, while some of us looked into the future two years ago and foresaw everything. One Agreed Framework should have been enough for any observer possessed of an average ration of common sense. Crediting myself with that much, in March of 2007, I wrote a post in the form of news reports...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks

July 24, 2008

Anju Links for 24 July 2008

CONDI RICE WAS NOT AVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: A South Korean NGO reports that North Korea carried out 901 public executions last year. Don’t expect to see this in State’s human rights report next year. Boy, talking to the North Koreans really is changing them, isn’t it? JUST KILL YOURSELF NOW IF YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE THIS: The protocol has to be one “that can give us confidence that we’re able to verify the accuracy of the North Korean declaration,” she said....

Anju Links

June 4, 2008

In Food Aid Talks, North Korea Reverts to Old Ways; Regime Thins Population of P’yang

A reliable source who asks not to be named e-mailed me yesterday to pass along a fly-on-the-wall description of an “expert’s meeting” in Beijing. The purpose of the meeting between U.S. and North Korean officials had been to agree on the technical details of the U.S. food aid program — exactly how the North Korean regime will and will not allow us to feed its population. The meeting was described as “fairly downbeat” and “contentious,” with the North Korean negotiators...

Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change

March 2, 2008

North Korea Has a Meth Problem

North Korea’s government has long been suspected of producing illicit drugs for export. In 2003, a high-level defector testified that the goverment is deeply involved in producing and exporting opiates, including heroin, and amphetamines. North Korea’s official ideology, really “crude, race-based nationalism” thinly veiled in socialism, would have had no problem justifying the poisoning of Japanese and Australian kids, but it was just a matter of time before North Korean drugs found their way into North Korean society. Until recently,...

Drugs & N Korea/Inside NK/Regime Change

January 1, 2008

A Better War

HAPPY NEW YEAR. Iraq and U.S. politics are two subjects that are being thoroughly covered by other blogs, but I’ve been following both stories very closely (while mostly sparing you my thoughts on either). Here, however, are some interesting (to me) “miscellaneous” stories about Iraq, terrorism, and politics that might also interest you. MY NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION is the same as last year’s: to make better use of the FOIA. This new law may make it easier for me to...

Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. Military

December 14, 2007

Daily NK: Rising banditry in N. Korea

As respect for the law disappears and a regular market economy is not introduced in North Korea, the trend to earn money by any means ““ fair or foul – has dominated. For instance, even in the daytime soldiers or gangsters stop trucks and rob them of their freight. Such incidents are occurring frequently. [Daily NK, Yoon Il Geun] Amid a number of reports of this kind, you have to wonder about the broader implications of groups of armed men...

Inside NK

October 14, 2007

NYT: It Was a Reactor

Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports. [N.Y. Times, David Sanger and Mark Mazzetti] Even among other journalists who cover this story and the White House, Sanger is well known for having good sources...

Six-Party Talks

September 11, 2007

Newsweek Reports on Son Jong Nam, North Korea’s Only (Possibly) Living Dissident

A new Newsweek piece about North Korea’s underground movement reports on the plight of Son Jong Nam. If Son still lives, he sits on death row in Pyongyang for spreading his faith. You will recall that I previously wrote about him here, and told you how you can join in a campaign to save his life. Newsweek estimates that there are between 20,000 and 100,000 underground Christians in North Korea. You can’t bring Christianity to such a place on a...

Inside NK/Religion/Resistance

August 24, 2007

“Famine in North Korea”: An Interactive Review (3 of 3)

[OFK: In this post, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard respond to Part 1 and Part 2 of my review of their book, “Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform.”] Josh Stanton has written by far the most thoughtful and cogent analysis of Famine in North Korea that we have seen to date. Stanton’s review is generous, but also raises important questions about virtually all elements of our analysis. In the interest of furthering both scholarly and policy debate, we...

Books & Films/Famine & Food Aid

July 20, 2007

Taliban Kidnap 18 South Koreans in Afghanistan

They were members of a church group, and readers may recall other church groups from South Korea have also ventured into some very dangerous places. Taliban gunmen abducted at least 18 members of a South Korean church group in southern Afghanistan, and a purported spokesman for the Islamic militia said Friday it will question them about their activities in Afghanistan before deciding their fate. The Koreans were seized Thursday in Ghazni province as they were traveling by bus from Kabul...

Korean Society/Religion

May 4, 2007

Anju Links for 4 May 2007: Foot-and-Mouth Strikes North Korean Cattle and American Politicians

1. The latest outbreak of disease in North Korea is foot-and-mouth among the cattle, and presumably the oxen that would be used as draft animals for spring plowing. That’s very bad news for a country with a declining food situation and no margin of survival. The U.N., which generally takes pains to avoid offending North Korea, says that the outbreak is “under control.” 2. New, Improved, and Completely Failed! It has now been 20 days since North Korea violated all...

Anju Links

April 20, 2007

Rhetoric and the Record on North Korean Human Rights

[Update: video of the event and full text of the speech below] So I went to this yesterday, thanks to the kind invitation of the organizers, and left with the usual sense of guilt I feel every time I meet Jay Lefkowitz. Lefkowitz has acquired an understandable “Oh sh*t, not that guy again” expression whenever he sees me. If I were him, so would I. Even when I’ve been critical of him, I’ve said that Lefkowitz is sincere,...

Human Rights/Washington Views

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...

Resistance

October 30, 2006

As Roh Prepares to Name a New Cabinet, New Calls to Reboot Uri

After the local elections, I had blogged about the rift in the Uri Party about merging with other parties on the left. In the wake of Uri’s beating in the last round of elections, it’s painfully obvious that the left is weak and fragmented and only stands a chance if it unites. Note, for example, how Uri can’t win in South Jeolla province because other lef-wing parties win instead. In that spirit, a former Justice Minister and Uri founder has...

Diplomacy/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea

September 30, 2006

Guild of Liars, Part 2: North Korean Refugees Expose the Lies of the National Lawyers’ Guild

[Updated] Kudos to the Bar Assocation for doing what the cowardly and politicized National Human Rights Commission won’t. The report included testimony similar to that in papers issued by Amnesty International and other rights groups, describing forced abortions and infanticide in North Korea’s political prisons. The bar association report was the first of its kind, although the group issues annual reports on human rights in the South. It was issued against a backdrop of criticism by rights activists of...

Appeasement/Human Rights/Korean Law

Search Results for: frag