Search Results for “lankov”

November 27, 2007

Still Collapsing?

The Weekly Standard publishes a very non-specific, unsourced prediction that North Korea is on the verge of collapse. Read it for yourself, but I don’t find it very persuasive. While collapse is a distinct possibility for the reasons Andrei Lankov has recently repeated (see yesterday’s post), I don’t see signs that it’s more imminent today than it was a year ago. If anything, the North Korean leadership has gained strength from its acceptance by the Bush Administration.

Inside NK/Kremlinology

November 26, 2007

Impervious to Evidence: State’s Appeasement Express Arrives at the Koryo Hotel

[Update: Richardson links to State’s quasi-denial: why, yes, we have stationed a State Department employee in Pyongyang, but he’s strictly there to supervise the equipment for the technical process of disabling North Korea’s nuclear programs. That’s peculiar. If this employee’s job is strictly scientific or technical, why not avoid giving people the wrong idea and send someone from the Department of Energy or Defense instead? At best, this is a trial balloon. More likely, we’ve just seen the camel’s...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation

October 29, 2007

There Is Such a Thing as ‘Good’ Engagement

If you’re reading this, you’re bearing with me despite the light blogging of late. Thank you. I make a habit of not talking about my work here, but suffice to say that it carries significant responsibilities that sometimes leave no time and energy for other things. At times like these, when there is very little time left over, I owe that time to my family. Thank you again for your understanding, for continuing to stop by, and for your e-mails. ...

Deprogramming/Six-Party Talks

October 3, 2007

Define “All”

Update: A reader was kind enough to send a copy of the latest six-party joint statement, which you can read here. Some of the key langugage: 2. The DPRK agreed to provide a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear programs in accordance with the February 13 agreement by 31 December 2007. A deadline. I like deadlines. But this adds no clarity that nuclear “programs” means nuclear “weapons,” and nothing about inspection or verification beyond Yongbyon. 3. The...

Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks

September 18, 2007

Chaos Conquers North Korea

I had really wanted to publish a Q&A with Professor Andrei Lankov this morning, but since Yahoo’s e-mail service has gone from bad to worse, it’s simply not possible for me to even open up my e-mail to pull up his responses. So spread the word: Yahoo! mail stinks. Meanwhile, there’s a wave of fresh evidence, most of it via the Daily NK, to support Lankov’s thesis that North Korea can’t control the spread of chaos or the erosion of...

Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/NK Economics

North Korea F.A.Q.

Why blog about North Korea? North Korea’s nuclear program and the diplomacy that has attempted to end it for decades are widely covered in the media, but the media has done a poor job reporting the wider North Korea story: its people and their suffering, the society in which they live, and what these things say about the failure of the international community to respond to a grave humanitarian crisis. Those missing pieces of the story are the pieces that...

Comments: 73

Interviews

This blog has been privileged to host some interviews and discussions with some of world’s leading experts and insiders on Korea and policy. I expect to publish more such interviews as time permits. Next up will be Professor Andrei Lankov, a former Soviet citizen who attended college at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, who will discuss his new book, “North of the DMZ.” Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Scholar on Political Economy, American Enterprise Institute (also in Korean); Prof....

Comments: 2

July 9, 2007

All Quid, No Quo

If Andrei Lankov is right and most North Koreans secretly know that they don’t really live in an earthly paradise, these must be confusing times. Any of them who mull the oddities of the wider world in the privacy of their own minds must be asking themselves: “Why do they pay us?” If North Korea has few natural resources and a dwindling population of a few million, why does it seem that everyone on earth lines up to pay tribute...

"United" Nations

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

April 18, 2007

‘So many people died, they wrapped bodies in plastic sheets and buried them in a mountain.’

Human Rights Watch, one of the industry bigs that (until now) had been mostly absent from the discussion of human rights in North Korea, has made an important entry into that discussion, via this Washington Post op-ed by Kay Sok. Ms. Sok makes several important points here, and the first of these is how North Korea’s version of socialism is a recipe for selective deprivation as a weapon of class warfare: Many of these North Koreans crossed the border because...

Human Rights/Refugees

April 10, 2007

North Korea by Google Earth: Kim Jong Il’s Largest Palace

[Updated; The Mystery of the Tangun Tomb] Remember my March 28th post, a stream of consciousness that washed against the subject of EU sanctions against North Korea? Among the items sanctioned were pure-bred horses, which are the kind not even North Koreans would dare eat — because of who owns them. That led me to the one location in North Korea where I suspected that such horses might be kept. I had recently found that location on Google Earth while...

Google Earth/History/Kim Jong Il

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

February 20, 2007

10,000th N. Korean Refugee Arrives in S. Korea

[Update: No, this can’t be right. Compare it to Andrei Lankov’s figures on Page 54 of this study. I suspect that the total number of defectors living in the South has just exceeded the 10,000 mark, and that the reporter is misinterpreting that figure.] The arrival of 10 North Koreans here late last week heralds an era of 10,000 defectors a year arriving from the Stalinist country. Until the early 1990s, only a few dozen North Koreans fled the...

Defectors/Refugees

December 9, 2006

New Report on North Korean Refugees

The report, from the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, mainly deals with the problem of absorbing refugees into South Korean society. There are five authors; Andrei Lankov wrote one chapter, and Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard edited the paper itself. It’s a long read, so in a few days’ time, I may bump this post up, and those of us who’ve read it can discuss further. Really, from what I’ve read, it sounds like an open letter...

Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees

October 24, 2006

‘Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.’

Reports the Australian: An underground resistance movement in North Korea, capable of smuggling out videos of executions and staging violent acts of defiance, has emerged as the Kim Jong-il regime faces international sanctions for testing a nuclear bomb. Let’s contain our exuberance long enough to ask ourselves if it’s irrational. Break this down into its components. I do believe that organized networks of guerrilla cameras, missionaries, and people smugglers are operating; that they’re increasing their reach inside North Korea; and...

Resistance

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

September 23, 2006

Waiting for the Ceausescu Moment

History has a strange habit of pivoting on the tempers and moods of ordinary people whom it swallows and forgets, and one of those people is the first angry man in a crowd of thousands in Bucharest, on December 20, 1989. For some reason, he acted on his urge to shout blasphemous words at Europe’s most dreaded tryant. There were others in that crowd whose anger overcame their fear, and those others also shouted out their discontent. The tyrant failed...

Democracy/NK Economics/Resistance

September 14, 2006

Must-Read! ‘The Natural Death of N. Korean Stalinism’

[Updated] With “The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism,” Andrei Lankov, possibly the Western world’s single authentic North Korea expert, has just provided us with an impressive collection of empirical evidence to support his argument that the North Korean regime’s control apparatus is losing its grip (a big hat tip to Andy Jackson). Those whose interest in North Korea is inversely proportional to the availability of information about it will pore through this article, fascinated at the amount and quality...

North Korea

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