OFK in the WaPo

Many thanks to my friend Prof. Sung Yoon Lee for offering me the opportunity to co-write this with him, especially since he frankly did most of the writing this time.  It’s a pleasure to write with Prof. Lee.  He’s a terrific writer, and our views align so closely that there’s no need for painstaking negotiations over wording and content.  Really, I don’t know of anyone who (1) understands the pathology of North Korea better, and (2) can express it so...

Good Sanctions and Bad Sanctions

Weeks before North Korea’s latest nuclear test, it was clear that the political climate surrounding North Korea policy was ready for a big shift away from honor-system diplomacy and toward tougher sanctions.  This test is likely to mean a major legislative push here in Washington — not just to punish North Korea, but to craft and enact sanctions that attack the regime’s structural weaknesses, with the intent of either coercing its disarmament or destroying it.  For all the tension that will...

Guess who just tested a nuke. Now I’m going to sleep.

Here’s the USGS report, coming in at 4.9,  and here’s the first report saying it looks like a nuke test.  In case you’re keeping track, North Korea’s 2009 test measured 4.7 on the Richter scale after a yield estimated between 2 and 8 kilotons. Its 2006 test registered 4.2, at a yield of just under a kiloton.  Remember — this is a logarithmic scale, which means that a 5 is ten times larger than a 4. Anyway, a nuclear test site isn’t the only...

In Poor Taste

Quite a few readers have been coming in over the last two days from this New York Times Op-Ed by Adam Johnson, author of the acclaimed The Orphan Master’s Son.  Johnson links to the Camp 14 page and asks how anyone could be so tasteless as to post a satirical review of a North Korean concentration camp.  Johnson thinks that in the same sense as the maps review something disturbing and inhuman about North Korea, the reactions reveal something disturbing and inhuman about us. Writing at...

U.N. may investigate N. Korean officials for crimes against humanity

I don’t know what’s gotten into the U.N. lately, but this would be a pretty big deal: North Korea’s leaders are likely to be the target of a U.N. investigation into their personal responsibility for rapes, torture, executions, arbitrary arrests and abductions, following an expert report published on Tuesday. The report by Marzuki Darusman, an Indonesian lawyer who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said North Korea’s “grave, systematic and widespread” human rights violations ought to...

Open Sources: Special Nukewatch Edition

ANYONE UP FOR A NUKE POOL? So North Korea didn’t test a nuke on Monday, as rumor had it, but Sung Yoon Lee was on the record (in an email to me) before that, saying it would happen around February 10th. If it’s a uranium device, the closest guess gets my autograph on your copy of “Meltdown.”  I say this knowing that there might be two winners, and that it might be a while before we know, if we ever do. For more on...

Sometimes, a missile is just a missile

Every time North Korea tests a rocket, Hans Blix sheds a little tear and Ban Ki Moon’s fluffy white tail stops wagging, because North Korean rocket tests violate three U.N. Security Council Resolutions — 1695 (which bans “all activities related to its ballistic missile programme”), UNSCR 1718 (ditto, and requires N. Korea to “re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching”), and 1874 (which bans “any launch using ballistic missile technology”).  North Korea’s official response is that it is...

Mansourov praises Kim Jong Un’s “surprisingly good” domestic policies, sees “hope in the air.”

Writing at 38 North, the last fantasyland of Sunshine’s remaining advocates, Alexandre Mansourov argues that “Kim Jong Un’s domestic policy record” so far has been “surprisingly good.” But, by the time 2012 came to a close, one could detect hope in the air, and new positive expectations about the future. There was also plenty of public thirst for new information and foreign experiences, and an especially surprising amount of joy and enthusiasm on the streets of Pyongyang, now illuminated by jumbotrons,...

The Stillbirth of Sunshine Lite

SO PARK GEUN-HYE HASN’T EVEN BEEN INAUGURATED YET, and her plans to engage North Korea — she called them “trustpolitik” — are turning out just as I’d predicted they would, and just how Sung Yoon Lee predicted in the opening paragraphs of this piece — they’re being overcome by North Korea’s own plans: Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has ordered his top military and party officials to take “substantial and high-profile important state measures” to retaliate against American-led United Nations sanctions on the country, the North’s...

The Whole World Is Watching

Since I started this blog nearly ten years ago, I’ve had one primary objective — to do my small part to make it impossible for people with more influence than me to ignore North Korea’s crimes against humanity.  This week, for the first time, this quixotic campaign does not seem like such an exercise in futility.  Today, everyone on earth seems to be talking about Google maps and satellite imagery of concentration camps in North Korea, even posting fake “reviews”...

Open Sources, Jan. 29, 2013

GOOGLE HAS RELEASED A NEW ATLAS of North Korea, and Curtis, who has endured countless hours of the torture that is North Korean television for Queen and Country, is deservedly and prominently credited.  On a personally gratifying note, it also seems apparent that the mapping of the political prison camps derives in large part from the work of this humble blog. *          *         * AIR KORYO’S AGEING Russian aircraft are banned from Chinese...

Technical Help Wanted

One of the things they didn’t teach me us in law school was web design, and I will soon have to take on a significant project on this site that I lack the time and the technical sophistication to do myself. In short, I need some technical help from someone with a solid understanding of WordPress, databases, sql files, and such things.  Ideally, I’m asking for a referral to a known, reputable, and affordable commercial service to consult with.  (The...

Kim Jong Un personality cult now visible to space aliens.

I was snooping around the Hyesan area this weekend, taking in some very recent (October 2012) imagery, when I spotted a propaganda sign — clearly not one of those I’d posted about before. It was next to this reservoir: Look what happens when you switch to the next-most recent image, from October 2005: So all of this is new construction. It says, “Long live Songun Korea’s General Kim Jong Un!,” or somesuch nonsense. But at least they got the damn...

Why Susan Rice’s new Security Council resolution is a great victory … for China and North Korea

The Obama Administration spin on the long-stalled U.N. Security Council Resolution 2087 is that it “tightened” U.N. sanctions against North Korea, and that securing China’s vote for that resolution represents some sort of diplomatic accomplishment for the U.S. and Susan Rice. Despite China’s rejection of proposals by the United States to add new sanctions, the Obama administration sought to characterize the vote as a tough response. “This resolution demonstrates to North Korea that there are unanimous and significant consequences for its...

Open Sources, Jan. 24, 2013

I MAY HAVE A MORE COMPLETE REACTION TO UNSCR 2087 after I’ve had more time to read it and work through its provisions, but I’m not yet ready to accept the spin that this tightened sanctions on North Korea.  Frankly, I’m worried that it actually gives China a basis to argue that it narrowed the sweep of 1718’s financial provisions — the ones with the most potential to be effective, if enforced.  Not that any U.N. resolution matters if China...