Search Results for: burma

October 15, 2007

Links for 15 Oct 07

*   North Korea is  building or repairing the fences around its nuclear test site in the northeast.   What  reports like these don’t mention, however, is that directly to the northeast of that test site lies  Camp 16, one of North Korea’s more horrendous concentration camps.  And  if the  Daily NK’s December 2006  report of a mass escape is true, it might be that the North Koreans are actually repairing the camp’s fences, not the test sites.  Hopefully, an intrepid...

Categories Anju Links
September 24, 2007

The Rangoon Autumn

Updates below: 9/21:   Original post, background of the protests.  9/22:  Monks  march to  Aung San Suu Syi’s home in record downpour; 10,000 protest in Mandalay. 9/23:  Protests hit 8 cities; Rangoon turnout at 20,000; World leaders speak out against use of force to quell protests, but the U.N. is silent. 9/24:  Rangoon protests draw 100,000; Their hold on power seriously threatened, junta generals threaten to use force; Bush  to announce new sanctions  before U.N. General Assembly; Burmese entertainers join the opposition....

Categories Democracy/Southeast Asia
September 20, 2007

We must be smoking what they’re growing

North Korea was dropped from the U.S. list of countries producing illicit drugs, a sign of further relief of tensions between the two countries. “North Korea is not affecting the United States as much as the requirements on the list,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Christy McCampbell said on Sept. 17 in Washington, according to a transcript of her speech on the State Department Web site. [Bloomberg] And that decision is based on what? On absolutely nothing but the interests...

Categories Appeasement/Axis of Evil/Drugs & N Korea/Six-Party Talks
September 17, 2007

The Orchard File: What are North Korea and Syria up to?

In the wake of the first reports about a reported Israeli air strike in  Syria, a  new crop  of reports  has considerably muddied facts that initially had seemed much clearer.  Journalistic politics is certainly a part of the problem.  Some of the reports are alarming, while others seek to downplay, and anyone who claims to be objective about war, diplomacy, and WMD today  is lying.  You probably know where I stand on Agreed Framework 2.0 by now.  If the more...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
September 14, 2007

My Kind of Spy Scandal

Tired of hearing about South Korean officials leaking our secrets and technology, or about North Korean agents gradually pulling  a smothering blanket of juche over the South?  Had enough Robert Kim already?  Take heart.  The bad guys have troubles of their own: For years, Ambassador Li Bin was China’s  go-to diplomat for the tense Korean Peninsula. After studies in North Korea, Li had served several tours in the Chinese embassies in Pyongyang and Seoul. Fluent in Korean and gregarious in...

Categories China/China & Korea/Diplomacy
September 2, 2007

What’s the Value of a North Korean Disclosure Anyway?

Update:   Woohoo!   They agreed to full disclosure again, for the second time in six months!   Thanks to the brilliant diplomacy  of our State Department, we can actually  bask in the afterglow of the same breakthrough twice a year!   It’s twice the  feelgood for the price!   At least, until someone leaks that we had to pay another price …. [Hill]  said he and Kim had discussed a range of issues in their two days of talks...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
August 30, 2007

State Dept. Won’t Remove N. Korea from Terror List … Yet

The chief U.S. envoy at North Korean nuclear talks said Wednesday the United States will make sure close ally Japan is satisfied before lifting North Korea from a U.S. list of countries accused of sponsoring terrorists. Christopher Hill acknowledged the North has raised the terror-list removal repeatedly as a crucial part of a February nuclear disarmament accord. But, he said, the United States is “not going to cup our eyes and pretend a country is not a state sponsor of...

Categories Abductions/Diplomacy/Japan & Korea/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. Politics
June 25, 2007

House Moves to Cut Funds for UNDP, Human Rights Council

Each entity has recently brought particular discredit on itself, and in each case, there is a North Korea nexus. The UNDP recently failed a UN internal audit after U.S. diplomats outed the organization for allowing its Pyongyang operations to become, as a U.N. staffer put it, “an ATM machine” for the regime. It turns out that North Korea used some of the funds to buy overseas real estate and dual-use equipment, and that the U.N. even had a stock of...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Korean Education
April 23, 2007

Anju Links for 23 April 2007

*   The Ides of April.   I’ve previously blogged about the replacement of Premier  Pak Pong Ju with Kim Yong Il.  Now, we learn that Kim Kyok-Sik is taking over as the new “military first,” to borrow a tired  expression,  which technically makes him second only to Korigula himself (ht: Richardson).  Two other old party hacks have gone off to that Eternal Party Congress chaired by Mephistopheles himself, or soon will:  Foreign Minister  Paek Nam-Sun  and Marshall Cho Myong-Rok.  All...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Korean Society/Kremlinology/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks/Southeast Asia/Uncategorized/WMD
November 17, 2006

Proliferation Security Watch

The AP has a very detailed story on the search of a North Korean ship in the Indian Ocean, along with a nice summary of other searches in the recent past.  In this case, it sounds like all they found was cement. In other searches, Hong Kong authorities detained two North Korean cargo ships in October for safety violations apparently unrelated to the U.N. sanctions. Myanmar permitted a North Korean cargo ship in distress to anchor at a port in...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/China & Korea/Japan & Korea/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized/WMD
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...

Categories Resistance
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...

Categories Democracy/NK Economics/Resistance
January 31, 2006

SOTU Commentary ‘06

On North Korea, President Bush said very little: “The demands of justice require their freedom as well [specifically naming the people of North Korea, Syria, Burma, and Zimbabwe, among others].” The rhetoric was no more soaring, and certainly no more specific, than anything I’ve heard him say before. I can live without soaring rhetoric for public diplomacy’s sake, but what I can’t forgive is that this president has frittered away six years without forming a forceful or even a particularly...

Categories Uncategorized
November 1, 2005

Minister of Historical Amnesia

Updated again Nov. 3; thanks to reader usinkorea for the hat tip; thanks to the Marmot for linking and to his readers for stopping by. Once again, anti-Unification Minister Chung Dong Young has opened his mouth, and once again, nothing good came out of it. The latest nominal justification for giving Chung a supply of ink so far out of proportion to his intellect is the 55th anniversary of the Korea Times. Chung’s first sentence, however, makes it apparent that...

Categories Uncategorized
September 16, 2005

OFK EXCLUSIVE–Congress Responds to MacArthur Protests

Post updated; scroll down. Thanks very much to my deep-cover source in the House of Representatives (how important it makes me feel to use that phrase). Here is the House International Relations Committee’s response to the MacArthur protests, addressed to Roh Moo-Hyun. Enjoy. Newspapers, if you care, please include the URL of the site but don’t print my full name or discuss my work, wife, kids, home address, favorite color, etc. Update 9/15: It’s not exclusive anymore. This is all...

Categories Uncategorized
August 29, 2005

Carnival of the Revolutions, 29 August 2005

Welcome to the Carnival of the Revolutions edition for August 29th. Hosting next week’s edition (Sept. 5) will be Thinking-East; next up (Sept. 12) is Quid Nimis. Updates added, typos fixed. East Asia and the Pacific Rim Burma: Did the government’s army use chemical weapons against Karen rebels earlier this year? The Jubilee Campaign, a Christian human rights NGO, prints an editorial by Lord David Alton, a member of the British House of Lords. Publius reports on new rumors of...

Categories Uncategorized
April 17, 2005

Lessons of History: Denial Is Eternal

Thirty years ago today, Khmer Rouge forces entered Phnom Phenh. And even now, with the mass graves opened, and the bones of the victims there for all to see, some continue to argue that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are not to blame: [T]o blame the death and destruction caused by foreign invasion and embargo during 1975-79 on Pol Pot’s controversial revolutionary policies is merely reactionary propaganda. —Henry C.K. Liu Does the logic sound familiar? After North Korea signed...

Categories Uncategorized