Anju Links for 3 July 2008

STARVING NORTH KOREAN WOMEN TURN TO PROSTITUTION:  “Around stations in big cities, you can see many pimps affiliated to inns . . . .  They approach pedestrians, euphemistically saying that “˜I am selling a bed,’ or “˜selling a flower.'”  Sadly,  some of those forced to survive this way are children. 

IT’S CAUTIOUSLY ENCOURAGING to hear USAID official John Brause say something like this about the first shipment of U.S. food aid to North Korea  since 2005: 

The agreement to provide food aid was signed at the beginning of May. “We actually bought the commodities in the middle of May. The ship sailed 20-some days ago from the Pacific Northwest,” he said.

Everything was signed except the agreement between North Korea and the World Food Program and the five U.S.-based non-governmental organizations participating with the United Nations agency to carry out the program.

“As the ship neared North Korea,” Brause said, “the agreement with the NGOs and the WFP had not been signed by the government, and there was some indication that they may not be signed.” The ship slowed and did not return to its previous heading until June 27, Brause said.

“I just want to be clear that had the agreements not been signed, the ship probably would not have arrived,” he said.  [Reuters]

Brause says his monitors have “unprecedented” access to their recipients, but if you set the bar low enough, there’s plenty of room for new precedents.

JUST SAY NO to corn:

North Korea, which aid agencies say is facing acute food shortages, declined a South Korean offer to provide 50,000 metric tons of corn, the Unification Ministry in Seoul said.  [Bloomberg, Heejin Koo]

JUST SAY NO to beef:  Writing in the Asia Times, Don Kirk  describes  the Ungovernable Republic of Korea.  For a place with so many starving people, there sure are a lot of finicky eaters in Korea. 

ONE SMALL STEP AT A TIME:  Tim Peters writes in to report another from Europe, via Eline de Groot of the Jubilee Campaign in the Netherlands: 

[L]ast week (25 June), the whole Dutch Parliament accepted a proposal (motion) from one of the Dutch Christian parliamentarians (his name is Joel Voordewind), which calls on the Dutch government to force China to keep the Refugee Convention for the North Korean Refugees in China and further this motion asks our government to urge the Chinese governrment to come to arbitrage between the UNHCR and China. So the Dutch parliamentarians are since last week quite well informed about the subject!” 

That’s nice, but will China care if our State Department doesn’t?  Our State Department needs the sort of purge the likes of which haven’t been seen since Moscow in the thirties. 

SPEAKING OF WHICH:  If you can stand any more, the Washington Post confirms what we already knew would not be in North Korea’s “complete and correct” disclosure, which of course, is neither of those things. 

MARCUS NOLAND, WHO CALLS  the demolition of the Yongbyon cooling tower “a publicity stunt,” doesn’t think the easing of sanctions will have much of an effect on North Korea’s trade with the United States.   If pressed,  Noland would undoubtedly remind me that North Korea has  the world’s worst  credit rating and no banking system, but he’s is forgetting that whatever State is doing today is a pale shadow of what it wants to do tomorrow.

THE ASH HEAP OF HISTORY AWAITS YOU:  I was going to take note of the happy fact that Colombia’s narco-Leninist FARC guerrillas are deserting and dying in droves and  appear headed for extinction, and then I  heard the  terrific news of the hostage rescue there.  The story of how the Colombian military did it is a  fascinating one.

I DOWNLOADED some old German newsreels: editions of  “Die Deutsche Wochenschau” circa March 1945, as Koniev and Zhukhov’s tanks rolled up to the Oder.  What consistently amazes me about  these films  is how Nazi Germany in its  gotterdammerung (as with East Germany in its final weeks) could project such  confidence in an  invincibility in which the propagandists themselves did not believe.   I know this for a fact by having read  Geobbels’s diary from those months.  This sharpened  my curiosity,  so I downloaded some Soviet newreels from the very same time, only to see remarkable similarities of content, style, music, and narration, but leading to the opposite conclusion.   So accounting for how style changes with time, and for the  greater availability of information,  how would  contemporary propagandists deliver a message  of a similar  variance  with reality?  It turns out to require less imagination than one might hope.

IT SEEMS PRETTY DUMB of the Republicans to throw rocks at Obama for migrating toward an Iraq policy less likely to trigger genocide and reenergize medieval terrorism.  Obama was wrong  about the surge and terrifyingly cavalier about the alternatives to it, and that’s reason to question his judgment, just as he’ll question McCain’s for voting to authorize the war to begin with.   Republicans would do better  to suggest that Obama’s newly calibrated policy is insincere, and that he’d bow to the MoveOn crowd and withdraw quickly and irresponsibly.  But to attack any politician for moving in the direction of what’s best for the country will only block his path toward doing what’s best for the country.