Open Sources

Among reporters who aren’t terribly experienced as North Korea watchers, there’s been much recent excitement about the prospect of North Korea and South Korea talking again. I see little harm and some good in working-level talks between generals, but I think the exuberance of these cub reporters is misplaced. Look more closely, and all of the obstacles to Agreed Framework III are still in place. South Korea is still demanding that North Korea apologize for sinking the Cheonan and shelling Yeonpyeong Island, which North Korea will never do. The United States is still saying that “progress in South-North Korea relations is a precondition to resuming the stalled six-party talks.” It’s right that we should stick to this position, and it also guarantees that we’ll never even get to the six-party talks. That’s just as well, since any “breakthrough” there would be just as illusory as the last ones.

In fact, this isn’t the worst state of affairs we could find ourselves in. The least capable reporters covering North Korea are fooled, people who know better aren’t, and the allies — for once — are behaving like allies instead of dancing to Kim Jong Il’s tune.

Did North Korea Cheat? It’s always surprising to me that people are still surprised by North Korea’s progress toward a uranium enrichment capability, and I don’t think you have to be a nuclear scientist to make reasonable inferences about that:

“These are P-2 centrifuges whereas in Iran, because of international inspectors, they only have been able to make (less sophisticated) P-1 centrifuges,” Hecker said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency. “My analysis is, if what they (North Koreans) told me is correct, they have a very sophisticated second generation centrifuge at Yongbyon.” [….]

“There also is concern that if that’s what they have, then they must have been doing this for a very long time,” he said.

In February 2005, Selig Harrison alleged “that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data” about North Korea’s uranium enrichment program to scuttle the first Agreed Framework. Harrison has not retracted this charge; however, in August 2009, Harrison was told the Associated Press that, “Everything I’ve ever said about North Korea since 1972 has seemed at the time like screaming into the wilderness, and everything I’ve ever advocated has come to pass.

How times have changed. And yet they haven’t changed enough:

The nation’s human rights commission Friday called for the introduction of legislation on North Korean human rights and an independent archive to investigate, collect and record human rights violations in the reclusive North.

Hyun Byung-chul, president of the National Human Rights Commission, expressed regret for the commission’s minimal attention to the issue in the past.

“Nothing has been done by the commission to actually improve North Korean human rights, which is very shameful,” Hyun said in a conference held to unveil the commission’s roadmap to help improve North Korean rights. “We will take the first step this year to gradually change human rights conditions in the North.

The new Congress takes on U.N. reform:

Claudia Rosett, journalist in residence for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, testified against the UNDP at the hearing entitled “The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action.” “You had North Korean employees handling the checkbook and the accounts. In Pyongyang, you had transfers on behalf of other agencies via an entity tied to North Korean proliferation,” Rosett told the panel. “You had the import of dual use items into North Korea,” she said.

But UNDP spokesman Stephane Dujarric said both a Senate panel and an investigatory panel of non-UN officials documented “that UNDP accounted for funds used in its programs in North Korea.” The panels established “that they were used for the limited purposes for which they were intended,” mainly relating to farm production, Dujarric said in a statement.

North Korea seems to damage and corrupt every institution it touches.

There must be more to this story: The State Department cuts funding to Radio Free North Korea … because of “accounting errors?”

OFK gets results! “Production at an inter-Korean industrial park dropped 15 percent in November last year when the North bombarded a South Korean island, raising bilateral tensions to the highest level in years, the Unification Ministry said Sunday.” Curtis has much, much more on Kaesong. I’d say someone wants us to believe that Kaesong’s future is bleak.

Even in Seoul, it takes courage for a North Korean to make paintings like this:

“For a long time, I honestly believed Kim was a great leader and that my country was better off than others,” Song said in an interview in his workroom, which was little more than a cubicle inside a tiny run-down shopping mall on the outskirts of Seoul.

Click, laugh.

So now that journalists have tracked down the Chinese animators behind that subversive rabbits-versus-tigers cartoon, the creators naturally say they were just venting and didn’t mean any political message to be taken. Well, what would you say if you’d just said something brave and subversive in China, and if you figured the police would soon be on their way? I have to wonder how the journalists tracked these animators down, and whether, as a matter of journalistic ethics, they should have.

North Korean general Park Cheong Soon has assumed room temperature, in case you care.