Open Sources, July 18, 2014

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THAT’LL SHOW ‘EM: The State Department is sending the International Civil Aviation Organization a strongly worded complaint about North Korea’s rocket launches. Oh, and the U.N. Security Council issued a press release of disapproval:

[You can change the puppets, but the strings still move the same way.]

Somewhere in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un is asking his generals how many divisions the ICAO has, and Park Geun-Hye is asking her Foreign Minister whether she should send him to Xi Jinping’s throne with 1,000 taels of gold or 5,000.

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HOW NORTH KOREANS ARE CONDITIONED not to ask “why.”

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HOW NORTH KOREA obtains and distributes consumer goods, according to a recent defector.

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SUE MI TERRY’S article, “A Korea Whole and Free,” is now available at Foreign Affairs. Hat tip to this piece in The National Interest, which discusses some of the things I hope the ROK Army is preparing to do to stabilize the North if things do fall apart. I hope the lesson we learn from Syria is that even the most peaceful, democratic revolution can turn into hell on earth if we don’t support those who share our values and our interests.

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THOSE WHO ADVOCATE for North Korea’s referral to the International Criminal Court would be well advised to consider its institutional decline in Africa, and the growing reliance on ad hoc courts as a replacement. That’s particularly worthy of consideration in North Korea’s case, because (1) everyone knows that China would veto an ICC referral, and (2) South Korea, as a highly developed nation, can afford to support an ad hoc tribunal.

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THE CHOSUN ILBO keeps you up on the latest unconfirmed rumors about State Department kremlinology. I suppose Sung Kim will end up in some position of influence over North Korea policy, and given his background as a Chris Hill crony, we have little reason to expect that he’d exercise it with much competence.

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KIM JONG UN’S BORDER CRACKDOWN catches a woman who was smuggling out “sensitive internal documents.” May God help her … and her family.

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PARK SANG-HAK AND seven fellow defectors have launched more leaflet balloons against North Korea:

“Since the start of this year, the North fired missiles and artillery shells on dozens of occasions, firing away (money) worth three months of food for North Korean people,” Park Sang-hak, the head of the activist group Fighters for Free North Korea, said. “We decided to launch the anti-Pyongyang leaflets since the government did not take any action.” [Yonhap]

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IN A RARE CASE of rising humanitarian spending, North Korea has increased its spending on used medical supplies, including radiology equipment (meaning, x-ray machines?). The new spending may or may not move North Korea up from near last place in global rankings for health care spending. Yonhap speculates that importing drugs could give North Korea a means to reverse-engineer and re-export the drugs. Or, that the new imports may have been necessitated by the recent apartment collapse in Pyongyang, which would suggest that North Korean hospitals were unprepared to treat survivors of the disaster.

Obviously, it remains to be seen where the equipment would be installed and how equally its benefits would be distributed, but I can think of a lot of worse things North Korea has imported recently.

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AFTER ALL THE INK THAT HAS BEEN SPILLED over it and all of the money that’s being spent on it, I still have no idea how President Park plans to reunify Korea, but she’s established a blue-ribbon committee to carry out those cryptic plans.