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Category: Diplomacy

October 25, 2006

North Korea Sold Ryongchon Relief Donations

The first clue should have been why they said they needed 50 televisions (background  and photos  of the still-not-quite-unexplained disaster; click the first link and scroll down for a before-and-after gif animation using satellite images).  A North Korean government-sponsored company has reportedly been selling products to North Korean citizens using the nonprofit aid products received from the international community, including South Korea during the Yongchon disaster of April 2004. Members of a North Korean aid organization located in Dandong City,...
Categories Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid
October 24, 2006

More Grim News on N. Korea’s Food Situation

New reports are  predicting that things are looking bleak for North Korea’s food situation this winter. Millions of North Koreans are at risk of starvation this winter as humanitarian aid levels drop amid an international furore over the country’s nuclear bomb test. Aid agencies say much of the population is already surviving on basic rations and fear any further drop in food supplies could lead to a repeat of the 1990s famine that killed as many as two million people....
Categories "United" Nations/China/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid
October 24, 2006

Proliferation Security Watch

*   Hong Kong authorities have detained a North Korean ship “Kang Nam I, a 2,035-ton general cargo ship,” which had arrived from Shanghai.  North Korean crew members and Hong Kong customs officials suggest that the inspection is related to a couple dozen safety violations, that the ship is empty, and that the inspections are not related to U.N.S.C.R. 1718.  Crew members claim that the ship will sail again in two days.  The Chosun Ilbo reports that the search didn’t...
Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Geopolitics/Money Laundering/Technology/Uncategorized/WMD
October 23, 2006

U.N. Envoy: N. Korea Sends Handicapped to Camps

[Update:   Welcome Powerline readers!] Since I began blogging about North Korea, one of my core philosophies  has been  that nukes, diplomacy, and human rights aren’t logically separable. That’s because you deal with governments that possess a basic regard for human life differently from those that lack one. Governments in the first category share our desire to preserve life by avoiding war. Governments in the second category seek only to preserve and expand their own power; their motivations are not...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/The Camps
October 23, 2006

Ban Ki-Moon’s Image Makeover?

Already, Ban can see that what was popular in Seoul won’t cut it in the General Assembly.  In the rest of the world, North Korea is a pariah.  Besides, the man is highly sensitive about what bloggers say about him. “Taking the advantage of the U.N. Secretary-general’s authority and the U.N.’s functions, I plan to make the utmost efforts to actually improve the human rights situation in North Korea,” he said. Citing reports from U.N. human rights envoys and related...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
October 21, 2006

Dance, Little Piggy! (Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 14)

Most observers had speculated, since at least 1994 or so, that North Korea has the capacity to create a crude nuclear weapon. That appears to be exactly what they demonstrated recently, meaning that the only real news was our need to recalibrate Kim Jong Il’s brass-to-brains ratio. I didn’t guess whether he’d actually go through with it, but I did believe that he’d try to time it just before the U.S. election if he did. I also guessed that if...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/China & Korea/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea
October 21, 2006

MUST READ: NYT on Korean Nationalism, North and South

Today, even though it has a highly advanced economy — more than 80 percent of South Koreans have broadband Internet access at home, the highest rate in the world — the country has a nearly provincial relationship to its local heroes, like Ban Ki-moon, the foreign minister who will be the next U.N. secretary general. The most famous South Korean of recent times was Hwang Woo Suk, a scientist who in 2004 and 2005 announced breakthroughs in cloning. At home,...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Korean History/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 21, 2006

Condi Rice Saves Thirty Minutes of My Life

[Update:   Senior State Department official Victor Cha flat-out says it aint so.] … by raising serious doubts about the hearsay report that Kim Jong Il had apologized to a Chinese envoy for his recent nuclear test, or promised not to do it again. I don’t think apology and regret are components of the emotional vocabulary of a psychopath or a malignant narcissist, except as a means of manipulating others.  Kim Jong Il had his reasons.  I don’t know what...
Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Russia/Russia & Korea/WMD
October 19, 2006

The Death of an Alliance, Part 56

At the end of this post, there is big news, but  if I told you now, I couldn’t wring the last full measure of absurdity out of  it.  So please stick with me here.  I have  accused the South Korean government of promoting anti-Americanism.  When I do, I speak of things like  this: The chief presidential secretary for security Song Min-soon on Wednesday said South Korea would be the greatest victim in a war on the peninsula due to the...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD/WTF?
October 19, 2006

Interview: L. Gordon Flake, Executive Director, Mansfield Foundation

Gordon Flake (bio)  is two things that make his opinions interesting and valuable to me.  First, he’s a fluent Korean speaker, and those of us who aren’t are always at some disadvantage to those who do when we are gathering the facts we process into our views.  Second — and Gordon may not agree with this characterization — his views  strike me as classically  liberal. His views are probably more independent and less jaundiced by partisan bias or  ambitions  than...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Blogs & Blogging/Famine & Food Aid/Google Earth/Human Rights/Korean Politics/Korean Society/Media Criticism/NK Economics/Proliferation/Refugees/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
October 17, 2006

Of Tin-Pot Crises, and Real Ones

U.N. Resolution 1695, passed after North Korea’s missile tests, demanded that countries exercise “vigilance” to be certain that their money wasn’t paying for more missiles.  South Korea adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach and continued as if nothing had changed.  It even had another illegal payments-to-North Korea  kerfuffle (“I apologize for the illegal remittance issue, which was caused by mismatch between law and reality” — a real classic).  The focii of all these legal and ethical evasions are Kumgang...
Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 16, 2006

NRO on Ban Ki-Moon and the Alliance

It reads like an autopsy. The choice of Ban Ki-moon should have been good news. South Korea and the United States are formal treaty allies. We have about 30,000 troops in South Korea, who train alongside the South’s army, and a headquarters meant to take operational control of all of them in the event of a crisis…. Yet the author, Mario Loyola,  thinks that South Korea  is  fully  capable of self-defense.  He thinks Roh and Ban really see the alliance...
Categories "United" Nations/An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
October 16, 2006

Axis, Schmaxis, Part 4

Iran reacts to U.N.S.C.R. 1718: “Some Western countries have turned the U.N. Security Council into a weapon to impose their hegemony and issue resolutions against countries that oppose them,” Ahmadinejad was quoted by the state-run television as saying Monday. “They use the council for threats and intimidation,” the television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. But Iran “won’t be intimidated,” he said. “Mounting threats and pressures against Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities won’t cause even one iota of hesitation in the will of...
Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/Iran/WMD
October 16, 2006

Grand Nationals Call for Reexamining Aid to North Korea

The GNP had been modestly supportive of “engagement” theories during the high times of the unifiction, but in South Korea, the high has worn off. Park Geun-Hye, an exceedingly cunning sensor of the shifting political winds, is staking out “Sunshine Lite” as something more reciprocal than her previous statements had suggested. Here’s a rough translation of her most recent statement: The Sunshine Policy is necessary for leading North Korea toward change and for releasing tensions between North and South. But...
Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 15, 2006

U.N.S.C.R. 1718: Who Won, Who Lost (Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 13)

John Bolton: Winner. I’d like to hear John Bolton’s critics deny that, as with Resolution 1695, he has wrung far more effectiveness from the U.N. than we had come to expect. Not only should we confirm this man, pronto, we should clone him. Madeleine Albright never got results like these. The United States: Winner. We got everything we really wanted here: help constricting Kim Jong Il’s financial arteries the right to search his ships and planes. an embargo on the...
Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Geopolitics/Japan/Japan & Korea/Money Laundering/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 15, 2006

Curt Weldon Under FBI Investigation

He’s North Korea’s favorite Republican Congressman, whose guest, “Ambassador” Hang Song-Ryol, played the starring role in the “Bastardgate” incident in the halls of the U.S. Congress.  Weldon took Han’s side and engaged in a public swearing contest against my friend, Suzanne Scholte, and several eyewitnesses whose Korean language skills no doubt exceed Weldon’s.  At the time, I dug up evidence of the current allegations against Weldon, so they’re nothing new. Old news has a way of becoming big news in...
Categories Diplomacy/Washington Views
October 15, 2006

So Much for the Death of Sunshine

No, I don’t think any objective observer can really claim that Sunshine bears any reasonable chance of success, and I think its rejection by Korean voters can only be more overwhelming than it was before the test. But rigor mortis has a strong grip on Kim Dae Jung, Roh, and company, meaning that God-only-knows-what. It’s really difficult to put much stock in what Korean politicians are saying about it, other than (1) they’re confused and inconsistent, and (2) they’re desperate...
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
October 14, 2006

U.N. Security Council Resolution Takes Shape Passes Resolution 1718

Update: Too good to be true? Looks like the vote will be delayed … probably so that the Chinese and Russians can water this thing down. —– Update 2:   On again.   Supposedly, there will be a vote today. —– Updated 3:   It passed; analysis below, and the full text at the bottom of this post.   Naturally, the North Korean delegate walked out and denounced everyone for being “gangster-like. This is what the psychologists refer to as “projection.” ...
Categories "United" Nations/NK Economics/NK Military/WMD