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February 17, 2019

As Trump goes soft on North Korea, the Democrats are outflanking him

BEFORE DONALD TRUMP FELL IN LOVE WITH KIM JONG-UN, Washington had found an almost unprecedented amount of bipartisan unity around the need to enforce sanctions until Kim Jong-un had irreversibly begun to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction and end his crimes against humanity. Most sensible people who send representatives to Congress believe in concepts like evil and pathological mendacity. Yet these concepts are anathema to the twenty percent of the population on the left end of the political Bell...
Categories Anju Links
December 19, 2017

Guest Commentary: On information as a second front against North Korea

The following is a guest commentary by long-time OFK reader and commenter Rand Millar. ~   ~   ~ During the course of 2017 the considerable progress made in its nuclear warhead and ICBM development programs caused the dictatorship ruling the northern half of Korea to become the top foreign policy and security concern of the U.S. government. There are no realistic prospects of negotiations between Washington and its adversary ensconced in Pyongyang. The Pyongyang regime will no more negotiate away its...
Categories Anju Links
February 24, 2017

N. Korea just killed a guy with one of the WMDs that caused us to invade Iraq … in a crowded airport terminal, in a friendly nation.

Last night, Malaysian police revealed that Kim Jong-nam’s killers murdered him with VX, the deadliest of the nerve agents. I had hypothesized before that the killers almost certainly acted on orders from His Porcine Majesty. Saddam Hussein’s suspected possession of stockpiles of VX was at the core of our justification for invading Iraq. This time, the case doesn’t rely on grainy satellite photos or shadowy, unnamed sources. (And this time, an invasion is also the wrong answer to the problem;...
Categories Anju Links/Southeast Asia/Terrorism (NK)
June 6, 2016

Obama Administration, GOP Congress join forces in N. Korea sanctions push in Asia

It’s a rare day in any election year, much less this one, when anyone could write a post title like that about a major public policy issue. Now, for the first time since I began writing this blog, all of the cylinders — the President, the Congress, the U.N., South Korea, and Japan — are all firing in the same sequence to raise the pressure on Pyongyang and Beijing. Over the last week, we’ve seen the Republican Congress’s key foreign...
Categories Anju Links/Money Laundering/Sanctions
April 5, 2016

Radio Free Asia launches investigation of N. Korean forced labor

Radio Free Asia has launched an investigative reporting project into the use of North Korean labor on three continents, and the dangers those joint ventures pose not only to the North Korean workers, but to their customers abroad. RFA also published this infographic about where the North Korean workers are, doing everything from logging and construction to staffing medical clinics. No doubt, the conditions in which the North Korean workers labor also vary, which causes some to criticize the description...
Categories Anju Links/Human Rights/Sanctions
March 17, 2016

Obama blocks N. Korean assets, bans labor exports, sanctions ships and banks.

Just this morning, I was writing about reports that President Obama would sign a new North Korea sanctions executive order. The Executive Order the President signed this afternoon takes several important steps toward implementing the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, and to a lesser extent, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270. Full implementation will require years of aggressive investigation and designation of targets, but this is a good start. The text of the E.O. itself is strong, exceeding in several...
Categories Anju Links
January 23, 2016

Arguments to Impotence, Part 2: A response to Joseph DeThomas

As Professor Lee and I have flogged, and flogged, and flogged, and flogged this horse that our sanctions against North Korea were far weaker than was widely assumed, we knew a few of you were rolling your eyes and wondering how long we would go on flogging it. The answer, of course, is, “As long as it takes.”  If the published opinions of Michael Green, Victor Cha, Bruce Klingner, Scott Snyder, the editors of The Washington Post, Evans Revere, Robert Gallucci, and...
Categories Anju Links
January 10, 2016

South Korea’s loudspeaking needs a strategic objective

Barely four months ago, Park Geun-hye’s negotiating team exchanged high-fives and backslaps with its North Korean counterparts, and came home having secured either peace in our time, or (as I called it) an agreement to fight another day. Today, South Korea says the North’s nuke test was “a grave violation” of the August agreement, the loudspeakers are blaring on both sides of the DMZ, and North Korea says the noise is pushing the two Koreas to “the brink of war.”...
Categories Anju Links
December 31, 2015

On His Corpulency’s Secret Service: N. Korea has had a lot of car not-accidents (updated)

Kim Yang-gon, the head of the North’s United Front Department, has become the latest top North Korean official to assume ambient temperature. As head of the UFD, Kim was North Korea’s nearest analogue to the South’s Unification Minister, but he was also responsible for North Korea’s influence and subversion operations inside South Korea. It is one of my ruder habits to point out that the UFD has a rather substantial fifth column at its service in the South. For more...
Categories Anju Links
December 3, 2015

NIS: More senior cadres flee purges in North Korea

In recent weeks, our speculation about Choe Ryong-Hae — described by some (but not all) observers as North Korea’s third-highest official — has been resolved, if you believe South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, which says Choe was “sent … to a rural collective farm for reeducation” over “the alleged collapse of a water tunnel at a power station.” To let Choe live would depart from recent precedent for Kim Jong-Un, who made sure that Jang Song-Thaek and Hyon Yong-Chol would be safely out...
Categories Anju Links/Kremlinology/Regime Change/Resistance
November 3, 2015

China helps N. Korea nuke up & break sanctions, then says sanctions don’t work.

Two weeks ago, the Obama Administration’s point man on North Korea policy told Congress that sanctions are hurting Pyongyang. I must confess to some skepticism. [Ski lift made in China.] Instead, the evidence suggests that North Korea’s rich are getting richer, and its poor are staying poor. Materially speaking, the capital’s elites have never had it better, and openly buy imported consumer goods with dollars. Marcus Noland also sees evidence that, whatever the official statistics tell us, Pyongyang’s palace economy appears to have grown in recent years. Outside Pyongyang, however, 70 to 84...
Categories Anju Links
November 1, 2015

Sam Pa, 88 Queensway, KKG & Bureau 39: A case study in how China helps N. Korea evade sanctions

Last week, I highlighted Andrea Berger’s excellent post at 38 North, calling for the U.N. Security Council to sanction North Korea’s third-party enablers. Berger named some of those enablers, but I’d like to name another one of the most important ones — the Hong Kong-based 88 Queensway Group, headed by one Sam Pa, also known by his birth name “Xu Jinghua” or any of “at least eight aliases,” each with its own matching passport. According to multiple news reports, Pa has extensive connections to Chinese politicians, and with its intelligence services....
Categories Anju Links/China/Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 18, 2015

Congress to hold hearings on N. Korea & terrorism, human rights, nukes this week

The first hearing, entitled, “The Persistent North Korea Denuclearization and Human Rights Challenge,” will be held Tuesday at 10 a.m., before the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The witnesses will be Sung Kim, the State Department’s Special Representative For North Korea Policy And Deputy Assistant Secretary For Korea and Japan, and Robert King, State’s Special Envoy For North Korean Human Rights Issues. The second hearing will be before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, on...
Categories Anju Links/Human Rights/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law/WMD
October 8, 2015

U.N. report demands that N. Korean leaders be held accountable through prosecution, sanctions

U.N. Special Rapporteur Marzuki Darusman has issued another report on human rights in North Korea (or more accurately, the lack thereof). The bad news is that the situation hasn’t improved, and North Korea and China are still stonewalling: Regrettably, the situation remains the same, despite the grave concerns reiterated by the international community in different forums. The Special Rapporteur also reflects on issues around accountability for those human rights violations, which should be addressed at an early stage, and on current efforts by the international community...
Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Anju Links/Human Rights/Sanctions
October 7, 2015

Sens. Gardner, Rubio & Risch to introduce new North Korea sanctions bill (updated)

The new bill was revealed in this column by Josh Rogin, and includes a link to the full text. The bill, which still has no number, will be the Senate’s second version of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, following the introduction by Senators Menendez and Graham of S. 1747 in July. Both bills follow the lead of Ed Royce and Elliot Engel, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who introduced H.R. 757 in January. H.R. 757,...
Categories Anju Links/Sanctions
September 9, 2015

Pyongyang’s elites wait for Phase Five, and wait ….

Robert Collins, the author of the famous briefing on the seven phases of regime collapse in North Korea, almost certainly does not recall that, years ago, I was among a small group of Army officers who heard him deliver his briefing at Yongsan Garrison, in Seoul. For those who aren’t familiar with the seven phases, Robert Kaplan reproduced them in The Atlantic: Phase One: resource depletion; Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion; Phase...
Categories Anju Links/Defectors/Kremlinology/Regime Change/Resistance
June 19, 2015

Is the North Korean military falling apart?

Last week, a 19 year-old North Korean army private fled “repeated physical abuse at the hands of his superiors” and “the realities of his impoverished country,” walked and rode for a week as a fugitive, crossed the heavily mined DMZ, and fell asleep next to a South Korean guard post.* Surely this young soldier knows that his family will now face terrible retribution for what he has done. We can even speculate that others have tried, and failed, at similar attempts that...
Categories Anju Links/Border Control/NK Military/Resistance