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Category: South Korea

December 2, 2016

Why Seoul’s blacklisting of Air Koryo & Dandong Hongxiang matters

South Korea is the first of the Free Three (the U.S., South Korea, and Japan) to announce independent multilateral sanctions on North Korea following the approval of UNSCR 2321. Some of the measures, such as the blacklisting of Choe Ryong-hae and Hwang Pyong-so, will probably mean almost nothing until some future left-wing president tries to give one of them a ticker-tape parade along the Chongro. An extension of South Korea’s ban on ships that have entered North Korean ports within...
Categories China & Korea/Korean Politics/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
November 16, 2016

Trump & Korea Policy: We Now Enter the Bargaining Stage

If South Korea’s most sober and cool-headed people are checking the prices of houses in Fairfax this week, there are some good reasons for that. Our next president-elect’s Korea policy could not be more unsettled if he had written it on an Etch-a-Sketch, set the Etch-a-Sketch on the bed of the honeymoon suite in Trump Tower, and fed four quarters into the magic fingers. In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump advocated a surgical strike against the North’s...
Categories An Alliance?/Korean War II/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics
October 31, 2016

Why China and North Korea want Park Geun-hye gone

Nearly all of the news from Korea this week is about the scandal that has paralyzed President Park Geun-hye’s presidency, and may even end it. Going by Alastair Gale’s report in The Wall Street Journal, the scandal has three main elements, along with some other (mostly) unspoken elements. First, Park has said that her “friend, Choi Soon-sil, had helped her prepare speeches early in her presidential term.” She has since apologized for this, although I can’t see why. Most American...
Categories Korean Politics/Subversion
September 1, 2016

What victory looks like from Pyongyang (Parts 1 and 2)

Part 1 David Straub’s “Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea“ has resonated with me in several ways, but none of them more than Straub’s deep ambivalence about Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when I also served there as a young Army officer. Straub admits that in writing his book, he struggled to reconcile, and to show his readers, an honest-yet-fair portrayal of a society that earned his affection, and also caused him much exasperation, even as he...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Diplomacy/Korean Society/Korean War II
August 5, 2016

S. Korea’s quisling left goes all-out to bully N. Koreans out of defecting, and it just might work

We still have few details and no confirmation regarding the reported defection of that North Korean general in China, other than this Korea Times report that he absconded with $40 million, and that he “was in charge of Section 39 inside the Korean Workers’ Party.” (KBS had reported that he was in charge of regime slush funds in southeast Asia only.) The Korea Times report probably refers to what’s more commonly referred to as Bureau 39, Room 39, or Office 39, the...
Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/The Fifth Column/Useful Idiocy
July 20, 2016

The Republicans on North Korea

A few minutes before I sat down to write this, the Republicans officially nominated Donald Trump as their presidential candidate. So on one hand, I’d guess a GOP platform won’t mean much more to Trump than that tax plan you’ve already forgotten about. On the other hand, the GOP platform probably reflects the views of its rank-and-file and down-ballot candidates, and it looks like a thinly veiled call for overthrowing His Corpulency: We are a Pacific nation with economic, military, and...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. Politics
July 5, 2016

Minbyun’s frivolous lawfare terrorizes 12 young N. Korean refugees & endangers lives.

The western association of “left” with “liberal” does not hold up well in South Korea, whose political spectrum is dominated by warring factions of nationalists. These factions wield the law as an authoritarian sword against their rivals, and as a (sometimes flimsy) shield against their rivals’ authoritarian assaults. Historically, the worst authoritarianism was on the political right before the transition to democracy in 1987. The left still fuels its moral propulsion from the nostalgia of dissent dating back to this...
Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Korean Politics/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
April 18, 2016

Dear President Park: Make Reunification Your Legacy

Last week was a tough week for Park Geun-hye, when her party lost its majority in the National Assembly. The simplest explanation for this is that historically, ruling parties usually take beatings in mid-term elections, particularly when their own voters don’t show up to vote. The ruling party may poll well in the abstract, but a party that enters an election divided is likely to underperform expectations.  Republicans, take note. And don’t look so smug, Democrats. Something like this appears...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Propaganda/Reconstruction/Subversion
March 11, 2016

Park Geun-hye finds her inner Thatcher

This week, the South Korean government imposed bilateral sanctions on North Korea, banning from its harbors ships that have been to North Korea in the last 180 days, cancelling a joint logistics project with Russia to export coal through Rajin, and designating “30 companies with links to the North’s nuclear and missile programs …, 38 North Korean nationals and two foreigners.” The targets include “Leonard Lai, president of ­Singapore-based Senat Shipping” (see this post) and “the Taiwanese president of Royal Team...
Categories Kaesong/Korean Politics/North-South/Sunshine
March 10, 2016

Convicted N. Korean spy now protesting against sanctions in front of the Pentagon

Years before the Democratic Labor Party lawmaker Lee Seok-ki was recorded on a wiretap plotting violent attacks in support of a proposed North Korean invasion, the DLP was rocked by another North Korean fifth column scandal — the alleged Il Shim Hue spy ring. On October 24th, 2006, South Korea’s state intelligence agency, the NIS, arrested three men: Michael Jang, former Democratic Labor Party (DLP) central committee member Lee Jeong Hun, and the head of a private education institute, Son Jeong...
Categories The Fifth Column
March 3, 2016

South Korean National Assembly passes human rights bill. Finally.

Last month, I leveled some bitter criticism at South Korea’s opposition Minju Party for blocking North Korean human rights legislation (ironically enough, “Minju” means “democracy”). This week, after an eleven-year battle, the opposition finally gave up its obstructionism, yielded to the tides of morality and history, and allowed the bill to pass the National Assembly. The final vote for 212 for and 24 abstentions (and none against?). Belated as it was, this victory gives us some reasons to rejoice. First, it’s a...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society
February 2, 2016

Of the North’s crimes against humanity, the world will ask, “Where was South Korea?”

South Korea’s political left, which has long been divided over whether to be violently pro-North Korean, ideologically pro-North Korean, or merely anti-anti-North Korean, has again blocked a vote in South Korea’s National Assembly on a North Korean human rights law that’s been languishing there since 2005. The law itself is weak bori-cha. It had been watered down until it did little more than fund NGOs seeking direct engagement with the North Korean people. But even as a symbolic gesture, as a...
Categories Human Rights/Japan & Korea/Korean Law/Korean Politics/North-South
August 11, 2015

North Korean Men Cross DMZ (and plant land mines)

By now, you’ve read that South Korea’s government has accused the North Korean military of sending soldiers across the DMZ to plant mines near South Korean guard posts, an act that blew the legs off two South Korean soldiers last week. The two South Koreans, both staff sergeants, triggered the mines last Tuesday just outside their post, within the South Korean half of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer separating the two Korean armies. One lost both legs in the...
Categories Appeasement/Kaesong/Korean War II/North-South/Propaganda/ROK Military/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy
April 22, 2015

Craig Urquhart: Withdraw U.S. soldiers from Korea

Writing at NK News, Craig Urquhart makes a punchy but powerful case for withdrawing U.S. soldiers from South Korea: South Korea has been allowed to act like an overgrown child for decades. The U.S. exercised exclusive military command because South Korea could not be trusted not to start a world war, and now resists the American push to transfer operational command. It relies on U.S. protection when it flubs its own diplomatic efforts. It carved out a state-sponsored industrial policy...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
March 14, 2015

N. Korea calls for S. Koreans to join “patriotic struggle to check and foil the U.S. imperialists.”

Following North Korea’s post-hoc support for the slashing of U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert, my two main questions where (1) whether the North had a role in inciting the attack (for which I’ve seen no direct evidence thus far); and (2) whether the North is calling for more violent anti-American attacks. KCNA’s latest helps us answer the latter question in the affirmative. It isn’t specific about its favored methods of “patriotic struggle,” although its recent approval of the slashing of diplomats should give you...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Terrorism (NK)
March 11, 2015

Roh Moo Hyun’s ex-campaign manager just hates it when politicians exploit tragic isolated incidents

The good news is that Ambassador Mark Lippert has been released from the hospital, and is recovering well. [Joongang Ilbo] Give the South Koreans credit for making lemonade from lemons — the news coverage here has been filled with images of well-wishers greeting Lippert, or expressing regret for the attack on him. The greetings look both staged and sincere,* but because of that reaction, most Americans will see Kim Ki-Jong as one small turd in a vast, sweet, fizzy bowl of gachi gapshida....
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Terrorism (NK)/The Fifth Column/U.S. & Korea
March 5, 2015

N. Korea’s support for slashing of U.S. Amb’r might be state sponsorship of terrorism

Yonhap and The Washington Post are reporting that North Korea’s official “news” agency, the Korean Central News Agency or KCNA, has expressed its support for an extremist’s slashing of U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert yesterday, calling it “a just punishment.” You won’t find those words in the English version of KCNA’s report, whose headline is a dry, “U.S. Ambassador Attacked by S. Korean,” although you will see that KCNA spelled the Ambassador’s name “Report.” The Korean-language headline of the same article, however, translates to something like, “Act of...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Terrorism (NK)/The Fifth Column
March 4, 2015

Breaking: U.S. Ambassador to S. Korea slashed by guy who really hates bloodshed

Here’s a link to the story, and here’s a picture: Picture released of injured U.S. ambassador Lippert on YTN pic.twitter.com/ztxS3QzwmH ” Mark Broome (@mark_arirang) March 4, 2015 Hat tip to Sung Yoon Lee. More to follow, but initial word I’m hearing suggests a political motive. ~   ~   ~ Update 1: AFP’s report has more details. Seoul (AFP) – The US ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, was injured in an attack by a razor-wielding assailant Thursday in Seoul, police and television...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/The Fifth Column