Category: Uncategorized

Via Richardson at DPRK studies, there are fresh reports that the North Koreans are hanging up pictures of second son Kim Jong-Chol. Richardson has another picture that’s not so flattering, either. It’s interesting that the story is emerging as Kim Jong Il is traveling in China; however, the information has a not-so-fresh smell: The newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, said the North Korean senior official, who defected to South Korea, had said many communist party officials were hanging the picture of Kim’s...

Remember when Chung told elderly voters to stay home on Election Day? Someone in his party seems determined to make their votes count. The police raided the Seoul city chapter office of the governing Uri Party yesterday, an action that was a first in this country and would have been unthinkable under Korea’s strongman presidents. The police were following up on complaints that the party may have enrolled about 100 elderly people “• and collected party dues from them “•...

An explosion ripped through a superstore in the bustling business district of downtown Shenzhen just one day after a reported visit by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to the city. Accounts of the incident that surfaced in Hong Kong papers on Tuesday said the explosives were left in a storage locker at the Carrefour superstore detonated at around 1 p.m. injuring three workers. Prior to the attack, five superstores including Carrefour, Shenzhen Xinyijia Supermarket and the Shenzhen Baijia Supermarket reportedly...

Apparently, the South Koreans don’t approve of counterfeiting, either. Incidentally, they’re at least five years overdue for a W50,000 bill. Mature economies don’t force citizens to carry their money in wheelbarrows.

Thuggish tactics may have prevented him from talking to far-left Voice of the People last week, but our man in Korea is determined to leave no stronghold of the radical, pro-North Korean left untouched. Now, he’s now on the Internet: “I think all South Koreans should be worried about a regime that treats its own people so badly,” Vershbow said in a message posted at Café USA, the embassy PR website set up by his predecessor Christopher Hill. He claimed...

Thank God for those moments when candor at least appears to leak through the diplomatic sieve: Kim’s lengthy tour of China’s boom cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen suggests that soliciting Chinese support for North Korean economic reform was also high on his agenda. A staff member of a Chinese think tank says on previous occasions when Kim visited developed areas in China, he presented relevant economic reform policies after returning home. However, a source in Beijing said the tour of...

The suit relates to people abducted during the war, which ended with an armistice (but no peace treaty) in 1953: [The plaintiffs] say the government failed to ascertain the whereabouts of a single South Korean abductee, nor were they allowed to meet their families during family reunions. “The government has deceived us, making it appear as if it was trying to solve the question of the abductees and prisoners of war while in reality only focusing on the 480 abducted...

The presidential advisor for science and technology Park Ky-young admitted Tuesday to a conflict of interest arising from W250 million (US$250,000) in research grants she received from the disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk. Park has already tendered her resignation. Watching MBC news last night, I also saw Chung Dong-Young trying to explain away his efforts to lure Hwang into the Uri party, although that by itself would be just politics as usual.

Finally, I can’t restrain my enthusiasm over this Korea Times column, which completely nails my own complaints about the Korean legal system. As someone who dealt regularly with the deficiencies that system on a regular basis while a JAG officer in Korea, its awfulness has been a favorite rant of mine since the early days of this blog (ht The Marmot). The context is the “Hong Kong Eleven,” a group of violent South Korean union thugs who went to Hong...

Iraq Watch. This week’s theme seems to be the state and the rule of law. Just as the rule of law disintegrates when the state is unresponsive to the will of the people, reestablishing the rule of law is essential to allowing the people to express their will peacefully. Sir Robert Thompson, the great British theorist of counterinsurgency, would likely have made the reconstitution of Iraq’s police the first priority, even before the army. The best organisation to be responsible...

[Updated; Scroll down.] If the military and the peasantry unite as one, then none on this earth could possibly subvert them. –MaoRural uprisings in China are becoming so frequent, it’s getting hard to keep track of them. BEIJING (Reuters) – China has sealed off a village in southern Guangdong province after days of protests over land grabs ended at the weekend in clashes with police that killed a teenage girl, two residents said on Monday. Last week’s protest came a...

Mystery Solved: Not that the speculation excited me much, but Kim Jong Il is in southern China. Frequent brief disappearances are de rigeur for this particular despot. The predictable triumph of exuberance over experience is the reporting that this time, he’s touring factories and learning about economic reform! Some people have been holding in that lungful of smoke for almost nine years now. The truth is that this horse has been led to that water before. . . .

Suicidal Gestures: Roh is talking of resigning from the Uri Party, probably to further cement its image as the party of destroying every institution it enters.

Paging Alex Trebek? The next time Congressmen Moran and Murtha are up for election, I hope someone has the sense to run this video clip in their respective districts. Ouch.

[Updated 15 Jan 06] I had meant to say something earlier about how South Korea’s culture of politics-by-thuggery has now touched even the U.S. Ambassador to Korea, Alexander Vershbow. The Flying Yangban’s observations have inspired me to add more, beyond the expression of my strong agreement with those observations. Finally, after years of watching U.S. ambassadors work the cocktail circuit while the propaganda war was lost in the streets below, a U.S. ambassador has the vision and guts to do...

ZAWAHIRI DEAD? Update: Alas, it seems not yet. Here’s wishing him a speedy journey to his place in the Shaitan’s harem.

That Was Predictable: South Korea’s war on prostitution isn’t ending prostitution.

Why Are We Hearing So Little About Afghanistan? Perhaps because stories like this one aren’t popular with editors. Between 80 and 90 percent of Afghans are optimistic, pro-U.S., and anti-Taliban.