August 8, 2010

Sit Down for This One: 9/11/05 Riot at MacArthur Statue Was a North Korean Job

I know this probably stuns you as much as it stuns me: Seoul police arrested two pro-Pyongyang activists on charges of starting a campaign to remove a statue of U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur from a park in Incheon under orders from North Korea. According to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, two leaders of the Korean Confederation Unification Promotion Council were arrested on charges of receiving directives from a North Korean agent from 2004 to 2005 to stage a series of...
Categories The Fifth Column
August 5, 2010

Plan B Watch: Einhorn Goes to Tokyo, Pressure Builds on China

The latest reports in the Korean press tell us that the President will soon sign an over-arching executive order that will subsume the authorities of Executive Order 13,382 (see sidebars), and will also allow the blocking of assets used for proliferation, drug trafficking, and currency counterfeiting: In a press briefing on Monday, Department spokesman Philip Crowley said, “We have no doubt that North Korea has engaged directly in counterfeit operations as a means of bringing currency into the country. This...
Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Crime/NK Economics/Proliferation/Sanctions
August 4, 2010

North Korea raised the stakes in its face-off with the United States and South Korea on Saturday, threatening to use nuclear weapons if Washington and Seoul go ahead with military exercises planned for regional waters this summer. [WaPo] President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 to reward it for giving up its nuclear weapons, and as of June 23, 2010, President Obama saw no particular reason to disturb that decision....
Categories Anju Links
August 3, 2010

Did Lee Myung Bak Just Get His Mojo Back?

I’ve been meaning to write about the latest off-year election results in South Korea for the last several days. In what must be a welcome shift for Lee, unlike the June local and provincial elections, the ruling GNP scored what Yonhap called “a stunning victory over the opposition parties.” In crucial by-elections gauging public sentiment toward the Lee Myung-bak administration midway through its term, the ruling Grand National Party yesterday scored precious victories in high-profile districts, making a successful political...
Categories Cheonan Incident/Korean Politics
August 3, 2010

The Peace Train Stops at Al-Jazzeera

Professor Sung Yoon Lee is a friend of mine, and this is why friends don’t let friends go on Al Jazzeera. When the floodlights snap on, you just might find yourself in a circus tent. In the extreme opposite corner, we have present “Professor” of Pacific Rim Studies Christine Hong, who appears to a an exact genetic clone of her comrade in the struggle, Christine Ahn, right down to the hip, urbane glasses (damn you to hell, Hwang Woo-Seok!). The...
Categories Cheonan Incident/Useful Idiocy
August 2, 2010

Plan B Watch: Robert Einhorn Visits Seoul; State Directs Strong Criticism at China

Robert Einhorn, President Obama’s special adviser for non-proliferation and arms control, is visiting Seoul and Tokyo this week. He is accompanied by Daniel Glaser, who works with Treasury’s Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and who was a key architect of the Banco Delta Asia sanctions in 2005 and 2006. At the risk of making a comparison that Glaser might not necessarily welcome, his presence in Seoul has far more deterrent value than parking an aircraft carrier off the coast...
Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions
August 1, 2010

North Korean Land Mine Kills One South Korean, Injures Another

A North Korean mine which drifted along a river into the neighbouring South killed a man and badly injured another when it exploded, military officials said Sunday.  Several wooden box mines have been retrieved by South Korean soldiers and police, but it was not immediately clear how the mines ended up drifting into the South.  The explosion was reported shortly before midnight Saturday in a restricted border area in Yeoncheon, 60 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of Seoul, the defence ministry...
Categories NK Military/North-South
July 31, 2010

A modest proposal for Christine Ahn: if you really want peace, maybe you should start by asking North Korea to stop attacking South Korea.

Just when it seemed that no one would, Dennis, the Anarcho-Syndicalist-sounding Congressgnome from Middle Earth, has stepped up to save North Korea from being repressed by the violence inherent in the system: “If North Korea presents some kind of a limited missile threat to any part of the United States coastline, the obvious solution would be to go to North Korea, and to negotiate with them and to talk to them, and to work with them to avoid any confrontation,”...
Categories Useful Idiocy
July 30, 2010

Free Aijalon Gomes

It should go without saying that I am in sympathy with the goals of Robert Park and Aijalon Gomes, and in complete disagreement that they advanced those goals through their quixotic walks into North Korea. Most people today only remember Park for his bizarre confession and his crypic references to the sort of sexual torture that, without knowing more, sounded like something more than a few of us have purchased for our friends at bachelor parties in our boorish youth....
Categories Aijalon Gomes
July 29, 2010

My God, how I would love to attend one of these: Around 150 people gathered at a park at Imjingak near the border to release ten giant balloons carrying some 100,000 leaflets, 300 DVDs and 1,000 one-US-dollar notes. An activist shouting ‘Down with Kim Jong Il’ ripped up a North Korean flag with a knife. Another wore a traditional Korean funeral hat with the message ‘Congratulations, Kim Jong Il’s death’. The leaflets and DVDs criticised Pyongyang’s human rights record and...
Categories Anju Links
July 29, 2010

North Korean Soccer Team Faces Criticism Session

Once again, this is why North Korea should be banned from FIFA play pending further investigation and monitoring of how it treats its players and coaches: The team and coach Kim Jong Hun were summoned to a meeting at the People’s Palace of Culture in Pyongyang on July 2, the U.S.-financed Radio Free Asia reported Monday. Sports Minister Pak Myong Chol was among some 400 government officials, athletes and others at the six-hour-long closed-door session, the report said. Team members...
Categories Sports
July 28, 2010

Plan B Watch: A Shot Across China’s Bow?

Hey, did the State Department threaten the Bank of China and the Bank of Shanghai? Or to put the question more bluntly, did someone just grow a pair? A diplomatic source here said the U.S. will blacklist more North Korean entities and individuals in the coming weeks so that international financial institutions would cut off ties with them. Any foreign banks refusing to sever business ties with the North Korean entities and individuals in question will have U.S. financial institutions...
Categories China/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law
July 28, 2010

Why There Is a Cold War in Asia

When someone escapes from North Korea and makes contact with South Koreans, and when China then repatriates that person to North Korea, the North Korean authorities typically execute that person, or send him to die in a prison camp. China has known this for years. That’s why the Chinese government is an accessory to murder when it does things like this: China has repatriated an 81-year-old former South Korean prisoner of war who had fled North Korea decades after being...
Categories China/China & Korea/Korean War/Refugees
July 27, 2010

Lifting Trade Sanctions: A Bad Idea We’ve Already Tried

This seems rather badly timed, somehow. In Forbes, grad student Koen C. Munneke argues that “[i]nstead of following the previously ineffective path of applying pressure and saber-rattling, the international community should switch to ….” Let me guess: the previously ineffective path of trying to use investment to better the lives of ordinary North Koreans and broadening the minds of their overlords, in the hope that they might again promise to disarm? If only someone had thought of that before! It’s...
Categories NK Economics
July 27, 2010

Dealing with Khmer and North Korean Killers

As the first sentence is finally handed out to a former member of the Khmer Rouge regime, it reminds us of a human rights catastrophe still in progress. Admittedly, I don’t know much about the history of Cambodia, including the nightmare under the Khmer Rouge, but this is a reminder that someday (may it be very soon), decisions made today will determine the fate of many now running the regime in North Korea. The details and issues addressed in South...
Categories History/Human Rights/Southeast Asia
July 26, 2010

Plan B Watch: Treasury Targets 100 Suspicious N. Korean Accounts Worldwide

According to multiple newspaper reports published since late last week, the Obama Administration’s new asset-freezing campaign against North Korea began in earnest in June. The Treasury Department, having identified about 200 accounts worldwide suspected of storing the proceeds of banned weapons sales, currency counterfeiting, counterfeit cigarettes and Viagra, proliferation, drug trafficking, and other things that all sovereign nations to do pay for yachts for their despotic rulers. Treasury focused on 100 accounts where its evidence was strongest and quietly persuaded...
Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions
July 22, 2010

Plan B Watch: Clinton Announces Tightening of N. Korea Sanctions

Well, it’s about damn time: The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it would impose further economic sanctions against North Korea, throwing legal weight behind a choreographed show of pressure on the North that included an unusual joint visit to the demilitarized zone by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The measures, announced here by Mrs. Clinton after talks with South Korean officials, focus on counterfeiting, money laundering and other dealings that she said the...
Categories An Alliance?/Cheonan Incident/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. & Korea