Selig Harrison: Lee Myung Bak “Invited” Cheonan Attack

I don’t know whether North Korea torpedoed the Cheonan, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Lee Myung Bak has invited retaliation by repudiating the commitment to coexistence and eventual confederation enshrined in the two summit declarations negotiated with Kim Dae Jang and Roh Moo Hyun. [Selig Harrison in the Hanky] Did this widely-quoted North Korea “expert” just excuse an unprovoked sneak attack that killed 46 South Korean sailors? This is not meant as an excuse for the North...

Rumor: Chris Hill to Retire

Just a year after the Senate confirmed failed North Korea negotiator Chris Hill as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, NHK is reporting that Hill plans to retire this summer. There has been occasional grumbling about Hill’s performance in office in Baghdad, though nothing approaching the criticism of his performance as a negotiator with North Korea. One of those who apparently didn’t much care for Hill was Gen. Ray Odierno, one of the architects of the military strategy that stabilized Iraq in...

14 May 2010

So, I suppose some of you probably have questions for Laura and Lisa Ling: ask them here. My own comment is in moderation as I write this. _______________________ We are all necons: Colin Powell says that Kim Jong Il will face the judgment of history. It would have been better yet had Powell done less, as Secretary of State, to defer that judgment. _______________________ In China, that paradise of socialist equality, the price of female human beings is soaring: Young...

Can you say, “kokiri kalbi?”

This is the cutest picture I could find. Two baby elephants intended as a gift to North Korea are unlikely to survive the journey by air, Zimbabwean conservationists said Thursday. The independent Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said the 18-month-old elephants were being held in pens in the western Hwange National Park, along with pairs of most of the park’s other animal species bound for North Korea. The country is a longtime ally of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. [L.A. Times] As...

Cheonan conclusions will mean tougher N. Korea policies … for a while, anyway

It certainly looks like every government official outside Beijing who has seen the evidence now believes that North Korea sank the Cheonan and killed 46 members of its crew. Among those who have drawn their conclusions are the South Korean government, the Obama Administration, and the Republicans in Congress. The multinational investigation is now sufficiently advanced that the official Yonhap News Agency says that the findings could be released as early as next week. One interesting leak references a stray...

13 May 2010

To most, a joke; to a few, a nightmare: Did you hear the one about North Korea claiming to have achieved nuclear fusion? Something tells me that my banner image will still be good for the time being. _______________________ Like most things about North Korea, its World Cup team looks rather strange to foreign eyes. _______________________ Another North Korean man has defected to the South by sea. _______________________ The Chosun Ilbo talks about North Korea’s special forces, and the damage...

North Korea Arms Terrorists, State Department Dozes

The Foreign Minister of Israel has become the first government official to openly accuse North Korea of arming terrorists since the U.S. government removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2008: The Israeli foreign minister said on Wednesday that North Korean weapons seized in Thailand last year were headed for Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. [….] “With huge numbers of different weapons … (it had the) intention to smuggling these weapons to Hamas and to...

Mad Cow Revisionism

The Hankyoreh reacts to comments by President Lee by reinventing the Mad Cow riots of 2008: During a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, President Lee said, “It has been two years since the candlelight vigil demonstrations and although many suppositions proved untrue, not one of those intellectuals or medical sector figures who participated back then has engaged in any reflection. The president also said, “Without reflection, there is no development of society. He added, “I would like to say that it is...

A Field Guide to the Septuagenarian Apparatchiks of North Korea

The Chosun Ilbo, profiling who sat where as the North Koreans (a very few of them) feasted in Beijing, gives us a great who’s who photo. The caption reads: Clockwise from top left, Kim Yong-chun, Hyon Chol-Hae and Ri Myong-su (directors of the National Defense Commission), Choe Thae-bok, Kim Ki-nam, Jang Song-taek, Kim Yang-gon, Kim Yong-il, Kang Sok-ju, Tae Jong-soo, Kim Pyong-hae (Workers’ Party secretary for North Pyongan Province), and Ju Kyu-chang /Yonhap There’s also more evidence that Jang Song-Thaek...

Cheonan Incident Updates

Andrei Lankov talks about China’s motives for supporting Kim Jong Il and predicts that in due course, it will be business as usual all over again: At all probability, this time we will see another repetition of the old game. Chinese will insist that North Korea should come back to the six-party talks (Beijing’s pet project), and also should restrain itself. Kim Jong-il will claim his sovereign rights to run his state as he pleases while inquiring how much aid...

Kaesong Death Watch

Alternate title: Of fools and their money. North Korea has led a delegation of Chinese investors on a tour of the Kaesong Industrial Complex. Would the North Koreans really confiscate Kaesong as they did Kumgang and hand it over to the Chinese? I sure as hell wish they would. Nothing would please me more than such an ineradicable deterrent to foreign investment, such a thorough repudiation of the Sunshine Policy, and the closure of Kaesong’s money pipe to Pyongyang. Alas,...

10 May 2010: If They’ve Lost Fred Hiatt ….

If China really is “a moderating, useful influence” over North Korea, why did it roll out the red carpet for Kim Jong Il and reportedly offer him a $100 million bailout while it is the prime suspect in an action as dangerous and provocative as sinking the Cheonan? Suddenly, another bulb goes on at the Post: Despite all the time spent in six-party talks in recent years, and all the discussion of China’s new role as a “responsible stakeholder” and...

Audio of UN Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn’s Special Address to PSCORE

Updated below. As Joshua mentioned previously, UN Special Rapporteur on North Korean Human Rights, Vitit Muntarbhorn, spoke in Seoul to a PSCORE seminar April 30th during North Korea Freedom Week. His talk was entitled, “Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: Retrospect, Aspects and Prospects.” I used my camera to record the audio, but I didn’t get the first few minutes because I was busy taking photos. Listening to him talk, you very quickly get a sense of...

Samsung Tries to Sue Its Way to Mohammunity

Recently, a friend approached me about the idea of writing a column for a South Korean newspaper. I declined on the basis that I’m already overtaxed by the burden of writing this blog, but perhaps I should have added “the defense of personal jurisdiction” as another reason: In his Christmas Day 2009 column for the Korea Times, Michael Breen decided to lampoon such national newsmakers as President Lee Myung-bak and the pop idol Rain. Headlined “What People Got for Christmas,”...

Lender Beware: North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank Sued in U.S. Federal Court

The Korea Times reports that since its establishment in 1959, North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank has been the regime’s “main foreign exchange bank,” with “branch offices in France, Australia, Kuwait, Hong Kong and Beijing.” The Times also informs us that the bank now finds itself the defendant in a multi-million dollar lawsuit in a U.S. federal district court: A state-run North Korean bank is facing trial in the United States for failing to pay a $5 million loan that it...

6 May 2010

Another reason not to hike the DMZ these days: NORTH Korea has completed deployment of about 50,000 special forces along the border with South Korea, a report said on Wednesday, amid high tensions over the sinking of a Seoul warship. The deployment began two or three years ago and seven 7,000-strong divisions are now in place, an unidentified senior government official told Yonhap news agency. __________________ North Korea’s “unofficial spokesman” Kim Myong Chol has constructed an elaborate theory blaming the...

North Korea Denies Hwang Jang Yop Assassination Attempt

North Korea denies trying to assassinate Hwang Jang Yop (also, the Korean War and the existence of concentration camps). The North Korean web site Uriminzokkiri, the very same one that just two weeks before had said, in reference to Hwang, and I quote, “Traitors have always been slaughtered with knives,” now calls the reports of the assassination plot “a ridiculous fabrication.” I look forward to John Feffer’s explanation for why North Korea’s involvement is improbable. President Bush removed North Korea...

Has the Teflon Finally Worn Off the Wok?

For well over a decade, the South Korean street and government have let China get away with murder — literally — of North Korean refugees, and South Korean POW’s and their families. Koreans quickly forgot their anger after hundreds of Chinese “students” rioted in downtown Seoul and beat and kicked Korean citizens (but, said the Chinese government that bused the mobs in, they really meant well). But for once, I’m gratified to see South Koreans sharing my sense of outrage...