January 21, 2009

39.91 N, 127.55 E: Hamhung, Haunted City

In 1997, Washington Post correspondent Keith Richburg was allowed into the city of Hamhung, just inland from North Korea’s east coast, to try to find the truth behind fragmentary rumors of a famine inside the world’s most isolated country. Although Hamhung is North Korea’s second-largest city and a key industrial center, it was an isolated place with few foreign visitors, little commerce with the outside world, and at a great distance from any international border. This is what Hamhung looks...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Google Earth
January 20, 2009

National Geographic, ‘Escaping North Korea’

National Geographic’s February 2009 issue is out, and it contains an article about North Korean refugees. It’s written in the form of a narrative about three refugees — “Black,” “Red,” and “White” — and their escape through China to South Korea. “White” and “Red” survived victimization by the cross-border sex trade. After her arrival in the South, White was also diagnosed with and survived cancer. For “Black,” the deprogramming process began with his first exposure to the truth about Kim...
Categories Refugees
January 19, 2009

AEI Scholars Predict Gloomy Future for N. Korea Policy

Dan Blumenthal, who was a senior foreign policy advisor to John McCain, has teamed up with Aaron Friedberg again to offer “An American Strategy for Asia,” one that might have gotten wider circulated had the economy not collapsed shortly before the election. Their ideas will probably experience continuous vindication as we near the mid-point of the third Clinton Administration, which by my count started around December 2006. Unfortunately, there is little reason to doubt at this point that the Kim...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
January 18, 2009

North Korea Fails to Stamp Out Private Markets

I wonder how long it will take for a North Korea “expert” in some South Korean university to call this a sign of reform: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il slapped restrictions on farmers’ markets last year, but his writ does not appear to run there. The North Korean regime said permitting the markets to operate had been “a transitional step taken under difficult economic conditions,” and according to a notice posted at Haeju Market, South Hwanghae Province that the Chosun...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Resistance
January 18, 2009

U.S. and ROK Sign Cost-Sharing Agreement

After more than a year of acrimonious negotiations — a year that should be seen as part of a perpetual, multi-year negotiation — the United States and South Korea have signed another cost-sharing agreement. So is it a good deal? The question isn’t easily answered, with all of the bullshit you have to squeegie away to get down to the facts of it: Korea has signed an agreement with the United States to provide W760 billion to keep American troops...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
January 17, 2009

For the Thousandth Time, Secretary Rice ….

Ad infinitum, ad nauseum, ad eternitum, ad apocalyptum, North Korea will never negotiate away its nuclear weapons, no matter what it promises our gullible diplomats in treaties or agreed frameworks: In an apparent message to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama who will take office next week, North Korea said Saturday it may not give up its nuclear weapons even if Washington normalizes relations with it. “Normalization of diplomatic relations and the nuclear issue are entirely different issues,” a spokesman for the...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/WMD
January 17, 2009

Hostile Policy: N. Korea Threatens ‘Confrontration’ Along Sea Boundary

It looks like Joe Biden was right about at least one thing: Military tension escalated sharply along the inter-Korean border on Saturday as North Korea vowed to take an “all-out confrontational posture” against South Korea, just hours after it said it would hold onto its nuclear arms. South Korea put its military on heightened alert, warning that armed clashes might take place in disputed waters in the Yellow Sea …. “Now that traitor (South Korean President) Lee Myung-bak and his...
Categories NK Military/ROK Military/Terrorism (NK)
January 17, 2009

South Korean Officer Gets 3 1/2 Years in North Korea Spy Scandal

Somehow, the spirit of the June 15th declaration hasn’t reached all levels of the North Korean government: A South Korean army officer has been sentenced to three and a half years in military prison for aiding a North Korean spy in a sex-for-secrets scandal last year, an official said Friday. The 27-year-old first lieutenant, identified only by his last name Hwang, was arrested in July on charges of supplying classified information to North Korean spy Won Jeong-hwa while being aware...
Categories Korean Law/ROK Military/The Fifth Column
January 17, 2009

Hostile Policy Not Quite Dead

History will record that President Bush experienced just one brief glint of success at influencing the North Koreans during his entire presidency. Naturally, our State Department had nothing to do with it. In fact, when State realized that another cabinet department (Treasury) might actually solve the North Korean problem once and for all, it dove in to rescue failure from the jaws of success. Most people in Washington tend to think in terms of dealing with national security threats in...
Categories NK Economics/Proliferation/WMD
January 16, 2009

That’s Weapons Grade Uranium

The debate about North Korea’s uranium cheat should be over with even Hillary Clinton’s acknowledgment of it, but Condi Rice’s statement that North Korea possesses some unknown quantity of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium isn’t a fact we should just gloss over. That’s the first time I’ve seen that reported. Update: The Daily NK has more recent statements from the Administration on this topic, including from President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. The President stated during the last press conference of his...
Categories Proliferation/WMD
January 16, 2009

FTA Prospects Still Bleak

You know, with all of the anti-American falsehoods some Koreans proliferated before the FTA was signed, I thought the entire effort was more trouble than it was worth even before the beef riots, also inspired by asinine libel, and largely attended by people so stupid as to legitimize the issue of reproductive licensing. Then came the recent parliamentary brawls: And for a moment, South Korea blessed a troubled world with the gift of laughter. (If you polled Koreans about how...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea
January 16, 2009

Korea Invents New Form of Child Exploitation

Korea’s entertainment industry, legal “profession,” and police force join forces to shake down kids: “We have struggled to find a way to stop the abuse of the justice system,” said Hwang Un-ha, Daejeon Jungbu Police chief. “So we decided to exercise the right of police to refer cases for summary trial. It was a solution to save kids. [Joongang Ilbo, emphasis mine] How compassionate of them. Copyright holders, however, are upset, claiming that the matter must not be treated lightly....
Categories Korean Law/Korean Society
January 15, 2009

Meet the New Boss: Kim Jong Il Reportedly Names Kim Jong Un as Successor

Kyodo News is reporting that the North Korean regime has chosen Kim Jong Un as the successor to Kim Jong Il. The report follows months of rumors of a succession announcement and rumors of Kim Jong Il’s ill health. You can read my own run-down of the succession contest here. I must register my grave disappointment that Kim Jong Chol, who would have been such fine blogging material and who really seemed like a contender, was not chosen. Instead, we...
Categories Kremlinology
January 15, 2009

John Bolton Abducts Hillary Clinton, Assumes Her Identity, Nears Easy Confirmation Wearing Drag and Mask

First George W. Bush became Jimmy Carter, now this, at “Hillary Clinton’s” confirmation hearing: “Our goal is to end the North Korean nuclear program – both the plutonium reprocessing program and the highly enriched uranium program, which there is reason to believe exists, although never quite verified,” she said. Her vision of North Korea policy was much stronger in her written statements provided to Senator Richard Lugar before the hearing. “The new Administration will pursue direct diplomacy bilaterally and within...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
January 14, 2009

Lee Myung Bak’s Nightmare Scenario

Yesterday, I noted that North Korea is now demanding the full normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States as its latest demand prerequisite to nuclear disarmament … notwithstanding the fact that as recently as February 2007, it had agreed to disarm in exchange for a completely different set of demands. Having achieved its first set of demands — the lifting of U.S. sanctions, the terror-sponsor designation, and probably enough fuel oil and food to take care of its inner...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan/U.S. & Korea
January 14, 2009

The Rest of the Story

The Chosun Ilbo tells the story of Lee Ae-Ran, a North Korean refugee in the South, who just earned her Ph.D. in Nutritional Science and Food Management from the prestigious Ewha Women’s University. By doing so, claims the Chosun, Ms. Lee has become the first female North Korean defector to earn a Ph.D. from a South Korean university. Ms. Lee’s name sounded familiar to me — maybe because it sounds vaguely like the name of a girl I once dated...
Categories Defectors/Refugees