August 18, 2008

Dems’ N. Korea Platform Collapses Under the Weight of History and Logic

You’d think that with a cast of 300 foreign policy advisors  on Obama’s team alone, the Democrats could find one who  has some  idea of who Roh  Moo Hyun was,  what he stood for, and what he would not stand against.  The Democrats have rolled out their 2008 platform.  Party platforms aren’t widely regarded for being repositories of substance.  They’re  better known  dispensing crumbs to interest groups.  When those interests conflict, they get resolved in the great unseen food chain...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics
August 18, 2008

Hill Admits Six Party Talks Stalled Again

Less than three months before the next election and after the United States  gave up key  demands on  disclosure and disarmament, North Korea  is balking at verification of even its limited nuclear disclosure.  The talks are now stalled, but U.S. negotiator Chris Hill tells us that we must continue to be  patient: “As you know in the Six-Party process we’ve often suffered delays. We’re in another delay now, but I just want to stress that we are ready to de-list...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
August 17, 2008

What Ranch Country Thinks of Korea’s Beef Protests

Update, 12/08: Here’s how history will record this whole ridiculous episode. As Korea heaves a meek “never mind” to a national crisis based on exposed falsehoods and manipulated by an  anti-democratic fifth column, American Korea-watchers may be tempted to  assume that the episode passed without being noticed by most Americans.  That’s not a safe thing to assume for my part of the country, the part that produces most of that beef.  If you’re not from that part of the country,...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea
August 16, 2008

Second N. Korean Disqualified for Doping

Earlier, I reported that North Korean pistol-shooter Kim Jong-Su had been stripped of two medals,  one silver and  one bronze, for doping.  The banned drugs Kim took were beta-blockers, which suppress anxiety that  can make a shooter jittery.  Now, a second North Korean shooter, Kim Hyon-Ung, has been disqualified: “Kim Hyon-Ung was barred from participating in the Games after it became known belatedly that he failed a doping test carried out during the Asian championships,” the official said. “North Korean...
Categories NK Crime
August 16, 2008

Anju Links for 16 August 2008

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL wonders what it means that North Korea is still on the terror list, and adds this: At the beginning of his Administration, Mr. Bush spoke eloquently about the suffering of the North Korean people and the brutality of the regime that oppresses them. He and his Administration have been quiet on the subject for two years, in pursuit of a nuclear deal that is still more promise than reality. We hope they keep speaking up. BECAUSE...
Categories Anju Links
August 14, 2008

Anju Links for 14 August 2008

THE END OF SUNSHINE:  North Korea has begun expelling “unnecessary” South Koreans from Kumgang, presumably meaning everyone but the cashiers and Brinks truck drivers. The South said 11 personnel including two from the state-run Korea Tourism Organisation and nine in charge of a newly built facility for reunions of separated families in the resort had been asked to leave by early Monday. “One left on Saturday and another two are supposed to leave today,” a spokesman for the South’s unification...
Categories Anju Links
August 14, 2008

North Korea’s Next Tantrum

A  shoe is about to drop, but  which shoe?  Among Washington’s Korea-watching klatsch, there’s a popular parlor game that goes like this: DOVE:  The North Koreans are proud, fanatical, and emotional.  You have to be careful not to antagonize them with idle talk about human rights and  intrusive verification or you’ll spoil the negotiations.  And we’re this close (thumb and index finger a milimeter apart) to a breakthrough. HAWK:  The North Koreans are calculating and react  with malice aforethought.  Their...
Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
August 12, 2008

Anju Links for 12 August 2008

NO JUCHE FOR YOU: The South Korean government has refused permission for delegations from an unnamed  “local youth group” and the infamously extremist Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union to visit North Korea.   The decision has reportedly caused a spike in the  prices of invisible ink, pen-shaped transmitters,  and cyanide capsules in college dormitories, faculty lounges, and union halls across South Korea. A SECOND SHIPMENT OF AMERICAN FOOD AID has arrived to feed North Korea’s needy army. FIVE NORTH KOREAN...
Categories Anju Links
August 12, 2008

If Jay Lefkowitz Falls in the Forest ….

A week after we learned that the North Koreans  disinvited him from  visiting Kaesong — something about which our State Department offered no adverse reaction — Lefkowitz has canceled a scheduled visit to Seoul as well.  These events belie the sincerity of President Bush  and even Chris Hill sporadically talking the talk on human rights again: They “shared the view that in the process of normalizing relations, meaningful progress should be made on improving North Korea’s human rights record.” This...
Categories U.S. Politics
August 11, 2008

The Freedom of the State’s Press to Deceive the People Shall Be Abridged

[Updated below] In the wake of a court’s decision ordering a retraction of a distorted, sloppy, and  false  MBC report that triggered massive anti-government protests, Lee Myung Bak is moving to clean house.   A principled approach would be to ask why Korea’s government (or for that matter, ours) is in the business of broadcasting the news anyway and just saw off this vestigial limb.  Instead, Lee is being Lee and conducting a purge. The shakeup culminated on Friday at national...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Censorship/Korean Society/Media Criticism/The Fifth Column
August 8, 2008

N. Korea Food Crisis Updates

Good Friends was our early warning system.  Now that the famine has begun, the U.N. is sounding an alarm.  North Korea is heading toward its worst food crisis since the 1990s because of flooding, successive crop failures and worldwide inflation for staples such as rice and corn, the United Nations World Food Program said Wednesday. The agency shied away from predicting another famine like the one that killed as many as 2 million people in the 1990s, but said its...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
August 7, 2008

North Korea Rejected Lefkowitz Visit to Kaesong; We Had to Hear It from the South Koreans

A few weeks ago, after Jay Lefkowitz, the Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, cancelled a visit to Kaesong, I speculated that the North Koreans felt free to just blow him off:  “One wonders whether the North Koreans, sensing how completely Lefkowitz has been marginalized in Washington, simply withdrew his permission to visit.”  And that turns about to be pretty much what happened: “We understand the North has refused to register the application by the special envoy,” South...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/NK Economics
August 6, 2008

Chinese Regime Loses the P.R. Game Before the Opening Ceremony

A friend who recently visted China with his Chinese wife tells me that  today, there are banners in Beijing telling people in great detail how to make small talk and answer questions asked by foreigners.  Chinese are even instructed on what Hollywood celebreties they like.  That’s a lot of elaborate effort to go to only to screw up your P.R. effort this badly just before those other  games begin: MEDIA RELATIONS: The beating of two Japanese journalists by police in...
Categories China
August 5, 2008

N. Korean Defectors Escape Severe Malnutrition Only to Acquire “Chronic” Case of Munchies

Just when I think I’ve seen everything …. Two North Korean defectors living in Britain were jailed after they were caught working at a secret cannabis farm, a U.S. broadcaster reported Saturday. Radio Free Asia (RFA), monitored in Seoul, said a Liverpool court sentenced this week the North Korean men — who lived in the country under refugee status — to jail terms, after they were arrested in March during a police raid of a cannabis farm in Southport, a...
Categories Drugs & N Korea/Refugees/WTF?
August 5, 2008

The End of Sunshine

North Korea is now threatening to expel South Korean  staff from Kumgang.  A spokesman for the North Korean military unit in charge of the region around Kumgang said it would kick out all South Koreans “we deemed unnecessary” from the resort. Although South Korea suspended tourism after the shooting, more than 260 South Korean businesspeople remain there, most of them affiliated with Hyundai-Asan, a Seoul-based company that operates the resort together with the North Korean  government. The unidentified spokesman said...
Categories Appeasement/NK Economics
August 4, 2008

Anju Links for 4 August 2008

WHAT BETTER SYMBOL could there be of the complete intellectual and moral collapse of Bush’s North Korea policy  than this? (Hat tip to a friend.) THE KOREAN CHURCH COALITION, which I think has to be the single most dynamic activist organization promoting human rights in North Korea today, has amassed a very impressive list of supportive letters from politicians of both parties.  I’ve posted some quotes below the fold.  The obvious  question is whether those are more than mere words. ...
Categories Anju Links