December 17, 2007

Another bad harvest in North Korea

The Rural Development Administration of South Korea, via the Daily NK, reports that  this year’s cereal crop in North Korea  may be  2.5 million (metric?) tons short of the country’s needs, at just over 4 million tons.  Although these figures are obviously of questionable reliability, when compared to prior-year harvests,  a 4M-ton cereal harvest  would be about mid-range between the harvest figures at the height of the Great Famine and the years since then.   In relative terms, however,  food deficit...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
December 17, 2007

Don’t let the absence of tact, polish, logic, and stability fool you: Ron Paul slithers like a true pol

Please don’t take this as a reflection on my personal  life, but perhaps  because I’ve lived in Nevada, Korea, and Washington, D.C.,  I  have only  mild moral objections to voluntary exchanges of sex for money between adults.  I’d think that this would be a rare point on which I’d agree with Ron Paul.  But when asked if he was  “shocked” to learn that  the Moonlight Bunny Ranch had contributed to his campaign, Paul missed  the chance  to  defend social libertarianism by...
Categories U.S. Politics
December 14, 2007

Daily NK: Rising banditry in N. Korea

As respect for the law disappears and a regular market economy is not introduced in North Korea, the trend to earn money by any means ““ fair or foul – has dominated. For instance, even in the daytime soldiers or gangsters stop trucks and rob them of their freight. Such incidents are occurring frequently. [Daily NK, Yoon Il Geun] Amid a number of reports of this kind, you have to wonder about the broader implications of groups of armed men...
Categories Inside NK
December 14, 2007

Protest updates

A number of videos from the November 30th-December 1st protests at Chinese embassies and consulates are now available on YouTube here. Although the protests were not numerically large — for that, you need a cause that’s widely supported by people without regular jobs — they took place in a much larger number of cities than previously, and they showed much more ambition in their use of street theater. In front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, the North Korean Freedom...
Categories Activism
December 13, 2007

Great moments in diplomacy

As the two sides started the second-day meeting, a North Korean navy official tried to show a slide displaying the North’s proposal on the fishing zone in front of pool reporters.  A South Korean naval officer rushed over and stopped the move, triggering a minor scuffle.  [Yonhap] This, kids, is why you don’t bring makkoli along to a negotiation.  By the way, this is what I consider a successful end to any inter-Korean negotiation involving the Roh Administration.
Categories Diplomacy
December 13, 2007

Condi: U.S. not ready to engage N. Korea broadly

A day after the New York Philharmonic announced it would play a concert in the North Korean capital and a week after word of a personal letter from Bush to leader of the communist nation, Kim Jong Il, Rice downplayed the significance of both. “This is not a regime that the United States is prepared to engage broadly,” she said. “If we are going to engage it broadly, it’s clear in the program that we have laid out how that...
Categories Diplomacy/U.S. Politics
December 13, 2007

North Korea still refusing to admit HEU program

The chief nuclear negotiators of South Korea and China Thursday met in Beijing to hammer out a joint message to North Korea, urging Pyongyang to come clean on all its nuclear programs and activities. North Korea is reportedly refusing to acknowledge its long-suspected uranium enrichment program, creating what Foreign Minister Song Min-soon has called a new “bump” in six-way nuclear disarmament talks that involve the two Koreas, the U.S., Japan, China and Russia.  [Yonhap] Just watch us fold like lawn...
Categories Six-Party Talks
December 13, 2007

Congressional Research Service issues report on the implications of removing North Korea from the terror sponsor list

Yesterday, a reader and friend was kind enough to forward the entire report to me (thanks!), which I’ve uploaded onto this blog, and which you can access here: crs-north-korea-terrorism-list-removal.pdf   Since then,  this has  generated some press attention in South Korea.  The report’s authors are the highly regarded Larry  Niksch and Raphael Perl.  There’s too much valuable information in there for me to graf and do it justice; this one is a must-read.  I’ll limit my comments to a few...
Categories Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
December 12, 2007

House passes Burma sanctions bill

I had given up on the idea that this would ever happen.  Kudos for Tom Lantos: The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday blocking imports of Myanmar rubies and removing tax credits for U.S. firms investing in the military-ruled Southeast Asian country. The Block Burmese JADE (Junta’s Anti-Democratic Efforts) Act, drafted after Myanmar’s suppression of pro-democracy protests in September, was approved as the junta rejected a U.N. report putting the death toll from that crackdown at 31....
Categories Southeast Asia
December 12, 2007

Senate resolution would set conditions for de-listing North Korea as a terror sponsor

I knew this was coming but was asked not to  write about it.  But now, I see that Richardson has a link to a Yonhap story about it.  Now that it’s out, I’ll speak out of school for a moment and say that I suggested  a couple  of the provisions that made it into the resolution, although I’d rather not say which ones. The sponsor is Sam Brownback, who having dropped his presidential bid, is back to doing what earned...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/U.S. Politics
December 11, 2007

Desperately in need of a stranger’s hand

At the end of last month, I linked to a post at Powerline, quoting Noah Pollak on the subject of Annapolis, which I said then could just as well apply to  Condi Rice’s  eleventh-hour test of Kim Jong Il’s character.  Pollak said, If Condi’s pursuit of the peace process is due to a belief that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible and will unlock the forces of moderation and conviviality in the Middle East, then, well, she is simply a...
Categories Diplomacy/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
December 10, 2007

Drug-Resistant TB Hits N. Korea

I’ve previously  explained my conflicted feelings about the Eugene Bell Foundation, but I would rate their reporting about the spread of disease inside North Korea as fairly reliable.  A friend (thank you) passed along an e-mail message/ press release meant to recruit support for an EBF trip to North Korea.  It contained this alarming news: [C]ountermeasures are urgently needed for the recent increase of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) patients in North Korea.    After years of visiting and providing TB...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
December 8, 2007

North Korea hasn’t lost its talent for making enemies

[Update: This seems as good a place as any to tack on two more sets of comments from Chris Hill; plus, the Administration’s loyal soldier  Victor Cha weighs in at the Chosun Ilbo.  Scroll down.]   Let’s face it: American conservatives are more interested in and concerned by events in the Middle East than they are in North Korea, and a bad deal with North Korea might not have been enough to mobilize their opposition if it only affected Korea....
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation
December 8, 2007

Time to Shake Some Money-Makers

Recently, I articulated my suspicion that the Eugene Bell Foundation’s plan for family reunions between elderly Korean-Americans and their North Korean relatives would turn out to be just what Kaesong, Kumgang, and just about every other “grand opening” scheme also was: a cash pipeline to the North delivering dubious benefits and incalculable costs — incalculable because we have little or no idea of how Kim Jong Il spends the large sums he extracts from the South. In the case of...
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
December 7, 2007

Daewoo proudly announces Burma deal, complete absence of business ethics

I suppose, by now, we shouldn’t be surprised that South Korean companies find no regime too murderous or repugnant to do business with, and given the celebratory “tae-han-min-guk” tone this article, South Korean consumers probably won’t object to Daewoo pimping natural gas for the Burmese junta.  I doubt we’ll even hear from our old friend Assemblyman Im Jung In, who briefly halted his support for Kim Jong Il’s agents in the South to denounce Burma’s slightly less horrid atrocities. I...
Categories Human Rights/Southeast Asia
December 7, 2007

Chinese tanker spills oil along the South Korean coast

Those waters, southwest of Seoul,  are some of South Korea’s most productive ones for producing shellfish, so this could seriously harm the livelihoods of a lot of people. A crane-carrying vessel collided with an oil tanker off of South Korea’s west coast on Friday, spilling more than 66,000 barrels of crude oil in what was believed to be South Korea’s largest offshore oil leak, officials said. Officials at the Maritime and Fisheries Ministry, citing Coast Guard reports, initially said about...
Categories China & Korea