January 13, 2007

Shenyang Six Update

From LiNK: We know how agonizing it is to think of the possible fate of the Shenyang Six if things do not go well in negotiations with People’s Republic of China. Please rest assured that we are doing all that we can. The instant there is a role for us all in the grassroots to play, you will hear about it, and we will mobilize internationally for the six. At the moment, we are waiting on high-level discussions and working...
Categories Activism/China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees
January 12, 2007

UniFiction Ministry Plans ‘Peace Education’ and ‘Unification Education’ in Public Schools

From the Ministry’s own Web site: Minister Lee said, “The inter-Korean relations have improved from confrontation and tension to reconciliation and cooperation. Excuse me????   In order to match such improvement, peace education needs to be introduced into the curriculum of school and unification education. I want to promote the peace education in a future-oriented way so that the people can foster their ability to keep peace firmly and it can contribute to the peace in Northeast Asia as well...
Categories Appeasement
January 12, 2007

What Unites These Nations?

ASEAN says it wants to become a more robust organization with more “teeth.”   Think they can do it?  Maybe this is a clue: The 10 leaders, whose members range from an absolute monarchy and military juntas to parliamentary democracies and one-party communist states, have agreed to start drafting a charter that would give ASEAN a legal basis for the first time since it was founded at the height of the Vietnam war nearly 40 years ago. I wonder what...
Categories Southeast Asia
January 12, 2007

Beyond Empty Threats

  Yes, Stealth fighters have some value in deterring a North Korean  first strike, if we think that’s a possibility, but I do not believe that any weapon in the U.S. military arsenal (with this possible exception) can deter or prevent a North Korean nuclear test.  The threat of a direct, large-scale  use of force by either the United States or North Korea against the other  is an empty threat.  The conventional Korean War has been a standoff since 1953. ...
Categories An Alliance?/NK Military/Resistance/ROK Military/U.S. Military
January 12, 2007

Fortunately, No Translators Were Present

Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, stated that the new South Korean president must be “sensitive to the needs of the (Asia-Pacific) region, in addition to thinking about North-South relations.” …. Washington expects the new Korean administration to think “about working closely with Tokyo and Washington in terms of joint approaches, in terms of what’s going on in North Korea,” he told Yonhap News Agency after meeting with Kim Geun-tae, chairman of the ruling Uri Party, at Kim’s parliament...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
January 12, 2007

Donga Ilbo Interview: David Straub

Straub, a State Department expert on Korea and Japan who has been a member of our six-party negotiating team, will spend an unspecified amount of time at an unspecified university — the report seems to have been mangled by an editor —  doing the heroic work of openly questioning Korea’s historical mythology: “I would like to teach historical issues such as Katsura-Taft Secret Agreement (a secret treaty between Japan and the U.S. The U.S. recognized Japanese control of the Korean...
Categories America/Anti-Americanism/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea
January 11, 2007

Lefkowitz on Kaesong: ‘Material support for a rogue government, its nuclear ambitions, and its human rights atrocities.’

[Updates Below; and a big welcome to  everyone coming in from Gateway  Pundit.]   Ambassador Jay Lefkowitz, the  U.S. Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea,  has an excellent new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (thanks to a reader!) that will provoke an absolute  Category 5 sh*tstorm  between the United States and South Korea, and for the best of reasons.  Without question, the State Department and the Administration have not always lived up the high ideals the Special...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
January 10, 2007

N. Korean Foreign Minister Conveys Dear Leader’s Greetings to Saddam Hussein, Presents Credentials to Satan

In an obituary dated Jan. 4, the Minju Chosun said, “Regrettably, Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun passed away at 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 2 at the age of 77 because of terminal disease (lung cancer),” the newspaper was quoted as saying by Yonhap News Agency.  [link] After  a simple funeral service in Paek’s provincial  home town, his porcine corpse was disinterred, rendered into soondae and taeji-kalbi,  and eaten by starving neighbors. Pic:  REUTERS/Viktor Korotayev
Categories Diplomacy/Kremlinology
January 10, 2007

Gov’t Investigates Misuse of Funds It Gave to ‘Civic’ Groups

I’ve previously written about the South Korean government’s provision of $5.2  billion in state funds to 149 different  hippie communes, drum circles,  and commie spy cells “civic” groups, only to have it revealed that some of those groups had a history of organized political violence.  The worst offender was South Korea’s largest labor organization, the ardently pro-North Korean and anti-American Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, and the worst of the violence was over the government’s  costly failure  to negotiate a...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Law/Korean Politics/The Fifth Column
January 10, 2007

Be Sure the Survivors Stay Buried

The South  Korean government is going all out to find the remains of its  Korean War dead:  The Defense Ministry has set up a task force to retrieve and identify the remains of the dead from the 1950-53 Korean War, officials said Wednesday. The team of 85 is modeled after the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. Its mission is to excavate remains and identify them through DNA analysis, they said. Col. Park Sin-han, chief of the team, said they would...
Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Korean War/ROK Military
January 10, 2007

Two Questions for Lee Jae-Joung

1.  If poverty is  really the reason why North Korea builds nukes, then why is it that the people who actually built the thing  have so much higher a standard of living than  I do  (contrarily, I wonder how much Lee really knows about what poor North Koreans think about this)? 2.  If the key to denuclearization is ending poverty in North Korea, why has your government tolerated the North Korean regime’s theft of your government’s aid from the neediest...
Categories Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid/WMD
January 10, 2007

German Newspaper: Supernotes Are a CIA Plot!

Things sure have gotten strange over in the Soft Reich when a major German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allemaigne Zeitung, theorizes — in a complete evidentiary vacuum, too — that North Korean supernotes are actually a secret CIA plot run  from from a printing house in the DC area  (Korean link).  The sole basis for this novel theory, besides the unshakeable conviction that George W. Bush must be responsible for all evil on earth, is that counterfeiting is simply too complex...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Counterfeiting/Europe/WMD
January 10, 2007

The Death of an Alliance, Part 62: South Korea’s Government (and North Korea’s Agents) Try to Veto USFK Restructuring

Update 1/10:   The Korean reaction to General Bell’s push-back has actually ranged from the restrained (the leftist Hankyoreh picked up Yonhap’s coverage, quoted below, but had no editorial comment) to the rueful (the conservative Chosun Ilbo’s reporting focused blame on its own government): A key U.S. military official handling Korea’s national security has voiced his discontent with an ally by using the word “fight”. After the press conference, Korea’s Ministry of National Defense rushed to contain the situation by saying...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
January 9, 2007

Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 17

After North Korea showed up at last month’s disarmament talks just long enough to give the United States the finger, you wouldn’t expect us to go wobbly on our financial measures against North Korea’s financing of WMD’s, counterfeit currency, and other illegal proceeds.  With the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1695 and 1718, those measurements have become requirements.  The good news is that we’re not going wobbly. Treasury, mainly in the physical form of Undersecretary Stuart Levey, has been...
Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/Counterfeiting/Iran/Money Laundering/NK Economics/WMD
January 9, 2007

Will They or Won’t They?

The USFK Commander, General B.B. Bell, thinks another North Korean nuke test is “likely,” although the South Koreans remain in denial mode. Update:   As Kalani  points out in the comments, the headline arguably misstates what Bell actually said: There is no reason to believe that at some time in the future, when it serves their purposes, that they won’t test another one,” General B.B. Bell told a news conference. “So I suspect some day they will,” Bell said, adding...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. Military/WMD