November 6, 2013

N. Korean military looking pretty decrepit these days.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons development is blazing ahead, but series of reports from North Korea suggest that its conventional forces are decaying, ill-disciplined, and even underfunded. First, a Hainan Class submarine chaser and a patrol boat sank in separate incidents off the coast of Wonsan (or, maybe the two ships collided; hey, it’s North Korea — who knows?). North Korea admits the loss of the 60s-vintage sub chaser. The North hasn’t given a casualty count, but showed Kim Jong un...
Categories NK Military
November 4, 2013

Witnesses: North Korea culpable for famine deaths

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry for North Korea has done excellent and necessary work collecting testimony about the regime’s political prison camps. Michael Kirby, the Commission’s Chairman, has earned the eternal gratitude of the Korean people for his forthrightness, and friends of mine who met him during the COI’s session in Washington last week tell me they were deeply impressed with both Kirby and Sonja Biserko (the third commissioner, Marzuki Darusman, who performed admirably as the U.N. Special Rapporteur, fell ill...
Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Famine & Food Aid
October 31, 2013

Open Sources, Halloween Edition

~          1          ~ ATTACK OF THE TROLLS: So the other day, while reading something at NK News, I noticed that some obvious troll(s) had claimed in the comments that the North Korean Human Rights Film Festival in Toronto was a “fake event” that never took place. Now, I wasn’t there myself, but this Al Jazeera reporter was, which causes me to suspect that some person or persons is or are trying to sow false...
Categories Anju Links
October 30, 2013

Open Sources, October 30, 2013

~          1          ~ AGREED FRAMEWORK III WATCH: Yesterday, I fisked Ambs. Bosworth and Gallucci for calling for talks with North Korea despite the concession by one of them (Bosworth) that a deal could never be verified, and despite North Korea’s repeated statements that they would never disarm. As if on cue, the North Koreans have said it again! SEOUL, Oct. 30 (Yonhap) — North Korea said Wednesday that its nuclear weapons program is not a...
Categories Anju Links
October 29, 2013

Bosworth and Gallucci: Let’s pay Kim Jong Un to pretend to disarm, and we can pretend to believe him.

Writing with Robert Gallucci in The New York Times, Stephen Bosworth writes that the North Koreans, contrary to countless public and private statements that its nukes are non-negotiable, are ready to enter disarmament negotiations in good faith, and that we should give them shiny objects for doing that: The North Koreans — who are longtime participants in government-to-government talks and well plugged-in to their country’s leadership — stated that if dialogue were to resume, their nuclear weapons program would be on the negotiating table. They...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
October 28, 2013

Is the next Banco Delta Asia in Malaysia?

Over the weekend, a lot people were giggling at the decision by Paul Chan, President of HELP University, to award an honorary degree in economics of Kim Jong Un. Foreign Policy’s Isaac Stone Fish, who first revealed the story, obligingly prints Chan’s manifesto, which reads like the work of a true belieber — a man who writes as if he has spent an inordinate amount of time watching High School Musical over and over again. I have fond memories of...
Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
October 25, 2013

Early signs are good for the new AP Pyongyang.

So I finally found a minute to read Tim Sullivan’s piece in National Geographic, and it’s actually quite good: In the parking lot, though, as we slid open the door to the van that ferries us everywhere, the monks reappeared. A minder was beside them. All looked at us expectantly. Then the older monk spoke. “I know what you want to ask,” Zang Hye Myong said. Suddenly it was obvious why the monks had followed us. Minders do not introduce...
Categories Anju Links/AP Watch
October 25, 2013

Genius: HRNK’s Project ChocoPie

A Message from HRNK: Join Us for Project Choco Pie Dear Friends, Thank you for supporting HRNK’s mission to promote human rights in North Korea. For 65 years, North Korea has been theheart of darkness, under the three-generation rule of the Kim regime. In the 1990s, as millions starved, North Korea’s leadership spent billions on nukes and ballistic missiles. Despite the regime’s crackdown, small, but resilient markets have since developed, fending off another famine. The smuggled South Korean choco pie has become the symbol of North Korea’s...
Categories Activism
October 24, 2013

Ambassador Gifford’s Trojan Rabbit

Just in time for North Korea’s latest nuke test scare, Mike Gifford, the British Ambassador to North Korea, takes to the pages of the L.A. Times to urge readers to support “engagement” with North Korea, although not very convincingly. Gifford begins with a litany of reasons why we either shouldn’t, or can’t — human rights (reason enough to isolate South Africa and Sudan, but not North Korea, apparently); WMD proliferation, attacks, and threats (followed by U.N. sanctions that impose financial transparency requirements North Korea...
Categories Anju Links/Europe/Sunshine
October 23, 2013

Not all sanctions were created equal.

David Albright has questioned the conclusions of Josh Pollack, in a to-be-released academic paper, that North Korea has now acquired the ability to advance its nuclear weapons with indigenous technology, that the technological horse is out of the barn door, and that there’s nothing more that sanctions can do. (Implication: North Korea is a nuclear state, and we just have to live with that.) Only we really don’t know the exact parameters of what Pollack concludes, because (at least according to...
Categories Sanctions
October 20, 2013

At Foreign Policy, AP’s Jean Lee takes a parting shot at OFK (Updated)

Frankly, I’m glad to see someone at the AP begin to address my criticisms on their substance, even if the hardest questions went unasked. The original article at Foreign Policy is here. Below is my response, as posted in the comments, with one typo corrected. I wish the author of this article had offered me an opportunity to comment or respond, because there’s much that the article left unsaid. In any event, I’d like to offer FP’s readers a better...
Categories AP Watch
October 19, 2013

Open Sources, October 19, 2013

~          1          ~ I HAVE A GREAT DEAL OF SYMPATHY FOR family members who want to bring their abducted loved ones from home North Korea after so many years, especially as we read that some of them are nearing the end of their lives, but it’s hard for me to concede that paying ransom—and just look how Jeyup S. Kwaak struggles, not quite successfully, not to use that word—is the right answer. First, the...
Categories Anju Links
October 18, 2013

Kaesong was not shut down properly. Would you like to restart Kaesong in safe mode?*

Like most people, I don’t know what the genius behind this shutdown strategy realistically expected to accomplish with it. Its sudden, and apparently pressured, abandonment suggests that its mastermind didn’t think through its potential economic or political consequences, and that the decision was largely motivated by emotion and impulse, most likely egged on by a few yes-men in an echo chamber. He will (and should) pay significant economic and political costs for it. Potential investors, foreign governments, domestic government officials,...
Categories Sunshine
October 17, 2013

Open Sources, October 17, 2013

PEACE IN OUR TIME, Part 1:  South Korea says that the North is ready for another nuke test any old time, and reveals that at the height of Sunshine and Agreed Framework II, the North was building missile silos: Several South Korean government sources confirmed yesterday that the North has numerous underground missile launch facilities around 2,000 meters (2,190 yards) south of Mount Paektu. The silos, they said, were constructed in the mid-2000s and were determined to have been completed recently. Somewhere in my...
Categories Anju Links
October 16, 2013

AP’s new Bureau Chief should tell us: Are these kids dead or alive?*

Last night, a reader forwarded me AP’s announcement that it had replaced Jean Lee as Bureau Chief in both Seoul and Pyongyang. The new Bureau Chief in Pyongyang will be Eric Talmadge, whose name is absent from the vast OFK archives, and whose reputation is thus a blank slate. The AP has also caught up with the spirit of ’45 by appointing a separate Bureau Chief for Seoul, Foster Klug. Klug’s name is one of the best known in Korea...
Categories AP Watch/Refugees
October 14, 2013

Open Sources, October 14, 2013

IT’S CALLED AN ARMISTICE, STUPID. We learned today that our Secretary of State has been busy begging North Korea for Agreed Framework III, offering them a “Non-Aggression Pact” if they give up their nukes. Where to begin with this? First, the North Koreans reacted to that idea about as favorably as I did. Second, would this be like the non-aggression pact that North Korea signed in 1953, only to violate in 1968, 2002, 2010–and most of the years before and since–and...
Categories Anju Links
October 12, 2013

Open Sources, Oct. 12, 2013

WHAT’S THAT, YOU SAY? And they’re floating it into North Korea? That’s really too good to be true, and I’m checking with a contact to see if it is. One thing’s for sure–if it is true, I’ll report it before the AP does. Update, 10/14: According to a knowledgeable reader, the “conservative groups” in question are still attempting to acquire the alleged video, but do have an (again, alleged) photo of Ri naked with another man, which they’re floating into...
Categories Anju Links
October 11, 2013

N. Korea says Park GH’s father “smelled of elderberries,” S. Korea responds with “large wooden badger” plan

I don’t know about you, but I sure got tired of Park Geun Hye’s hippie Earth mother act last summer, after North Korea started making nice, right after banks all over China and Europe started blocking North Korean accounts. Thank God that’s over with. We’re back to steaming reactors, spinning centrifuges, war drums, nasty taunts, and all the things we’ve grown to love and miss about North Korea. The North was uncharacteristically quietly during August’s Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises, but for reasons known only...
Categories North-South/ROK Military/Sunshine/U.S. Military