February 15, 2013

Open Sources, February 15, 2013

UPDATE/BREAKING:  More nuke tests coming soon? *          *          * ALL OF YOU WHO BET that Park Geun Hye would tilt toward engagement — you know who you are — pay up: “No matter how many nuclear tests North Korea conducts to bolster its nuclear capabilities, it will eventually bring itself self-destruction by wasting its resources,” Ms. Park was quoted as saying by her office during a meeting with her national security and foreign...
Categories Anju Links
February 14, 2013

AP Exclusive! North Korea’s nuke test a cry for peace

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — AP Pyongyang has all the logic and perspective of KCNA Pyongyang and none of the guilty pleasures of KCNA’s prose.   The way North Korea sees it, only bigger weapons and more threatening provocations will force Washington to come to the table to discuss what Pyongyang says it really wants: peace. [….] North Korea has long cited the U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, and what it considers a...
Categories AP Watch/WMD
February 13, 2013

Open Sources, Feb. 13, 2013: Special Non-Nuclear Edition

I’D BEEN SAVING UP some anju links for later this week, but in light of the latest nuke test, I’m going to just clear the decks now.  First, in response to J’s request, I set up an e-mail subscription feature.  Tell me how that’s working for you. *          *          * AP WATCH, PT. 1.  The AP’s Vice President admits, in effect, that the only thing AP has gotten access to is the regime’s...
Categories Anju Links/AP Watch
February 12, 2013

OFK in the WaPo

Many thanks to my friend Prof. Sung Yoon Lee for offering me the opportunity to co-write this with him, especially since he frankly did most of the writing this time.  It’s a pleasure to write with Prof. Lee.  He’s a terrific writer, and our views align so closely that there’s no need for painstaking negotiations over wording and content.  Really, I don’t know of anyone who (1) understands the pathology of North Korea better, and (2) can express it so...
Categories Human Rights/Sanctions/The Camps
February 12, 2013

Good Sanctions and Bad Sanctions

Weeks before North Korea’s latest nuclear test, it was clear that the political climate surrounding North Korea policy was ready for a big shift away from honor-system diplomacy and toward tougher sanctions.  This test is likely to mean a major legislative push here in Washington — not just to punish North Korea, but to craft and enact sanctions that attack the regime’s structural weaknesses, with the intent of either coercing its disarmament or destroying it.  For all the tension that will...
Categories Anju Links/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
February 11, 2013

Guess who just tested a nuke. Now I’m going to sleep.

Here’s the USGS report, coming in at 4.9,  and here’s the first report saying it looks like a nuke test.  In case you’re keeping track, North Korea’s 2009 test measured 4.7 on the Richter scale after a yield estimated between 2 and 8 kilotons. Its 2006 test registered 4.2, at a yield of just under a kiloton.  Remember — this is a logarithmic scale, which means that a 5 is ten times larger than a 4. Anyway, a nuclear test site isn’t the only...
Categories Proliferation/WMD
February 10, 2013

In Poor Taste

Quite a few readers have been coming in over the last two days from this New York Times Op-Ed by Adam Johnson, author of the acclaimed The Orphan Master’s Son.  Johnson links to the Camp 14 page and asks how anyone could be so tasteless as to post a satirical review of a North Korean concentration camp.  Johnson thinks that in the same sense as the maps review something disturbing and inhuman about North Korea, the reactions reveal something disturbing and inhuman about us. Writing at...
Categories Humor/Satire/The Camps
February 9, 2013

U.N. may investigate N. Korean officials for crimes against humanity

I don’t know what’s gotten into the U.N. lately, but this would be a pretty big deal: North Korea’s leaders are likely to be the target of a U.N. investigation into their personal responsibility for rapes, torture, executions, arbitrary arrests and abductions, following an expert report published on Tuesday. The report by Marzuki Darusman, an Indonesian lawyer who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said North Korea’s “grave, systematic and widespread” human rights violations ought to...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
February 7, 2013

Open Sources: Special Nukewatch Edition

ANYONE UP FOR A NUKE POOL? So North Korea didn’t test a nuke on Monday, as rumor had it, but Sung Yoon Lee was on the record (in an email to me) before that, saying it would happen around February 10th. If it’s a uranium device, the closest guess gets my autograph on your copy of “Meltdown.”  I say this knowing that there might be two winners, and that it might be a while before we know, if we ever do. For more on...
Categories Proliferation/WMD
February 6, 2013

Sometimes, a missile is just a missile

Every time North Korea tests a rocket, Hans Blix sheds a little tear and Ban Ki Moon’s fluffy white tail stops wagging, because North Korean rocket tests violate three U.N. Security Council Resolutions — 1695 (which bans “all activities related to its ballistic missile programme”), UNSCR 1718 (ditto, and requires N. Korea to “re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching”), and 1874 (which bans “any launch using ballistic missile technology”).  North Korea’s official response is that it is...
Categories Anju Links/Anti-Americanism/Propaganda/WMD/WTF?
February 5, 2013

Mansourov praises Kim Jong Un’s “surprisingly good” domestic policies, sees “hope in the air.”

Writing at 38 North, the last fantasyland of Sunshine’s remaining advocates, Alexandre Mansourov argues that “Kim Jong Un’s domestic policy record” so far has been “surprisingly good.” But, by the time 2012 came to a close, one could detect hope in the air, and new positive expectations about the future. There was also plenty of public thirst for new information and foreign experiences, and an especially surprising amount of joy and enthusiasm on the streets of Pyongyang, now illuminated by jumbotrons,...
Categories Fiskings
January 31, 2013

The Stillbirth of Sunshine Lite

SO PARK GEUN-HYE HASN’T EVEN BEEN INAUGURATED YET, and her plans to engage North Korea — she called them “trustpolitik” — are turning out just as I’d predicted they would, and just how Sung Yoon Lee predicted in the opening paragraphs of this piece — they’re being overcome by North Korea’s own plans: Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has ordered his top military and party officials to take “substantial and high-profile important state measures” to retaliate against American-led United Nations sanctions on the country, the North’s...
Categories North-South/Sunshine
January 30, 2013

The Whole World Is Watching

Since I started this blog nearly ten years ago, I’ve had one primary objective — to do my small part to make it impossible for people with more influence than me to ignore North Korea’s crimes against humanity.  This week, for the first time, this quixotic campaign does not seem like such an exercise in futility.  Today, everyone on earth seems to be talking about Google maps and satellite imagery of concentration camps in North Korea, even posting fake “reviews”...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps
January 29, 2013

Open Sources, Jan. 29, 2013

GOOGLE HAS RELEASED A NEW ATLAS of North Korea, and Curtis, who has endured countless hours of the torture that is North Korean television for Queen and Country, is deservedly and prominently credited.  On a personally gratifying note, it also seems apparent that the mapping of the political prison camps derives in large part from the work of this humble blog. *          *         * AIR KORYO’S AGEING Russian aircraft are banned from Chinese...
Categories Anju Links
January 28, 2013

Technical Help Wanted

One of the things they didn’t teach me us in law school was web design, and I will soon have to take on a significant project on this site that I lack the time and the technical sophistication to do myself. In short, I need some technical help from someone with a solid understanding of WordPress, databases, sql files, and such things.  Ideally, I’m asking for a referral to a known, reputable, and affordable commercial service to consult with.  (The...
Categories Blogs & Blogging