Fine? Why Fine?

Pyongyang Village

Some interesting antidotes about "economic reforms" in North Korea in this AP report, but the bottom line is the place is still hopeless.

The government has released few details, but foreign aid agencies say that besides letting farmers sell some of their own crops, the reforms have raised wages and cut subsidies.

But most of the country's 22 million people still depend on foreign food aid and are struggling with inflation set off by the economic changes. Aid workers say a bottle of vegetable oil on the open market now costs the equivalent of two months' pay for the average worker.

North Korean officials insist the reforms are working.

Huh?

The NorKs are bailing on their nukes?

Monday agreed to stop building nuclear weapons and allow international inspections in exchange for energy aid, economic cooperation and security assurances, in a first step toward disarmament after two years of six-nation talks.

Captain Ed calls it a "a stunning foreign-policy victory for the Bush administration" but Chris Short writing at Jawa is more skeptical.

Dan Darling also has a brief post up.

...DJ too.

Kim Jong-Orwell

I'm entirely disenterested in blogging much these days but here's some scary shit from Hitch.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")

[...]

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place—North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave—my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.

Shedding Some Light

It's hard to find stories about the refugees that are fleeing North Korea (mostly because they usually end up in China). But there are a couple of articles that provide a hint at the lives of defectors.

First, the NYT.

Sitting on a bare floor in a chilly one-room apartment, Lee Hae Jon and her younger sister, Hae Sun, struggled recently for words to describe their lives since they clandestinely made their way here from North Korea five years ago. Their mother married a Chinese man and disappeared from their lives without a trace. Since then, a Chinese widow of Korean descent has taken the girls into her apartment and kept them clothed and fed. But for five years, the teenage sisters have not dared to go outside in daylight for fear of being sent back to their country, or worse, trafficked as young brides or prostitutes in this booming Chinese border city.

The sisters try to teach themselves Chinese, using a couple of old textbooks and repeating phrases from television, which they watch endlessly. A crude Hula-Hoop is their only source of exercise, and each knock on the door their only excitement. They never know whether it is help from their caretaker's friends or the police coming to arrest them.

"We have no friends, and no future, nothing at all, really," said the soft-spoken older sister, Hae Jon, 17. "But if we stay here, at least we have enough to eat. In our country, we could go for days without eating."

[...]

"If we are so poor," she continued, "it must be because of Kim Jong Il's mistakes," she said referring to North Korea's leader. The woman [A different woman from the above excerpt.--Rob A.] said her daughter had decided to stay in China, but that she would soon return home, after illegally earning money doing piecework for a factory here.

And from Slate:

The next day, the fruit vendor came through. He graciously passed on a North Korean friend's cell number, telling me that Whang was expecting my call. (For the refugees' protection, it is standard practice not to use full names; in this case, Whang told me that the North Korean government likely has him listed as missing or, given its poor record-keeping—estimates of North Korea's population range from 17 million to 23 million—may not even know or care about his existence.) I invited him to meet me at the Hotel Shilla, where I had a late afternoon interview.

Whang's lined face made him look older than 35 years. He had succeeded in defecting on his third attempt in September 2003. From China he went to a third country with the help of a broker, paid for with his earnings from a clam-shell-processing factory and money loaned to him by his relatives, finally arriving in South Korea. He almost died a few times; he was caught by Russian and Chinese officers; and he was returned and detained by the North Korean KGB on at least one occasion. One time he was released from a labor camp after he faked an injury (the government lacks the resources to treat internees). He even ate a piece of nail once he made it into China, hoping that when he was hit, his intestine or colon would burst, and he would be sent to a hospital, from where it would be easier to escape. Ironically, no one brutalized him.

P-yo-yo-gyang

CQ has a roundup of the continuing saga of the diplomatic dance where stuck in with the NorKs. Captain Ed summarizes:

Where the NoKos stated last week that six-party talks were dead, now they just have two preconditions to their restart. They want a guarantee of peaceful coexistence from the US and some sort of assurance of "concrete results" from nuclear disarmament. The concreete results they want -- that they desperately need -- is financial support for the tottering Kim tyranny. Their people starve by the millions, and the demonization of America will hold their loyalty for only so long before someone gets a sense of how tenuous his grip on power really is.

That probably has been the game all along, and the nuclear weapons (if they truly exist) are only the fodder for his extortion racket. They also provided extra benefit as a scare tactic to undermine American resolve and get the best deal he could get, without having to answer to his Chinese allies/masters. Now Kim has been forced back to the table on Bush's terms. It looks like the grown-ups in the White House have learned from Kim's history.

It's encouraging, I suppose.

Super, Just Super

Banner day for the remaining Axis of Evil guys.

North Korea on Thursday announced for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and rejected moves to restart disarmament talks any time soon, saying it needs the armaments as protection against an increasingly hostile United States.

The communist state's pronouncement dramatically raised the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea's nuclear program through six-nation talks.

"We … have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North)," the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Elsewhere...

President Mohammad Khatami vowed that no Iranian government would ever abandon the progress that the country has made in developing peaceful nuclear technology.

The comment did not augur well for negotiations with the big three European powers who are currently trying to persuade Iran to cease permanently the enrichment of uranium.

Khatami warned that if the talks with Britain, France and Germany fail, his government will not be bound by its undertaking to suspend enrichment.

Fantastic.

Time Has Come?

Captain Ed has a post on an AP report that they have video of demonstrations against the regime in North Korea.

The 35-minute videotape, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, shows written statements posted on a wall, urging North Koreans to fight to retrieve freedom and democracy.

A man is heard, but not seen, reading a statement, demanding Kim Jong Il be removed from his post. "The North Korean people are suffering from hunger and poverty because of Kim Jong Il's dictatorship and dogmatic politics," the man says.

Big trouble for KJI? Possibly, but Shannon Love's comments on the NY Times report of the Urkrainian security forces standing down during the demonstrations would seem to apply to NK as well.

Peaceful protest are not the true revolutions. The true revolution occurs when the people with guns decide whether to back or to oppose the revolution. The peaceful protest can only occur in a security bubble created by Orwell's "rough men" who stand quietly off camera threatening to due violence to those who attack the protesters. Without that protection, the Kiev protesters would have faced the same fate as those of Tiananmen Square.

Here's to hoping that there are "rough men" in NK who know their time has come.

Taking Fashion Advice From KJI

Darlin' don't you go and cut your hair
Do you think it's gonna make him change?
"I'm just a boy with a new haircut"
And that's a pretty nice haircut
Charge it like a puzzle
Hit men wearing muzzles
Hesitate you die

--"Cut Your Hair" by Pavement

This Little Kimmy's Gone to the Market

In furtherance to this disjointed mess of a post from the other day, here's a piece by a guy with pretty good credentials on North Korea. The article spans from the post-war era to today and the effect that markets (initially black markets) have had in changing that country. Specifically, in the last 15 years or so. The whole thing is really worth reading, but I'll just give you his conclusion.

But the North Korean economy has indeed come a long way from its Stalinist ways. Now the government has neither money nor support nor the political will to revive the Stalinist-style central economy. There is no way back, only forward. Stalinism is dead. Welcome to capitalism, comrades!

This is not to give the impression that I or the author think this going to happen overnight, but he presents a convincing case.

(Via Untold Millions.)

UPDATE

This is interesting as well, if true.

The only son of one of North Korea's top generals has defected with his family and is in the hands of U.S. intelligence officials, according to secret reports from the Japan Defense Agency. 

Hello?

Kim Jong-Il has been awfully quiet of late, huh? He may be in hiding or dead or whatever.

I guess diplomats have to play this game, but I can still hate the way it sounds.

A senior U.S. official said in a recent interview that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is a ``rational’’ leader who would be able to transform his impoverished Stalinist state once he resolves the nuclear standoff with the international community. 

``Many accusations that he (Kim Jong-il) is some sort of crazy person are not correct,’’ U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said in an exclusive interview with The Korea Times at his office in the State Department. He said Kim’s leadership is one that is unique and rational.

Kelly, who heads the U.S. effort to deal with the North Korean nuclear crisis, dismissed the speculation the impoverished nation will collapse anytime soon.

``It would be a mistake to somehow suggest that the country is inherently unstable and its Army-first policy guarantees a kind of built-in stability,’’ said the leader of the U.S. delegation to the past three rounds of six-party talks aimed at peacefully resolving the crisis. The six parties are made up of South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the U.S.

The fourth round of talks were scheduled for September this year but was not realized due to Pyongyang’s refusal.

Saying that he was disappointed at the North’s reluctance to come to the negotiating table, Kelly voiced concern about the possibility of nuclear weapons testing.

Rational? Not exactly the word you'd use to describe a guy who had the state-run media put out a story that he shot 38 under par with 5 hole-in-ones. Sure it's all bluster, but the rational "North Koreans" are currently threatening Japan with war. 

Kelly may not be right that Kim Jong-Il has such a safe hold on power in that country, apparently cell phones are widely available (on the black market).

In a country where nearly every facet of society is controlled, North Korean authorities are encountering a new foe: the cellphone.

Mobile phones, which are ubiquitous in China and South Korea, are now infiltrating North Korea and are allowing information into - and out of - the "hermit kingdom."

Douglas Shin, a Korean-American minister who has been campaigning for human rights in North Korea, sees the emerging cellphone "revolution" as paralleling, if not abetting, budding dissent against the government.

"At first cellphones worked on a narrow band of land along the Chinese border," says Mr. Shin. "Now they can penetrate a great distance."

Often, he says, cellphone users must climb a hill or mountain to use them, but still he says it's possible to convey messages that previously would never have penetrated the barriers of a state that bars normal international mail and ordinary telephone calls for all but a privileged few.

Many observers say the fact that anyone can hold such long-distance conversations in North Korea could spell trouble for the country's leader, Kim Jong Il.

As the article goes on to suggest, you can bet we'll be working those phones for psyops-type stuff. Aside from that fact, the phones will be used to get the word out about what a hellhole that place is.