The showcase city of the privileged and the stop for visitors is drowning. The sweeping boulevards, gigantic buildings under construction, the pretty faces of healthy folks putting on a seemingly scripted routine a lot like The Truman Show is interrupted. However, the show must go on, and most likely, the precious aid coming from all over the place will most likely go there first. I suspect the paradise city will be back to where it was before ready to greet the few visitors it allows in to show the greatness of the leaders who adorn the walls, monuments, billboards and hearts of those that reside there. The mass games are still slated to give a propaganda extravaganza despite the devastation state controlled media is frantically reporting. People from all over the place will go and pile praises on mythical leaders who enjoy god-like status despite the decades of suffering under the iron grip. While the games go on, people outside the May Day Stadium are piling sandbags, looking for loved ones, finding any scrap of food, and something to sleep in. Chances are, if the person in need is not in the class of the privileged, they will be last in line if not forgotten.
Continue reading ‘North Korea: Paradise Lost’
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This is a very good video on the Intelligence challenges of North Korea. This is one part of a three part series on “The Current State of North Korea and the future of the U.S.-Korea Alliance” hosted by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Foreign Policy Magazine, Oct. 13, 2006. (Link)
Moderator: Aaron Friedberg (Professor of Politics an International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University)
Speakers: Stephen Kim (North Korea analyst, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) talks briefly on the inner workings of the Kim regime
Marcus Noland (Senior Fellow, Institute for International Economics) talks about the North Korean economy
Betsy Henderson (Director of Research, Radio Free Asia) talks about the media and North Korea
Christopher Chyba (Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University) talks about the nuclear North Korea
The video is about an hour and a half. Well worth the watch in my opinion. Enjoy:
(Under the Creative Commons License - Link to the official Page)
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There is growing concern with Pyongyang asking Washington to take them off the sponsors of terrorism list. I had to read the article several times to digest the whole thing, but I will link you to the story so you can read it for yourself.
WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush faces a delicate task as the United States works to persuade North Korea to scrap its nuclear weapons: Fulfill a pledge to remove the North from a U.S. list of countries accused of sponsoring terrorism without alienating ally Japan and American conservatives.
Failure to take North Korea off the State Department list would jeopardize years of disarmament negotiations by infuriating Pyongyang, which views the terrorist designation as evidence of hostile U.S. intentions.
(Emphasis is mine)
I am not a hardline conservative, but this is very scary. Pyongyang has promised to shut down the reactor before, and to give into the demands of Kim Jong-Il would be foolhardy at best. Kim has backed up on is promises before, and will make all kinds of them to remain in power. See Richardson’s theory of disengagement. The two sides are arguing the following:
Following through, on the other hand, would anger conservatives in Bush’s Republican Party and officials in Japan. Hard-liners in both countries complain that the Bush administration, eager for a nuclear resolution, has been far too willing to bend to North Korean demands.
The Bush administration, once wary of any perceived concession to the North, has taken a different approach recently. Opposition Democrats long criticized the White House for following a policy that they said had allowed the North’s nuclear arsenal to grow.
In an effort to reach a nuclear settlement, the United States agreed in February to begin the process of removing the designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism as part of the procedure to end the North’s nuclear program.
Continue reading ‘Kim Jong Il is not a terrorist?’
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For my first post on this blog, I thought what would be better than to kick it off with one of the best papers I have read about the possible inner workings of the North Korean leadership? This took several reads for me to grasp everything in this paper, but it was well worth the read. The link to the synopsis is here.
Basically, the paper outlines the roles and possible differences of the elites within the kitchen cabinets of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. While the paper does admit it is based on speculation because of the opaque nature of the North Korean leadership, in my mind, this is very well-written.
There is a download to the full report in PDF format if you wish to read it, and is about 3 megs. If you are on dialup, it also breaks down the report in chapters for faster downloading.
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