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We have a strong interest in moral as well as practical debate about North Korea. The country generates ethical dilemmas of the first order, and we now have a growing body of international humanitarian law that can be used as a guide to think about the regime’s abuses; as we noted in an earlier post, [...]
Last year I received an message from a former US government official that read in part, “During the Clinton Administration, decisions to provide food aid were based on our best assessment of humanitarian need, consistent with longstanding U.S. policy. We would have provided food aid whether the North Koreans participated in various meetings or not, [...]
My former teacher, the late Bela Balassa, once observed that the maintenance of a radically distorted price structure, as existed in his native Hungary during the communist period, by necessity required a repressive apparatus, since it was human nature to trade to try and better one’s circumstances. I am reminded of this fundamental insight when reading recurrent [...]
With some regularity, analysts trot out the prediction that North Korea’s nuclear program could induce Japan to go nuclear. Elizabeth Bakanic provided a relatively balanced review of the issues several years back for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We have never been convinced; the nuclear taboo still runs deep–particularly after “3/11″–and the US would [...]
A number of things have come into our inboxes on human rights in North Korea; a brief roundup. Item 1. We blogged earlier on a meeting in Japan of a new International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea. The goal of the coalition is to seek the appointment of a UN Commission [...]
This past week the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights held a hearing on North Korea. It features testimonies by two prison camp survivors, Kim Hye-Sook and Kim Young-Soon, as well as our friends and fellow travelers Suzanne Scholte from the North Korea Freedom Coalition and Greg Scarlatoiu who recently became the Executive Director of [...]
Sometimes stories don’t need a helluva lot of comment. The AFP has recently reported that South Korea has arrested a man allegedly sent by North Korea to assassinate outspoken North Korean defector Park Sang-hak with a poison-tipped needle. Park worked at a propaganda unit of the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League until 1999, when [...]
A couple of weeks ago, during a presentation at the Korea Society, Homer Williams posed a question during the discussion period regarding the 2008 North Korean census. In his public comment as well as our private discussion afterward, he expressed skepticism about the veracity of the census, in particular with regard to the age structure of [...]
No sooner had we posted a skeptical note on the political economy of pipelines than we appeared to be undercut by the flow of events. President Lee Myung Bak said that the pipeline project could move forward at a faster-than-expected pace. On a single day—September 15– Alexey Miller, chairman of Gazprom’s management committee, hosted separate [...]
