Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

North Korea trip by Richardson and Schmidt set for next week

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Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will lead a private humanitarian mission to North Korea next week, Richardson’s office confirmed in a statement Saturday.

The trip comes despite public criticism from the U.S. State Department, which has said the visit was ill-timed in light of tensions stemming from North Korea’s recent rocket launch.

The delegation will also include Jared Cohen, the director of a Google initiative known as Google Ideas and Schmidt’s co-author on an upcoming book about how the Internet is changing the world.

Last July, Cohen organized a conference outside Los Angeles that featured nearly a dozen North Korean defectors, who gave harrowing accounts of privation and coerced criminal activity including drug sales.

Schmidt spoke at the conference and met with the group, according to panel moderator and North Korea expert Sheena Chestnut Greitens, now a graduate student at Harvard University.

Richardson, a former ambassador to the United Nations, has made numerous trips to North Korea. Many observers expect Richardson to seek the release of Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American tour guide who was detained last year.

Bill approved making it possible for Americans to adopt North Korean children

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The US Congress has approved a bill which aims to make it possible for Americans to adopt orphaned North Korean children. The measure was passed by the House in September and by the Senate last week.

The North Korea Refugee Adoption Act instructs the US State Department to devise a comprehensive strategy to facilitate the adoption of North Korean children by US citizens.

US Republican lawmaker Ileana Ros Lehtinen, a key backer of the bill, said late last year that the legislation aims to “provide loving families for some of the world’s most endangered children.”

Supporters of the measure said many North Korean children become orphaned or stateless when their families flee with them to China or other neighboring nations, and that the youngsters often are left without the proper care. But many children who remain in North Korea fare no better, Ros Lehtinen said.

“We are all too keenly all aware of the extreme repression, malnutrition, and poverty suffered by so many inside North Korea today. Those threats often take the greatest toll on children,” the Republican lawmaker said.

Any efforts to facilitate adoptions, Ros Lehtinen said, would ensure that the North Korean adoptees are genuine orphans, and not victims of child trafficking.

The United States is home to the largest ethnic Korean population outside of Northeast Asia, with nearly two million Americans of Korean descent.

Google executive and Governor Bill Richardson to visit North Korea

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Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, will be traveling to North Korea on a private, humanitarian mission led by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that could take place as early as this month, sources told The Associated Press.

The trip would be the first by a top executive from U.S.-based Google, the world’s largest Internet search provider, to a country considered to have the most restrictive Internet policies on the planet. To add to the mystery, last year a group of North Koreans paid a visit to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

North Korea is in the midst of what leader Kim Jong Un called a modern-day “industrial revolution” in a New Year’s Day speech to the nation. Kim Jong Un is pushing science and technology as a path to economic development for the impoverished country, aiming for computers in every school and digitized machinery in every factory.

However, giving citizens open access to the Internet has not been part of the regime’s strategy. While some North Koreans can access a domestic Intranet service, very few have clearance to freely surf the World Wide Web.

It was not immediately clear who Schmidt and Richardson expect to meet in North Korea.

The visit also follows North Korea’s announcement that an American citizen of Korean descent has been jailed in Pyongyang on suspicion of committing “hostile” acts against the state. Kenneth Bae, identified in North Korean state media by his Korean name, Pae Jun Ho, is the fifth American detained in North Korea in the past four years. The exact circumstances of his arrest were not clear.

Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who often serves as an envoy to countries that do not have diplomatic relations with the United States, will try to meet with North Korean officials, and possibly Bae, to discuss the case, the sources said.

BBC World Service to broadcast into North Korea?

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The Independent reports that the BBC World Service could for the first time begin broadcasting programs aimed at residents of North Korea.

Barack Obama’s administration is encouraging the British Foreign Office to back plans to establish a BBC Korean service to help open up the most secret country on earth.  They believe the BBC’s reputation for impartiality could help build up trust with communist state’s 24 million population.

Peter Horrocks, the head of the BBC World Service, will discuss the matter in Westminster with MPs from the All Party Group on North Korea early in the new year. Lord Alton, who leads the group, which has also met with the Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire, said Washington-based officials had recently been in London to support the idea of a BBC service. The talks come amid signs that North Korean citizens are increasingly ignoring a ban that forbids them from accessing foreign media.

The US government-run networks Voice of America and Radio Free Asia already broadcast into North Korea. Based on interviews with some of the 25,000 North Korean defectors suggests that 14 per cent had listened to Radio Free Asia, 11.6 per cent to Voice of America and six per cent to South Korean radio.

Although the World Service transmits to 188 million in 27 countries it has never broadcast a Korean service. This is partly because North Korea arrests citizens discovered listening to foreign media and sends them to camps where more than 150,000 political prisoners are believed to be held.

North Korean markets with women at the helm

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Five North Koreans visiting China spoke to NPR recently, offering a rare insight into how political dictates have had an extraordinary social impact in their own homes. All of them count among the elite, who have enough money to enter China legally and hope to return to their families North Korea.

“In the past, our husbands would bring home rations, and we’d live off that,” says Mrs. Kim. “Now there are no rations, and the women support the families. If we don’t make money, they starve, so life is hard for women.”

Facing a catastrophic famine in the mid-1990s, the state had reduced — and then mostly stopped — giving out the rations, known as the Public Distribution System.

By then, markets had sprung up illegally to keep people alive, and have thrived despite the state’s numerous attempts to roll them back. The government had imposed a welter of restrictions on market activity, including forbidding anyone except older women from market trading. Those restrictions have largely been relaxed recently.

Most women trade in the markets, orjangmadang. Mrs. Kim gets up at 4:30 each morning to feed the animals she sells, and also brews alcohol illegally. Every minute of the day is spent figuring out how to feed her family, including an adult son and daughter whose state-run jobs do not provide enough to live on.

For almost half of North Korean families, private trading forms the only source of income, according to research done by American academics at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

 

South Korea’s new trustpolitik with North Korea

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After a tight race, South Korean voters last week picked Park Geun-hye of the establishment Saenuri Party as their next President.

Park’s foremost challenge when she takes office in February will be North Korea. The outgoing government of President Lee Myung-bak, a no-nonsense former corporate CEO, reversed 10 years of so-called sunshine policy — a conciliatory approach to Pyongyang that saw two summits, the South’s investments in the North and reunions of family members separated by the Korean War. Lee adopted a stern approach, cutting off dialogue and humanitarian aid over Pyongyang’s unwillingness to drop its nuclear-weapons program.

When Pyongyang shelled South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island, Lee ordered the South Korean military to prepare for retaliatory strikes on the North’s missile bases in the event of further provocation. He also canceled inter-Korean Red Cross talks that were scheduled to occur two days after the shelling.

This past year, Pyongyang’s failed long-range rocket launch in April and a successful launch earlier this month further strained relations between the two Koreas. “There’s a sense that something has to give,” says Hahm Chai-bong, head of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.

Park looks as if she will be doing the giving. Despite Pyongyang’s persistent recalcitrance, Park believes that improving bilateral relations will help persuade North Korea to curtail its nuclear program as well as set the two Koreas on a path of reunification — the “100% completion of Korea,” as she has termed it. Her confidence-building measures — she calls them “trustpolitik” — include the renewal of humanitarian aid to the North and re-establishing social and cultural exchanges.

TIME

A death knell for the North Korean regime?

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A New York Times excerpt on how a typical North Korean might react to a visit to a border city in China:

The lucky few North Koreans who make it to Dandong [a large Chinese, border city across the Yalu River from North Korea] are stunned by what they find: the car-choked streets, hot showers and the ability to speak out without fear.

But mostly, they are overwhelmed by the array and abundance of inexpensive food.

While her compatriots said they stuffed themselves with meat-filled dumplings and rice, Mrs. Kim ate only apples for the first five days. She said she had not eaten them since childhood.

“I thought our country lived well,” she said, “but I was mistaken.”

The more North Korea’s new leader Kim Jong-Un opens his country up to the outside, the more people will find that that they have been told for half a century now is a pathetic lie. What that means for the future of the regime only time will tell, but as we’ve seen elsewhere in the world openness to the outside is often the death knell for dictatorships.

The cost of the North Korean rocket launch

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While only the highest echelons of North Korea’s opaque leadership will know the full financial cost of Wednesday’s launch, South Korea’s government estimates Pyongyang spent $1.3 billion on its rocket program this year.

Though the price of North Korea’s rocket launches might be lower because North Korean workers earn much less than their southern neighbors, says Cheong Wook-Sik, Director of South Korea’s Peace Network in Seoul.

According to an official from South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, the two rockets launched this year — this week’s mission and a failed attempt in April — cost $600 million, while the launch site itself is estimated at $400 million. Other related facilities add another $300 million.

“[$1.3 billion] is equivalent to acquiring 4.6 million tons of corn,” a South Korean official said. “If this was used for solving the food shortage issue, North Koreans would not have to worry about food for four to five years.”

But the financial cost and any risk of further sanctions may be a tradeoff for internal political gain as leader Kim Jong-Un tries to solidify his grip on power. Cheong Wook-Sik, Director of South Korea’s Peace Network in Seoul, said, “If North Korea succeeds in launching a satellite, North Korea propaganda may spin this by saying the country has become a prosperous and strong nation. That will help Kim Jong-Un both consolidate his power and help maintain the legacy of his father.”

If there is a message to the international community, adds Cheong, it may be that North Korea is implying “our satellite launch means we have nuclear weapons, we have a delivery system.”

Whatever the cost, what is known is that North Korea is one of the poorest countries in Asia, with an economy worth just $40 billion, according to the CIA World Factbook.

The curious timing of North Korea’s rocket launch

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The curious timing of North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket launch, outside of its usual spring-summer launch window, raises questions about the political motivations behind Pyongyang’s attention-grabbing move.

On Wednesday morning, just before 10 a.m. local time, South Korean news agency Yonhap and the Japanese government reported that the rocket had been launched. It came just days after North Korea extended the launch window due to technical issues.

Taking heed of launch and the usual caveats about reading North Korean government behavior, we can discern three motives underlying Pyongyang’s latest move: international bargaining, domestic legitimacy and strategic leverage.

With Barack Obama’s re-election in Washington and Xi Jinping named as the new Chinese President, the region awaits the outcomes of the Japanese election on December 16 and the South Korean presidential poll on December 19. Proliferation-related negotiating activity is on hold, leaving a diplomatic vacuum until the new governments are settled.

External aid fills gaps in the domestic economy and satisfies vital needs such as food and energy that the regime cannot provide for indigenously. The gambit fails if there are no negotiations. While North Korea appears to have no intention of relinquishing its nuclear or missile capabilities, its habitual tactic of engineering crises to leverage aid from the international community in exchange for de-escalation or proliferation freeze agreements is predicated on negotiations actually taking place.

A December rocket launch sends a strong signal from Pyongyang to its regional interlocutors to ensure that North Korea does not get overlooked amid the bureaucratic maelstrom that usually follows changes in government.

CNN

On agricultural reform in North Korea

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North Korea has long relied on socialized agriculture, placing several families on a common piece of land to farm for the state.  The result has been malnutrition and even starvation.

Reforms reportedly have been adopted to reduce the number of families per plot, and establish a production quota above which farmers can keep the excess. The objective however may not be greater freedom but reordered regulation.

There are indications that the regime is manipulating prices in an attempt to eliminate private markets and seizing privately farmed plots of land for collective use.

Open Radio for North Korea reported that “North Korean citizens, who experienced the similar situation in 2002, are preparing for Kim Jong-un’s New Economic Management System.  To prepare for the prices skyrocketing, they are hoarding Chinese money, and prices and the exchange rate keep rising.”