Starting Points: North Korea

Showing posts with label North Korea. Show all posts

Jun 19, 2010

N. Korea lifts restrictions on private markets as last resort in food crisis

North Koreans work on a farm near the Yalu River. A dire food shortage has led the government to lift all restrictions on private markets. (Jacky Chen - Reuters)

By Chico Harlan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 18, 2010; 4:27 PM

SEOUL -- Bowing to reality, the North Korean government has lifted all restrictions on private markets -- a last-resort option for a leadership desperate to prevent its people from starving.

In recent weeks, according to North Korea observers and defector groups with sources in the country, Kim Jong Il's government admitted its inability to solve the current food shortage and encouraged its people to rely on private markets for the purchase of goods. Though the policy reversal will not alter daily patterns -- North Koreans have depended on such markets for more than 15 years -- the latest order from Pyongyang abandons a key pillar of a central, planned economy.

With November's currency revaluation, Kim wiped out his citizens' personal savings and struck a blow against the private food distribution system sustaining his country. The latest policy switch, though, stands as an acknowledgment that the currency move was a failure and that only capitalist-style trading can prevent widespread famine.

"The North Korean government has tried all possible ways [for a planned economy] and failed, and it now has to resort to the last option," said Koh Yu-hwan, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "There's been lots of back and forth in what the government has been willing to tolerate, and I cannot rule out the possibility of them trying to bring back restrictions on the markets. But it is hard for the government to reverse it now."

Because North Korea operates in secrecy and isolation, outside observers rely on informants and accounts from defectors. In this case, experts agree that the food shortage is dire. Several analysts who monitor and travel to North Korea said that in recent weeks, Pyongyang has abandoned almost all its rules about who can spend money and when. That would seem to indicate that Kim -- who once equated free-market trading with "egotism" and a collapse of social order -- now wants to rehabilitate the markets damaged in November.

As of May 26, the government no longer forces markets to close at 6 or 7 p.m., has dropped the rule restricting customers to women older than 40 and has lifted a ban on certain goods being sold. An official in the city of Pyungsung informed the Good Friends humanitarian group that the living standard had "drastically decreased since the currency exchange, and the government cannot provide distribution so they have to bring the market back up."

The Good Friends newsletter quoted the official as saying: "There are increasing deaths from starvation so opening [the] market is a reasonable resolution. Death due to starvation has gone out of control."

In the mid-1990s, amid a total collapse of the central planned economy, somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of the population -- perhaps 1 million people -- died of starvation. Meanwhile, North Koreans increasingly turned to small markets for trading and buying supplies.

In part because of that, the hermit nation now maintains a stronger line of defense against starvation -- one that did not exist during the famine.

Compared with the peak of the food crisis, in the mid and late '90s, "the actual amount of food -- less is available now," said Kim Heung-gwang, a North Korean defector and president of a group called North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity. "But back then, the food circulation industry wasn't as built up. Even though the absolute amount of food is less now than it was 15 years ago, I think the starvation problem will be less significant."

In 1994, Kim said, people "didn't know how to survive because they were looking for rations."

North Korea analysts say that the Nov. 30, 2009, currency reform caused nearly as much trauma as the famine 15 years earlier. The government turned 100 won into 1, and North Koreans responded with minor protests.

In recent months, North Korea's chronic food problems have probably worsened. When South Korea's government concluded in late May that the North was responsible for sinking one of the South's warships, killing 46 people, international outrage caused food aid to slow. The South announced that it would cut all trade with its neighbor, though the North has denied any responsibility. China remains North Korea's primary benefactor, but little is known about how much food China supplies. According to analysts, Pyongyang's latest reaction could suggest it is struggling to secure the necessary aid from China.

Staff writer Blaine Harden and special correspondent Yoonjung Seo contributed to this report.

May 29, 2010

North Korea Exporting Nuke Technology to Burma: UN Experts

Image by Rennett Stowe via Flickr

By EDITH M. LEDERER/ AP WRITER

Friday, May 28, 2010

UNITED NATIONS — North Korea is exporting nuclear and ballistic missile technology and using multiple intermediaries, shell companies and overseas criminal networks to circumvent U.N. sanctions, U.N. experts said in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The seven-member panel monitoring the implementation of sanctions against North Korea said its research indicates that Pyongyang is involved in banned nuclear and ballistic activities in Iran, Syria and Burma. It called for further study of these suspected activities and urged all countries to try to prevent them.

The 47-page report, obtained late Thursday by AP, and a lengthy annex document, details sanctions violations reported by U.N. member states, including four cases involving arms exports and two seizures of luxury goods by Italy — two yachts and high-end recording and video equipment. The report also details the broad range of techniques that North Korea is using to try to evade sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council after its two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.

Council diplomats discussed the report by the experts from Britain, Japan, the United States, France, South Korea, Russia and China at a closed-door meeting on Thursday.

Its release happened to coincide with heightened tensions between North Korea and South Korea over the March sinking of a South Korean navy ship which killed 46 sailors. The council is waiting for South Korea to decide what action it wants the U.N.'s most powerful body to take in response to the sinking, which a multinational investigation determined was caused by a North Korean torpedo.

The panel of experts said there is general agreement that the U.N. embargoes on nuclear and ballistic missile related items and technology, on arms exports and imports except light weapons, and on luxury goods, are having an impact.

But it said the list of eight entities and five individuals currently subject to an asset freeze and travel ban seriously understates those known to be engaged in banned activities and called for additional names to be added. It noted that North Korea moved quickly to have other companies take over activities of the eight banned entities.

The experts said an analysis of the four North Korean attempts to illegally export arms revealed that Pyongyang used "a number of masking techniques" to avoid sanctions. They include providing false descriptions and mislabeling of the contents of shipping containers, falsifying the manifest and information about the origin and destination of the goods, "and use of multiple layers of intermediaries, shell companies, and financial institutions," the panel said.

It noted that a chartered jet intercepted in Thailand in December carrying 35 tons of conventional weapons including surface-to-air missiles from North Korea was owned by a company in the United Arab Emirates, registered in Georgia, leased to a shell company registered in New Zealand and then chartered to another shell company registered in Hong Kong — which may have been an attempt to mask its destination.

North Korea is also concealing arms exports by shipping components in kits for assembly overseas, the experts said.

As one example, the panel said it learned after North Korean military equipment was seized at Durban harbor in South Africa that scores of technicians from the North had gone to the Republic of Congo, where the equipment was to have been assembled.

The experts called for "extra vigilance" at the first overseas port handling North Korean cargo and close monitoring of airplanes flying from the North, saying Pyongyang is believed to use air cargo "to handle high valued and sensitive arms exports."

While North Korea maintains a wide network of trade offices which do legitimate business as well as most of the country's illicit trade and covert acquisitions, the panel said Pyongyang "has also established links with overseas criminal networks to carry out these activities, including the transportation and distribution of illicit and smuggled cargoes."

This may also include goods related to weapons of mass destruction and arms, it added.

Under council resolutions, all countries are required to submit reports on what they are doing to implement sanctions but as of April 30 the panel said it had still not heard from 112 of the 192 U.N. member states — including 51 in Africa, 28 in Asia, and 25 in Latin America and the Caribbean.

While no country reported on nuclear or ballistic missile-related imports or exports from North Korea since the second sanctions resolution was adopted last June, the panel said it reviewed several U.S. and French government assessments, reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency, research papers and media reports indicating Pyongyang's continuing involvement in such activities.
These reports indicate North Korea "has continued to provide missiles, components, and technology to certain countries including Iran and Syria ... (and) has provided assistance for a nuclear program in Syria, including the design and construction of a thermal reactor at Dair Alzour," the panel said.

Syria denied the allegations in a letter to the IAEA, but the U.N. nuclear agency is still trying to obtain reports on the site and its activities, the panel said.

The experts said they are also looking into "suspicious activity in Burma," including activities of Namchongang Trading, one of the companies subject to U.N. sanctions, and reports that Japan in June 2009 arrested three individuals for attempting to illegally export a magnetometer — which measures magnetic fields — to Burma via Malaysia allegedly under the direction of a company known to be associated with illicit procurement for North Korea's nuclear and military programs. The company was not identified.

Apr 2, 2010

Overtures to China may signal opening of North Korea's economy

Image by IsaacMao via Flickr

By Blaine Harden
Friday, April 2, 2010; A10

SEOUL -- Squeezed by food shortages and financial sanctions, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il appears to be reaching out to China and Chinese investors in a way that could mark an extraordinary opening in the insular nation's shuttered economy.

Kim might soon travel to China, according to the office of South Korea's president and U.S. officials. They cited preparations that appear to be underway in the Chinese border city of Dandong and in Beijing. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday it does not have information on whether Kim will visit China.

Such a trip could help restart six-party talks, hosted by China, aimed at persuading North Korea to denuclearize in return for economic and political benefits.

Kim is also attempting to accelerate Chinese investment and has ordered the creation of a State Development Bank. Officials from the new bank told a South Korean professor last week that they intend to allow the construction of foreign-owned factories in major North Korean cities. This would allow Chinese firms, many of which are running short of low-cost factory workers, access to North Korea's pool of low-wage laborers.

If the investments move forward, they would represent a major policy reversal by the government. For six decades, North Korea has sealed almost all its citizens off from the "poisons" of capitalism.

Outreach to China comes at a time of sharply increased pressure on Kim's leadership.

Image by yeowatzup via Flickr

Inside North Korea, food shortages have worsened because of botched currency reform, which disrupted the private markets that feed most of the country's 22.5 million people. Kim's medical ills also include kidney failure, and he undergoes dialysis every two weeks, according to the head of a state-run think tank in Seoul.

And outside, U.N. sanctions are reportedly limiting the North's ability to profit from weapons sales. State trafficking in counterfeit cigarettes and illicit drugs appears to be dwindling. In addition, large-scale food aid from South Korea has been stopped until Pyongyang agrees to junk its nuclear weapons.

"Through this State Development Bank, North Korea is trying to lure foreign investment in agriculture, ports, railroads and also light industry," said Lim Eul-chul, a research professor at the Seoul-based Institute for Far Eastern Studies. He spent four days in Pyongyang last week, talking to officials from the bank and to Chinese businessmen.

They told Lim that the bank is offering itself to foreign investors as a one-stop investment shop. With its board including senior members of the military and the ruling party, the bank will be able to conduct transactions with foreign commercial banks and invest in major projects, North Korean state-controlled media have said.

"The North is now planning to open foreign-owned factories not just in closed-off special economic zones, but in major cities like Nampo and Wonsan," Lim said. Until now, the government has confined nearly all foreign business operations to sealed-off economic zones, such as Kaesong near the South Korean border. "The military is closely cooperating with the State Development Bank to try to increase foreign investment."

Although the repressive power of the army and security forces remains strong, the North's command-style economy is a ruin. There were unconfirmed reports of starvation deaths in some areas this winter.

Image via Wikipedia

Kim, 68, and showing the effects of a 2008 stroke, is in the early stages of handing power over to his untested 27-year-old son, Kim Jong Eun. But the legitimacy of the succession -- and of the state itself -- is being weakened by the growth of the markets and increased public access to foreign media.

Refugee surveys show that many North Koreans blame Kim's government for food shortages, corruption and incompetence.

"Kim Jong Il doesn't have many cards to play, so there is more and more pressure on him to return to the six-party talks," said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "He is also aiming to get investment from ethnic Korean businesses in China."

In South Korea and China, there is widespread skepticism about North Korea's willingness to create modern banking systems and enforce laws that allow foreign companies to operate under standardized accounting rules.

Companies that have invested in North Korean mineral ventures have complained for years of corruption and outright theft by the government.

Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.

Feb 22, 2010

A family and a conscience, destroyed by North Korea's cruelty

Image via Wikipedia

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 22, 2010; A07

SEOUL -- "I am fool."

That self-assessment comes from Oh Kil-nam, a South Korean economist who moved to North Korea a quarter-century ago, dragging along his unhappy wife and two teenage daughters. He then defected to the West, leaving his family stranded in a country his wife had called "a living hell."

Oh lives alone now in a fusty, computer-filled apartment here in the capital of South Korea. At 68, he is retired as a researcher for a government-funded think tank. He says he drinks too much rice wine and dwells too much on what might have been.

His wife and daughters -- if alive -- are believed to be prisoners in Camp No. 15, one of several sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea.

Nineteen years ago, North Korean authorities, via unofficial intermediaries based in Germany, sent Oh letters that were written in his wife's hand, saying she and the girls were in the camp. There were pictures of them posing in the snow -- and a cassette tape with voices of his daughters begging to see their daddy.

High-resolution satellite images of Camp 15 and several other political prisons have been widely circulated in the past year on Google Earth, arousing increased concern about human rights abuses inside the North Korean gulag, which has existed for more than half a century -- twice as long the Soviet gulag. But documentary evidence of life inside the North's camps remains exceedingly rare.

Oh is the only person known to have received this kind of evidence about inmates, according to Lee Jee-hae, legal advisor to Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag, a human rights group based in Seoul.

North Korea officially denies the existence of the camps and has never allowed outsiders to visit them. But about 154,000 people are being held in six large camps, according to the latest estimate by the South Korean government.

Defectors who have been released from Camp 15 say public executions are common there, along with beatings, rapes, starvation and the disappearance of female prisoners impregnated by guards. They say that prisoners have no access to soap, underwear, socks, tampons or toilet paper -- and that most inmates die by age 50, usually of illnesses exacerbated by overwork and chronic hunger.

The self-acknowledged foolishness of Oh began in Germany in 1985.

He was married with two young daughters and studying for a doctoral degree in economics at the University of Tuebingen. He was also an outspoken and left-leaning opponent of the authoritarian government then running South Korea.

His activism attracted the attention of North Korean agents, who approached Oh and offered help with a family medical problem. His wife, Shin Sook-ja, a South Korean nurse, was sick with hepatitis. The North Koreans convinced Oh that she would get free first-class treatment in Pyongyang and he would get a good government job.

"My wife did not want to go," Oh said. "I ignored her objections."

Via East Germany and Moscow, the family arrived in Pyongyang on Dec. 3, 1985, Oh said, and was immediately taken to nearby mountains for indoctrination at a military camp.

"The moment we stepped into that camp, I knew my wife was right and that I had made the wrong decision," Oh said.

His wife received no treatment for hepatitis. Instead, she and her husband spent several months studying the teachings of Kim Il Sung, the "Great Leader" and founding dictator of North Korea. He died in 1994 and was replaced by his son, Kim Jong Il, who continues to run what is often called the most repressive state on earth.

Oh and his wife were given jobs working in a radio station broadcasting propaganda to South Korea. Soon, though, authorities ordered Oh to return to Germany and recruit more South Korean students to live in North Korea. His wife and daughters, he was told, could not go along. Oh recalls that he and his wife argued bitterly about what he should do.

"She hit me in the face when I said I would come back with some South Koreans," Oh said. "She said I could not have that on my conscience. She told me to leave North Korea and never come back. She told me to think of her and our daughters as being dead from a car accident."

En route to Germany, Oh turned himself over to authorities in Copenhagen and was granted political asylum. He was debriefed for several weeks in Munich, he said, by U.S. agents from the CIA.

Shortly after Oh defected, his wife and daughters were detained in Pyongyang and taken to Camp 15, a former North Korean prisoner told Amnesty International. Two years later, according to another former prisoner, the three were moved from a "rehabilitation" section of the camp, where prisoners are sometimes released, to a "complete control district," where they work until they die.

There has been no further information about Oh's wife and daughters since then.

In the early 1990s, Oh wrote a book, "Please Return My Wife and Daughters, Kim Il Sung." It did not occasion a response from North Korea. Oh said he sometimes believes his family is still alive, and sometimes he is convinced that they are dead. Either way, he blames himself.

Special correspondent June Lee in Seoul contributed to this report.

Jan 27, 2010

Books of The Times - Demick, Hassig, Oh and Myers on Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea

Image by Dunechaser via Flickr

NOTHING TO ENVY

Ordinary Lives in North Korea

By Barbara Demick

Illustrated. 314 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $26.

THE HIDDEN PEOPLE OF NORTH KOREA

Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

By Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh

Illustrated. 300 pages. Rowman & Littlefield. $39.95.

THE CLEANEST RACE

How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters

By B. R. Myers

Illustrated. 200 pages. Melville House. $24.95.

By DWIGHT GARNER

Computers are rare in North Korea, and the Internet, for most of its citizens, is little more than a whispered rumor. It’s probable, in fact, that only one person surfs the Web in North Korea without someone monitoring every click: Kim Jong-il, that authoritarian regime’s supreme leader.

When he’s online, and not lurking on sites devoted to his obsessions (movies, fancy food, young women, nuclear weapons), Mr. Kim must sometimes see what his country looks like, to the rest of the world, in those haunting satellite photographs of the Far East at night.

You’ve probably seen them. The countries near North Korea — Japan, South Korea, China — are ablaze with splotches and pinpricks of light, with beaming civilization. But North Korea, a country nearly the size of England, home to some 23 million people, is a black hole, an ocean of dark. Barbara Demick, a foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, begins her excellent new book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” by poring over these satellite images. She’s shocked by them, and moved. “North Korea is not an undeveloped country,” she observes. “It is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.”

Image by oceandesetoiles via Flickr

“Nothing to Envy” is one of three provocative new books about North Korea, from writers who are committed to parsing the slivers of light that escape this enigmatic and often baffling place. The others are “The Hidden People of North Korea,” by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, and “The Cleanest Race,” by B. R. Myers.

North Korea is not an easy country to observe. Few foreign journalists are allowed in, and then only with official minders and strictly limited itineraries. To get a sense of how ordinary citizens live, writers must rely primarily on the accounts of defectors.

If we have trouble seeing North Koreans plainly, they cannot see us at all. Telephone use is severely restricted. (Even the telephone book is a classified document marked “secret.”) Postal service is spotty. There is essentially no e-mail. Television and radios receive only approved channels. The country’s citizens are force-fed a steady, numbing diet of state propaganda devoted to sustaining the personality cult of Kim Jong-il and savaging all things American.

How are North Koreans taught to think about us? Well, here’s one indication. Children learn a ditty called “Shoot the Yankee Bastards” in music class. One verse goes:

Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.

(The truly poignant words here are “with my own hands.”)

Ms. Demick’s book is a lovely work of narrative nonfiction, one that follows the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan. It’s a book that offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.

Image via Wikipedia

The people Ms. Demick observes lived, before their defections, in northeastern North Korea, far from the country’s tidy, Potemkin village-like capital, Pyongyang. The existences she describes sound brutal: there is often not enough food; citizens work long days that can be followed by hours of ideological training at night; spying on one’s neighbors is a national pastime; a nonpatriotic comment, especially an anti-Kim Jong-il wisecrack, can have you sent to a gulag for life, if not executed.

Ms. Demick writes especially well about the difficult lives of those who do manage to defect. Not only are they bewildered by life outside of North Korea, and have to be taught to do things like use an A.T.M., but they also live with deep shame and guilt, knowing that relatives left behind have probably been sent to prison as punishment for their escape.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book, “The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom,” is wonkier than Ms. Demick’s and less reader-friendly, but it covers more ground. The authors are married (Ms. Oh’s parents were North Koreans who fled to South Korea); he is an independent consultant specializing in North Korean affairs, and she is on the research staff of the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Va.

Their book is based on more than 200 interviews with defectors, and it paints a picture of a restless populace, increasingly dubious about the official propaganda. “It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the people support Kim Jong-il,” they write. “Rather, it does not occur to them to oppose him.” North Koreans are too busy trying to survive, and too preoccupied by the tensions of the supposed mighty conflict with America, to be able to think about much else.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s portrait of Mr. Kim’s hyper-sybaritic lifestyle is detailed and devastating. He may look like a man of the people, they write, with his tan slacks, zippered jackets and stout build that make him resemble Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners.” But they chronicle his obsession with the latest electronics, the “pleasure teams” of girls he keeps handy, the Bordeaux wine he has flown in. While many of his people starve, they write, Mr. Kim “is such a connoisseur that, according to his former chef, every grain of rice destined for his dinner table is inspected for quality and shape.”

The authors are aware that Mr. Kim’s anti-American paranoia isn’t baseless. The leader of a different country in George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” they note, was captured and later hanged.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book concludes with pointed policy recommendations. They think it is nearly hopeless to negotiate with Mr. Kim and suspect that “nonproliferation agreements with the regime will simply encourage it to brandish new threats in the future.” Instead of fixating on Korea’s weapons, the authors suggest bypassing the regime and reaching out to North Korea’s people, who sorely need humanitarian aid and “a new way of thinking about their government and their society.”

Mr. Myers, the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters,” is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and famously the author of “A Reader’s Manifesto,” a controversial and humorless broadside against the literary writers (Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy among them) whom he finds pretentious or obscure. Mr. Myers directs the international studies department at Dongseo University in South Korea.

He is a crisp, pushy writer who is at his best when on the attack, and his often counterintuitive new book attempts a psychological profile of Kim Jong-il and his regime. Mr. Myers has pored through mountains of North Korean propaganda — from nightly news reports and newspapers to war movies, comics, wall posters and dictionaries — and he argues that the West is misreading the country’s core beliefs.

He explains that North Korea’s dominant worldview is “far removed” from the Communism, Confucianism and official “show-window” ideologies that Westerners analyze. Instead, he argues, this worldview “can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.” His North Korea is guided by a “paranoid, race-based nationalism.”

Mr. Myers’s arguments are too wily and complex to be neatly summarized here, but he includes a fascinating analysis of Mr. Kim’s depiction as an essentially — and crucially — feminine military leader. His regime presents North Korea more as a motherland than a fatherland, Mr. Myers writes, and he cites official slogans about Mr. Kim like “We Cannot Live Away From His Breast.” The lack of a patriarchal authority figure, he says, “may also have helped the regime preserve stability by depriving people of a target to rebel against.”

Mr. Myers also cautions against the idea that the West can persuade North Korea to shed its nuclear weapons. Mr. Kim “cannot disarm and hope to stay in power,” he writes. At the same time, he notes, “blue jeans will not bring down this dictatorship.” Any signs of serious unrest, he observes, will encourage Mr. Kim to raise the level of the tension with the West, and possibly do something rash with his nuclear arsenal.

Kim Jong-il reportedly suffered a stroke in 2008 and has looked frail during his recent, and increasingly rare, public appearances. While the world speculates about his successor, almost certainly to be one of his sons, one of the lessons of these books is not to remove our eyes from the blinkered lives of the average North Korean.

“The Kim regime essentially holds its people hostage,” Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh write, and they are dismayed to note that “the United States is much more interested in the hostage taker’s weapons of mass destruction than in the fate of his hostages.”

North Koreans sometimes joke, Ms. Demick writes in “Nothing to Envy,” that they live like “frogs in the well.” It’s a line that sends you back to study those satellite images, and to contemplate those who dwell under Mr. Kim’s inky moral darkness.

Jan 9, 2010

On birthday of Kim Jong-il's son, a North Korea rising star

On the birthday of Kim Jong-un, North Korea leader Kim Jong-il's son, newspaper drew attention to the "unusual brightness" and placement of Venus, which was seen as a good sign for Kim Jong-un.

By Donald Kirk Correspondent
posted January 8, 2010 at 8:33 am EST

Washington —

At least one of the planets appeared to be properly aligned – in the rhetoric from Pyongyang – when North Korea’s heir apparent, Kim Jong-un, marked his 26^th or 27^th birthday Friday.

Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency reported several days ago that the “morning star” Venus “shed an unusually bright light” above the lake that fills the crater of sacred Mount Paektu on North Korea’s border with China.

Considering that North Korean mythology holds that Kim Jong-un’s father, Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, was born in a log cabin on a slope of Paektu, at 9,000 feet the highest peak on the Korean peninsula, observers take the report of Venus shimmering high above as a serious portent.

North Korea’s party newspaper Rodong Sinmun evoked the image of Paektu again on Friday, calling on readers to “toast to the endlessly bright future of Chosun (the traditional name for Korea) that will resemble the shape of the sun and the holy land of Paektu.”

The editorial, like the report on “the morning star Venus,” did not mention Kim Jong-un by name, but analysts are confident of the connection. “They believe Venus symbolized Kim Jong-un,” says Ryoo Kihl-jae, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, carefully measuring his words. “Many people who have visited North Korea say so.”

Whether or not Kim Jong-un is openly declared as heir to his father’s power, reports of birthday observances around the country leave little doubt of his rising stature.

Defense commission could be springboard

Daily NK, one of several organizations in Seoul that write about North Korea, reported Friday on a “central conference” in Pyongyang and elsewhere featuring “commemorative events” for officials and “lectures for residents.” Such a conference is normally a grand affair, similar to those staged annually for Kim Jong-il’s birthday, which falls next month, or the birthdays of Kim Jong-il's father, Great Leader Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994, and mother, Kim Jong-suk, who died in 1949.

The commemorations parallel meetings going on around the country to rev up support for a revaluation of North Korea’s currency that has stripped a small but rising mercantile middle class of much of the money hoarded from often illicit black-market dealings. The currency reform is widely viewed as having failed since while the newly valued money goes down markedly in value, hunger persists, and markets flounder.

For all the signs of Kim Jong-un’s growing stature, however, his exact age remains uncertain. That’s presumed to be because North Korea’s aging leadership may well see him as far too young and inexperienced while his father hastily grooms him for power by giving him increasing responsibilities and escorting him on visits to military units and factories.

The North Korean media has reported that Kim Jong-un was born in 1982, one year earlier than the year previously believed. His mother, Ko Young-hee, born in Japan, once a dancer in one of the troupes that performs for North Korea’s ruling elite as well as foreign visitors, reportedly died in 2004, likely from breast cancer.

Kim Jong-un is believed to be serving on the national defense commission while also serving an apprenticeship in the department of organization and guidance, a nebulous agency with tentacles throughout the armed forces, the government, and the Workers’ Party, the three pillars of the North Korean power ruling structure.

A position for Kim Jong-un on the defense commission could well serve as a springboard to succeed his father, the commission chairman, who took over the post well before the death in 1994 of his own father, Great Leader Kim Il-sung.

The Daily NK report adds credibility to a report by the rival NK Open Radio, which reported Thursday that about 7,000 people attended the “central conference” in Pyongyang and that North Koreans on Friday and Saturday are observing a two-day holiday. Ha Tae Keung, president of NK Open Radio, says his station, which broadcasts two hours of news and analysis daily by short wave into North Korea from Seoul, attributes the report to three different sources who inform the station from illegal cell phone contacts near the North’s border with China.

“Of course the observances symbolize to their people the North Korean regime power shift,” says Mr. Ha. “They officialize the power inheritance.”

New emphasis on youth

Yet another sign of the shift that’s under way is the emphasis placed in a New Year’s editorial published in all North Korean newspapers on the rising power of youth.

The editorial described “the youth” as “a shock brigade in the great revolutionary upsurge” – and called on young people to “become heroes, who add luster to the era of the great upsurge with undying labor feats and talented persons.”

Those lines, toward the end of a lengthy message that placed primary emphasis on rebuilding the economy, seems to be a reference to Kim Jong-un’s ascent. He is believed to have been on a fast track to power for at least a year while uncertainty prevails regarding the health of his father, said to be suffering from diabetes and a possible stroke.

Kim Jong-un “becomes more powerful as time goes on,” says Ryoo Kihl-jae. ”Some people argue that he now has a position on the national defense commission,” the center of power in North Korea.

Kim Jong-un seems to have gotten the nod ahead of two older brothers. It is assumed that he basically is a front person for a coterie of elderly leaders, including his uncle, Jang Sung-taek, brother of his late mother.

Mr. Jang’s place in that leadership, however, “will be valid only as long as Kim Jong-il lives,” says Mr. Ryoo. “It is not certain after Kim Jong-il dies.”

Jan 7, 2010

N. Korean currency crackdown fuels inflation, food shortages

Image by yeowatzup via Flickr

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A11

TOKYO -- Strong-armed currency reform in North Korea, which has confiscated the savings of small businesses and forbidden the use of foreign money, is now causing runaway inflation and contributing to food shortages, according to several reports from inside the closed state.

Currency reform is part of an aggressive crackdown on free markets by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

His government has ordered the closure by the end of March of a large wholesale market in the northeastern port city of Chongjin, according to Good Friends, a Seoul-based aid group with a network of informants inside the country. Another major wholesale market near the capital, Pyongyang, was shut down in June.

After a decade of explosive growth, markets have substantially supplanted the central government as a means of employing and distributing food to North Korea's 23.5 million people. The kudzu-like spread of grass-roots capitalism -- and the government's inability to control it -- has angered Kim and his top lieutenants.

To hobble traders who acquire goods from neighboring China, the government has imposed controls on travel and lodging in border areas, ordered the public not to use the large suitcases that are popular with traders and increased punishment for illegal border crossing.

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North Korea is "not moving toward a free-market economy, but will further strengthen the principle and order of social economic management," an official of the North Korean central bank recently told the Choson Sinbo, a Tokyo-based newspaper that is a mouthpiece for Kim's government.

But reining in the markets is a formidable task, even for North Korean authorities, who preside over what is often described as the world's most repressive police state. United Nations officials estimate that half the calories consumed in North Korea now come from food bought in private markets. Recent surveys of defectors have found that as many as 75 percent of them were involved in market activities before fleeing the country.

At the end of 2009, North Korea moved suddenly to wipe out the wealth of all those who had profited from market trading. It revalued the local currency, the won, while sharply restricting the amount of old won that could be traded for new. The rules, as first announced, made it illegal for citizens to possess more than $40 worth of local currency.

The revaluation triggered widespread anger and rare public protests. The government, as a result, eased exchange limits and increased cash payments to farmers and some workers, according to several accounts from inside the country.

Besides penalizing traders, an apparent goal of the currency revaluation was to slow inflation, which has plagued North Korea for years. But the government's action appears to have backfired, with potentially disastrous consequences in a country that is chronically short of food.

The black-market value of "new" won has reportedly plummeted against Chinese currency, spooking private traders, who have pulled their goods out of markets. Outside economists say suspicion about the value of the won has made residents wary, increasing economic stagnation and worsening food shortages.

The central government held a teleconference in late December with officials in every province, city and county "to discuss how to supply consumer goods to residents in the aftermath of the currency exchange," according to Good Friends.

At year's end, the government also announced a ban on the use of foreign currency. The North's richest private traders kept their savings in foreign currency and used it to import Chinese and South Korean goods for sale in North Korean markets.

But euros, dollars and Chinese yuan are also the preferred currency of the North Korean elite, who used them at state shops to buy luxury goods unavailable to most of the population. The survival of Kim's government, many analysts say, depends on catering to the needs of a few thousand elite officials in government and the military.

The consequences of crimping their lifestyles are difficult to predict, but the South Korean government has expressed concern.

"It is difficult to estimate the threat to us that will arise in the aftermath of the currency reform," South Korean Defense Minister Kim Tae-young said in a year-end message to his country's armed forces.

Uncertainty, inflation and shortages triggered by currency reform come at a time when Kim, now 67 and recovering from a stroke in 2008, is laying the groundwork for a successor.

The rollout of his third son, Kim Jong Eun, 26, as the heir apparent may be gathering momentum, according to the North Korea Intellectuals Society, a defector group in Seoul.

Citing sources inside North Korea, it said that his birthday on Jan. 8 is the subject of a Workers' Party decree calling for a commemoration of Kim Jong Eun as "the other leader of us and our future."

Dec 28, 2009

Pakistani scientist depicts more advanced nuclear program in North Korea

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By R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 28, 2009; A02

North Korea has constructed a plant to manufacture a gas needed for uranium enrichment, according to a previously unpublicized account by the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb program, a development that indicates Pyongyang opened a second way to build nuclear weapons as early as the 1990s.

Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan also said that North Korea may have been enriching uranium on a small scale by 2002, with "maybe 3,000 or even more" centrifuges, and that Pakistan helped the country with vital machinery, drawings and technical advice for at least six years.

North Korea's nuclear program is among the world's most opaque, and Khan's account could not be independently corroborated. But one U.S. intelligence official and a U.S. diplomat said his information adds to their suspicions that North Korea has long pursued the enrichment of uranium in addition to making plutonium for bombs, and may help explain Pyongyang's assertion in September that it is in the final stages of such enrichment.

Khan's account of the pilot plant, which he says North Korea built without help, is included in a narrative that depicts relations between the two countries' scientists as exceptionally close for nearly a decade. Khan says, for example, that during a visit to North Korea in 1999, he toured a mountain tunnel. There his hosts showed him boxes containing components of three finished nuclear warheads, which he was told could be assembled for use atop missiles within an hour.

"While they explained the construction [design of their bombs], they quietly showed me the six boxes" containing split cores for the warheads, as well as "64 ignitors/detonators per bomb packed in 6 separate boxes," Khan said.

Old assumptions

His visit occurred seven years before the country's first detonation, prompting some current and former U.S. officials to say that Khan's account, if correct, suggests North Korea's achievements were more advanced than previously known, and that the country may have more sophisticated weapons, or a larger number, than earlier estimated.

But Siegfried S. Hecker, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory director who was allowed to see some North Korean plutonium during a visit to its nuclear facilities in January 2004, said after hearing Khan's description of the trip he remains unconvinced that the country in 1999 had enough fissile material on hand to make such weapons.

Hecker said Khan may have tried to get himself "off the hook, to say what [he] . . . did was not that bad because these guys already had nuclear weapons. That's a nice way to cover his own tracks."

Since some of Khan's actions were exposed in 2003 and 2004, top Pakistani officials have called him a rogue proliferator. Khan said, however, there was a tacit agreement between the two governments that his laboratory "would advise and guide them with the centrifuge program and that the North Koreans would help Pakistan in fitting the nuclear warhead into the Ghauri missile" -- his country's name for its version of the Nodong missiles that Pakistan bought from North Korea.

Pakistan gave North Korea vital equipment and software, and in return North Korea also "taught us how to make Krytrons" -- extremely fast electrical switches that are used in nuclear detonations and are tightly controlled in international commerce. Contradicting Pakistani statements that the government had no involvement in such sensitive transfers, Khan says his assistance was approved by top political and Army officials, including then-Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who currently oversees Pakistan's atomic arsenal.

Khan, 73, is under house arrest in Islamabad. He has threatened to disclose sensitive information if he remains in confinement.

A contentious issue

The issue of what the hermetic country has been doing with uranium and when it started has been especially contentious since 2002. When an Obama administration envoy, Stephen Bosworth, visited North Korea this month, he "strongly put down a marker" that future talks must include discussion of uranium, a senior U.S. official said.

Pakistani officials in Washington dismissed Khan's assertions as baseless, without responding to questions about Kidwai's role. "Pakistan, as a nuclear weapons state, has always acted with full responsibility and never engaged itself in any activity in violation of the non-proliferation norms," the embassy said in a statement.

Song Ryol Han, the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, denied that his country had a uranium program before last spring or that it ever discussed the issue "with Dr. Khan in Pakistan." Song said that "only after last April, when the U.S. hostility entered extremely critical stage" did the country start such a program as a "nuclear deterrence" measure.

Khan described his dealings with the country in official documents and in correspondence with a former British journalist, Simon Henderson, who said he thinks an accurate understanding of Pakistan's nuclear history is relevant for U.S. policymaking. The Washington Post independently verified that the documents were produced by Khan.

In his written account, Khan said the capacity of North Korea's plant for making the centrifuge feedstock, a caustic material known as uranium hexafluoride, "initially was two tons per year" and later was raised to 10 tons a year. He did not give the plant's location but said that at one point North Korea sent a kilogram of the gas it had made to Pakistan for testing. He also stated that Pakistan shared a sample of its own gas to be used as a manufacturing standard by the North Koreans.

A U.S. government nuclear expert, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said constructing a plant of this size will probably be seen as "a very serious commitment" to making nuclear arms with a method that is hard to detect. The official noted that the country was obligated to report such facilities under a global treaty to which it was a party until 2003.

Khan said he understood that North Korea's ambition was to produce enriched uranium fuel for an aged reactor because it could not rely on a continuing foreign supply of such fuel. But two officials noted that if North Korea indeed had 3,000 or more centrifuges operating by 2002, which Khan called "quite likely," then work on that scale opens the door to industrial-scale enrichment for weapons as well.

Khan said he negotiated the purchase of 10 Nodong missiles and related technology for $150 million after visiting North Korea in 1994 at the request of Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistan's prime minister, and top army officials. "As a result of this deal, 10 North Korean experts came to Kahuta and were housed within the complex," Khan said, referring to the city in northeastern Pakistan where his laboratory is situated.

Khan said three army staff chiefs approved the stay of the North Koreans, who "were officially allowed to visit all the workshops and meet and discuss freely with the scientists and engineers," including those working on P-1 centrifuges, as well as more advanced models known as P-2s.

After gaining the approval of an army chief and after the payment of funds by North Korea, "I asked my people to prepare 20 outdated P-1 machines and gave them. Since they were working in the plant and were familiar with the P-2 machines, they asked for 4 of these too."

Undermining a pledge?

Several former U.S. officials, after being informed of Khan's statements, said they undermine North Korea's 1994 pledge to work with the United States "for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula."

"This paints a picture of even more collaboration than I assumed those countries had," said Robert G. Joseph, a prominent critic of the 1994 agreement. Joseph served as the principal nonproliferation official at the White House under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005 and then as undersecretary of state for arms control.

Khan said Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the chief of the army staff from 1998 to 2007 and president from 2001 to 2008, and "his right-hand men" -- including Kidwai, Khan asserted -- "knew everything and were controlling incoming and outgoing consignments." Kidwai heads the group that controls Pakistan's arsenal, estimated by some U.S. government analysts at more than 100 weapons.

But Musharraf, in his 2006 autobiography, said that Khan was responsible for all of the nuclear-related exports to North Korea and that "neither the Pakistan Army nor any of the past governments of Pakistan was ever involved or had any knowledge of A.Q.'s proliferation activities."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Nov 2, 2009

Reality Check: The Hermit Kingdom by Christian Caryl - Foreign Policy

An unchanging, irrational Stalinist dictatorship? Not so much.

BY CHRISTIAN CARYL | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009

Forget the hairdos and the funny suits. Kim Jong Il is no madman.

We don't have access to his shrink, of course, but there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that he's irrational. In terms of judging his own people and the international community, he seems to have done a remarkable job with what he has been given. One reason: cold-eyed awareness of the reality of his position. He has told at least one reliable source that his own regime's propaganda is all lies, and he surely knows -- given that he maintains constant access to the Internet and CNN -- that his economy is a basket case and his country is an international pariah.

He also knows that it's almost impossible for him to reform without putting his own government (and probably his life) at risk. While Chinese communist leader Deng Xiaoping was able to allow in investors from Taiwan and Hong Kong to jump-start his economy without having to worry that they would end up calling the shots, Kim faces an unhappy neighbor in South Korea whose economic strength means that any sort of perestroika-style economic modernization could quickly lead to loss of political control. Indeed, Kim is thought to have circulated videotapes of the execution of Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to North Korean communist party members, just to make sure they get the point.

Given such constraints, Kim's hysterical rhetoric, missile launches, and stentorian nuclear threats look like a cynical but logical strategy for blackmailing the world into handing over adequate food and money for him to keep his regime in business. Kim may be a dictator, but he's not deluded.

What's more, it's not just about Kim. No one should be expecting the regime to change even if Kim himself departs (a prospect much discussed since his recent bout of poor health). Although Kim has reportedly tapped his third son as his official heir, the day-to-day affairs of the country have been run for years by the Kim-headed National Defense Commission, and Kim's powerful brother-in-law, who recently joined it, is already positioned to act as regent should Kim Senior pass away. Even if 26-year-old Kim Jong Un actually becomes the putative new Great Dear Bright Amazing Leader, he's likely -- given his youth and inexperience -- to be a figurehead.

And even if this latest Kim is granted some measure of real power, you can forget all those hopeful news reports about the presumably liberalizing effect of his purported Swiss education. For Kim 3.0 will face the brutal reality that his father does: Any substantial opening will entail ceding control to the much more powerful South. For the moment, though, the North is gradually moving toward some form of collective leadership. Its aging members will be reluctant to vote for any sort of drastic reform, but they'll face the same sort of pressures that Kim does today.

Those pressures are only increasing as North Korea grows more open to the world than at any point in its 60-year history. Notwithstanding ritual media references to North Korea as "static" and "Orwellian," today's North Korea is a place where people make a living off private markets and international trade. In the mid-1990s the North's economic mismanagement compounded the damage from flooding, triggering an epochal famine that killed as many as 2 million people. The corresponding collapse of state-managed networks for the production and distribution of food forced many North Koreans -- including party members -- to look to their own devices to keep themselves fed (and the government increasingly looked away). In 2002 Kim's government tacitly acknowledged this when it pushed through a series of tentative economic reforms that essentially allowed this minimal market sector to continue existing.

Under the "sunshine policy" instituted by the late South Korean President Kim Dae Jung at the beginning of this century, the North and South dramatically boosted economic cooperation, spurring trade and travel and even creating two enclaves inside the North where Southern managers and tourists mingled with Northerners. The North did its best to restrict access, but knowledge and goods from both zones have spilled out -- perhaps one reason why Pyongyang has seen fit to crack down on both of them in recent months. One defector told Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick in 2005: "It is not the same old North Korea anymore except in name."

Lately, according to scholars such as Andrei Lankov at South Korea's Kookmin University, the government has been struggling to push back against the unwanted consequences of this reluctant liberalization. Not long ago a Japanese newspaper reported a new wave of raids by so-called "109 squads," special police units that sweep through villages in search of illicit videos and music from the South. As recently noted by members of parliament in Seoul, smuggled South Korean ramen noodles and whoopie pies are particularly prized by those in the North who can afford them. Kim Jong Il has reason to take such trifles seriously. The number of North Koreans who have voted with their feet over the past decade, leaving the country for economic and political reasons, is now probably in the hundreds of thousands.

Of course, North Korea still maintains a vast police state that includes a network of concentration camps spanning the country. And yet there are also intriguing signs that the government's power is no longer unlimited. As part of the campaign to reassert its authority, the central government has repeatedly tried to crack down on the grass-roots private markets that serve as the main source of sustenance for ordinary folk, but so far it has notably failed to make the measures stick. An attempt to close a key market in the city of Chongjin last year actually set off public protests. And a new set of tough regulations this year has proven mysteriously hard to implement -- perhaps because communist party officials now rely on the markets to stay alive themselves.

Yet the idea that the North has enclosed itself in an airtight seal remains a staple of international coverage. That may have been accurate in the past. But over the last 10 years the country's trade with China has mushroomed, and with the inflow of Chinese goods have also come video players, South Korean DVDs, and illicit Bibles. Defectors report the popularity of everything from South Korean boy bands to the movie Titanic. As a result, the regime's propaganda has largely lost its punch.

North Korea's growing dependence on cross-border trade also means that it's much more vulnerable to external pressure than is commonly recognized. Many North Korea watchers think that sanctions imposed by the administration of George W. Bush in 2005 played a crucial role in bringing Pyongyang back to the six-party talks a few months later; the sanctions proved effective because many Chinese banks shut down their business with the North for fear of losing access to the U.S. financial sector. And this year trade between China and North Korea has slipped perceptibly -- perhaps because a new round of U.N. sanctions, imposed after Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon last year, has also affected the North's financial dealings with Chinese partners. That could be one reason why Pyongyang has suddenly started making overtures to the international community again after months of saber rattling.

So let's try to forget the lazy assumption that Kim is simply unhinged. (For what it's worth, at least one of the U.S. officials to have dealt directly with him, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, has repeatedly insisted that "Kim is not a nut.") There's no question that the regime remains extremely dangerous to its own citizens -- and potentially to the outside world as well, through proliferation or desperate acts of aggression. And many experts warn that it's highly unlikely that Pyongyang will ever give up its nukes. The nuclear program is the only national success story that Kim Jong Il can really call his own, making it a key source of legitimacy at a time when his standing is weaker than ever. But that doesn't mean that outside powers should take off the pressure. Containing North Korea's threats to international security will continue to be a full-time job.

A Glass Darkly - Desperate for Food

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In the early 1990s famine took hold in North Korea. The inefficient collective farms had never been able to feed the population and changing conditions caused China and Russia to cut back on the aid they had been supplying the regime. North Korea is a tightly controlled society and though no official figures are available (the regime ordered hospitals and physicians not to record starvation as a cause of death), it is estimated that up to a tenth of the population perished. That would amount to somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million people.

It has been said that people raised in Communist countries cannot fend for themselves, because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. When the public-distribution system was cut off, people tapped their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in fields, and draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants.

Women exchanged recipe tips: When making cornmeal, don’t throw out the husks, cob, leaves, and stem of the corn—throw everything into the grinder. Even if it isn’t nutritious, it is filling. Boil noodles for at least an hour to make them appear bigger. Add a few leaves of grass to soup to make it look as if it contained vegetables. Women would strip the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour.

North Koreans picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the roof to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.

The gathering and production of food was the focus of all enterprise. You woke up early to find your breakfast, and as soon as it was finished you thought about what to find for dinner. You slept during lunchtime because you were exhausted.

For more information read “The Good Cook: A battle against famine in North Korea” by Barbara Demick in The New Yorker (November 2, 2009) pp. 58-64.

You can find a audio-slide overview of Demick’s article here.

Oct 23, 2009

The Chosun Ilbo - Two Koreas 'in Secret Singapore Meeting'

There were secret contacts between the two Koreas in Singapore during Oct. 15-20, possibly to discuss an inter-Korean summit, South Korean officials have admitted. Speaking on condition of anonymity, officials said Kim Yang-gon, the director of North Korea's United Front Department, secretly visited China and contacted a South Korean official. The official has not been identified but is believed to be unconnected to the Unification Ministry.

Korea Broadcasting System (KBS) on Thursday said a South Korean official secretly met with Kim in Singapore and discussed the summit question. Quoting an intelligence official, KBS said Kim arrived in Beijing on Oct. 15 but went to Singapore with Won Tong-yon, a ranking member of the Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, and contacted a high ranking South Korean official there. The contact was initiated by the North Korean side, it added.

The South Korean official told Kim that a summit would require a fundamental change in the North Korean nuclear issue, and that no economic assistance could be promised for the summit, the broadcaster claimed. He also insisted that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il will have to visit Seoul this time as two previous summits took place in North Korea. The negotiations ended inconclusively as the North Koreans objected to the idea of Kim Jong-il traveling to the South for security reasons, it added.

A source in Beijing confirmed that the meeting took place. One key figure in the ruling Grand National Party said, "North Korea has long requested a meeting with a person who can speak on behalf of President Lee Myung-bak, and it is true that such a meeting was recently on the verge of happening, but since news of the meeting was made public, meetings of senior officials from both Koreas will be difficult to hold for some time."