Mixed Fortunes for Former Friends

Last Friday, South Korean lawmaker-elect Lee Seok Gi was reminded again that the party in whose name he was elected to the National Assembly on April 11^th, has not really got the guts to expel him in order to reform itself.

If it had unexpectedly shown the degree of backbone needed to kick him out then it would not have been undeserved, however. Having emerged onto the political landscape at the beginning of the year as a proportional representation candidate for the hard left-leaning United Progressive Party (UPP), Lee has come under near constant pressure to jump ship since compelling evidence linking him to electoral fraud in a January primary election was uncovered. Voices of condemnation then rose to a crescendo when a section of the party which supports Lee spent seven hours systematically disrupting a televised central committee meeting on May 12^th; crashing the stage, pushing and shoving party leaders, tearing clothing and finally bringing about the adjournment of the entire event.

It is said that the purpose of the violence was to protect the right of both Lee and fellow proportional representative Kim Jae Yeon to enter the National Assembly. The event had been set up to facilitate a vote on the establishment of an emergency leadership entity whose actions, Lee’s supporters rightly feared, would result in the two being compelled to give up their seats.

The Darkness of Heart, by Prof. Ra Jong Yil

On May 14th, 2012, Professor Ra Jong Yil of Hanyang University, a Roh Moo Hyun-era ambassador in both Tokyo and London, as well as a former head of the South Korean National Intelligence Service, gave a keynote address to an international conference on North Korean human rights in LA.

The speech, which I was lucky enough to see beforehand, is very much worth reading for a number of reasons; however, primary among these is that Professor Ra, an avowed progressive figure "from way back" and someone close to the very heart of the Sunshine Policy itself, seems to be on the verge of playing a role in the election battle of de facto Saenuri Party leader Park Geun Hye this year.

It is hard to envision at this stage what might emerge from such a combination of conservative politics that would hopefully be more compassionate than those of Lee Myung Bak and progressive thought that hopefully would have learned the lessons, both good and bad, of the Sunshine Policy era. Of course, we cannot forget that both the Democratic United Party and North Korea would want to have a say in what emerged from it, too.

But in any case, this is a good time to start reading the tea leaves, and I cannot think of a better place to do that than with 'The Darkness of Heart- On the Prolonged Abuse of Human Rights by State Power.'

Too Many Conspiracy Theories, Too Little Time

The U.S.-based blog NK News recently took a number of media outlets (and here, although it has been corrected) to task in an enjoyable and clear-cut debunking of what we shall henceforth call “The Mad Myth of the $15 Website”. To paraphrase the story; the aforementioned media outlets took the website of the Korea Friendship Association to be an official DPRK government website, which it isn't, and reported that it had been redesigned using a $15 template, which it had. Thus, following the very well worn path outlined in 'North Korea Reporting 101', the North Korean government was once again made to look not only mad and bad, but also cheap.

It was a good and necessary debunking, and one which has now inspired me to engage in a little debunking of my own; namely, of a Radio Free Asia (RFA) article from April 26th, ‘North, Tracking Down Spreaders of Rocket Launch Failure Facts.’ (The original article has vanished, but this Chosun Ilbo one was based on it.)

According to the article, the North Korean authorities are now hunting down students guilty of claiming that the Unha-3/Gwangmyungsung-3 launch of April 13th was a failure. It cites a university student from North Hamkyung Province as saying, “In Hoiryeong University of Education, they are seeking out those students who spread the false rumor that the Gwangmyungsung-3 launch failed. On the 21st they handed down an order to this effect to the NSA agents responsible for the university in a meeting of academic department leaders and Party cell secretaries.”

Still more controversially, it says that North Korea's televised admission of launch failure was a sham: “They organized for all the ‘television relay stations’ that convert the satellite signal for relay to the regions of North Korea to be shut off so the people of North Korea could not watch.”

According to the RFA source, who presumably hails from Hoiryeong, nobody had cared about the satellite launch when it happened since there had been so many celebratory events to attend and tasks to deal with, but “following the culmination of the Day of the Sun celebrations on April15th, the satellite launch failure rumor started spreading bit-by-bit.

In a convoluted explanation of a kind that always makes me suspicious, the article also goes on to explain that the focus is on university students because they generally do have an interest in the launch failure issue, whereas common people don’t care very much about it at all, so the authorities have moved to quash the idea of launch failure at source, telling students that it was a plot by the enemy to spread information “harmful to the esteem of the Republic.”

Which is odd, is it not? Because what we know to be true is that on April 13th, just four hours after the failure of the ‘Unha-3’ rocket launch, news that the ‘Gwangmyungsung-3’ satellite it carried had “failed to enter orbit” was released in a special newscast by a Chosun Central TV anchor.

So what happened? Would the North Korean authorities really have gone to the frankly implausible lengths of producing a TV news program acknowledging the failure, but not even in a truthful way, since all they did was concede that the satellite had failed to enter orbit, and then organising for all the TV signal relay stations in the country to go down at the same time in order that the man on the street would be unable to see it?

Such a story would certainly fit in with a particular strain of North Korea reporting; the same kind that resulted in The Mad Myth of the $15 Website, as it happens. But, as usual, the simplest explanation is the right one. Simply, the story is nonsense.

My evidence for this is two-fold. First, I was actually in Pyongyang on the day after the test, and during that time I was asked by more than one person on more than one occassion for my opinion of the launch failure. In one exchange, an official with the main North Korean tourist authority engaged me in an entertaining discussion (in front of the USS Pueblo, for those who wish to visualize), during which he politely but confidently reminded me of the difference between a launch “failure” and a “failure of a satellite to enter orbit.”

Our conversation went on for some time, covering the nature of rocket launches, how hard it is to put satellites in orbit, and South Korea’s own two failed launches (which were both well reported in Rodong Shinmun and are widely known about in North Korea). Finally, we settled on a politically non-controversial position; that North Korea has limited resources and is doing quite well to have gotten this far. Surely, we agreed, they will get it right next time. He had, of course, seen the news on TV.

Aware that despite all my investigative in-situ efforts, readers might still be prepared to believe that either a) only the people of Pyongyang were allowed to watch the broadcast, or better yet b) that the tourist official had been primed by the shadowy Workers' Party to persuade me toward this way of thinking, my second piece of evidence is that I also took the time to ask a number of North Koreans whether their friends, family and contacts know about the story, and not one of them, not even one, did not know about the failure. For example, one of those I spoke to told me, "I spoke to my brother and he knew all about it, and my friends knew, too."

So they saw it on TV? "Yes."

Potemkin ICBMs: So Good We Had to Hide Them

The game of "are they real or ain't they" which has surrounded a set of ICBMs on (allegedly) Chinese TEL's that North Korea allowed to rumble through Pyongyang on the 15th doesn't particularly interest me, but for the sake of adding circumstantial evidence to the "they're clearly just mock-ups" hypothesis, here is a picture from a friend of mine, Tony Henshall, with whom I was lucky enough to enjoy the parade in question from a location just across the Taedong River.

North Korean ICBM on Chinese TEL crossing Okryu Bridge in Pyongyang, April 15th, 2012 (©Tony Henshall)

As you can see, Tony has done us the service of capturing a lovely shot of one of the mysterious projectiles on its TEL coming across Okryu Bridge, i.e moments after it passed through Kim Il Sung Square.

Note that unlike every other piece of military hardware that passed by, these "ICBMs" were all shrouded in camouflage netting, just like the one above. Admittedly I'm not a military man, but I couldn't help thinking that this did not mean that the weapons were actually so advanced that the Chosun People's Army dared not let foreigners see them close up lest they sell the secrets abroad; rather, that the closer one were allowed to get to them, the less believable they were likely to become.

The takeaway? At the very least it makes me wonder whether our North Korea policy might not be best off starting with, "Your rockets don't work, your missiles are fake and you can never launch your nukes in anger anyway, so what exactly are you hoping to achieve?"

Strategic patience? Strategic indifference, perhaps.

Holding North Korea to a Higher Standard

Shortly before I was due to fly out of Gimpo Aiport on a perfectly serviceable, relatively inexpensive and wholly successful (notwithstanding some fairly unfriendly service) China Southern Airlines jet plane on the morning of the 13th, the North Korean regime finally pinged its much vaunted, long awaited and reportedly rather more expensive ‘Unha-3’ rocket into the sky. But, as we all know, it wasn’t up there for long; indeed, back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that my antiquated Boeing flying machine was in the sky for approximately 110 times longer than the mysterious projectile let loose from Cheolsan County in North Pyongan Province at 7:39AM. It also came down in both the location and manner intended.

However, neither the China Southern success story nor the North Korean failure was the interesting point. The interesting point was that the North actually admitted to the failure on Chosun Central TV just four hours after it happened. Naturally, the question was and remains, “Why?”

The truth is probably simple, as the truth often is. In essence, the authorities were forced to quickly conclude that they couldn’t keep such a thing under wraps forever. 

Born of watching Pyongyang’s approach to World Cup qualifying matches over a number of tournament cycles, my hypothesis is that the authorities had assumed (wrongly) that they would be able to manage the launch by recording it and then showing it off to reporters as and when it had been confirmed as a success (a fair presumption being that this would be the case, since the last time a similar stunt was tried the rocket went a very, very long way indeed).

This plan, had it been implemented, would have been in contrast to that of 2010, when the North went into the World Cup in South Africa with unreasonably high hopes after stunning Asia with an exceptional qualifying round performance, and the authorities therefore decided that the finals would be broadcast live to the folks back home. Only losing by a single goal to Brazil in the North’s opening match exacerbated this illusory trend, but that then made losing 7-1 to Portugal a few days later come as a very nasty shock indeed. The takeaway? One must be vigilant for errors born of chance. Micromanage: record, record, record.

However, this cautious initial plan was impossible for two reasons. First, with so many international journalists, tourists and pin-badged Friendship Association riff-raff loitering around the place, the likelihood of the Pyongyang citizenry finding out about the failure for themselves was deemed to be extremely high, meaning that the regime felt it would be better off revealing the "failure to enter orbit" for itself; and second, with so many people (a) able to hear the news from South Korean radio stations in places like Kaesong and (b) receiving it in the process of doing cross-border business in China, the chances of the truth leaking into society via those routes was considered similarly great, meaning that the traditional twin options of either claiming success or simply saying nothing were out of reach.

Thus the North was, for almost the first time in history, forced to admit to failure.

In the light of that fact, one question stands out: could it be that if the international media, notably Associated Press but also ITAR-TASS and Xinhua, were to “man up” and do the job journalists should be doing in deeply inhospitable environs (rather than the opposite, which KCNA already does to great effect) and if the South Korean government could simultaneously be persuaded to permit a broad range of radio broadcasters to utilize domestic FM frequencies to broadcast (informative, rather than openly propagandist) news and current affairs information into North Korea on a daily basis, at cheaper rates and with greater clarity than current circumstances allow, then we would have the capacity to hold the government of Kim Jong Eun to higher standards of honesty going forward than has ever been the case before?

You may scoff and say that nothing has changed. But there's only one way to find out.