Where is Amnesy International?  From the Chosun:

Police in Tianjin, China are indiscriminately taking fingerprints and blood samples from ethnic Koreans there to investigate the murder of a Korean student. Angry ethnic Koreans in the city said Tuesday that police started taking fingerprints and blood samples by visiting their homes and Korean companies there. A Korean running a company there who gave his name as Lee (50) said, “Two investigators with Chinese law enforcement came to our office today and sampled finger prints of all of 10 fingers and blood from four Korean workers and two ethnic Korean workers.”

Police target Korean men between 25 and 45 who have been living there, Korean residents said. Sampling is being carried out across the city. Police say they concluded the murder of a 20-year-old Korean woman who was studying there at an apartment in the Hexi District on Oct. 2 was committed by an acquaintance. An ethnic Korean identified as Lee (50) said, “Police consider every Korean adult man living here a suspect. This is a serious infringement on human rights, to indiscriminately take fingerprints and blood from foreigners.”

The usual human rights groups are probably to busy investigating more important things like false claims of Korans being flushed down the toilet at Gitmo to be bothered by such things as gulags in North Korea or an involuntary round up of Koreans in China.

Some bad autumn weather is hitting the east coast of Korea:

People in Gangwon Province on Monday (Oct. 23) suffered damage from unusually heavy fall rain and strong winds.

Heavy rain warnings and alerts were issued in the province. Hyangnobong Peak received 252 millimeters of rainfall, Misiryeong 260 millimeters, Sokcho 201 millimeters and Goseong 87 millimeters. The rainfall was the largest recorded for the latter part of October in the regions.

Winds with a speed of 20 meters per second also struck the region, and strong wind warnings were issued. Trees and signboards on many streets were blown down.

A dozen fishing vessels that were docked at harbors broke loose and many sank. Some houses and roads were inundated and seven elementary schools closed temporarily. About 13,000 households lost power.

It will be interesting to see if the North Koreans will use this flooding from this recent bad weather in order to get more free aid from the South Koreans.

Brian at Gangwon Notes has pictures up of the storm damage as well.

The DOW has past the 12,000 mark setting new all time highs despite the war in Iraq and the North Korean nuclear threat.  Now even more good news is coming out about the US economy:

The Labor Department Friday announced that the number of jobs increased between April 2005 and March 2006 not by 5.8 million but by 6.6 million.
…
The federal budget deficit has been cut in half in three years, three years faster than George W. Bush called for. Why? Tax receipts were up 5.5 percent in FY 2004, 14.5 percent in FY 2005, and 11.7 percent in FY 2006. That’s up 34.9 percent in three years. And that’s after the 2003 tax cuts.

So why isn’t anyone hearing about this?  Why is it only doom and gloom in the media?  Could it be because the media would rather show you footage of sniper attacks killing US servicemen in Iraq before the November election?

HT: CDR Salamander

I suspect the same is true in Korea as well:

But while reports of robberies by U.S. servicemembers may grab local headlines, cabbies say they have more problems with their countrymen, whether combative drunks or thieves. Most drivers interviewed recently by Stars and Stripes said they feel safer on the bases.

“If I work at night, I have to expect lots of scary situations,” said Yukio Kawamitsu, 56, as he waited for a fare recently on Camp Foster. “Japanese passengers, too, sometimes give us a hard time because many of them are drunk.

“In fact, when dealing with drunken customers, Americans are much easier because we cannot communicate fully. Some Japanese customers get really fussy, giving us hard time.”

(…)

“It’s much easier,” said Takemasa Chibana, who is with a taxi company that has base access. He said American riders are more polite and trips are shorter. “When I worked for an off-base company, I had to drive about 250 kilometers (about 155 miles) every day,” he said. “On base, I only have to drive half of it to earn about the same amount.

If you live in Kunsan they are looking for volunteers to help teach English:

“When I explain this to people on base, I tell them to think of ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ with Robin Williams, when he tries to teach them a song,” said Barrett, who works in the Logistical Readiness Squadron’s inventory section.

Unfortunately for Kunsan area schools, there aren’t enough Patrick Barretts to go around. There are 19 airmen volunteering their time every other Saturday, down from 63 when the program started in 2001.

Meanwhile, there are about 70 schools that would like a volunteer English teacher from the base, said Rosemary Song, Kunsan Air Base community relations director. Base officials usually make a push for volunteers during the summer and winter school breaks.

During those breaks, the base also supports English camps, where airmen immerse students in American culture. The children practice the language skills they learn in school, but also learn how to buy groceries and use the post office.

The winter camp is fully booked with volunteers, Song said; however, many more are wanted for Saturday mornings.

Now a days it seems like you can almost always count on “Low Quality Foreign English Teachers^TM” to take GI incidents out of the headlines:

A dozen Korean-American, American and Canadian English-language lecturers were under investigation for taking drugs on Monday.

Police said that they detected 12 English lecturers at private institutes, or “hagwons,’’ on suspicion of taking marijuana, Philopon or methamphetamine.

They arrested five Korean-Americans and two Americans, while charging without detention two Korean-Americans, a Korean-Canadian, a Canadian and an American.

The teachers, who are in their 20s and 30s, have worked as English lecturers at hagwons in Seoul and Kyonggi Province since early 2000 and habitually taken drugs at their residences, according to police.

The seven Korean-Americans, who emigrated to the U.S. when young, belonged to Korean-American crime rings there, such as Korean Play Boy. They were deprived of their permanent resident status by their host country for their involvement in drug trafficking, illegal gun possession and robbery, the police said.

After being expelled from the U.S., they got the jobs at the institutes with fake diplomas obtained through a broker.

Now a days it seems like you can almost always count on “Low Quality Foreign English Teachers^TM” to take GI incidents out of the headlines. 

What Yongsan busnapping?

By the way another quick observation, permanent residency card holders are not citizens thus they are not Korean-Americans as labeled in the article, they are in fact Koreans.

A whole lot more over at the Marmot’s Hole.

So will the Korean government dispatch troops to Lebanon?:

South Korea has finished a field survey of Lebanon before deciding whether to contribute troops to U.N. peacekeeping forces there, government officials said Monday.

“But we need more time to consult with the relevant authorities before deciding whether to send our troops to Lebanon,” said a government official, who was one of the four members of the survey team sent to the Middle Eastern country.

Let me translate this for those of you who don’t speak Korean BS.  What this government official is really trying to say is that the Korean government really doesn’t want to send troops there, but they probably will have to since Ban Ki-moon is going to be the UN Secretary General and they want to save face for him.  So what they are trying to find is a nice peaceful area, preferably one with great internet access for Starcraft gaming, where they can base some troops who will do nothing, but it will appear that the Koreans are doing something; much like all the other UN troops in Lebanon.

I have a great recommendation for the Korean government.  How about you load up the Zaytun unit from it’s comfortable confines in peaceful Kurdistan and have them set up shop in Lebanon?

2ID soldiers continue to aid the family of one of the girls killed in the 2002 accident:

Four years after a military vehicle killed two South Korean children, 2nd Infantry Division soldiers still are making amends.

About 25 soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division’s G-9 Civil Military Operations section and 15 South Korean soldiers helped harvest the farm on Thursday of Shin Hyun-soo, the father of one of the dead children.

Soldiers arrived at 10 a.m. and harvested eggplant, soybeans and peppers on about 18,000 square feet of farmland.

The family still mourns the loss of their 13-year-old daughter, Shin Hyo-soon, who was killed with Shim Mi-sun by a U.S. Army 60-ton tracked bridge carrier while crossing a country road in Yangju.

And they have welcomed the soldiers’ help each year since the girls died.

The family members “were actually very warm,” Lt. Col. Todd Goehler said. “They greeted all of the soldiers and we had a good lunch with them.”

 What I find interesting is that with all the anti-US groups that love to use the deceased girls image during the protests, none of them bother to do anything to help the families of the deceased girls.  That is because the anti-US groups don’t care about the families they just want to use the girls images to promote their own anti-US agenda.

I’m not really surprised but it appears that Korean President Roh Moo-hyun is slowly building a fan club at the New York Times. It must be one of those, “the enemy of my enemy, is my friend” kind of things since neither Roh or the New York Times cares much for President Bush. The latest NY Times article on North Korea is from Nicholas Kristof who has plenty of interesting things to say about
North Korea.

Send in the Fat Guys

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

A North Korean visiting
South Korea once sniffed that all the cars must have been brought in from around the country just to make a good impression for his visit. His South Korean host added dryly that it had been even more difficult to bring in all the tall buildings. Such interactions with the outside world are the best hope to chip away at North Korean totalitarianism, but we’ve missed the opportunity because for decades we’ve conspired with Kim Jong-il to isolate his people.Lately Americans have been quarreling over who is more to blame for
North Korea’s nuclear test, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Well, Mr. Clinton inherited a situation that, if it had continued, would have resulted in
North Korea having hundreds of nuclear weapons by now, and producing an additional 50 each year. Instead, Mr. Clinton negotiated a deal with
North Korea that resulted in it producing not a single ounce of new plutonium in his eight years in office.In contrast, President Bush inherited that North Korean nuclear freeze and, if he had just left it alone,
North Korea wouldn’t have produced any new plutonium. But Mr. Bush overruled Colin Powell’s efforts to continue the engagement and so
North Korea has churned out enough plutonium on Mr. Bush’s watch for perhaps eight nuclear weapons.

Of course Kristoff has to bring up the blame game of
Clinton had it right and Bush has it wrong. As I have said before
Clinton tried paying blackmail diplomacy in 1994 and it didn’t work partly because the North Koreans continued a covert nuclear program anyway because they need nuclear weapons for regime survival as well as for nationalistic reasons. The Clinton White House probably knew about it and that is why the two light water reactors they promised to build were never seriously constructed. Later the Bush Administration confronted the North Koreans on their covert program and the North Koreans even admitted to it and of course demanded more blackmail more bi-lateral diplomatic talks over the program.

But in a larger sense, the North Korean nuclear test and the fact that Kim Jong-il is still in power represent a failure not so much of either Mr. Bush or Mr. Clinton, but of decades of bipartisan American policy that aimed to isolate the North. Look around the world at the regimes we despise: North Korea, Cuba, Burma and
Iran. Those are among the world’s most long-lived regimes, and that’s partly because the sanctions and isolation we have imposed on them have actually propped them up by giving those countries leaders an excuse for their economic failures and a chance to cloak themselves in nationalism.

The North Koreans don’t need isolation as an excuse to blame foreigners for economic failures or to create more nationalism. Look at South Korea, the Asian Financial Crisis in the 90’s is called the IMF crisis in South Korea because the South Korean government blamed the IMF for the crisis thus in turn turn blaming the big, bad foreigners for the financial crisis instead of the government’s own backwards financial and banking policies that actually led to the crisis. To this day the people in
South Korea still believe foreigners are to blame for the Asian Financial Crisis in the 90’s. Nationalism is also as high as ever in South Korea when dealing with foreigners especially the Japanese and the
United States. I could write a book on the number of things Koreans blame the Japanese and the
United States for. Heck I could write a book on just the things Koreans blame “Low Quality Canadian English Teachers^TM ” for much less the US and
Japan. Whether you engage or isolate the North Koreans it doesn’t matter, foreigners will still be scapedgoated for the North Korean regimes failures.

Kim Jong-il sees that the best way to preserve North Korean totalitarianism is in the formaldehyde of its own isolation. In effect, Mr. Kim has placed sanctions on his own country, and we’re abetting him.In the 1970’s, North Korea poked its head out of its shell, negotiating with
South Korea, seeking foreign investors and sending letters to Jimmy Carter seeking talks. Mr. Carter considered inviting the leaders of North and South Korea to a summit meeting at a place like
Camp David but dropped the idea when his own aides reacted with horror.Yet if we had held such a meeting, and gradually encouraged trade and other contacts,
North Korea’s regime might well have collapsed by now. At least, it would have moderated enough that the country would look like China or
Vietnam. I lived in China in the 1980’s and 1990’s when Communist ideology was collapsing there, and I’m convinced that the best way to undermine North Korea’s government would be to send in business executives overweight ones, if possible. In a country like
North Korea, where the government responded to famine by broadcasting a cautionary documentary about a man who exploded after eating too much rice, nothing would be more subversive than tubby foreigners.

The China example doesn’t work in Kim Jong-il’s case because the economic reforms put forward by Deng Xiaoping that have led to today’s current economic success didn’t happen until Mao was dead. Mao couldn’t completely open the country for fear the population would see his lies for what they were and revolt against him. Once he was dead new leaders could gradually open the country and as the population became more connected to the outside world any failures of the past would be Mao’s failures not the new leadership’s who were working to improve Chinese life. Much like
Mao, North Korea cannot open up to the outside world until Kim Jong-il is dead and a new leader can start with a clean slate and slowly open the country without fear of losing his head. Kim Jong-il will never completely open the country and anyone thinking otherwise is wasting their time trying to form policy around that belief.

Mr. Bush is right that we have to punish North Korea for its brazen nuclear test, and the administration has been sensible and prudent in the last few weeks in devising a series of penalties. But after
North Korea drags itself back to six-party talks, we should begin to move away from our long, failed strategy of trying to isolate the world’s most isolated country. In particular, it’s a mistake for us to reproach the South Koreans who have more of a stake than anybody, and who understand the North Koreans better than we do for operating factories in the Kaesong industrial zone in
North Korea. It’s true that those North Korean workers have no rights, and that
North Korea will use the hard currency to bolster its military. But those South Korean factories are expected to employ 700,000 workers by 2012.While North Korea can survive punitive sanctions, I don’t think the regime can survive the shock of having 700,000 of its citizens working for South Korean capitalists and realizing that the southerners are so rich and spoiled that they refuse to eat rice with gravel in it. The biggest threat to
North Korea’s regime isn’t from American warships, but from the sight of other Koreans dieting, or listening on iPods to love songs, or watching decadent television comedies.So let’s stop helping the Dear Leader isolate his own people.

First of all I find it interesting that people on the left will condemn western companies for operating sweat shops in Latin America for example, but when it comes to
North Korea they are willing to look the other way. Anyway, the majority of the people in South Korea don’t even support the current Uri government and more than likely a more conservative administration will be elected next year which may mean the end of the
Kaesong project all together, though I have my doubts. The Kaesong Industrial Zone was part of the Sunshine Policy that believed that economic engagement would be reawarded with better behavior from
North Korea and most importantly keeping the status quo on the peninsula so the economy could continue to surge. The economic projects with
North Korea was nothing more than a bribe for the North Koreans to behave so South Koreans can continue their own economic success. The North Koreans haven’t behaved and South Koreans feel betrayed some what by the North Koreans but as recent polls have shown more South Koreans blame the big, bad foreigners for the nuclear test than the North Koreans. South Koreans could care less about human rights and reunification with North Korea when their ability to own a Hyundai and take vacations to
Guam are threatened. Thus the current South Korean government believes the bribes need to continue and much like the American left, wishes the US government would just hurry up and pay off Kim Jong-il as well, so this would all just go away. HT: Florida Maschist

First of all, big hat tip to One Free Korea for providing the links to two interesting articles on North Korea.  The first article is about nationalism on the Korean peninsula:

Because nationalism is more of a collective belief than a particular policy, the positions adopted in its name can evolve, even rotate. Inter-Korean hostility subsided as a result of the “sunshine policy” initiated by former President Kim Dae-jung, who dropped the stance of utter hostility taken by the conservative generals who ruled South Korea from the 1960’s until the 1990’s. The same national pride that set North and South against each other can also create common ties. Now, instead of regarding the North as a violently psychotic regime, the southern attitude is more along the indulgent yet exasperated lines of “Oh, no, what’s our nutty brother done today?” Particularly among South Koreans with no memories of the Korean War — that’s now most of the country — yearnings for peace and good relations, as well as anti-Americanism, are stronger than the hostile anti-Communist intent of their fathers and grandfathers. And in the wake of Germany’s costly unification, policy makers in Seoul realize that the collapse of the North, which an older generation wished for, would create a high degree of political instability and an enormous financial burden that should perhaps be avoided. This helps explain why Seoul has limited its antinuclear criticism of the North, and why South Koreans aren’t rushing for bomb shelters quite yet.

Wacky nationalism is nothing new for those of us who have spent time in Korea, but it is a good article to read for those who don’t understand why South Korea takes such a soft approach towards North Korea.

The second article is on the increasingly falling information blockade over North Korea:

“Money now trumps ideology for an increasing number of North Koreans, and that has allowed this underground railroad to flourish,” said Peter M. Beck, the Northeast Asia project director in Seoul, South Korea, of the International Crisis Group, which has extensively researched the subject in several Asian countries and is publishing a report. “The biggest barrier to leaving North Korea is just money. If you have enough money, you can get out quite easily. It speaks to the marketization of North Korea, especially since economic reforms were implemented in 2002. Anything can be bought in the North now.”

“The state’s control is weakening at the periphery,” Mr. Beck said, explaining that most refugees came out of the North’s rural areas but few from around Pyongyang, where the state’s grip remained strong.

State control may be decreasing on the periphery, but before real change can come to North Korea, Kim Jong-il’s political base in Pyongyang also needs to have a collapse of the information blockade as well.  Will the new sanctions cause this to happen?  Time will tell.