Isolating the Isolated

While Pakistan’s internal civil wars, conflicts that will only escalate as the United States accelerates its efforts in Afghanistan and pushes more Taliban and their sympathizers into Pakistan’s ungovernable “safe havens,” making that country the most dangerous nation on earth, there is another nuclear power that seems to have made a pact with the devil. No, it’s not Iran. It’s North Korea.

Reading North Korean tea leaves is exceptionally difficult, and even Western intelligence agencies fall way short of providing accurate information about this dark and cruel place. We know the leadership is well supplied with luxury goods and access to various forms of Western decadence. We understand that significant profits are generated from land, desperately needed to grow food for this starving nation, turned to growing high-profit crops that feed narcotics addicts globally, enhancing the coffers of the privileged permitted to run these drug farms. Force labor and harsh conditions abound as local residents are denied access to information about the rest of the world. They see and hear only what Dear Leader – Kim Jong-il (and soon his son, Kim Jong-un) – want them to see and hear.

But Kim Jong-il’s health has forced him to prepare for a transition, one that required the consent of a powerful military. Kim embarrassingly wanted his “line of succession” – a “communist crown” he inherited from his father – to pass on to his son, Kim Jong-un. This oxymoronic lineal communist dictatorship did not have sufficient power, in my opinion, for simply ordering the young scion of this “il” family to take power. Instead, Dear Leader had to make significant concessions to his generals.

It’s hard not to make this conclusion when all of the nuclear and missile tests, the open hostility to the United States and the rest of the world, are taking place at precisely the time when the transition of power is being implemented. It seems as if the generals got Kim Jong-il to grant their requests to push their military hardware/supremacy program to the max, at the expense of near uniform global condemnation and the inevitable escalation of “sanctions” further denying North Korea from access to needed food and medical supplies – all to secure the generals’ consent to the ascension of Kim Jong-un to take his father’s place.

But how do you isolate an already-isolated land? How do you punish a nation – deprive it of food and medical supplies – when the leadership doesn’t remotely care about its people and can supply the hedonistic requirements of the top leadership with occasional flights to secure those luxuries? As an American task force follows a suspicious North Korean cargo ship across the seas, you have to wonder if the North simply loaded the boat with an innocuous cargo simply to make the Americans look foolish.

To underscore the futility of an enhanced blockade to prevent the delivery of goods to the impoverished North, the leadership just banned a number of imports – including Chinese foodstuffs and products – and severely limited the rights of the locals to conduct open-air markets (particularly in the north, near the Chinese border) that had been sanctioned in 2002 after a period of extreme food shortages and mass starvation. In effect, the North Korean government has imposed effective “sanctions” on itself to show the world the absolute futility of imposing genuine sanctions in response to the nuclear and missile tests. They are slapping the rest of the world in the face and taking a great step backward to make a point.

The July 5^th Los Angeles Times: “Farmers markets that had been permitted to sell homegrown vegetables, usually laid out on tarpaulins on the ground, gradually expanded. Traders (many crossing the border illegally) started importing Chinese goods, including children's sneakers, bananas and DVD players. North Koreans brightened up their famously drab landscape a bit by wearing pinks, polka dots and paisleys, occasionally sporting T-shirts with English writing….

“[But now] many Chinese goods are now taboo that markets stock only about 35% of the merchandise previously available, some say. ‘They want to promote our own products made in North Korea, but since everything is ‘made in China,’ there is nothing to buy,’ said Kim Young Chul, a civilian working for the North Korean military who had come to China to sell wild ginseng on behalf of his employer.

“The open-air markets where people do most of their buying and selling are now open only from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. The only people permitted to sell at the markets are women older than 50; everybody else is required to spend their days at their official jobs at government-run businesses. …‘They're telling us that we don't need markets and that socialism provides everything we need,’ said an unemployed factory worker in her 50s, who gave her name as Lee Myong Hee…” Kim Jong-il betrayed his own people, accepted the will of the hardliners in the military, just to seal the “legitimacy” of his family’s rule.

The Times: “‘The North Koreans want to close off their country so they will not be hurt by sanctions. They think everybody is out to ruin their country and they are getting rid of anything that could be a threat,’ said Cho Myong-chol, a former economics professor at Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University who defected to South Korea in 1994.” As much as we despise the North Korean leadership, it is hard to feel anything but pity for the average isolated, under-nourished and exceptionally impoverished citizen of this inhumane nation of power-hungry and vain leaders.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.