In Praise of an Imaginary Theme Park

Thanks to U.S. missionary Robert Park, North Koreans woke up Friday, February 5th to a new twist on old propaganda. We still live in the Happiest Place on Earth, crowed the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), but today we have an American’s words to prove it.

“I have never seen such kind and generous people,” gushes Park, who walked through the main gates of the Hermit Kingdom on Christmas Day. “Religious freedom is fully ensured… I’ve learned that in the DPRK people can read and believe whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want… The DPRK respects the rights of all the people and guarantees their freedom and they enjoy a happy and stable life.”

Since it’s unlikely Park could be so thoroughly brainwashed within the space of six short weeks (the North Koreans are good, but they’re not that good), his cascading words are more likely a reflection of either a false confession signed in exchange for freedom or a third-party narrative cooked up by the 1960s English dictionary-toting KCNA crew.

Regardless, the Tumen River damage has – once again – been done. In a place where the brainwashed masses have been led to believe that Kim Jong-il is the karmic equivalent of Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Goofy, 28-year-old would-be martyr Park has inadvertently put his stamp of approval on a map of North Korea that ignores TomorrowLand in favor of Fantasyland, where glorious churches stand in place of odious labor camps. Or, to use another Walt analogy, Park has ended up singing the praises of a World of Laughter rather than a World of Tears, a World of Hope over a World of Fear.

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Winding Down the Year of the Ox

Those who pay attention to the Chinese calendar know that we are at the tail end (pun intended) of a Year of the Ox, which began January 26th, 2009 and ends February 14th, 2010. However, over the past few days, formerly imprisoned reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling have been doing their best to embrace a new year of the X-O-X-O-X-O.

On Friday, January 22nd, it was confirmed that Laura has ended her five-year professional association with Current TV, citing as one of the reasons a desire to focus on starting a family. Meanwhile, a day later in Chicago, Euna told an audience at an @AACChicago event that the hardest thing about the specter of a North Korean labor camp was not knowing whether she would be able to survive the ordeal so as to eventually reunite with her husband Michael Saldate and daughter Hana. For both women, understandably, what counts most in the wake of escaping the clutches of Pyongyang (beyond perhaps good health) is the importance of loved ones.

Intriguingly, the man who was put in the hot seat by Laura and Euna’s actions at the Chinese-North Korean border on the morning of March 17th, Barack Obama, was born in a previous Year of the Ox – 1961. This despite the fact that a description of traits shared by Ox Year people, offered up by the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, makes Obama sound more like the Dear Leader: angers easily, has a fierce temper, is extremely stubborn…

On the other hand, it seems perfectly fitting that Kim Jong-il was born during a Year of the Snake (1941), not to mention that the man beckoned to Pyongyang by said slitherer to rescue Ling and Lee, Bill Clinton, bears the mark of the Dog (1946). If this were North Korea, a state-mandated glorious retelling of the tanglings of the Ox, the mighty Serpent and the Dog would probably already be on the shelves. But on this side of the Pacific, we can look forward instead to a pair of books by Lee and the Ling sisters that will celebrate the halo of the X-O-X-O-X-O.

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Robert Park’s Misguided Criticism

In an interview given to @Reuters by Robert Park shortly before he wandered across the North Korean border on Christmas Day (video of interview here), the Tucson, AZ Christian activist – who had previously been ministering to Hermit Kingdom refugees along the Chinese border – had harsh words for Laura Ling and Euna Lee.

“As a result of what happened to the journalists, a refugee friend of mine said it was one of the best things that happened for North Korea’s liberation. This was shortly after it happened and they were freed [August 4th]. But now it has become worse because the journalists have not spoken out about the human rights crisis. They were ransomed for a lot of money and they went home and wrote a book.”

Though Bill Clinton was shown arriving in Pyongyang with a suitcase, and our friend Spelunker speculated it could be full of money, that notion has never been corroborated. Similarly, no book about the Ling-Lee ordeal has yet been written; towards the end of the year, Euna signed a deal with Random House’s Broadway Books and is currently working on her tome. Finally, albeit quietly, Ling and Lee have both been urging people to support the New York-based refugee charity LiNK (Liberty in North Korea).

Park would have been better served to embrace the actions of the @Current duo. Like the 28-year-old Park, the then 32-year-old Ling and 36-year-old Lee were trying to shine a light on the same general story that isn’t being told. And, if you believe the account publicized just before Park’s crossing by the two border guards who apprehended the American reporters, the guide who shepherded Ling, Lee and Mitchell Koss across the frozen Tumen River on March 17th did not set them up. In other words, if true, it means Ling, Lee and Park all voluntarily stepped into the glare of one of today’s most dangerous humanitarian heartbeats.

Though speculation about Park’s fate is all over the map, the consensus guess is that he will be deported from North Korea after a relatively brief detainment. If and when that occurs, Park should make a beeline for Ling and allow her to be the first person to interview him about his upside-down ordeal.

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A Few Gift Ideas

Even though they do not celebrate Christmas in North Korea, it would seem permissible – nay, mandatory – for special U.S. Envoy Stephen Bosworth to present Kim Jong-il with an early Yuletide offering when he visits Pyongyang on December 8th. This despite the fact that the Dear Leader is scheduled to be there in spirit only and has a tendency to quickly toss such diplomatic offerings onto a Twin Peaks pile recently visited – and wonderfully detailed – by Beijing prof @prchovanec.

Nevertheless, with Bosworth focused on learning the latest North Korean tango steps, I thought I’d offer up some friendly diplomatic gift suggestions. Please feel free to chime in with any of your own.

1) Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue: Perhaps one day, as part of a new era of U.S.-North Korea relations, Amazon.com will deliver to Pyongyang. Until then, Bosworth might do well to personally deliver an ode to the stateside version of a cult of political personality.

2) Michael Jackson’s This Is It: One of the great what-if scenarios of the Ling-Lee detainment is the idea that the Gloved One expressed a sincere desire to try and intercede on the journalists’ behalf. A Jackson family-signed DVD would seem to be tailor-made for Kim Jong-il’s pop culture MoJo.

3) A Chia Obama: Triangulating perfectly into the current geopolitical horizon by virtue of the fact that it is made in China, this greener-grass emblem is the trinket that comes closest to approximating the crazy tall tales told in North Korea of how nature has celebrated the birth of its top leaders.

4) A Snuggie: What better token of forward-looking frivolous capitalism than the current champ of U.S. Informercial airwaves? Not to mention the fact that Kim Jong-il might actually wear it.

5) The Los Angeles Clippers: In 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously passed to Kim Jong-il a basketball signed by the original MJ, Michael Jordan. Contingent on a couple of future Pyongyang condo contracts, Donald Stirling might be amenable to shipping the entire Clippers team over on loan for the rest of the 2009-2010 season. Let’s face it, there may be no better current way for the league to prove that the NBA is indeed a place where caring (about our emotional well-being) happens.

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Will the Real Kim Jong-il Please Stand Up?

Tonight, moreso than any previous Halloween, a gaggle of would-be Kim Jong-il’s will be saddling up to good-looking women at parties and warbling, “Tlick or tleat?” And if one or more of these Dear Leader dress-ups happens to be at the same place as a costumed Laura Ling, Euna Lee and-or Bill Clinton (or if a pint-sized Jong shows up tonight on the doorstep of Laura and husband Iain Clayton’s North Hollywood home), then August history may repeat itself in, respectively, amusing and awkward fashion.

However, thanks to Japanese writer and long-time KJi conspiracy theorist Toshimitsu Shigemura, tonight’s Slim Shady Dictator ranks will also conjure up conversation about a fascinating new slant: the idea that Clinton met on August 4th in Pyongyang not with Kim Jong-il #1 but rather KJi #2 or – perish the thought – KJi #3.

Shigemura is no crackpot; once a reporter for the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, he now teaches international relations at Tokyo’s Waseda University. Still, while long-time Asia beat journalist Donald Kirk and others concede that there is little doubt Kim Jong-il has people stand in for him at some public appearances, they firmly believe the big Clinton pow-wow was not such an instance.

Nevertheless, the James Bond-like scenario of a craftily schooled evil twin has understandably captured the public’s imagination; even America’s number one pundit, @EbertChicago, couldn’t help but retweet the idea as a tantalizing question. Bottom line: whether Kim Jong-il died years ago or was simply too sick to glad-hand Clinton for three hours and 17 minutes on the evening of the 4th, this year’s most Oscar-worthy Best Actor candidate may reside in a land where the import of Academy screeners is punishable by death.

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Euna-Laura Trumps Linda-Monica

Last Wednesday evening at Fleming’s Prime Steak House in Sarasota, Florida, Bill Clinton received yet another impromptu standing ovation from a group of restaurant patrons, this time at the close of a day’s worth of golf playing and speech-making sponsored by the parents of Doug and Roger Band, close confidants who accompanied the President on his trip to North Korea. It was the latest vivid reminder of just how dramatically the conclusion brought about by Clinton to the arrest of Laura Ling and Euna Lee on March 17th, 2009 has eclipsed the stain of the Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp mess unleashed by Matt Drudge on January 17th, 1998.

The great Op Ed piece that has yet to be written about the Ling-Lee saga is not a rehash of those early morning China-North Korea border events by fleeing cameraman-producer Mitchell Koss, but rather a rumination about the big picture developments that have followed by Lewinsky herself, who now holds a Masters Degree in Social Psychology. It would be fascinating to get random-woman Lewinsky’s take on how two subsequent random-women have completely remade the personal reputation of the 39th President.

Separately, the last-minute decision by Ling, Lee, Koss and their guide to venture into Tumen River territory has triggered a new awareness of the North Korean refugee crisis and sparked some carefully choreographed Hermit Kingdom momentum towards new bilateral and six-party discussions. (It’s also added a new dimension to @lisaling’s feature news reporting.) But for now, the most jaw-dropping tangential turnaround brought about by the @current gals is the realignment of William Jefferson Clinton with the nomenclature of a William Jefferson.

No matter what your definition of is, is, the Clinton comeback IS nothing short of a modern PR miracle. So on this, the two-month anniversary of Bill’s August 4th rescue of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, he owes them an equal debt of gratitude for giving him back his dignity.

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North Korea’s Mata Hari

Although Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s producer-cameraman Mitchell Koss greatly endangered North Korean refugees and their helpers by fleeing back to the Chinese side of the border on March 17th and thereby allowing the Chinese authorities to seize his camera footage, the fallout from his actions is nothing compared to that engendered by Won Jeong-hwa. As we approach the one-year anniversary of this 35-year-old’s time served in a South Korean jail (October 15th), it’s worth revisiting the @CurrentVanguard-worthy case of North Korea’s equivalent to the infamous Mata Hari.

This North Korean spy’s accomplishments are two-fold. Having initially fled to China in the 1990s, she returned in 1998 and went on to help arrange the abduction of some 100 North Koreans and seven South Koreans. Then, in 2001, she relocated to South Korea, where she posed as a defector and firmly established herself as an appointed public speaker, regaling factory audiences with tales of the evil Hermit Kingdom. Along the way, she successfully seduced at least one South Korean officer and passed back information about defectors, military secrets and more.

Jeon-hwa (pictured above) was finally caught in the spring of 2008 with a 65-year-old “foster father,”, and though she could have been given the death penalty for her crimes (she was found guilty on all counts), lucky for her the trial took place in South Korea, not the North. She ultimately received a five-year sentence from the Suwon District Court south of Seoul.

The trial also revealed that during one of her trips back to China from South Korea to liaise with fellow operatives, she took possession of poisoned syringes to assassinate one of North Korea’s highest ranking defectors as well as various South Korean officials. But that part of the plan was never successfully carried out. Still, from November 2006 until her capture, Jeon-hwa made 52 more “security lectures,” during which she customarily blamed the U.S. and Japan for the Korean War and framed North Korea’s nuclear armament as a simple act of self-defense.

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The Queen of Six-Party Simulations

As we approach a seemingly inevitable restart of the Six-Party talks, many different experts are sharing what they think might happen when representatives from the U.S., China, Russia, Japan and South Korea try to cajole North Korea from brinksmanship to the brink of nuclear disarmament. But I would venture to say that no one at the moment has a more pragmatic sense of this setting than Nicole Marae Finneman, Director of Research and Academic Affairs at the Washington, D.C. based Korea Economic Institute (KEI).

Over the past year and a half, through the prism of 730 individual participants and roughly 115 different locations ranging from Princeton to the United States Air Force Academy, Finneman (pictured below) has facilitated students through a carefully scored simulation of the Six-Party talks. Perhaps not surprisingly, she says the rarest outcome is one that is best for all participants, where each team winds up with a range of points between 70 to 90 rather than between 35 to 70, and with the North Korea players exchanging serious concessions on nuclear verification for aid.

“Watching those participants in the role of North Korea discover, then internalize and try to use the significant upper hand they have at the actual negotiating table is what fascinates me the most,” Finneman reveals via e-mail interview with @LiberateLaura. “Almost exactly half of the time, they [North Korea] walk away.”

“On the scoring system, status quo isn’t so awful for them, though they could definitely get a better outcome through negotiation.” (For example, a status quo gives North Korea 60 points and South Korea zero.)

Finneman says she has also noticed recurring negotiating traits based on the age of her participants. Older male players tend to interpret their roles more dominantly than their female counterparts, while at the younger college level the balance of power belongs more to the women, who usually take the lead in organizing the process.

Finneman does not allow participants to choose their country, randomly assigning the half-dozen geopolitical goodies. Regardless, the person(s) acting as North Korea almost always have an “Ah hah!” moment that connects them with what Kim Jong-il has known for years – namely, that they are in the driver’s seat.

A grant from the Korea Foundation funds Finneman’s busy travels, with trips to North Carolina, Hawaii, Minnesota and Michigan set for the near future. She is also sometimes joined by illustrious invited guests such as Dr. Han S. Park, the University of Georgia professor who played a prominent role in the back channel efforts to release journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Finneman will in fact be catching up again with Park next month.

“Each representative of his or her country [at the fictional summit] is given a different point system that assigns value to the different challenges,” Finneman explains. ”So for example, on the nuclear front, verification levels are cart blanche, Full IAEA access, by invite only; in terms of abductees, there is full apology, allowing a commission to investigate further, acknowledgement. And so on.”

“Each possible outcome has an assigned value,” she continues. “The negotiator’s goal is to walk away with as many points as possible, and through negotiation may have to obviously loosen up on one issue to receive the points it desires on another… All told, though I’ve never done the math, I believe there are roughly 50 technically possible outcomes, though I’ve only seen about 12-15 happen.”

So there you have it, the concrete possibility of more than a dozen different outcomes when the real Six-Party talkers sit down together (before or alongside some related U.S.-North Korea bilateral sweetening). And no matter what happens, you can bet that Finneman – whose separate consulting firm also offers negotiating training and simulations – will have a better sense of how things are developing than many of the more widely quoted experts.

Filed under: Interviews

Loose Ends

Laura and Lisa Lisa Ling dined last week with Bill Clinton at the Almond bistro in New York and lunched with Hillary Clinton over the weekend at a branch of the Korean restaurant Woo Lae Oak in Vienna, Virginia. Quite the culinary capper to a summer that thrust two sisters, a former President and a current Secretary of State into a very tight diplomatic corner.

If I were to apply the same questioning mentality to these meals as I did to other signpost events that led up to Laura and Euna Lee’s August 4th release, I would be asking things like: Did Bill and Hillary both personally pick up the tab? Did either restaurant offer their guests a meal on the house? At the Korean restaurant in Virginia, did Laura get a fortune cookie, and if so, what did it say?

But in these waning micro-days of the Ling-Lee case, as the macro level appears set to begin with bilateral sideline six-party discussions between the U.S. and North Korea, the crumbs worth mentioning lie far and wide from the welcome sight of a plentiful meal on home soil.

They Said, China Said: After Laura and Euna claimed in their September 2nd L.A. Times Op Ed that the North Korean border guards reached back into Chinese territory to seize them, China was quick to deny the accusation. Did it happen? Of course – North Korean border guards are known to cross the Tumen River for all kinds of different reasons.

But as it almost always does, North Korea silently acquiesced to its mighty and refugee-complicit neighbor. However, by cosmic coincidence, someone last week posted a 2003 Chinese police report confirming a massacre along the same border – in one night – of 56 North Koreans trying to flee the country. China apparently quietly cremated the bodies and kept the incident quiet, although it was referenced in a 2006 @WSJ article. But the point is, this is the bigger picture – Ling, Lee could easily have been shot, and as they themselves wrote, the story they were trying to tell needs to remain in the public consciousness.

Tracking the Guide: I have been urging a certain South Korean media outlet I am in touch with to keep a lookout for Kim Seong-cheol, the guide who fled back to the Chinese side on March 17th along with Mitch Koss. He was reportedly sentenced to six months in Sino jail, though it is not exactly clear when that sentence began. But by all rights, he should be a free man soon, and the exact circumstances of his apparent trickery are the one final piece of the crime scene puzzle.

The Soccer Squeeze: The North Koreans typically do not acknowledge the concept of a weekend. But in the case of the Ling-Lee trial, the proceedings were adjourned on Friday July 5th so that judge, interpreters, lawyer and everyone else other than the defendants could turn their attention to a World Cup Qualifying match being played the next day in Pyongyang between North Korea and Iran.

Thanks to a tie, North Korea made it into the World Cup for the first time since 1966. If the U.S. really wants the Hermit Kingdom to disarm, they should meet bilaterally with FIFA and make a case for the exclusion of North Korea from next year’s South Africa-hosted tournament until certain diplomatic and humanitarian conditions are met. It’s a bit of a dirty Yellow Card, but after all, that’s the way North Korea plays.

Filed under: Commentary

Grumpy Old Nation

It never occurred to me until today, but on this – the 61st anniversary of North Korea’s birth – all the speculation, analysis and questioning of the Hermit Kingdom’s motivations can arguably be reduced to a much simpler equation. The pricklier half of the Peninsula behaves geopolitically like the cranky senior citizen that it is.

Much of the nation’s unpredictable antagonism comes from its relationship with spoiled older brother South Korea (currently clocking in at a hefty 4,042 years of age). But at this point, the central dynamic is one of Grandpa Pyongyang reacting not just to its sibling but everyone else around it that is also trying to force him into early retirement.

“Put down the [nuclear] power tools!” North Korea’s extended international family is chorusing. “Play nicer with the caretakers! Otherwise, we will have no choice but to keep ratcheting up the rules of the U.N. nursing home. Lights out at 1874!”

Of course, it doesn’t help that this Russian-mid-wifed problem child is currently indentured to another cranky senior – 67-year-old Kim Jong-il. A grumpy old man leading a grumpy old nation has further complicated the situation, as he is wont to steal everyone else’s food, try to prevent visitors from leaving and pal around with the one or two other crazies. North Korea is not a spoiled child, as Secretary Clinton mused @gma recently, but rather a cantankerous senior; either way, a new nickname is in order – the Axis of Drool.

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