Happy Birthday, Old Man

Once again we arrive at the auspicious date of February 16, when the Lodestar for the 21st Century was brought into the world under the twin rainbows over the holy mother Mount Paekdu. Were it not for the Son of the Sun, the Shining Star of Juche and Songun policies, the imperial aggressors and their puppets would have destroyed the People's paradise with their decadent Jonas Brothers and Double Meat Whoppers.

Manse!
Dear Leader,
Manse!

Get the Fireworks Ready Boys, Hillary's Comin' !!!

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is headed to Asia soon, her first international travel with her new State Department business cards. Clinton will visit Japan Feb. 16-17, Indonesia Feb. 18-19, South Korea Feb. 19-20 and China Feb. 20-22. The visit comes as North Korea is ratcheting up its anti-U.S. rhetoric (the “problem is that the U.S. bellicose forces are supporting the puppets by waging saber-rattling against the DPRK from the outset of the new year”), anti-South Korean rhetoric (“The frantic exercises staged by the Lee Myung Bak warlike forces who put the inter-Korean relations in total stalemate and drove the situation on the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war through their reckless anti-DPRK confrontational moves will only precipitate their ruin”), and anti-Japanese rhetoric (“Japan is an aggression and war force which the international community should stand guard against, in particular”), and sending signals of impending missile tests. It is likely that, as part of a pattern of rhetoric leading to physical escalation, North Korea will greet Clinton’s visit to South Korea Feb. 19 or 20 with a test of short-range missiles in the West Sea (likely surface to surface anti-ship missiles, though there are reports Pyongyang was playing around with air-launched anti-ship missiles last year). This would be a near exact repeat of North Korea’s missile tests on Feb. 24, 2003, the day then Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in South Korea for Roh Moo Hyun’s inauguration. What will be interesting to watch is not the short-range missile tests (pretty run of the mill for the DPRK) but the potential for a more dramatic show - a launch of the Taepodong-2 in SLV configuration, either from the Musudan-ri launch site on the east coast or the newer Dongchan-ri site on the west coast. That will stir up not only the South Koreans, but the Japanese and Chinese as well, giving Clinton a real test of her new foreign policy credentials.

Kim Jong Il's Provincial Schedule

Here is a little something I have been fiddling with lately. It breaks down Kim Jong Il’s (non-military, non-art performance) field guidance visits by province. (This is an approximation, and there is an explanation of methodology below.) So what does it show? Well, we will begin with an assumption that Kim’s visits to certain economic activities demonstrate a particular focus on that economic project or sector. This may be inaccurate, but it will be our starting assumption: Kim Jong Il makes visits for a reason, and in some ways that reason can be deduced from the topic of the reported visit.

So first, it becomes clear that South Hwanghae province gets the shaft. This is somewhat interesting, as it is South Hwanghae that is shut off by the Northern Limit Line (NLL) that Pyongyang always complains about. It may simply reflect an insecurity of traveling to the province, though we don’t know that Kim doesn’t make regular visits there as part of his military tours. Or it could be that the province really isn't an economic priority, particularly with the NLL issue (most port upgrades have been in Nampo, just north of South Hwanghae, or across the Peninsula in Wonsan, so Haeju continues to sit in relative decline).

But aside from the under-visited South Hwanghae province, if these do reflect economic priorities, a couple of other things stand out.

In 2000 and 2001, there is a fairly strong focus on provinces that border South Korea (represented by shades of green), which makes sense given the 2000 summit between Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae Jung and the massive increase in the focus on cross-border projects. In 2002, there is a rapid drop in Kim’s visits to non-military projects along the border, as Pyongyang seeks to understand George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” remark.

In 2003 and 2004, economic projects at home were not a priority at all. That is not all unbelievable - at the time Pyongyang was concerned that Washington was going to declare “mission accomplished” in Iraq and turn its bomb-sites to another “Axis of Evil” member, North Korea. Really, economics take back seat to physical survival, and the tensions in the US-DPRK relations appear clearly reflected in these numbers.

What is perhaps most notable is the disproportionate attention to the four northern provinces (represented by shades of blue) in 2007 and 2008. It has always been conventional wisdom (a warning factor if there ever was one) that the northern provinces were the lowest priority for North Korea, that they were the least agriculturally and economically viable, that they were where the politically unreliable were sent, and that, if there were famine or other social problems in North Korea, they would be disproportionately represented in these four provinces along the Chinese and Russian borders.

It could be just a reflection of more attention to the places where Kim houses his long-range missile bases, but it may also be both a way to rebuild the support and loyalty of the disenfranchised politically unreliable class and to strengthen the border region with China, the latter both as a security measure and as preparation to replace the economic cross border activity along the DMZ with new economic zones along the PRC border. The most attention is given to Chagang (Jagang) province, one of the least developed of North Korea’s provinces. Kim has paid considerable attention to the province of late, something that may bear watching.

[Methodology Note: All reports of Kim’s public appearances are taken from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). For this review, a single KCNA report counts as a single visit, even if it included multiple factories or locations. For this chart, Field Guidance events are those to a factory, recreation area, business or infrastructure project. Those labeled in the “unclear” column are visits that, though not via exhaustive measures, it could not be determined exactly which province they occurred in. This is not all exact, but used for general comparisons, and assumes for this look that all visits by Kim Jong Il took place as reported in KCNA.]

Not Another Missile Test...

Its that time of year again. Time for Pyongyang to make sure everyone with a satellite sees that North Korea is preparing to launch a new missile. South Korean and Japanese media are citing U.S. spy satellite imagery of a train hauling a long, cylindrical object toward Dongchan, site of North Korea’s newer long-range missile/satellite launching facility. Now if there is one thing the North Koreans have mastered over the last decade or so, it is the art of manipulating foreign powers through the selective exposure of “secrets” to the always watchful international intelligence community. Since last year, North Korea has made sure that its final construction at the launch facility near Dongchan, in North Pyongan Province, has been seen and noted by interested powers. The new facility is bigger and better than the old Musudan facility, capable of launching the suspected Taepodong 2 or even Taepodong 3 missile (or SLV). Coming on the heels of the claimed Iranian satellite launch, it would appear that Pyongyang and Tehran are coordinating in seeking to get the attention of Barak Obama’s new U.S. administration. In fact, it is likely that they are coordinating their actions to create a bigger sense of crisis, to test the limits of the Obama administration’s capabilities and tolerances, and perhaps to try and gain rapid concessions from Obama in return for not distracting from the focus on the economy, on Afghanistan and iraq, and on the uneasy relations emerging with Russia. Rumor has it the North Koreans will be able to launch in a few months or less - perhaps around April 15 as a way to mark the anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth? (Try blowing that candle out.) But what is perhaps most interesting is that North Korea really wants to get this one right. Its first satellite launch attempt in 1998 failed in the final stage. A second launch in 2006 was either aborted intentionally (just a test of the new and improved first stage) or was another failure. It is important for Pyongyang to prove its missile capability, its technological capability, despite its isolation, as it heads into a new round of negotiations with Washington. This was the intent in 1998, and it remains the intent now. It is a show of capability and strength, a demonstration that North Korea doesn’t need negotiations - and thus giving itself a bit more leverage in the negotiations that it does desire.