Author: Mick Hartley

The North Korean government is reinstating the same policies that led to the mass famines of the Nineties:

Recent decisions by the North Korean government to suspend the operation of the World Food Programme, ban the private sale of grain, and fully reinstate the discredited Public Distribution System could lead to renewed hunger for North Korea’s already poor and destitute people, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.

The 34-page report, “A Matter of Survival: The North Korean Government’s Control of Food and the Risk of Hunger,” examines recent worrisome developments in North Korea’s food policies, its marginalization of the World Food Programme (WFP), its refusal to allow adequate monitoring of food aid, and the implications of the government’s new policies. Human Rights Watch noted that only a decade ago, similar policies led to the famine that killed anywhere from 580,000 to more than 3 million, according to independent researchers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

“While most international discussion of North Korea is about nuclear weapons, hunger remains a serious problem,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Regressive policies from a government that doesn’t allow free expression or independent observers to monitor the situation could someday lead to a repeat of the food crisis of the 1990s.”

Gerard Baker previews today’s local elections:

Having promised in last year’s general election campaign to step down before the next election, Blair has already limited his options. Since everyone knows he’s going, the argument goes, why prolong it? His closest aides still think he can soldier on for another year or so before handing over to his designated and increasingly restive neighbour Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer. But the betting in Westminster is that if the results are bad enough tonight they could accelerate the prime minister’s departure from Downing Street.

How bad do they have to be?

Labour could well finish third in the popular vote behind both the main opposition Conservatives and Labour’s fellow lefties the Liberal Democrats. That has happened before in local elections and would not of itself necessarily be terminal. Blair may indeed be helped somewhat by the diffusion of anti-government votes. The Tories who, if the history of local elections is a guide, should be making massive gains, may not advance all that much from their position in the equivalent elections four years ago. The Liberal Democrats are still a local force rather than a plausible alternative government. Most intriguing will be the strength of other parties- the Greens, the anti-European UK Independence Party, the anti-war Respect party of Saddam Hussein’s friend George Galloway and the rebarbative, neo-fascist, anti-immigration British National Party.

If they all advance at Labour’s expense it will muddy the waters somewhat and make it easier for Blair to claim the elections were no more than a passing protest, with people depositing their votes in the nearest available receptacle, safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t actually be choosing a government.

But come tomorrow morning this may sound like whistling past the graveyard. Thousands of Labour councilors will wake up out of their (part-time) jobs, their immediate political prospects in tatters.

If they and their friends on Labour’s benches in the House of Commons decide Blair is the culprit, they will surely increase the tension up the line to their political leaders to do something about it.

bductees, human rights, transparency for food aid delivery, or the 10,000-plus artillery tubes dug in at the DMZ at pointing South. […]

Lefkowitz is dead-on — not just morally, but legally. Based on the best information we have, the workers at Kaesong didn’t choose their work voluntarily, can’t quit, can’t organize, and have no say about the pay or working conditions.

How is that not slave labor?

It’s another blow against South Korea’s increasingly discredited Sunshine Policy.

The government is proposing that relatives of victims be allowed to address the court before sentence is passed. Perhaps they could take a lesson from Somalia:

A Somali teenager stabbed his father’s killer to death yesterday in a public execution ordered by an Islamic court.

Omar Hussein, 45, had been convicted of killing Sheik Osman Moallim, a teacher, in the capital, Mogadishu, after a dispute over the education of his 16-year-old son.

A court ordered that Sheik Moallim’s son, Mohamed, should execute the killer in the same manner as his father was murdered.

Hundreds of people watched the teenager stab Hussein several times in the chest and throat at the Koranic school where his father had worked, witnesses said.

Here’s Libyan leader Al-Qadhafi on Al-Jazeera TV:

Some people believe that Muhammad is the prophet of the Arabs or Muslims alone. This is a mistake. Muhammad is the Prophet of all people. He superseded all previous religions. If Jesus were alive when Muhammad was sent, he would have followed him. All people must be Muslims. […]

The Muslims were enraged by the defamation of their Prophet. But the people who defamed Muhammad were defaming their own prophet, because Muhammad is the prophet of the people in Scandinavia, in Europe, America, Asia and Africa. But since the holy texts that they read in Scandinavia are forged and call for hatred, they believe Muhammad is not their prophet.

You see? The jokes on them really, those silly Danes, because Muhammad is for everybody, so although they didn’t realise it they were mocking their own prophet!

We have fifty million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe – without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.

Allah mobilizes the Muslim nation of Turkey, and adds it to the European Union. That’s another 50 million Muslims. There will be 100 million Muslims in Europe. Albania, which is a Muslim country, has already entered the EU. Bosnia, which is a Muslim country, has already entered the EU. 50 percent of its citizens are Muslims. […]

Europe is in a predicament, and so is America. They should agree to become Islamic in the course of time, or else declare war on the Muslims.

lished the cartoons, put it succinctly when he wrote: “if a believer demands that I, as a non-believer, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.”

In fact—and here’s something many will find particularly hard to swallow—it’s important not only that people be free to criticize and mock religion. It’s important that they actually do so, from time to time.

of expression, and the separation of Church (or Mosque) and State.

It is especially strong in its condemnation of the anti-Americanism which, it notes, is “now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking.”

The Manifesto also blasts some liberals for “the excuse-making for suicide terrorism [and] the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the ‘anti-war’ movement with illiberal theocrats.”

The manifesto may sound like a lengthy statement of the obvious. But, in a way, that’s the point.

And Christopher Hitchens:

I believe there are three explanations for this horrid mutation of the left into a reactionary and nihilistic force. The first is nostalgia for the vanished “People’s Democracies” of the state socialist era. This has been stated plainly by Galloway and by Clark, whose political sect in the United States also defends Castro and Kim Jong-il.

The bulk of the anti-war movement also opposed the removal of the Muslim-slayer Slobodan Milosevic, which incidentally proves that their professed sympathy with oppressed Muslims is mainly a pose.

However, that professed sympathy does help us to understand the second motive. To many callow leftists, the turbulent masses of the Islamic world are at once a reminder of the glory days of “Third World” revolution, and a hasty substitute for the vanished proletariat of yore. Galloway has said as much in so many words and my old publishers at New Left Review have produced a book of Osama Bin Laden’s speeches in which he is compared with Che Guevara.

The third reason, not quite so well laid out by the rather 10th-rate theoreticians of today’s left, is that once you decide that American-led “globalisation” is the main enemy, then any revolt against it is better than none at all. […]

I have been flattered by an invitation to sign it [the Euston Manifesto], and I probably will, but if I agree it will be the most conservative document that I have ever initialled. Even the obvious has now become revolutionary. So call me a neo-conservative if you must: anything is preferable to the rotten unprincipled alliance between the former fans of the one-party state and the hysterical zealots of the one-god one.

The latest edition of Time Asia looks at the “Underground Railway”, the network of organisations helping North Koreans to escape the vast prison camp that is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. One of the leading lights is Rev. Tim Peters:

More than any other Westerner, Peters has become the public face of a network of activists, many motivated by their Christian faith, who try against formidable odds to bring North Koreans to Seoul. Peters and others in the network do not shrink from the comparison to the Underground Railroad of the U.S. Civil War era that brought African-American slaves from the South to freedom in the North. They embrace the comparison, convinced that their cause today is as just as the abolitionists’ was then. “When we look back at this era, at what [the North Korean government] has done to its people, I’m convinced the civilized world will be shocked—and also shamed,” Peters says softly. Shamed, he means, by its inaction, and by its lack of attention. “In the meantime,” he says, “we do what we can.”

Peters takes it for granted that North Korea and China will be hostile to his efforts. Far more galling to him is the attitude of the U.S. and South Korea. President Roh Moo Hyun’s government in Seoul pursues, in Peters’ words, a policy of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” in its pursuit of engagement with the North. The Seoul government, Peters says, does not want to do anything to upset North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, lest it reduce the chances for peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. “Any systematic effort to bring North Koreans to freedom might turn what now amounts to a trickle of refugees into a destabilizing flood—and Roh wants no part of it, nor do most South Koreans,” says a Western diplomat in Seoul.

But for the Christian activists who staff the Seoul Train, nothing has been more deflating than the actions—or, more precisely, inaction—of the Bush Administration. The activists viewed Bush as one of their own, a conservative Christian committed to human rights, unafraid to speak the truth about North Korea and its dictator. (“I loathe Kim Jong Il,” the President famously said in 2002). Last year, Peters believes, Bush showed his true colors when he spent more time in the Oval Office with Kang Chol Hwan, the author of a shattering memoir of life in the North Korean gulag [Aquariums of Pyongyang], than he had with Roh Moo Hyun. In October of 2004 Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act, and in the summer of 2005, Bush appointed Jay Lefkowitz, a former domestic-policy advisor in the White House, as a special envoy to deal specifically with North Korean human-rights issues. Though Bush called for $24 million a year to accept refugees from North Korea and broadcast news and information there, Congress has yet to appropriate any funding to carry out the policies. TIME has learned, however, that the Administration, under Lefkowitz’s prodding, is studying whether the United States might be able to take in a small number of North Korean refugees each year—something which, if it happened, would no doubt anger North Korea. Bush also raised the plight of North Korean refugees directly with Chinese President Hu Jintao during their meeting in Washington last week, seeking, a White House official said, “a more transparent process” in how Beijing deals with those who come across its border. It is, says Peters, about time.

ng December 2012, a date which the Maya have marked as the time of arrival of the Galactic Energy Cluster which will enlighten us…

Many cultures around the world, from India, Sumeria, Egypt, Peru, the Indians of North and Central America, the Inca and the Maya, call themselves the “Children of the Sun” or the “children of light.” Their ancestors, the civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, erected the first temples on energy potent points of the Planet. Their most important function was to serve as a gateway to other worlds and dimensions.

And here’s Professor Anthony Hardy, President of the European Association of Archaeologists, in a letter to the Times:

The situation of professional heritage management in Bosnia-Herzegovina is, since the Bosnian war, in a poor state, with a tiny number of people trying to do what they can to protect their rich heritage from looting and unmonitored or unauthorised development. It adds insult to injury when rich outsiders can come in and spend large sums pursuing their absurd theories (the construction of a colossal pyramid so large that it dwarfs even those of Egypt or Mesoamerica? 12,000 years ago?), in ways that most other countries would never countenance, instead of devoting their cash to the preservation of the endangered genuine sites and monuments in which Bosnia-Herzegovina abounds.

ction, Mearsheimer and Walt tell their readers that “the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars…. The evidence on which they rest is not controversial.” This is ludicrous. I would offer their readers a contrary proposition: that the “facts” presented by Mearsheimer and Walt suggest a fundamental ignorance of the history with which they deal, and that the “evidence” they deploy is so tendentious as to be evidence only of an acute bias. That is what will be not in serious dispute among scholars.