Once again, rosy optimism is billowing out of the Korean Peninsula. And once again, the rest of the world might remember that atop the regime in Pyongyang sit world-class thugs who have repeatedly refused to abide by their agreements.
US President George W. Bush started off the latest surge of hope two weeks ago with a personal letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, urging him in polite but firm terms to keep his pledge to abandon his nuclear weapons.
Six years ago, Bush made Kim a charter member of the "axis of evil." Then the New York Philharmonic accepted North Korea's invitation, with the blessings of the US State Department, to give a concert in Pyongyang in February.
To make sure the orchestra was prepared, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) has posted on its Web site the full score of the North Korean national anthem.
Moreover, for the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953, a South Korean cargo train chugged into North Korea last week headed for the Kaesong industrial complex that is run jointly by the North and the South.
Unification Minister Lee Jae-jeong rode the train to represent the Seoul government. And US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill has asserted that North Korea has been dismantling its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon even if it is not yet ready to account for the rest of its nuclear program. US officials, however, have neglected to point out that experts who have seen the reactor said it was falling apart and nearly useless.
Amid this mostly upbeat news, people outside of Korea might recall a South Korean diplomat named Lee Bum-suk. In the autumn of 1972, Lee was among those who escorted a visiting North Korean delegation around Seoul. It was the first such journey since the Korean War and included a stroll through the Secret Garden that had once been the joy of Korean kings.
In the autumn of 1983, Lee, by then Seoul's foreign minister, was murdered along with 16 other South Korean dignitaries by North Korean terrorists who exploded a bomb among them during a trip to Burma. The North Korean then in charge of such operations was Kim Jong-il.
In addition, North Korea tried to assassinate South Korean president Park Chung-hee in 1968 and again in 1974, when an assailant missed the president but gunned down his wife, Yook Young-soo.
The non-partisan Congressional Research Service reported recently that North Korea sent 3,693 armed agents into South Korea from 1954 to 1992 and had continued intermittent incursions and kidnappings since then.
Today, clues to current North Korean thinking abound. The reaction to Bush's letter to Kim was distinctly underwhelming. It rated all of two sentences in a KCNA dispatch, far less than its report on Kim's inspection of a cotton plantation.
At the same time, KCNA published a blistering attack on the US, lamenting that the Bush administration had manifested "extreme hostility toward the DPRK," or Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
KCNA asserted that North Korea was acquiring nuclear weapons, despite the difficulties in doing so, "to cope with the US' continued hostile policy toward the DPRK."
The official organ declared: "The DPRK can never abandon its nuclear program unless the US rolls back its hostile policy toward the DPRK."
In another dispatch last week, KCNA contended that the port call of an unnamed US nuclear-powered submarine in Pusan, South Korea, was "a reckless criminal act of chilling the denuclearization process in the Korean peninsula and driving the situation into the brink of war."
All this, KCNA concluded, "convinces the DPRK that there is no other option but to increase the military capabilities for self-defense in every way."
The news agency, widely considered to reflect the thinking of Kim closely, occasionally expresses contempt for the West, particularly its democracy.
It claimed last week that much touted freedom and democracy "are nothing but camouflage to hoodwink working masses and cover up the reactionary nature of bourgeois dictatorship."
An authority on North Korea, Aidan Foster-Carter of the University of Leeds in Britain, has said that periods of optimism about North Korea are but "false dawns."
He has argued: "Again and again, we start over with North Korea without asking what went wrong the last time or how come we never get past first base."
Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS