While the financial crisis has unfolded and the U.S. election had pummeled ahead, North Korea has broken the seals on some of its nuclear enrichment facilities and six-party talks have broken down.
According to this sardonic op-ed article By Dmitry Kosirev of Russia’s Novosti News Service, the regime of Kim Jong-il is up to its old tricks of manipulating the audience to best advantage – and the audience is election-mad America.
So what’s Pyongyang’s problem? Kosirev writes in part:
“Pyongyang accused Washington of not fulfilling its commitment to remove North Korea from the list of terrorist-supporting states. There’s a lot to be said about the quality of this list: either you support terrorism or not; and if this can be negotiated, what kind of list is that? But that’s a separate issue about the style of U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. explains its hesitance by pointing out North Korea’s refusal to adhere to the agreed-upon verification of its nuclear sites (which of course, Pyongyang has rejected). ”
What other leverage is Pyongyang using? Kosirev continues:
“South Korean satellites recorded some strange smoke over a firing range near the village of Gilju in Hamgyong Province. It’s the same place where, on October 9, 2006 North Korea detonated something that apparently allowed it to call itself a nuclear power. … Some people who have seen the satellite images say it could be a smokescreen to conceal from satellites preparations for a new nuclear test. Of course, the same effect could be obtained by a bucketful of burning rags that someone wanted to get rid of. And while North Koreans burned rags and laughed, Washington thought to itself: Is this good news on the eve of the elections – the detonation of a North Korean nuclear bomb right after Condoleezza Rice’s assurances that everything is fine? … Now everything depends on whether the North Korean authorities want to make a gift to American Republicans on the eve of the voting (in the form of a resumption of the disarmament process), or choose to wait until the new administration enters the White House.”
By Dmitry Kosirev
Translated By Yekaterina Blinova
October 3, 2008
Russia – Novosti – Original Article (Russia)
While America waited with bated breath for the outcome of the voting in Congress on the $700 billion bailout of failed financial institutions and as U.S. voters watched the debate of the two candidates for the vice presidency of the United States, in faraway North Korea, another act in the nuclear-diplomatic drama was quietly unfolding. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hills crossed the border between South and North Korea by car headed to the city of Pyongyang, where he spent an unexpectedly long time – three days.All the outside world has been able to glean from the trip is a photograph of Hill standing with American and North Korean diplomats on the hill above the city – and very few details about the talks. These were important talks intended to provide a path out of the unexpected deadlock in the process by which North Korea was to abandon its nuclear plans in exchange for the fulfillment of a number of demands.
It’s unlikely that the talks were entirely successful. Because on his way home during a brief conversation with reporters in Seoul, Hill said he couldn’t discuss the subject before reporting back to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and representatives of the other countries participating in Six-Party Talks on the “Korean nuclear problem.” In addition to the United States and North Korea, those talks include Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated and English-language foreign press coverage of the U.S. election and how the world perceives our nation.
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