Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH The uses of fear



	November 19, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: The uses of fear
By Bradley Martin

1 Getting their attention

The administration policy that was cobbled together recently by former US Defense Secretary William Perry is a two-track, carrot-or-stick, good cop-bad cop affair. While neither Perry nor anyone else has publicly laid out just what punitive action might be in store if Pyongyang fails to respond to the blandishments that Washington, Seoul and Tokyo are proffering, North Korean authorities seem to think it might be a preemptive military strike. And some analysts think fear of such an action is playing a significant role in the thinking of Kim Jong-il and company.

Here are some of the signs and portents:

Rodong Shinmun, the official Workers' Party newspaper, charged this week: ''The United States brought about a war in the [Balkans] on the pretext of the 'issue of humanitarianism' and is trying to provoke a war in the Korean Peninsula under the pretext of 'issue of missile'.''
James Laney, a former American ambassador to South Korea, according to a Yonhap report said last week that North Korea is mounting diplomatic efforts to forestall a preemptive strike such as the US unleashed on Iraq in the Gulf War. Those diplomatic efforts include remarks by North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun that his country would welcome a visit by a delegation from the US Congress - where North Korea thinking is dominated by hawkish Republicans - and wanted to resume dialogue with Washington.
South Korea's navy last week said, also according to Yonhap, that Nato's bombings in Yugoslavia had impressed upon Pyongyang that the US can use force at any time, in case it is dissatisfied with the outcome of negotiations on weapons of mass destruction.
The South Korean navy's analysis report also noted that North Korea had taken to responding with alacrity to recent charges of human rights abuses. It surmised that this haste to issue denials had something to do with Pyongyang's stunned reaction to the Yugoslavia bombings, which were justified on human rights rather than military grounds.

2 Good news for refugees in China?

The navy's analysts predict that North Korea will go beyond denials and actually ease up on the oppression of its people to avoid providing a pretext for a US attack. That certainly would be good news for the oppressed people themselves. But just in case North Korea continues to rank dead bottom in observance of human rights, advocacy groups are stepping up a campaign to enlist support from public opinion and lawmakers abroad - especially in the United States, where the issue of North Korean human rights in the past has tended to fall through the cracks with much more attention focused on its larger but considerably more benign neighbor, China..

The latest ranking of countries by human rights standards came from United States-based Freedom House this month. The group gave North Korea its lowest score - ''7'' - in civil liberties and political rights. It noted that North Korean agents operate not only at home but across the border in China, where it is they - rather than the Chinese authorities - who in many cases round up North Korean refugees and forcibly repatriate them.

Beijing may be getting tired of taking flak for its passive role at the border. According to a JoongAng Ilbo report, Kim Sang-ch'ol, chairman of the South Korea-based Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, told reporters last week that China's Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan on a recent visit to Pyongyang had discussed the defector issue with his North Korean counterpart, Paek.

After that, Kim was quoted as saying, Tang had made a secret visit to three communities in the self-governing ethnic Korean district of Yanbian in China's Jilin Province. Said Kim: ''Foreign Minister Tang's Yanbian visit was the first central government-level expression of China's concern about the North Korean defectors issue.''

Korea Asian Sex News | Asian Sex Gazette