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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (63430)	12/29/2002 5:27:44 PM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The reclusive communist leader -- once portrayed as an unstable madman and a cognac-swilling playboy serviced by a team of women known as the "Pleasure Squad" -- still keeps a low profile, and although the rhetoric over Kim Jong-il has considerably different tones now, it differs sharply While there is no denying that Kim Jong II is far from an exemplary leader, such statements as these are the stuff of which propaganda is made, especially when they lead off the article in question. SC@itsallintheslant.com

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (63430)	12/29/2002 5:56:36 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

An another interesting read on NK: Part One: Climbing Mount Myohyang By Simon Bone, September 1998 simonbone.com I suppose if you had to pick a time to travel to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it might as well be during a standoff with Japan. On 30 August, in anticipation of the country’s forthcoming 50th anniversary on 9 September, the DPRK launched a Taepo-Dong 1 multistage rocket, without warning, in the direction of the Land of the Rising Sun. Its second stage passed over Hokkaido and landed in the Pacific. The Japanese government mused openly about how to respond to this potential act of war. A few days later the Koreans claimed that their rocket was not an ICBM at all, but had instead launched a satellite that had made nearly one hundred orbits of the earth. And — here was the main point — another launch would take place within days. The Japanese reply, although couched in diplomatic terms, was unequivocal: Do that and we’ll bomb you. Two days after the anniversary, I was aboard a near-empty McDonnell-Douglas MD-82 headed for Pyongyang, one of a privileged few who were allowed to see what remained of the celebrations. There were perhaps twenty people on the plane, consisting of the dozen in our tour group and five or six others who may have been diplomats or businessmen. Everyone else had got off in Liaoyang. Whether or not there had been a satellite — the Russian space agency was alone in claiming to have tracked it — the point had been made: North Korea was now capable of firing a bomb at Japan. What kind of bomb remained a mystery. Recent US satellite pictures had shown a facility being built at Yongbyon that looked like an underground reprocessing plant. Welcome to the world of North Korean diplomacy.