Bolton went to the right place to give this tough a speech.
U.S. Arms Diplomat Denounces North Korean Leader
By JAMES BROOKE - NEW YORK TIMES
SEOUL, July 31 - The United States's top arms control diplomat gave a speech here today lambasting Kim Jong Il as "a tyrannical dictator" who presides over a country that is a "hellish nightmare."
"Kim Jong Il seems to care more about enriching uranium than enriching his own people," John R. Bolton, the American diplomat, said today, blasting the North Korean leader by name 41 times in a 25-minute speech. "While he lives like royalty in Pyongyang, he keeps hundreds of thousands of his people locked in prison camps with millions more mired in abject poverty, scrounging the ground for food. For many in North Korea, life is a hellish nightmare."
The speech capped a two-day visit here by Mr. Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
"The ball is in North Korea's court," Mr. Bolton said of the slow motion, nine-month-long process of talks about talks. He held fast to the position that North Korea's neighbors should have seats at the table for negotiations. He derided North Korea's repeated calls for one-on-one talks with the United States as a "one-note piano concerto."
For over a year, North Korea has insisted on bilateral talks with the United States, fearing that group talks would simply result in all the other nations ganging up on North Korea. Today's unflattering descriptions of North Korea's leader may unleash a backlash among North Korean officials who nurture a personality cult about a man they prefer to call "Dear Leader." Last year, North Korean officials complained bitterly after President Bush called Mr. Kim "evil."
Talking later to reporters, Mr. Bolton justified his bluntness saying: "It is important to tell the truth."
Today, Mr. Bolton appeared to invoke James Bond when talking about the leader of the secretive state 40 miles north of here.
"While nuclear blackmail used to be the province of fictional spy movies, Kim Jong Il is forcing us to live that reality," Mr. Bolton said, referring to the nation that officially calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Saying that China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States are united in demanding a nuclear weapons-free North Korea, he concluded: "The days of DPRK blackmail are over."
Before today's speech, speculation in the region ranged from a renewal of talks in September to a formal declaration by North Korea of a nuclear arsenal on Sept. 9, the 55th anniversary of the founding of the communist state.
But today's tough talk "could provide just another justification for North Korea to drag its feet on these supposed talks in September," said Victor D. Cha, a Georgetown University Korea expert, who is visiting here. On the Bush Administration side, Mr. Cha added, today's stark descriptions of North Korea "build the prerequisite components for the argument that the only place you can go is regime change."
Asked if he was advocating regime change in North Korea, Mr. Bolton responded: "No."
At the East Asia Institute, the private group that hosted the speech here, several South Koreans in the audience predicted that the speech would drive North Korea further into its shell.
"We are going to see gridlock with North Korea over a long time, he is saying that Kim Jong Il is not redeemable," Lim Won-Hyuk, a South Korean regional planner, said after listening to Mr. Bolton's speech here. "I think Kim Jong Il will basically wait for regime change in the U.S."
Mr. Kim's father, Kim Il Sung, ruled northern Korea through eight American presidencies. This year, Mr. Kim has been increasingly secretive about his movements, evidently fearing an American military attack. Last March, during the American bombing of Saddam Hussein's palaces in Baghdad, the North Korean leader broke with tradition and skipped the opening ceremonies of the Supreme People's Assembly in Pyongyang. Last Sunday, he was expected to review a massive military parade in North Korea's capital, marking the 50th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the Korean War. The parade was canceled.
In Seoul today, Mr. Bolton stressed in his speech: "The United States seeks a peaceful solution."
Two new forces gave spine to his speech. In the United States Congress, there is growing hostility to North Korea, a historical enemy. In China, there is increasing skepticism about North Korea, a historical ally.
In a flurry of activity in Washington this summer, bills are moving through both houses of Congress to ease the admission of North Korean refugees into the United States and to strip funding from a 10-year-old project to build nuclear reactors for North Korea.
Last week, a new umbrella group, the North Korea Freedom Coalition, was formed in Washington to back legislation that would the tie American government aid to improvement of conditions in North Korean labor camps and to the expediting of international adoptions of North Korean orphans
The United States should demand that international food aid go "directly to the country's vast, inhumane prison camps, where many of the repatriated refugees, as well as thousands of other political prisoners, are kept in unspeakable conditions," Sen. Richard G. Lugar, Republican Senator of Indiana, wrote two weeks ago in an op-ed essay in The Washington Post.
"In the meantime, we should authorize the resettlement of some North Korean refugees in this country, and press our allies to do the same," continued Sen. Lugar, a centrist, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "If this sparks a greater flow of North Koreans from their gulag-like country, some would argue, that could help keep pressure on North Korea or even hasten the fall of the Pyongyang regime, much as the flight of East Germans in 1989 helped undermine the Communist system there."
American diplomats are negotiating with China the possibility of construction of processing camps for refugees just across China's river borders with North Korea, human rights activists here say.
Two incidents today underlined the vulnerability of North Korean refugees who live in Asian countries illegally, fearing arrest or repatriation. In Bangkok, 10 North Koreans ran into the Japanese Embassy in Thailand and asked for asylum. In Taiwan, authorities placed on a flight to Seoul a 32-year-old North Korean woman who escaped China two weeks ago by swimming to a Panamanian freighter in a Chinese harbor.
China, which once described its relationship with North Korea as close as "lips and teeth," increasingly sees its impoverished and shrill neighbor as an economic failure that one day could flood northern China with millions of refugees.
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