North Korea rejects inspectors & Japan tied to funding N. Korea nukes

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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011129/ts/korea_north_usa_dc_3.html Thursday November 29 3:39 AM ET North Korea Rejects U.S. Call for Arms Inspections By Paul Eckert

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea angrily rejected on Thursday U.S. calls for inspections to hunt for suspected weapons of mass destruction and threatened to take unspecified ``necessary countermeasures.''

The North Korean Foreign Ministry, in a statement published by the state-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), also dismissed as ``quite nonsensical'' U.S. statements urging the communist state to do more to cooperate against terrorism.

``The U.S. is unreasonably demanding the DPRK receive an 'inspection' just as a thief turns on the master with a club,'' said the statement.

DPRK is the acronym for North Korea's official name -- the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

``Under this situation the DPRK cannot sit idle but is left with no option but to take necessary countermeasures,'' it said, without elaborating.

In a reminder of unresolved tensions across the world's most heavily armed frontier, South Korea's Defense Ministry condemned North Korea for triggering an incident two days earlier in which South and North Korean border guards exchanged machine gun fire.

SCOPE FOR CRISIS DIPLOMACY NARROW

The North's statement said U.S. calls for arms inspections and criticism of its abuses of human rights and religious freedom ``goes to prove that some forces in the United States, in fact, do not want the dialogue for the solution of the problems.''

North Korea frequently uses brinkmanship, threats and bluffs as a diplomatic tool to extract concessions from or get the attention of the United States.

``There is nothing that North Korea hates more than to be ignored by the U.S.,'' said Daryl Plunk, a Korea expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative American think tank.

But analysts say the North's scope for using such tactics has narrowed recently, because the United States is focused on the Afghan conflict and because the North is dependent on international support that would erode if it created a crisis.

Still, the United States has shown interest in the arms programs of North Korea, which remains on the list of states Washington accuses of sponsoring terrorism. The United States has raised concerns about the North's missile sales and possible stocks of biological arms.

President Bush has urged North Korea to allow inspectors to determine whether it has been producing weapons of mass destruction. The top U.S. disarmament diplomat has also listed the North as a leading germ warfare worry.

NUCLEAR PROJECT CONCERNS

The State Department, asked Tuesday what the United States was demanding, referred to the 1994 Agreed Framework deal with North Korea, under which Western countries agreed to build light-water reactors in North Korea in return for a freeze of the North's suspected nuclear weapons program.

North Korea must allow international inspections to determine the extent of its past nuclear program, before any critical parts of the new reactors are delivered to the North.

A senior delegation of the Korean peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), the multinational agency set up to build the reactors, will visit North Korea this weekend.

Renewing an earlier demand already rejected by the United States, the North Korean statement said Washington should comply ``with the DPRK's just demand for the compensation for the loss of electricity'' as a result of delays to the reactor project.

In an interview with Reuters Wednesday, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung urged the United States and North Korea to talk because they had ``many things to tell each other.'' Deb's comments: "many things to tell each other." my butt! Somehow I doubt that an exchange of four-letter words is going to help the situation any...

SHOOTING BLAMED ON NORTH

In comments which attracted wide attention in South Korea, Kim said he was ``disappointed'' with the stalemate in the South's relations with North Korea. But he said his ``Sunshine Policy'' of engaging the North had helped keep the Korean peninsula stable.

The opposition Grand National Party, which has advocated a tougher stance toward North Korea, said: ``It is fortunate that President Kim has belatedly recognized the North's duplicity.''

On the recent border shooting incident, the South Korean Defense Ministry voiced ``grave concern'' over what it said U.N. investigators found to be a violation of the truce which ended the 1950-53 Korean War.

It urged the North to rethink its refusal to meet U.N. officials to discuss the brief firefight, in which no one was hurt but a South Korean guardpost window was shot out.

Because the Korean conflict ended in an armed truce that has not been replaced by a peace treaty, capitalist South Korea and the communist North remain in a technical state of war.

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http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/010918/0918fulford_1.html

Tuesday September 18, 11:27 am Eastern Time

Forbes.com North Korea: Another Outcropping Of Terrorism

The attack on the World Trade Center would be like a kid's firecracker compared to the damage an atomic bomb would do. Unfortunately for Americans, there is a rogue state that has a long terrorist track record, connections with Middle Eastern terror groups and nuclear capabilities: North Korea.

New evidence suggests North Korea has circumvented an agreement with the U.S. government to stop development of nuclear weapons in exchange for the gift of two large nuclear power generation stations. This understanding is, in turn, part of a larger effort (called the "Sunshine Policy" by the current South Korean government) to engage Pyongyang in diplomatic and commercial contacts.

North Korea moved its entire nuclear development program to new underground bunkers before U.S. inspections of its old facilities began, says a researcher at the facilities who has fled to China, where she is in hiding.

She recently contacted Lee Young Hwa, a professor at Kansai University in Japan and head of an organization fighting to bring democracy to North Korea, as well as Jiro Ishimaru, a Japanese freelance journalist specializing in North Korean news. The underground facilities where research continues unabated are made to appear from aerial photos to be nothing more than a peasant's village, the researcher, who is trying to defect to America, told her two contacts.

North Korea is believed by some intelligence sources already to have the capability to launch a nuclear missile attack on the U.S. North Korea's communist regime has a long track record of terrorist attacks, including blowing up airliners and carrying out other sabotage abroad. The country's government has also told its army and agents to learn from the attack on the World Trade Center how to destroy on a low budget, said Lee.

Japanese Red Army terrorists, the same group that participated in mass murder at Israel's Tel Aviv airport in 1972 and are deeply connected to Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, have been quiet in recent years, but have been moving frequently between North Korea and the Middle East for the past decade, according to Lee, Ishimaru and Pyon Jin Il, head of Korea Report, a newsletter.

Another link: Pakistan, the chief supporter of Afghanistan's Taliban regime, has been buying missile technology from North Korea, as has Iran. If Pyongyang is a valid enemy in the U.S. war on terrorism, how to respond? A military strike, even one limited to missiles, has diplomatic and military ramifications. However, cutting off one of ruler Kim Jong Il's main sources of finance--illegal activities in Japan--might prove easier.

North Korea's government has been manufacturing large quantities of heroin, amphetamines, weapons and counterfeit U.S. dollars to finance its weapons development programs. It sells them either through criminal gangs in Japan or via Russia and China to the U.S. and Europe, the Korea experts say.

Members of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party also help finance the North Korean regime in exchange for bribes, the three experts say. For example, when Japan gave 500,000 tons of rice aid to North Korea last year, politicians received kickbacks from North Korea, Lee says. "I was with a North Korean official as he phoned a Japanese member of parliament and told him a shipment of free fish had been sent to a company he owns," he says.

Japan's ruling party has begun preparations to bail out credit cooperatives linked to the North Korean government with payments of public money that have amounted to $3 billion so far and could rise to over $10 billion, according to Kiyoshi Ueda, a member of Japan's opposition Democratic Party.

These banks would lend, for example, $12 million to North Korean businessmen in Japan, and they would have to pay $2 million of that to North Korea and to Japanese ruling party officials. "They are now trying to quietly use public money to restart these institutions with the same people in charge as those that drove them to bankruptcy in the first place," Lee says.

Another chunk of money that could have helped North Korea finance its atomic weapon and missile development came from Japan's Fuji Bank, now part of Mizuho Financial Holdings, the world's largest bank, according to The Crimes of Fuji Bank, a book by Mineo Yamamoto. Fuji paid $350 million to North Korean organizations in Japan in exchange for debt collection services, according to the book, which disappeared from circulation almost immediately after it was published in 1996. Fuji refused to comment. Deb's comments: Fuji is the very same bank that is stumbling at the brink of bankruptcy, that has already publicly admitted that if the books were accurately tallied, most customers would be bankrupt and most loans would have to be paid in full, asap.

The real risk associated with North Korea is that "nobody really knows what is going on there," says freelancer Ishimaru. "Nobody knows how much money goes from Japan to North Korea," adds the Korea Report's Pyon. U.S. policymakers may wish to find out.



-- Anonymous, November 29, 2001


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