The Marmot’s Hole

By SHELTON BUMGARNER
Marmot’s Hole Guest Blogger

The biggest news of this week was the anticipation, the dread, of what might (or might not) happen next week.

That’s right, the six-party talks are supposed to start up again next week at some point and during much of the week the press was giving us a play by play on when and if they would start up again.

After weeks of worry, the date of Sept. 2 was finally reported to be agreed upon.

The other big news this week was that previously secret diplomatic papers related to the ROK and Japan resuming normal diplomatic relations were released. One of the key aspects of the papers was the fact that the ROK considers Japan still legally accountable for the “comfort women” who were forced to service the Japanese imperial war machine during Korea’s 35 year occupation.

Decades-old archives were declassified on Friday in Seoul detailing closed-door meetings between Korea and Japan prior to the 1965 normalization treaty. Based on the files, the government here concluded that the negotiations resolved only financial claims and credit affairs, and that Tokyo remains obligated to take legal responsibility for its “inhumane crimes.”

However, the Japanese Premier has maintained his country’s stance that prewar and wartime issues were “fully and ultimately” resolved with the signing of the 1965 treaty. Korea contends that the pact fails to compensate “comfort women,” Korean A-bomb victims and Koreans forcefully displaced to Russia’s Sakhalin island to work for Japanese companies during the colonial period.

As I feared last week, the DPRK took the appointment of Jay Lefkowitz as the White House’s go-to guy on North Korea’s human rights issues as an opportunity to be its usual pain-in-the-ass self.

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea on Saturday demanded the United States rescind its recent appointment of a special envoy on human rights in the communist country, warning the position could hurt international efforts to end the North’s nuclear weapons program.

[...]

North Korea said the appointment “is an act of bad omen that hurts our generous and flexible efforts to resolve the nuclear problem” and demanded the envoy be “removed immediately.”

“It is an extremely challenging and dangerous act for the U.S. … to take its intention to topple our regime into the stage of detailed action,” the North’s state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary carried by its official Korean Central News Agency.

Koreans simply shrugged this week when President Roh Moo Hyun said he’d effectively give up power if the country’s opposition parties would form a co-coalition government with him.

Park Guen Hye, leader of the Grand National Party, the opposition group Roh is wooing, was quoted as saying by her aides: “This is not the first time. How many times is he going to say that?”

[...]

Now, Roh’s political adversaries have trouble taking his suggestion seriously. “If he is so diffident about being a president, why doesn’t he just step down?” asked Yoo Jong Pil, spokesman for the Democrats, a smaller opposition party.

During the course of the week, the United States and the ROK held joint military exercises, while the Sino-Russian exercises continued as well. And we were reminded that the DPRK simply loves to smuggle things for loot, including drugs and “supernotes.”

Showing yet again that if you invite the publisher of the world’s most influential newspaper to your surreal communist state, his newspaper might start producing copy making the citizens of your sworn enemy look cuter than a puppy in a petshop window, the New York Times has not one, but two cute (South) Korean stories this week (registration required).

Our quote of the week comes from Army Gen. Leon LaPorte, commander of Combined Forces Command Korea:

The North Korean military has a large standing Army of 1.2 million, with the ability to mobilize another 5 million, LaPorte said. “They have over 12,000 pieces of artillery. A portion of those can range Seoul from where they sit in underground facilities.”

The North Koreans maintain a large stockpile of chemical weapons, and leaders there do not consider chemical weapons of mass destruction. Current North Korean doctrine states that every third round fired would be a chemical round, LaPorte said. The general said the North Koreans have more than 800 missiles that can range the peninsula and beyond.