Word: aid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Many South Koreans feel the same way. In recent years, Seoul has tried just about everything - from hard-line demands to generous food and fertilizer aid - to convince the isolated regime to end its controversial nuclear-weapons program and improve ties with its southern neighbor. But relations between the two Koreas have remained more or less unchanged. The stalemate on the peninsula that began after the Korean War of the early 1950s continues, with Pyongyang still regularly hurling threats and insults at the South. The North's stubbornness has left South Koreans feeling helpless and uncertain about what an effective...
...Some South Koreans place at least part of the blame for the deteriorating North-South relationship on their own conservative President. Lee's two predecessors pursued an agenda of engagement with Pyongyang called the "sunshine policy," in which Seoul gave North Korea aid and investment - including the development of an industrial park just north of the border - in the hopes of defusing tensions. The "sunshine policy" produced two North-South summits - in 2000 and 2007 - but Pyongyang offered Seoul no meaningful concessions in return for its help. Upon taking office last year, Lee changed course and linked further economic cooperation...
...rotten." Some in Seoul have become annoyed that Pyongyang continued to spend money on its weapons programs even as South Korea donated large amounts of fertilizer and food to its much poorer Northern brethren. "What we're unhappy with is the fact that even if we send them aid, they don't use it for their people and instead spend everything on buying weapons," complains Kim Chang Bok, a 76-year-old retiree. "Seeing what they've done, I don't think we need to send aid." Even South Koreans who would like to see their government change its policy...
...nation commits, or is unable to prevent, massive human-rights abuses on its soil. Other, lesser African disasters do qualify for R2P intervention, in the form of large peacekeeping forces. The U.N. has authorized 26,000 troops for Darfur, where massacres are common and 2.5 million people need aid (and mostly receive it). It has also authorized another 20,000 for the Democratic Republic of Congo, where human-rights abuses are rife and millions are intermittently made refugees...
...Meanwhile, the country exists in a violent and anarchic vacuum, a place that has gone 18 years without a government, which is an al-Qaeda sanctuary and destination of choice for hundreds of foreign jihadists, and where millions need food but where 40 aid workers have been killed since the start of 2008. Somali expert Ken Menkhaus, political science professor at Davidson College, calls it the "longest-running instance of complete state collapse in the post-colonial...