Word: kim
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...allowed North Korea, without giving up much of anything, to gorge on a smorgasbord of South Korean aid amounting to more than $800 million in the past five years alone. The gravy train reached full throttle in October when Lee's predecessor, Roh Moo Hyun, held a summit with Kim in Pyongyang and agreed to provide a laundry list of goodies to the impoverished North, including the construction of shipbuilding facilities, the development of a special economic zone and the expansion of the Kaesong industrial park...
...costly projects on hold. He says he expects the North's cooperation on issues important to Seoul, such as holding reunions of families that have been separated since the end of the Korean War. Perhaps more importantly, Lee is making greater economic ties contingent on progress in denuclearization. If Kim completely abandons all of his nuclear programs, Lee says he'll institute a vast aid package aimed at tripling North Korea's annual per capita gross national income to $3,000. (South Korea's is more than $20,000.) Says Kim Tae Hyo, Lee's secretary for national strategy...
...policies. "The North Koreans are asking how hard they have to slap Lee until they push him back on the Sunshine road," says Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Lee has shown no intention of changing his mind. Kim, Lee's national-strategy secretary, calmly dismisses the North's rhetoric as "not a new phenomenon." In late March, South Korea's representative voted for a U.N. resolution criticizing North Korea's human-rights record, a reversal of Seoul's previously nonconfrontational stance on the issue...
...South Korea's central bank, and a bad harvest has worsened chronic food shortages, say North Korea watchers. Lee has pledged to maintain humanitarian aid to the North. But if Pyongyang's plight continues to worsen, Lee's tourniquet on other potentially vital economic arteries could force the Kim regime to heel...
...could also backfire. Pyongyang at the moment is still talking to the U.S., but North Korea in the past has proven almost impervious to economic punishment. The Rodong Sinmun already warned that Lee's hard line "throws a hurdle in the way of the settlement of the nuclear issue." Kim Jong Il, after all, is always looking for an excuse to break his word...