Word: kim
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...From a local lookout point, the town's residents can peer across a stretch of river at the scrubby, brown hills of North Korea, knowing that hidden from view are bunkers, artillery and rockets that could turn their town into rubble in an hour. But for people like Kim In Tae, who sells women's wear in Ilsan's Lotte department store, the weaponry poses no more of a threat than a stand of pine trees. "Unless the U.S. attacks North Korea first, I'm not nervous," Kim says. "North Korea wants to be equal...
...Kim's faith in the good intentions of his heavily armed neighbor is prevalent throughout most of South Korea. It's a belief that seemingly cannot be shaken even as the North Korea nuclear crisis worsens. Pyongyang is refusing to return to six-party negotiations with the U.S., South Korea, China, Japan and Russia on dismantling its nuclear program, and is sticking instead to its familiar diplomatic tactics of ambiguity and provocation. Last week, North Korea jangled nerves around the region again by announcing it had unloaded 8,000 fuel rods at its Yongbyon reactor?a step that would allow...
...That gloom hasn't yet filtered down to ordinary South Koreans. And the startling disconnect between official views of the danger that Kim Jong Il's despotic government poses to the world and the sanguine attitudes of South Korean citizens is making it desperately hard for diplomats from Washington and Seoul to forge a common strategy for defusing the crisis. After years of regarding North Koreans as bitter enemies, the prosperous, democratic South now holds a benign view of the hunger-wracked police state. To southerners, North Koreans may be brothers from another planet (as the International Crisis Group...
...onslaught from enemy tanks and troops. In those days, the town's proximity to North Korea made it an unpopular place to live. Today, property prices are as high as those in the rest of metropolitan Seoul. "Lots of people want to live here," says real estate broker Kim Bok Chun, 50. "There's lots of fresh air." The threat of a nuclear test by the North? "This isn't affecting the price of apartments," he says. "North Korea won't attack us with nukes?we're the same race." Says Lee Do Hwan, another employee of Ilsan's Lotte...
...These sentiments are reflected in the strain between Washington and Seoul over how to deal with Pyongyang. For decades, South Korea and the U.S. both treated North Korea as the enemy. But in 1997, with the election of pro-democracy activist Kim Dae Jung as President, Seoul changed course. The South's leaders realized that if Kim Jong Il's government collapsed and the North unraveled, the burden of feeding millions of starving North Koreans and rehabilitating the North's crippled economy could devastate South Korea's own economy for years to come. Seoul started to send aid across...