Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...What does this have to do with Pyongyang's recent belligerence? According to diplomats and intelligence sources in Washington and East Asia, plenty. The North Koreans have chosen what could have been a period of weakness - with an ailing leader trying to arrange the eventual transfer of power to an untested son - to state that it does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons program. "It's pretty clear they have made the strategic choice to be a nuclear power, period, and will no longer hold out the weapons program as a thing to be bargained away in talks...
...Enter the Hostages But Washington's desire to isolate the North has been complicated by Pyongyang's June 8 sentencing of two Americans to 12 years of hard labor. Euna Lee, 36, and Laura Ling, 32, were filming a report for Current TV, a San Francisco - based network co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, on North Korean refugees in China. They were working near the border city of Dandong in northeastern China when they were arrested on March 17. The two were convicted of illegal entry into North Korea - accounts differ as to whether the women inadvertently crossed...
...Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. government views the case as wholly separate from the other issues now dividing Pyongyang and Washington. But Pyongyang almost certainly does not. For a regime that acts more like a Mafia family than a government, kidnapping has been a tactic North Korea has used for decades. Relations between Japan and North Korea are inflamed precisely because of revelations that for years the North kidnapped Japanese and then used them to train North Korean spies in Japanese language, culture and history. At a moment when Washington is pledging to get tough, Pyongyang "will...
...choice. Judging from the testimony of defectors like Kang Chol Hwan, who spent a decade as a boy in one of North Korea's most notorious camps for political prisoners, the conditions of the journalists' imprisonment could be brutal. The Administration is considering whether sending a special envoy to Pyongyang would help. Former U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson, who has traveled to Pyongyang on special diplomatic missions, said recently, "Now is when the negotiating really begins." (Read "Your Move, China...
...Containment the broader challenge for obama is to craft a policy that contains three parts: it must continue to defuse tensions between North and South Korea, stop North Korea from selling weapons of mass destruction to others, and inflict sufficient economic pain on Pyongyang through new sanctions to make it rethink its determination to be a nuclear power. The primary mission of Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg on a recent visit to Seoul was to reinforce the U.S. military commitment to its long-standing ally, at a time when the "possibility of small-scale skirmishes [between North and South...