Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...prediction would have once been laughable. After all, North and South Korea are still technically at war, and in the autumn of 2006 Pyongyang's insular regime defied the world by testing a nuclear bomb. But since February 2007, when North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il struck a deal with the U.S., Japan, Russia, China and South Korea to begin dismantling his nuclear program in exchange for aid and normalized relations with Washington, there has been a burst of cooperation between the two Koreas. In mid-December, a direct rail link opened between Seoul and the Kaesong Industrial Complex across...
...Indeed, when Lee is inaugurated next month, he will assume office at a crucial time for the Korean peninsula. In October, outgoing South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun met in Pyongyang with Kim Jong Il, marking just the second inter-Korean summit ever. The North may also be on the brink of a historic peace agreement with the U.S. - one that President George W. Bush, in his last year in office, appears to want desperately in order to shore up his controversial foreign-policy legacy. A deal between Washington and Pyongyang - predicated on the North verifiably giving up its nuclear...
...leaves office next month. (South Korean Presidents under the constitution are limited to one five-year term.) In his first years in office, Roh was derided by many in Washington as an apologist for Kim Jong Il. Now, Bush has all but adopted the "Sunshine Policy" by promising Pyongyang a range of diplomatic and economic blandishments in return for the North's nuclear disarmament. Although Pyongyang missed a Dec. 31 deadline to come clean about the full extent of its nuclear-weapons program, as it had promised to do, the North is already dismantling its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon - which...
...Beijing, where I plunked down $4,000 in cash for the 10-day trip. The next day my fellow travelers and I received our visas and boarded a Soviet-era Tupolev plane belonging to Air Koryo, the national North Korean airline, for the two-hour flight to Pyongyang. We had no itinerary because our trip was considered "secret" information at that point. After landing, we were asked to hand over any cell phone, computer with GPS, radio and video camera?all forbidden from that moment forward...
...fall by the wayside in the face of larger rapprochement with the North. Dujarric says there is little that Japan can do at the moment as the "U.S. has caved in to North Korea" and argues that the six-party talks have become two-party talks - between Washington and Pyongyang. An opportunity could arise, however, if North Korea demands more aid as a condition for continuing with the negotiations. "For Japan to pay, something has to be paid [to them] for the abductees," he notes, "even if it is just a fig leaf." Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda broached the abductions...