Word: seoul
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...Washington over how to handle the North, so, too, are there conflicting opinions in Beijing over what to do. A diplomatic source who had direct involvement in the six-party talks says the Chinese Foreign Ministry has been more willing to accommodate the concerns of Washington, Tokyo and Seoul. But the other, and probably more powerful, influence in Beijing is the international department of the Chinese Communist Party, which tends to be pro-Pyongyang. Those two factions often struggle to influence the decisions of the senior leadership in Beijing, whose "red lines" seem to be a "constantly moving target...
...president of a Seoul-based organization called the North Korean Gulag Shutdown Movement, spent four years in Yodok for trying to escape the country. "I was always hungry and cold," he says, recalling life in the camp. He remembers scavenging for dead rodents and snakes to eat. "When I found one, that would be a good day," he says. At his camp, it "was normal for the prison guards to be cruel. No one had hope or cared about anything," says Kim, who was finally released. The camps' pervasive sense of hopelessness is a common theme woven through many defectors...
...Some say the same whims that informed their long sentence could work in the favor of Ling and Lee, who were reporting for Al Gore's Current TV when they were detained. North Korean activists like Seoul-based Kim Sang Hun, who has interviewed nearly two dozen former prisoners, says the journalists "won't see the real conditions" in the North's prison system because even Pyongyang knows the situation in the country's penal system is something to be ashamed of - a humiliating condition that the Americans would only bear witness to once they were released. Kim thinks...
...such sentiment holds, it is unlikely that North Korea's saber-rattling will scare Seoul into making new concessions or opening the aid spigot anytime soon. For now, frustrated South Koreans seem content to wait until North Korea shows some signs it is more willing to cooperate. Kim Jong Il "is like a frog in a well living in his own world," complains Kim, the retiree. "If he opens up, the North Koreans would be better off, and we would be better off, too, but he doesn't seem to understand that." Until he does, the conflict on the Korean...
...women on humanitarian grounds. But it is hardly a foregone conclusion that the North will comply anytime soon. The two women have become yet another bargaining chip between Washington and Pyongyang, and "no one knows at this point what the North will want for them," says a diplomat in Seoul. (See pictures of North Koreans at the polls...