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-------- canada
CANADA DETAINS AND DEPORTS OIL CONGRESS ACTIVISTS
From: Julie Light cwatch@corpwatch.org
Subject: Activists Detained & Deported--Urgent Release
PROJECT UNDERGROUND www.moles.org
TRANSNATIONAL RESOURCE & ACTION CENTER www.corpwatch.org
Contacts: Joshua Karliner, TRAC 415-561-6567
Shanna Langdon, Project Underground 510-705-8981
Currently In Jail: Amit Srivastava, TRAC cell: 415-786-4327
Carwil James, Project Underground cell: 510-421-0119
San Francisco, June 8-Bay Area activists set to speak at a teach-in on the human rights and environmental impacts of the oil industry were arrested by Canadian immigration officials last night at Calgary's international airport.
The officials told Carwil James of Project Underground and Amit Srivastava of the Transnational Resource & Action Center (TRAC) that they were detained because of their involvement in activities critical of the World Petroleum Congress-a global oil industry gathering.
"The Canadian government should be ashamed of itself for pre-empting free speech in such a heavy-handed manner. It appears that Canada is more interested in protecting oil corporations than human rights," said Joshua Karliner, Director of TRAC.
Using a law that apparently allows them to deny entry to individuals with two or more arrest convictions, Canadian officials detained James and Srivastava as they arrived for the Counter Petroleum Congress where they were scheduled to speak. Both activists have been convicted of misdemeanors in the past for engaging in non-violent civil disobedience. Mr. James was most recently arrested at the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Mr. Srivastava hasn't been arrested in nine years.
Immigration officials used this pretext to read through and copy paper and electronic documents the activists carried, including Mr. Srivastava's year long work plan.
"This detention is part of a systematic government effort at the behest of oil corporations--something we are more used to witnessing in dictatorships like Nigeria," said Danny Kennedy, Director of Project Underground. "Withfree trade, corporations move freely across border; people, especially those critical of corporate globalization, apparently cannot."
Both activists are people of color (Amit is Indian American and Carwil is African American). Other white activists with multiple civil disobedience charges were apparently let into Canada without any problem. "While this may be coincidence, we are also concerned that they may have been singled out as activists of color" said Kennedy.
The activists who were jailed over night and transported in chains and shackles were given two choices: either fight deportation and risk a life-long ban from Canada or withdraw their application to enter the country and leave immediately. Mr. James is staying and fighting deportation, working with Canadian immigration attorneys. Mr. Srivastava has withdrawn his application. He should be available to interview from 8 PST onward
-------- germany
REPORT ON BERLIN SPACE DEMO
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 02:22:54 -0400
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" globalnet@mindspring.com
In Berlin, the Anti-ILA campaign (ILA = International Air and Space Fair) tried to do a blockade of the main gate of the fair area at airport Berlin-Schoenefeld. Police had gained advance knowledge about that, however, and did a thorough check of cars that came from closeby Potsdam. They arrested 8 people who wanted to take part in the blockade. At the entrance, they arrested a few more and prevented the blockade.
They also prevented a protest action in the fair at a military Tornado airplane. On Saturday, we built up an information table at subway station Berlin-Rudow where shuttle buses to the main fair entrance left. We had (toy) balloons filled with helium which we handed to children. The balloons said "Use space peacefully" on one side. On the other they showed the CPIS logo (which we also use in Germany" and the words "Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space". The Mutlangen group had published a special edition of the "Weltraum Aktuell" ("News on Space") newsletter.
People were rather in a hurry to get on the buses and get to the trade show. But we handed out many leaflets, had some talks. And the kids took the ballons with them to the fair - I don't think anyone would have dared to take the balloons away from them! We were about 20 people who participated in the Rudow action. At the fair, they had several display areas in the open. In the main display area, most planes were military ones - the Eurofighter, the stealth bomber, and many others which names I don't know. People were allowed to climb up some of them and sit in the cockpit and were explained how they worked. There were many young boys keen to do that. They also had a Eurofighter flight simulator there. All the large military and aerospace/space campanies (with the exception of Boeing) were there. In addition to the fair, there were dozens of conferences and expert meetings during the the fair time. About 70% of these were on military subjects.
This year, the fair had a focus on (military) cooperation with Eastern Europe countries. Because France and Germany had decided to use the Airbus 400 as the new large transport plane for the military, the Russians were angry and did not display the Antonov...
Regina Hagen Darmstaedter Friedensforum Teichhausstrasse 46 D-64287 Darmstadt Germany Tel. [49] (6151) 47 114 Fax [49] (6151) 47 105
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German Nuclear Phaseout Deal Near, Gaps Remain
June 12, 2000
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jun2000/2000L-06-12-04.html
BERLIN, Germany, The German government and electricity industry look set to formally agree a phaseout plan for nuclear power this week, following a breakthrough achieved in a meeting between chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Manfred Remmel, president and CEO of the power firm RWE Energie, on June 7.
However, the agreement does not have a deadline by which all of Germany's 20 nuclear power stations would have to shut down.
Siemens Pressurized Water Reactor at Grohnde (Photos courtesy Siemens)
Tough negotiating is expected to continue on several areas, but a draft of the consensus paper leaked to the German press shows most of the agreement is in place.
One stumbling block, the fate of the Mulheim-Karlich nuclear reactor, has been overcome. It was closed in 1988 after only 13 months in service, but now its owner, RWE has won the government's acceptance of the station's inclusion in what the leaders called a "burden sharing" framework.
Under this arrangement, the industry will be allowed to generate a set volume of electricity and to share this between power stations - including the generating capacity of Mulheim-Karlich.
A key element of the deal yet to be decided is how much electricity the industry will be allowed to generate from nuclear plants, though figures of 2,600 to 2,700 terawatt hours of electricity are reported to be under discussion.
It is unclear how this will translate into reactor lifetimes. Previously, the government was pushing for a maximum 30-year lifespan per reactor, while the industry wanted each reactor to be allowed 35 years of actual operations.
Siemens Boiling Water Reactor at Gundremmingen
Utilities that generate power will be free to trade or share whatever level of production is allowed. This, and the fact that the agreement still lacks a final cap date by which power stations would have to shut down, is expected to lead to friction within the Red/Green coalition government, especially if the power generators win generous terms.
The minority Green coalition partner has already compromised significantly on its initial demands in agreeing to a common position with its Social Democratic Party (SPD) partner.
Other elements of the draft deal include a commitment by the government not to require closure of Germany's two oldest reactors - started up in 1968 and 1972 - before the end of 2002 at the earliest. This marks a further setback for the Green party, which wanted some power stations closed before the next general election, due in 2002.
In addition, the government is pledging not to change current safety standards for nuclear power stations or to introduce new taxes or other measures that would discriminate against the industry.
The deal will include a ban on transport of spent fuel for reprocessing from July 1, 2005, with companies being urged to stop the practice sooner if possible. This provision will be a blow to nuclear fuel reprocessors French owned Cogema and British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., already under fire for radiation leaks and safety management problems.
{Published in cooperation with ENDS Environment Daily, Europe's choice for environmental news. Environmental Data Services Ltd, London. Email: envdaily@ends.co.uk}
-------- health
EPA: Toxic Dioxins Put Human Health at Risk
June 12, 2000 (ENS)
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jun2000/2000L-06-12-11.html
WASHINGTON, DC, A group of environmental contaminants called dioxins are most dangerous for infants and children, but the health of adults exposed to the chemicals is also at risk, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said today in a long awaited reassessment of dioxin toxicity.
Dioxins can alter the fundamental growth and development of cells in a way that results in cancer and adverse effects upon reproduction and development in animals and potentially in people, the EPA said in a draft report.
Based on a more complete understanding of dioxins, the report finds that risks to people may be somewhat higher than previously believed, even though actual exposure seems to be declining among the general population.
The EPA released draft chapters of its reassessment of the health risks from dioxins for scientific and public review. The process includes review by an independent peer review panel in July and review by EPA's Scientific Advisory Board planned for October.
Aluminum plant beside a Catholic church, belches fumes over a New Orleans, Louisiana residential area. 1973. (Photo courtesy EPA)
A group of about 30 chemically related compounds is collectively referred to as dioxins. Dioxins are produced by waste incineration and other industrial processes. Collectively, they are one of 12 persistent organic pollutants which are the subject of a international treaty negotiation. These pollutants build up in the human and animal tissue, accumulating as they ascend up the food chain.
More than 100 prominent physicians, public health professional and scientists concerned about the effects of dioxins have appealed to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore "to develop a plan of action, which should include national and international commitments to the long-term goal of the virtual elimination" of the dangerous chemicals.
The EPA reassessment report has been in the works for nearly a decade and has been the target of much industry pressure, the health officials say. "The industries flooding our environment with dioxin have denied its dangers while this report has been held up for nine years," said Robert Musil, Ph.D., CEO and executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
"This reassessment tells the truth they don't want you to hear: dioxin is a dangerous cancer causing chemical that must be phased out," said Dr. Musil.
Child plays frisbee on a smoke-filled street in North Birmingham, Alabama, the most heavily polluted area of the city. 1972. Dioxins accumulate in fatty tissues and are not eliminated. (Photo courtesy EPA)
Dioxins are especially dangerous to children. As the physicians' letter to the President explains, "developing fetuses, nursing infants, and young children are at greatest risk from current levels of dioxin exposure. EPA's draft risk characterization warns that young children consume more than three times - and nursing infants 100 times - the amount of dioxins as adults, on a body weight basis."
The reassessment released today is the product of an exhaustive review by EPA scientists and other government and non-government scientists begun in 1991. It reflects comments received since release of an earlier draft in 1994, recommendations received from EPA's Scientific Advisory Board in 1995 and extensive additional data on dioxin obtained by the Agency.
Following completion of scientific and public review, EPA will issue the final dioxin reassessment document and at the same time will publish a draft dioxin Risk Management Strategy for public comment. The strategy will propose EPA policy and programs for dioxin using the reassessment as its scientific basis.
In addition to the two draft chapters for which the Agency is inviting comments, the entire reassessment and other background information are now available on EPA's dioxin reassessment web site: http://www.epa.gov/ncea/dioxin.htm.
Limited paper copies of the summary chapter, and a CD-ROM of the reassessment (not including the summary chapter), are available from the National Service Center for Environmental Publications at 1-800-490-9198.
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WHO Issues Antibiotic Alert
June 12, 2000
Associated Press - Intelihealth
http://ipn.intelihealth.com/IPN/ihtIPN?st=23883&t=7223&c=285768
WASHINGTON (AP) - The World Health Organization warned Monday that increasingly drug-resistant infections in rich and developing nations alike are threatening to make once-treatable diseases incurable.
Scientists have been urging action for years to fight the growing problem of infections becoming impervious to treatment. The WHO's new report adds to the alarm.
"We're losing windows of opportunity," said WHO infectious diseases chief Dr. David Heymann. "It's something we have to really address immediately or we're going to start losing our antibiotics."
"This is a major problem for us, and it isn't going to go away," added Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who helped WHO unveil the report. "We use the same antibiotics as other countries do," so resistance in one country is bad news for everybody.
Bacteria, parasites and viruses all naturally evolve to fight treatment. It's classic survival of the fittest: Bugs exposed to drugs that don't kill them become stronger, able to withstand subsequent treatment attempts, and pass on that drug resistance to their next generation.
Misuse of medications, particularly antibiotics, speeds this process.
In developed countries, people often overuse antibiotics, demanding them for viruses like colds. The body always harbors germs, so each unneeded antibiotic dose is an opportunity for them to evolve. U.S. and Canadian doctors are estimated to overprescribe antibiotics by 50 percent, the WHO report said.
Impoverished developing countries have the opposite problem. Many patients can't afford the full course needed to cure an infection. Antibiotics may be sold at market stalls where people buy a few doses without a doctor's exam. In Vietnam in 1997, researchers found more than 70 percent of patients were prescribed inadequate doses to cure serious infections.
Then there's misinformation: In the Philippines, people mistakenly use low doses of an anti-tuberculosis drug as a "lung vitamin," WHO said.
Animals add to the problem. Half the world's antibiotics are used on the farm, sometimes to treat illness but mostly to help healthy animals grow bigger. That encourages drug-resistant germs that cause food poisoning, WHO said.
What effect does all this have? Among the report's sobering examples:
-Gonorrhea was once easily curable with penicillin and tetracycline. "Today, you can't touch it anywhere in the world with those drugs," Heymann said. Poor nations can't afford more expensive alternatives and, to make matters worse, untreated gonorrhea is fueling spread of the AIDS virus.
-In Estonia, Latvia, and parts of Russia and China, more than 10 percent of tuberculosis patients have strains resistant to two powerful medicines. Overall, up to 2 percent of the world's 16 million TB sufferers have multi-drug resistant strains, particularly frightening because TB is airborne, spread when people cough.
-Malaria, the mosquito-spread infection that kills a million people a year, is resistant to the top medication 80 percent of the time.
-Some 5,000 Americans may have suffered longer-lasting food poisoning in 1998 from drug-resistant germs in chicken.
Nobody counts deaths from drug-resistant infections. The CDC says 88,000 Americans a year die of infections they catch in the hospital, and many are resistant to at least one antibiotic, complicating treatment attempts.
Wiser use of antimicrobial drugs is the solution, the WHO said. It recommended increased funding to help poor countries afford enough antibiotics, and education for poor and rich nations alike to avoid misuse.
WHO also recommended that human antibiotics not be used as growth promoters for animals. Europe already has banned several such drugs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has debated stricter rules here for several years, but is under industry pressure not to tighten animal drug restrictions.
-------- imf / world bank
Court bars Romanian IMF deal
By Phelim McAleer in Bucharest
Financial Times
June 12 2000 17:32GMT
From: Robert Weissman - rob@essential.org
Article highlight: "Successive governments have promised austerity, only to cave in to electoral pressures."
A key element of the Romanian government's agreement with the International Monetary Fund, which introduced a salary cap for employees in state-run companies, has been declared illegal by the Bucharest appeal court.
The decision represents a setback for the country's plans to rejuvenate its economy with the help of IMF funds. Last week, the IMF approved, after a number of delays, the extension of a $535m standby credit and the immediate release of $116m. This approval was expected to trigger further funds from the World Bank and the European Union.
However, the release of the funds was only sanctioned after firm commitments from the country's centre-right coalition government that state spending would be reduced, with salaries pegged and performance-related. Previously, managers at state-run industries could award themselves and their employees bonuses despite incurring huge losses and mounting arrears. It is not unusual for large state enterprises in Romania to owe considerable sums to state utilities and have large outstanding tax bills.
The court ruling followed a complaint from the Meridian Trade Union and an announcement by other unions that they would be initiating strikes and protests. It is likely to add to the problems of the government, which is unpopular in opinion polls, and which may lose power after parliamentary and presidential elections in the autumn. The former communist Social Democrat party (PDSR) gained crucial seats in recent local elections.
The forthcoming election was one of the main reasons the IMF had delayed granting the standby credit. Successive governments have promised austerity, only to cave in to electoral pressures. Cracks in the previously firm commitments from the government to the current IMF deal have already started to emerge. The trade and industry minister has disowned the law on state company salaries passed by the cabinet two weeks ago. Radu Berceanu, of the Democratic party, told the Romanian newspaper, Curentul, he was opposed to the new regulations. "The ordinance was signed in a hurry by some secretaries of state because [Prime Minister Mugur] Isarescu was leaving for the IMF meeting," he said.
----
Flip Side - Barbara Ehrenreich Anarkids and Hypocrites
from the june edition of The Progressive www.progressive.org
In retrospect, it looks like a case of false advertising. Posters for the April 16 anti-IMF actions in Washington, D.C., promised a "nonviolent demonstration." But what actually happened was that thousands of demonstrators were tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and/or beaten with police batons.
The Midnight Special Legal Collective, which provided legal support for the demonstrators, reports that one protester had three ribs broken during his arrest. Another was beaten bloody, then tossed into a paddy wagon with the instruction that he be driven around for a few hours before being taken to a hospital. In jail, hundreds of protesters were denied food or water for twenty-four hours, leading in at least one case to a severe hypoglycemic reaction. According to the legal collective:
"One group of men was taken into a basement, put into a cage, and told by a U.S. marshal, 'There are no cameras here. We can do whatever we want.' Anyone who looked up while the marshal was speaking was punched in the face. People were being released from prison in the middle of a cold, rainy night, without jackets, shoes, in some cases without shirts, and without any money to take a bus or cab anywhere--all had been taken from them by officials."
If this is nonviolence, you'd be better off taking up extreme boxing.
The anti-IMF posters were, of course, promising that the demonstrators themselves would behave in a nonviolent fashion, but nonviolence on one side is, at least in theory, connected to nonviolence on the other. If the protesters are civil and predictable in their actions, then, it is generally hoped and believed, the police will be moved to emulate them. And if the police should fall short of perfect nonviolence, then--the reasoning goes--the poor, martyred, demonstrators will at least have the moral upper hand. Hence, in no small part, the excessive reaction by organizers of the Seattle anti-WTO protests to the black-clad anarchists who threw rocks through the windows of NikeTown, Starbucks, the Gap, and a few other chain stores last November.
No humans were harmed in the rock-throwing incidents--the stores were closed at the time. Yet anti-WTO organizers from the Direct Action Network reacted as if their protest had been taken over by a band of Hell's Angels. Instead of treating the young rock-throwers like sisters and brothers in the struggle--wrongheaded, perhaps, but undeniably enthusiastic--protest organizers swept up the broken glass. They hinted that the perpetrators were agents provocateurs paid by the police. Some proudly assert--though I cannot confirm this--that Direct Action Network folks helped finger the rock-throwers for the police.
Will somebody please call Hypocrisy Watch? The same people who administered a public spanking to the anarkids featured, as one of the anti-WTO's honored guests, one José Bové, the French farmer who famously torched a McDonald's. The double standard for what counts as "violence" was never explained.
Seattle organizers also fretted that the anarkids' actions would upset the unions, although no union leaders issued a peep of complaint. It would have been odd if they had, since America has one of the most violent labor histories of any industrialized nation in the world, and not every little bit of that violence was perpetrated by the Pinkertons. Nor did the rock-throwing demonstrably "ruin" the Seattle protests in the eyes of the public. In fact, it probably doubled the media attention, with most press accounts carefully distinguishing between the 50,000 rock-less protesters and the twenty or so window-smashers.
And it would be interesting to know how many of the anarkid-bashers ever took the time to denounce the riot that swept Los Angeles just after the Rodney King verdict in 1990. Yes, I said "riot"--including attacks on people as well as property, much of it belonging to merely middle class, mostly Korean American, citizens. But the oh-so-politically-correct, whose numbers no doubt include some of today's self-righteously nonviolent protesters, prefer to call that an "uprising."
The events in Seattle and D.C. are in many obvious ways enormously heartening, but they also illustrate how absurdly ritualized leftwing protests have become, at least on the side of the protesters. Once, back in the now prehistoric sixties, a group would call for a demonstration, with or without a police permit, and the faithful would simply show up. If you were fortunate or fleet of foot, you got away unscathed. Otherwise--well, everyone knew there were risks to challenging the power of the state.
Sometime in the early 1980s, demonstration organizers started getting smarter--or, you might say, more scientific and controlling--about the process of demonstrating. In the anti-nuclear power and anti-war movements of the day, they carefully segregated protesters who wished to be arrested from those who did not and insisted that the potential arrestees be organized into "affinity groups" that had been trained for hours or even days in the technology of "nonviolent civil disobedience." It made sense at the time. Affinity groups provided a basis for consensual decision-making among large numbers of people. The training--in linking arms, going limp, and "jail solidarity"--helped assure minimal bodily harm to the arrestees. Besides, everything gets professionalized sooner or later: Why not the revolution?
But there are problems with the new liturgy of protest. For one thing, not everyone has a master's degree in nonviolent civil disobedience, and many potential protesters, even quite militant ones, would be put off by the counter-cultural atmosphere of the trainings. I can remember almost being turned away from an anti- nuclear action in 1982 until one of my companions had the wit to lie and claim that we had indeed gone through extensive training.
Then there is the numbingly ritual quality of the actions: Protesters sit down in a spot prearranged with the police, protesters get carried off by the police and booked, protesters get released. Sometimes safely ritualized protests can be effective, as when, in March 1999, almost 1,200 people--including dignitaries like former New York City Mayor David Dinkins--got themselves arrested to protest the shooting of Amadou Diallo. But even one of the organizers of that protest, longtime activist Leslie Cagan, points out the irony in the protesters' harmonious relationship with the very police force whose homicidal behavior they were protesting.
Worst of all, nonviolence on the part of protesters does not guarantee nonviolent behavior on the part of the police. In Seattle, as well as in D.C., many protesters were rewarded for their civility with pepper spray, beatings, and gas. These are not crossing guards we are up against, but some of the most highly militarized police in the world. In a few decades, they have moved from terrorizing communities of color to deploying torture as a tactic against anyone, of any color, who steps out of line: starving detainees in D.C., rubbing pepper spray in the eyes of anti-logging protesters in California, confining prisoners to potentially lethal restraint chairs, as Anne-Marie Cusac reported two months ago in this magazine.
Clearly the left, broadly speaking, has come to a creative impasse. We need to invent some new forms of demonstrating that minimize the danger while maximizing the possibilities for individual self-expression (sea turtle costumes, songs, dancing, and general playfulness). We need ways of protesting that are accessible to the uninitiated, untrained, nonvegan population as well as to the seasoned veteran. We need to figure out how to capture public attention while, as often as possible, directly accomplishing some not-entirely-symbolic purpose, such as gumming up a WTO meeting or, for that matter, slowing down latté sales at a Starbucks.
Rock-throwing doesn't exactly fit these criteria, nor did the old come-as-you-are demos of the sixties. But neither do the elaborately choreo-graphed rituals known as "nonviolent" civil disobedience. The people at Direct Action Network, Global Exchange, and other groups were smart enough to comprehend the workings of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank. Now it's time for them to figure out how large numbers of people can protest the international capitalist cabal without getting clobbered--or trashed by their fellow demonstrators--in the process.
---
Report on Federal Anti-Activist Intelligence Network
Chris Belcher <cbelcher@alchymedia.com>
Organization: Alchymedia
Subject: Re: Fwd: FW: INFO -- Fed Spy and Military Intelligence (fwd)]
By Frank Morales
On May 4, 2000, the Intelligence Newsletter, based in Paris, France, published a report which stated that "sources close to the Washington DC Metropolitan Police have given Intelligence Newsletter details about intelligence units that gather information on anti-globalization militants in the US and elsewhere". (1) In addition, the same sources said that during the April 17 Break the World Bank DC protests, "reserve units from the US Army Intelligence and Security Command helped Washington police keep an eye on demonstrations staged at the World Bank/IMF meetings." In addition, the French intelligence service report notes that "the Pentagon sent around 700 men from the Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir to assist the Washington police on April 17, including specialists in human and signals intelligence. One unit was even strategically located on the fourth floor balcony in a building at 1919 Pennsylvania Avenue with a birds-eye view of most demonstrators."
According to the report, information on the protest movements is collected and stored by six Regional Information Sharing System (RISS) centers funded by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance. Ostensibly these intelligence centers are set up to counter organized crime, drugs and terrorism but it takes no great stretch to comprehend how civil disobedience, once defined as a terrorist threat and/or criminal conspiracy would, or has become a target. According to the Intelligence Newsletter report, "the RISS also act against any political activist group deemed to be a threat and over the last year has found itself focusing on anti-globalization groups." In addition, the report notes that in order "to justify their interest in anti-globalization groups from a legal standpoint, the authorities lump them into a category of terrorist organizations. Among those considered as such at present are Global Justice (the group that organized the April 17 demonstration), Earth First, Greenpeace, American Indian Movement, Zapatista National Liberation Front and Act-Up." Although this story has yet to be verified, given the> existence of RISS and the paranoid proclivities of the US national security state and its civil disturbance planning apparatus, we should assume the report is accurate.
According to RISS program documents (2), the agency is set up to "share intelligence and coordinate efforts against criminal networks that operate in many locations across jurisdictional lines." The program "serves more than 5,300 member law enforcement agencies" across the country including the FBI, DEA, IRS, Secret Service, Customs and the BATF. It is overseen by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, State and Local Assistance Division, 810 Seventh Street, NW, Washington, DC (202-305-2923). Its immediate overseer is the Institute for Intergovernmental Research (IIR), PO Box 12729, Tallahassee, Florida, (850-385-0600). The IIR also sponsors the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training program (SLATT) which provides, via its "extremist research experts", "training and information to state and local law enforcement personnel in the areas of domestic anti-terrorism and extremist criminal activity." (3) The FBI's National Security Division Training Unit is a partner with IIR in providing SLATT training nationally.
According to a 1999 Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) report on RISS,the six federally funded Regional Information Sharing System centers are financed "to support law enforcement efforts to combat multi-jurisdictional criminal conspiracies and activities." (4) The six centers, the Middle Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network, Newtown, PA, the Mid-States Organized Crime Information Center, Springfield, MO, the New England State Police Information Network, Franklin, MA, the Rocky Mountain Information Network, Phoenix, AR, the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, Nashville, TN, and the Western States Information Network, Sacramento, CA, are set up in such a way that "each center's staff possess sufficient flexibility to tailor the individual center's priorities and operations to the particular - perhaps unique - needs of the region." According to the BJA report, the centers "maintain pools of specialized investigative equipment for loan to participating member agencies", including "photographic, communications (and) surveillance" equipment. In addition, "all six RISS Intelligence Centers have confidential funds available to member agencies for the purchase of investigative information, contraband, stolen property, and other items of an evidentiary nature. The net amount of confidential funds provided by the centers to member agencies totaled $265,526 for 1998."
According to the Intelligence Newsletter report cited earlier, it's the Mid-Atlantic Network, based in Newtown, Pennsylvania, whose region includes New York and the District of Columbia, that is particularly efficient in activist spy work. According to the report, that center "distributes intelligence on the groups to other police departments via RISSNET, enabling investigators to find links between the movements and look into their finances, telephone calls and membership lists." According to Mid-Atlantic Network documents, it was "initiated by the US Congress in 1974 to aid law enforcement agencies in targeting, identifying, and removing multi-jurisdictional criminal elements." The Network offers a "secure database containing information concerning known or suspected criminals, businesses, organizations and their related identifying information", along with "training in the seizure of computers." (5)
As mentioned earlier, the Intelligence Newsletter report claims that hundreds of Army intelligence operatives were present during the DC anti-World Bank demo. Again, with a premonition of tens of thousands of protesters, it is quite likely that the report is accurate. After all, one can rest assured that the Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan, code-named Garden Plot, is especially fixated on defending the seat of government (corporate) power in America. (6) That DC was flooded with intelligence operatives and assorted government spies is, lamentably, quite likely. The US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), cited in the French report, is a "a major army command", which "conducts dominant intelligence, security and information operations for military commanders and national decision makers." (7) Based at Fort Belvoir, Flagler Road, Virginia, (the Nolan Building) since 1989, INSCOM recently redesignated a number of units including "the Continental United States Military Intelligence Group that supported the National Security Agency and a number of field stations."
According to military documents, during the course of the 90's, "INSCOM was drawn into contingency operations other than war all over the globe" These "contingency operations" or domestic military operations other than war, are law enforcement "support missions" in civil disturbance suppression. Quite possibly they are run out of the "Emergency Operations Center" at Fort Belvoir. These operations have been enhanced with the recent creation of the "National Ground Intelligence Center." Further, according to INSCOM, "the mission of the Special Security Group that had disseminated Sensitive Compartmented Information since World War II was drastically realigned. The unit was redesignated and resubordinated to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group." Some of this "sensitive" information is contained in so-called top secret SAP programs. In this regard, INSCOM is in the business of "providing counterintelligence support to the Army's growing number of Special Access Programs -- highly sensitive projects which required exceptional security measures." Actually, the gathering of intelligence during the DC protest involves an even higher source, given that "in 1993 the Secretary of Defense ordered service human intelligence assets consolidated under Defense Intelligence Agency control", at which time "INSCOM turned over most of its human intelligence operations"
Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) Program, www.iir.com/riss/
State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) Program, www.iir.com/slatt/
Bureau of Justice assistance, The RISS Program, 1998, www.iir.com/Publications/RISSProgram1998.pdf
Middle Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network, www.iir.com/riss/magloclen/index.htm
Frank Morales, "US Military Civil Disturbance Planning The War at Home", CovertAction Quarterly #69, Spring/Summer 2000, www.covertaction.org/
US Army Intelligence and Security Command, www.vulcan.belvoir.army.mil/
---
Daybook
Wasington Times
June 12, 2000
http://www.washtimes.com/national/daybook-2000612212854.htm
HOUSE
World Bank meeting - all day - The World Bank begins the 15th meeting of the Caribbean Group for Cooperation in Economic Development.
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Washington Times
June 12, 2000
Embassy Row
James Morrison News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-2000612213852.htm
Wednesday
Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar, who meets Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott Thursday for talks on security, nonproliferation and peace issues in South Asia.
Thursday
Financial Secretary Donald Tsang of Hong Kong, who has meetings with the International Monetary Fund and several think tanks.
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China, in the W.T.O., Won't Become Free
To the Editor:
New York Times
June 12, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/letters/l12chi.html
In "Commies and Demmies" (column, June 6), Thomas L. Friedman writes that because "China is now committed to capitalism with W.T.O. characteristics," it will have to move toward "an independent judiciary" and "W.T.O. rules, not Communist Party whims."
But while Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization is a worthwhile experiment, every act of that government leads to the reverse logic. The power-shrinking unacceptability of an independent judiciary and loss of party control probably means that China is not in fact committed to capitalism with W.T.O. characteristics.
Unfortunately, I expect to see Communist Party stonewalling and tokenism on the liberalizing front, while the party exploits whatever painless gains it can extract from W.T.O. membership.
CHARLES FRED Maspeth, Queens, June 6, 2000
To the Editor:
In "Commies and Demmies" (column, June 6), Thomas L. Friedman made this parenthetical remark referring to the China trade bill:
"It would help if the unions got their heads out of the sand. Imagine if all the money and energy they wasted lobbying against China were applied to health or education funding?"
Well, imagine if all the billions that companies pay their executives were used to improve education. Imagine if the millions spent on each Osprey were used to pay for health care for the poor. Imagine if all the money that Microsoft's lawyers spent on its defense were used to help Angolans get clean water. Imagine . . .
DOUGLAS NILLES Madison, Wis., June 6, 2000
-------- japan
Japan Cops Probing Radioactive Mail
By SHIGEYOSHI KIMURA,
Associated Press Writer
June 12 6:21 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000612/wl/japan_radioactive_letters_1.html
TOKYO (AP) - Police were investigating reports Monday that envelopes containing small amounts of a radioactive powder were mailed to the prime minister's residence and other government offices, a police official said Monday.
At least one of the envelopes, all dated June 6, contained an anonymous message warning that radioactive materials were being sent from Japan to North Korea, a police official said. One government official reported getting a letter containing a sand-like substance.
The letters contained quantities of radioactive material too small to be harmful, Kyodo News agency reported, citing unidentified police sources. The report said nine government offices received the mysterious mail.
A spokesman at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police confirmed on condition of anonymity that officials were investigating the reports, but refused to elaborate. The office of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori refused to comment.
The Education Ministry received an envelope containing the mysterious substance with a letter warning that ``radioactive substance is being sent to North Korea and police should investigate because it is dangerous,'' said Hajime Kajiwara of the Kojimachi police station near the ministry.
Kazunobu Asada, an Education Ministry spokesman, said the envelope contained ``a very small amount of a sand-like substance.'' Asada said the letter was addressed to the education minister and did not include the sender's name.
Kyodo said the envelopes were mailed around June 6. An initial examination indicated the substance may be ground monazite, a mineral containing thorium, a nuclear fuel material, the report said. The envelopes were postmarked in Tokyo.
Similar envelopes were sent to the Home Affairs Ministry, the national police, defense and public security investigation agencies, as well as the Agency of Natural Resources and Energy, and the National Public Safety Commission, Kyodo said.
Yoshinori Inoue, an official at the Home Affairs Ministry, said the ministry received a letter dated June 6 but did not accept it because the sender's name was not on the envelope.
Also Monday, a package bomb exploded at a lawyers' office in Tokyo, slightly injuring a woman's right hand, police said, refusing the release further details. The office was located near major government offices in Tokyo.
## Magpie comment (by K. Hosokawa, editor, hosokawk@cc.saga-u.ac.jp): Contained in the envelopes were fragments of monazite, not processed thorium. They are radioactive anyway. R eportedly the mineral was accompanied by a letter demanding that the authori ties should investigate into "the uranium smuggling to North Korea." There seems to be little to substantiate the claim.
A bizarre incident indeed.
----
Police Check Radioactive Mail Sent to Japan PM
Yahoo News Monday June 12 5:42 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000612/ts/japan_radioactive_dc_3.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-japan-r.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - Police have launched an investigation after envelopes containing radioactive material were sent to Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori's residence and several government agencies, Japan's government spokesman said Monday.
The envelopes contained a small amount of a sand-like powder, including the radioactive element thorium, and the level of radioactivity was not deemed harmful, the Jiji news agency said.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Metropolitan police were investigating the incident, the top government spokesman, Mikio Aoki, told a regular news conference.
But the material contained in the envelopes -- about three grams in each -- had not been harmful, he said.
``The Metropolitan Police are handling (the investigation) and making all possible efforts,'' Aoki said. ``But at present, it is our judgment that there was no impact on human life.''
An Education Ministry official said an envelope had been received on June 6 containing a letter and a small amount of a sand-like substance.
``We didn't know what was in it, but because it was a mysterious package we sent it to the police and they are looking into this,'' the official told Reuters.
An official at the Science and Technology Agency confirmed receiving a similar package on June 7 and said it had been handed over to local police at Tokyo's Kojimachi station for further investigation.
Aoki said a similar envelope had been delivered to the prime minister's official residence and several other ministries, including the Home Affairs Ministry, on June 8.
Asked why the incident had not been made public before, Aoki said: ``It would have been unfortunate if, by making this public, the perpetrator had been influenced and the incident had spread.''
A total of nine government agencies including the National Police Agency and Defense Ministry received similar envelopes, Kyodo news agency said.
Mori is gearing up for a general election on June 25, with campaigning due to start Tuesday and his popularity sagging after comments reviving memories of Japan's wartime militarism.
Opinion polls have shown Mori's ratings battered down to levels last seen for a premier in 1989, when the LDP suffered a stunning Upper House defeat, after he said Japan was a ``divine nation with the emperor at its core.''
Although the election's outcome is tough to call, Mori's governing coalition still has a good chance of keeping a big enough majority in parliament's Lower House to stay in power, and maybe even let Mori keep his job, analysts said.
A series of opinion polls indicated a win, although by a smaller margin, for Mori's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has held power almost uninterrupted for 45 years and its two coalition partners.
---
Japan Cops Probing Radioactive Mail
Associated Press
June 12, 2000 Filed at 6:35 a.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Japan-Radioactive-Letters.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Envelopes containing small amounts of radioactive powder were mailed anonymously last week to the prime minister's residence and other government agencies, officials said Monday.
At least one of the envelopes, dated June 6, contained a message warning that radioactive materials were being sent from Japan to North Korea, a police official said. Another government official reported getting a letter containing a sand-like substance.
Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori's residence received one of the envelopes last Thursday, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Mikio Aoki. The envelope contained 3 grams of powder of about 1 micro-sievert of radioactivity -- too little to harm humans, he said.
The Science and Technology agency said the average person is exposed to about 1,000 micro-sieverts of radioactivity a year.
Kyodo News agency reported that an initial examination indicated the substance may be ground monazite, a mineral containing thorium, a nuclear fuel material. The envelopes were postmarked in Tokyo.
Nine government offices received the mysterious mail, and the government has warned ministries and agencies not to accept packages without the name of the sender, said Kazuhiko Koshikawa, a Mori spokesman.
It was not immediately clear if the mailings were meant to injure anyone. The threat brought memories of the Aum Shinri Kyo cult's 1995 nerve gas attack on subways in Tokyo's central government district, which killed 12.
The Education Ministry received an envelope containing the mysterious substance with a letter warning that ``radioactive substance is being sent to North Korea and police should investigate because it is dangerous,'' said Hajime Kajiwara, an official of the Kojimachi police station near the ministry.
Kazunobu Asada, an Education Ministry spokesman, said the envelope contained ``a very small amount of a sand-like substance.''
Similar envelopes were sent to the Home Affairs Ministry, the national police, defense and public security investigation agencies, as well as the Agency of Natural Resources and Energy, and the National Public Safety Commission, Kyodo reported.
Yoshinori Inoue, an official at the Home Affairs Ministry, said the ministry received a letter dated June 6 but did not accept it because the sender's name was not on the envelope.
Also Monday, a package bomb exploded at a lawyers' office in Tokyo, slightly injuring a woman's right hand, police said, refusing the release further details. The office was located near major government offices in Tokyo.
----
Okinawa Ad
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 17:23:18 -0500 From: CHoffman@CI.Cambridge.MA.US (Catherine B. Hoffman) Organization: City of Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dear Friend:
Thank you for joining Daniel Berrigan, Elise Boulding, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Di Gia, Mel King, Arthur Kinoy, Martha Matsuoka, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Rep. Byron Rushing, Roland Simbulan, Rep. Roy Takumi, Cornel West, Rev. Michael Yasutake, Howard Zinn and a thousand others in signing a petition for the removal of U.S. bases from Okinawa. We have taken the signatures to create an ad which will run in Okinawa in July. We hope you might be able to help us with a $10 donation for the ad.
Washington plans to construct a new state of the art base at Nago City in Okinawa. This base is to be the home of the Osprey, a warplane of great speed and long range with helicopter capabilities, much favored by the U.S. Marine Corps a division of which is based in Okinawa. The purpose of this new base, widely unpopular in Nago City and Okinawa, is to heighten the Pentagon's interventionist posture in the Asia-Pacific region and the Mideast. It coincides with Washington's effort to annul the status of Hiroshima and Kobe as nuclear-free port cities.
President Clinton and the late Prime Minister Obuchi arranged to have the July Summit meeting of the Group of Eight (representing the most heavily industrialized nations) in Nago City. This location will have the effect of putting extraordinary, pressure on the people of Nago and Okinawa to accept the new base; it could also serve to impress the representatives of the wealthy industrialized nations with the U.S. capacity to police Asia and the Mideast (areas of capital investment and natural resources important to the United States and other wealthy nations).
We think it essential that the voice of those in the United States who stand for peace be heard at this Summit meeting. This is why we are planning to place a full-page ad with the petition and signatures in a newspaper of Naha City, the capital of Okinawa, in Japanese and English on the day of the Summit.
The cost of this ad will be $10,000 of which $4,000 has already come in even before the campaign for funds has been launched. (We believe this indicates recognition that the ad represents a unique and internationally important opportunity to challenge Pentagon aggrandizement and express solidarity with the peace movement in Okinawa and mainland Japan.) The ad money must be secured by July 1, so please do not delay if you wish to contribute. Checks should be made out to the American Friends Service Committee and earmarked "Okinawa Work." Such contributions are tax deductible.
In addition, here in Boston, we are planning a noontime vigil on Friday, July 21, the first day of the summit and the day the ad will be released. We encourage others to do the same. If you would like materials to help you, please let us know. Also please tell us if you decide to do something. Even if there are small efforts all across the U.S., this would be very impressive.
Thank you for signing the petition....
Sincerely, Joseph Gerson, AFSC; Cathy Hoffman, Cambridge Peace Commission; Madge Kho, Boone Schirmer, Friends of the Filipino People and Yuichi Moroi for the Boston Okinawa Network.
Boston Okinawa Network c/o AFSC, 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02140 617-864-0999, 617-661-6130 JGerson@AFSC.org
-------- korea
Rumors Fly Over N.Korean Summit Delay
Yahoo News
Monday June 12 7:21 AM ET
By Jean Yoon
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000612/ts/korea_summit_dc_8.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - The secretive North Korean regime's postponement of a landmark inter-Korean summit has sent Seoul's hyperactive rumor mill into overdrive about the reasons behind the 24-hour delay.
Television snags, security concerns and rows over the format of the three-day summit -- the first between the leaders of two countries still technically at war -- were among the rumored reasons for the false start to the keenly awaited meeting.
An aide to South Korean President Kim Dae-jung told Reuters that North Korea, which requested the delay Sunday, was having problems with the television-transmitting facilities that will be broadcasting live parts of the meeting, which will now start Tuesday.
``We believe it's a technical problem linked to the poor quality of live broadcast tests from Pyongyang a few days ago,'' said assistant presidential press secretary Yoon Sock-joong.
``It has to be a minor problem to take just one day to fix. If it was something major it would have taken longer,'' he said.
But Yoon did not rule out the possibility that Pyongyang's security concerns could also have prompted the postponement.
``Security matters can also be viewed as a part of technical problems,'' he said.
Secret Itinerary
South Korea's National Assembly was due to hold a candlelight prayer meeting later Monday to wish for the success of the summit and unification of the Korean peninsula, which has been divided for more than half a century.
``All 70 million people of Korea share the single hope that the summit meeting will be a success,'' said Kim Young-jin, a South Korean lawmaker who organized the prayer meeting.
President Kim and his wife will attend a sendoff ceremony at a Seoul airport Tuesday morning and then address the nation.
``At the meeting with the northern side, I will say everything I want to say,'' a presidential statement said, paraphrasing Kim's planned remarks. ``I will make efforts so that the people in the South and North will understand each other better.''
Upon arrival in Pyongyang, about 180 km (110 miles) northeast of Seoul, Kim will tell the North: ``Let us seek ways for all Koreans in the South and North to live peacefully and happily,'' the statement said.
Kim is to have at least two exclusive meetings with Kim Jong-il, the Stalinist state's reclusive, mysterious leader, and one expanded meeting with a full complement of officials.
The two leaders will also get together at a welcoming banquet and possibly an end-summit dinner, Blue House officials said.
Local media quoted a senior government official as saying Pyongyang was upset about publication of Kim's itinerary.
``The South Korean media released too many reports, mostly based on speculation, on the president's schedule, including where he will stay, which places he will visit and who he will meet, and even his transportation methods,'' the Korea Herald quoted one official as telling reporters.
Rumored Disagreements
Some analysts said the problem may be bigger than just security.
``There may be disagreements between the two governments over the number of summit meetings between the leaders or whether they'll have an expanded meeting with ministers from both sides attending,'' said Hong Yong-pyo, a researcher at the Korea Institute of National Unification.
``Or North Korea might have protested to live broadcasting of the visit and wanted to limit it to just few hours,'' he said.
Of intense curiosity in Seoul is whether Kim will visit the mausoleum in Pyongyang where Kim Jong-il's father, former ''Great Leader'' Kim Il-sung, lies embalmed for public viewing. Such a visit would provoke controversy in South Korea, analysts said.
The presidential Blue House has confirmed that the President will present to Kim Jong-il a pair of Jindo dogs, a rare South Korean breed known for fierce loyalty to their owners. He may get a North Korean breed of dog in return.
Kim, leading a delegation of 130 officials and 50 South Korean reporters, will return by car Thursday, passing through the U.N. truce village of Panmunjom on the most heavily militarized border in the world.
---
Korean Summit - Hope And Skepticism in Washington
Yahoo News
Sunday June 11 1:14 PM ET
By David Storey
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000611/pl/korea_usa_dc_3.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is upbeat about this week's historic summit between South Korea and its reclusive northern neighbor, but memories of ax murders, aircraft bombings and nuclear brinkmanship by Stalinist North Korea darken the sense of hope.
With the United States preparing commemorations this month for the 50th anniversary of the Korean War, in which 37,000 U.S. troops died, no one is forgetting that there are almost exactly that number of American troops stationed in the south today near a border that U.S. President (Bill) Clinton calls the most dangerous place on the planet.
No one is forgetting that it is essentially the same Stalinist leadership making diplomatic overtures today that sent ax-wielding killers to slay American soldiers guarding a peaceful border post in 1976 and blew up a South Korean airliner over the Indian Ocean in 1987.
And it is the risk of possible missile attack from the comparatively tiny and impoverished country that has prompted plans for a $60 billion U.S. defensive shield which could undermine the panoply of international arms agreements that have helped secure peace between the superpowers for decades.
``I wake up every day nervous that something might happen in North Korea,'' Stanley Roth, Assistant Secretary of State for Asian and Pacific Affairs, said last week.
``It is very nice to create reassuring scenarios,'' he said as he listed signs that the reclusive North Korean leadership was finally starting to crack the shell of its Cold War isolation. ``But given the long history you cannot preclude the possibility of North Korea doing something'' provocative, he told a group of reporters.
Nevertheless, Washington appears buoyant over this week's Pyongyang summit, with a senior official even waxing lyrical about the ``courage'' and ``vision'' of President Kim Jong-il, who appears to have emerged as a possible force for change after taking years to consolidate power since succeeding his late father Kim Il-sung in 1994.
A ``Remarkable'' Time
``This really is a remarkable time,'' said the official, who set out the U.S. stance before the meeting but asked not to be identified. ``North Korea has made a decision to reach out and end its isolation -- to try to engage with the world,'' the official said.
Apart from an increased willingness to talk with the United States about controlling its nuclear development and plans to make long-range missiles in return for economic and other help, Pyongyang has shown a willingness to open up on many different fronts -- in Europe, Asia and with both Russia and China.
``Many people thought North Korea could only do one thing at a time. It is clear they can do many things, `` the senior official said.
Washington does not expect big concrete results from the summit, which has been put back a day to start on Tuesday after a request from North Korea, and sees it more as a symbol of a new process that could bring a permanent peace to the Korean peninsula. The 1950-53 war ended only in an armistice.
With a combination of toughness and fulfilled promises, Washington has worked closely with Japan and South Korea to coax North Korea, whose policy of total self-reliance has failed, to emerge from its 50-year defensive crouch.
U.S. officials ascribe much of the credit for the apparent success of that approach to South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, a former pro-democracy activist who has embraced a policy of engagement while facing down any threats to move to this summit.
Courage And Vision Of Two Kims
``We always knew Kim Dae-jung was a leader of enormous courage and vision,'' the senior official said. It had not been clear whether Kim Jong-il also had such qualities. ``It now appears he does,'' the official said.
However rosy the prospects may seem after the Kims meet, Washington is not expecting to lower its guard on the peninsula and in the region.
North Korea consistently makes as its first demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea, but Roth said even if there were a final peace agreement it would not necessarily lead to a pull-out.
``We are committed to forward deployment in the Pacific region,'' he said. ``We may change the role of the troops (in Korea) but it is not at all inevitable that we would leave,'' Roth said.
And, although Washington plans to shortly ease its trade and travel sanctions on the North, officials say normalization will be a long and convoluted process. The delay in this week's summit is emblematic of the kind of stuttering progress Washington has had in bilateral initiatives with the North and expects after decades of hostility and mistrust.
Kim Dae-jung has shifted the focus of the peace initiative, putting the idea of reunification on a back burner. ``He is not looking for the collapse of North Korea, a hard landing, but for peaceful coexistence,'' Roth said.
The challenge in dealing with North Korea, he said, was to effect change gradually, ``so they are not so desperate.''
Roth was careful not to suggest the North is showing any signs at this stage of reforming either its moribund economy, which has left hundreds of thousands hungry, or its monolithic communist system.
``But certainly its diplomacy is changing and we suspect the possibility of greater change is coming,'' Roth said.
---
Korean Summit Delayed by One Day
North Korea Asks Day's Delay in Summit to Prepare
Yahoo News
Last Updated Jun 12 12:58 PM EDT
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000611/ts/korea_summit_dc.html
http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/fc/World/Korea/
(Reuters) - North Korea has asked for a one-day delay in the summit between leaders of the two Koreas to better prepare for the three days of meetings, South Korea's presidential Blue House said Sunday. President Kim Dae-jung will now fly to Pyongyang Tuesday to meet his enigmatic counterpart Kim Jong-il for the first summit between leaders of the rival Koreas.
---
Promise of summit inspires mass youth-led celebrations
Washington Times
June 12, 2000
By Edward Neilan THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-200061223551.htm
SEOUL - The streets of Seoul took on a carnival atmosphere over the weekend as enthusiastic South Koreans brushed off the news that President Kim Dae-jung's historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had been postponed until tomorrow.
Music, placards, caricature masks of the summit participants, balloons and confetti were all in evidence in the downtown shopping and entertainment district of Myongdong over the weekend.
South Korean officials said they were not too worried by a notice from the secretive North Korean government on Saturday night asking that the three-day meeting between the two Kims be delayed for "minor technical reasons."
"The chief executive believes that waiting for one extra day is not a major issue since the two sides have waited over half a century," said Park June-young, chief spokesman for the South Korean president.
The postponement delayed the departure of Mr. Kim, who was to travel aboard a special flight to Pyongyang accompanied by his wife, Lee Hee Ho, a 130-member official delegation and 50 South Korean reporters.
Most of the celebrants in the streets were young men and women, not unlike the students who in past years have staged running battles on the same sidewalks against police with tear gas.
"These kids would do anything for a party," said Shim Jun-kun, a bus driver. "Most of them, even many of their parents, weren't even born when the Korean War started in 1950."
Despite the celebrations, government officials have sought in recent days to dampen expectations from the summit, warning citizens not to expect too much.
"What is most significant is that the leaders of both nations have the historic opportunity to talk directly," Kim Dae-jung noted cautiously.
World Research, a private public-opinion polling institute, found in April that 73.2 percent of South Koreans support the summit.
As a result, the long-feared North is enjoying a surge of interest, with its leader portrayed improbably as a likable folk hero. "Kim Jong-il: When are you coming to Seoul?" asks one large banner in the South Korean capital.
The craze is most evident in bookstores, where titles on North Korea that used to gather dust are attracting browsers and buyers.
Last week's best seller at the Korea Book Center was "100 Questions and 100 Answers About Kim Jong-il." The Shinsegae department store says it is suddenly selling $4,000 a day in North Korean products - mainly edible herbs and liquor.
The Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) aired a program yesterday on Kim Il-sung University, one of a series that will run through next Wednesday.
Other programs in the series include a comparison of North and South in a program about the unification process in Germany, a documentary on the life of women in the North and a documentary disclosing virtually unknown instances of diplomatic negotiations between the two Koreas over the past 50 years.
There is less enthusiasm among those families that have worked in vain for years to be reunited with close relatives living on the other side of the border.
The Dong Hwa Institute, a private organization representing such families, found in a poll that more than half its members do not expect progress at the summit. Officials said the families have been betrayed every time the relationship between the two Koreas shows signs of even slight improvement.
A note of caution also was struck by Keizo Nabeshima, former chief editorial writer for Kyodo News and one of several respected Japanese commentators among the large foreign press delegation.
Mr. Nabeshima said he was struck by "the close policy coordination" among Tokyo, Seoul and Washington that made the summit possible and suggested U.S. special envoy William Perry did a good job getting everyone in the mood.
"Keep in mind, though, that the three nations have delicate differences in policy priorities when it comes to North Korea," he said. "Pyongyang is likely to exploit these differences to drive a wedge in the three-nation coordination arrangement."
---
A note from the editor on the Korean summit
Washington Times
June 12, 2000
By David Jones THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-2000612231531.htm
The Korean summit
Asian affairs always have been of special interest to this newspaper, which maintains one of our only two overseas bureaus in Tokyo, and we intend to provide definitive coverage of the historic summit between the two Korean presidents beginning tomorrow in Pyongyang.
That will be a tall order, given the closed and highly secretive nature of the regime in Pyongyang - a government that often leaves even its few friends in the international community confused about its intentions.
That bewilderment extends even to China, North Korea's nearest thing to an ally since the collapse of the Soviet Union, or so I was told during a visit to Beijing in February.
During a briefing with a senior Chinese official, I asked whether visiting North Korean officials were not impressed with the explosion of economic growth in China and anxious to emulate the free-market reforms that have produced Beijing's towering skyscrapers and modern factories.
The official grimaced and gave me a frustrated shake of his head.
"You know, we bring them here to Beijing, and we take them to Shanghai," now the most modern and developed city in China, he said. "We show them the buildings and the factories. And all they do is accuse us of having betrayed the revolution."
With that conversation in mind, I was particularly interested when the news broke just over a week ago that North Korean President Kim Jong-il had made a secret visit to Beijing, presumably to consult with Chinese leaders ahead of the summit.
It was Mr. Kim's first visit to China in 17 years, so far as anyone knows. Could it be, I wondered, that the "Dear Leader" would be affected by the sight of China's economic transformation in ways that his subordinates had not?
There have been plenty of signs that North Korea is toying with the idea of opening up to foreign investment, if not to political influences, and we have done our best to report them in our pages.
Ben Barber noted in the paper on Wednesday that North Korea has opened diplomatic relations this year with Italy and Australia and is negotiating with at least five other countries, including Britain and Germany.
And South Korea's commerce minister told us in a surprisingly frank interview a month ago that his country expects the summit to open the door to a "rush" of foreign direct investment in the North.
Our correspondent
Readers will find a very different interpretation of Mr. Kim's trip to China in our scene-setting article yesterday by Ed Neilan, our Tokyo correspondent, who is in Seoul for the summit and hopes to get to the North Korean capital.
Mr. Neilan, a longtime Asia hand with close connections in the region, writes that for many in South Korea, Mr. Kim's visit to computer installations and talks with Chinese officials were "ominous signs."
He supports his argument with comments from Lee Hwang-jin, a North Korean-born banker now living in Seoul, and from Chin Chul-soo, a one-time Seoul bureau chief for the Associated Press.
It is sometimes the fate of a foreign editor to be contradicted by his reporters. While I will resolutely not allow anything into the paper I believe to be factually wrong, it is another matter with analysis and interpretation, especially when it is supported from quotes from credible sources.
Mr. Neilan, after all, knows the region better than I do. He has lived continuously in Asia since he moved to Tokyo in 1986 at the end of a four-year stint as foreign editor of The Washington Times.
Mr. Neilan left the paper in 1992 but remained in Japan. Over the next several years, he enjoyed a distinguished career as a self-syndicated columnist, as a fellow with the Hoover Institution and as a visiting scholar or professor at various Asian universities. He came back to The Times as our Asia correspondent last year.
I expect that readers will become familiar with Mr. Neilan's byline in the coming days as he brings his special experience and insights to his coverage of the Pyongyang summit.
• David W. Jones is foreign editor of The Washington Times. His e-mail is jones@twtmail.com.
mailto:jones@twtmail.com
---
Villain or 'capable leader'?
South Korea softens view of North leader as summit nears
Baltimore Sun
Jun 12 2000
By Frank Langfitt Sun Foreign Staff
http://www.sunspot.net/content/cover/story?section=cover&pagename=story&storyid=1150340227833
SEOUL, South Korea - Until recently, North Korea's Kim Jong Il was widely regarded as one of the world's nastiest and most eccentric leaders. Cutting a distinctive figure in a black pompadour, platform shoes and a gray Mao-style suit, the pudgy, 58-year-old dictator has been famous for his taste in nubile actresses, luxury cars and movies.
He presides over a hermit government that, having failed to feed its citizens, routinely imprisons and even executes those who try to flee abroad so that they can eat. So why are so many people saying such nice things about Kim Jong Il these days?
As the summit between the leaders of North and South Korea opens tomorrow, a day later than scheduled, Kim is undergoing a makeover. South Korea, which once portrayed him as a ruthless sadist, praises Kim as a competent leader. Chung Ju Yung, founder of South Korea's Hyundai Group, has described him as "courteous and well-mannered."
Last week, South Korean elementary school children included Kim Jong Il's bespectacled face in an outdoor mural alongside that of their president. All of that for a man who is alleged to have ordered the bombing of a South Korean airliner in 1987 that left 115 dead.
"Everything that we have heard or seen about Kim Jong Il of recent is positive," said a U.S. diplomat in Seoul. "He strikes those who meet him ... as reasonable, intelligent and capable. That's a fairly uniform impression that people seem to have."
This week's summit is the first between the leaders of the two Koreas since the peninsula was divided after World War II. The meeting could provide the greatest chance for peace between the Cold War rivals and shed light on the mysterious man behind one of the world's most reclusive governments.
Before the recent rapprochement, South Korea spared no effort to savage Kim Jong Il. In 1993, the English-language Korea Herald published "The True Story of Kim Jong Il," an entertaining hatchet job that portrayed him as a man without a redeeming feature.
The 145-page paperback, produced by the Institute for South-North Korea Studies, says the dictator was bad from the beginning. A former assistant to Kim's father, North Korea's founding leader Kim Il Sung, describes Kim the younger at age 4 stomping on every insect and earthworm he could find.
As an adult, he created a "pleasure team" of young women who served the sexual needs of him and his father. Kim ordered the kidnapping of South Korean actress Choi Eun Hui in 1978 to improve North Korea's film industry. After her escape in 1986, she described the Stalinist leader's lavish lifestyle.
"At the parties, we usually danced to the band music of foxtrot or disco and occasionally gambled playing blackjack or mah-jongg," Choi wrote. "Kim Jong Il was constantly offering me drinks, disregarding my weakness in drinks. They were drinking Western liquor, cognac." Choi also had some nice things to say about Kim, but they're not in the book. She said she found him bright, confident and self-deprecating at times. Given the secrecy surrounding Kim and his country, separating spin from substance is practically impossible. Recent attempts to cast Kim in a new light might be as much a function of the diplomatic demands of peacemaking as a re-evaluation of biased intelligence reports based largely on information from North Korean defectors.
Moon Chung In, director of the Institute of Korean Unification Studies at Seoul's prestigious Yonsei University, says earlier South Korean governments suppressed positive information about Kim because they wanted to topple his government.
After South Korean President Kim Dae Jung began pushing for reconciliation with Pyongyang, the government took a second look at North Korea's "Dear Leader," as Kim Jong Il is officially known.
"I think there has been some distortion," said Moon, who credits Kim for surviving politically after his father died in 1994. "Everyone predicted that he would collapse when Kim Il Sung died, but on the contrary, he was able to consolidate power."
In the past year, Kim has gone on a diplomatic offensive, establishing relations with Australia and Italy while perpetuating the notion that he is a changed man. In what might have been his first trip outside the country in 17 years, he secretly traveled to Beijing last month to meet with Chinese leaders.
During the three-day trip, he toured the Legend Group, China's mammoth computer company. Chinese television showed a grinning Kim giving President Jiang Zemin a bear hug and a kiss on each cheek. In a suggestion that he was maturing, Kim told Chinese officials that he had quit smoking and cut back on his drinking.
After Kim's return home, the New China news service quoted him as praising Beijing's market economic reforms, raising the possibility that he might someday adopt similar measures to rescue his impoverished, famine-stricken, Communist state.
It's hard to know whether Kim was trying to send a genuine message. China's government-controlled news media routinely quote visiting dignitaries saying flattering things about the country's economy. State media in Pyongyang rebroadcast the comments in North Korea.
Given past propaganda wars, South Koreans view the attempt to rehabilitate Kim with great skepticism. Moon acknowledges that embracing him presents Seoul with a difficult dilemma. But peacemaking requires reconciliation.
"If [the late Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin and the Israeli people just consider [Yasser] Arafat as a permanent enemy, there is no chance for peace," Moon said.
Some in South Korea think a few carefully chosen pleasantries might be a small price to pay to begin to put 55 years of animosity behind them.
Park Hang Joo, a 29-year-old environmental activist from Seoul, believes Kim is evil. "First and foremost, he's obsessed with power and he totally disregards the needs of the North Korean people," Park says.
But he adds: "If Kim Jong Il can provide us an opportunity to have a talk and live in peace, I think you can treat him as a legitimate partner. What is important is the future, not the past."
---
North Korea economy on knees ahead of summit: analysts
Agents France Presse
Monday, June 12 8:54 PM SGT
http://sg.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/afp/article.html?s=singapore/headlines/000612/world/afp/North_Korea_economy_on_knees_ahead_of_summit__analysts.html
WASHINGTON, June 12 (AFP) -North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was reportedly left agape by the power of technological wonders on show at a Chinese computer factory during his surprise visit to Beijing last month.
But should the Stalinist state's reclusive leader use this week's Korean summit to follow Communist China on the path of market reform, he will be handicapped by an economy choked by years of isolation, state control and drought-induced famine.
If North Korea liberalises and is to survive, it will need to be propped up for years by massive foreign aid and imported expertise, analysts here said.
The historic summit between Kim and South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung has come about partly because the Pyongyang regime believes only reform of its crude economy can guarantee its survival, some observers believe.
"There is a perception that North Korea is doing this out of economic desperation," said James Lilley, a former US ambassador to South Korea and China.
Originally scheduled to start Monday, the two-day meeting is now expected to begin Tuesday, after North Korea requested a one-day delay on Saturday night, citing "technical" reasons.
Kim's trip to China last month was seen here as a sign that he would be willing to undertake some change and even welcome Western investment.
But close observers say there is little evidence North Korea is keen to match its recent diplomatic emergence with economic reform.
It is also questionable whether a government reportedly paranoid about political opposition would be ready to relax control, which economic liberalisation would entail.
Whether proceeds of reform would be directed to alleviating the plight of the impoverished population or be poured into one of the world's largest armed forces is also unclear.
Many analysts say North Korea's economy is far more disadvantaged than were other centrally planned systems of China, Vietnam and the former Soviet Union when they set out on moderately successful but painful transitions.
North Korea's economy is highly politicised, stifled by years of totalitarian control. In addition to its woefully unskilled workforce, the infrastructure is non-existent in places and no independent legal framework exists to govern business transactions.
Still, countries including the United States, which has a huge strategic interest in the Korean summit, hope the potential payoffs from liberalisation will convince North Korea to step back from confrontation.
"If the international community can increase the stakes that North Korea has in engaging with the world, it decreases the likelihood that they will do things that will cut off that engagement," said a senior State Department official.
The United States has 37,000 troops supporting South Korea against its old Cold War foe, and is concerned North Korea's missile program could one day threaten its own security.
"The potential payoffs for reform are gigantic," said Marcus Noland of the Institute for International Economics.
But skeptics point out that investors from South Korea who have tried to set up projects in North Korea have already been frustrated.
"You have South Korean businessmen saying, I would invest but not with the regulations, I would invest but not with the labour market as it is right now," said Gordon Flake, of Washington's Mansfield Centre for Public Affairs.
Potential partners could also be put off by the lack of a dispute resolution system and the absence of guarantees their funds and projects are safe in a country where it is against the law to make a profit.
"The legal system is very political, there is no such thing as the rule of law as we know it in the West," said Jeong-Ho Roh, a law lecturer at Columbia University.
"Why on earth would you invest in North Korea when you have China or other countries?" he asked.
Given time and good training, many analysts say, North Korea's desperately unskilled workforce could compete -- but only if the government takes foreign advice to target salable products it can make more economically than anyone else.
Despite interest already expressed in North Korea by US firms like Coca-Cola and Pepsi Co Ltd, the north's best hope lies to the south, Noland said.
Just as China tapped the expertise of expats in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the former East Germany used West German knowledge, North Korea must learn from its "sugar daddy" South Korea, he added.
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US closely watching summit for clues on North Korea's Kim
Agents Presse France
Monday, June 12 8:53 PM SGT
http://sg.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/afp/article.html?s=singapore/headlines/000612/world/afp/US_closely_watching_summit_for_clues_on_North_Korea_s_Kim.html
WASHINGTON, June 12 (AFP) -The United States will watch this week's Korean summit with close interest, keen to flesh out its knowledge of an enigmatic regime in Pyongyang responsible for frequent foreign policy headaches.
As successive political crises have erupted over North Korea, US diplomats have been dealing largely in the dark -- handicapped by a sketchy knowledge of Kim Jong-Il, the reclusive figure who in 1994 succeeded his father, the "Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung.
"We and everyone else will be very interested in General Kim at the summit and getting a better understanding of what his thinking is, how he approaches such meetings and events," said a senior State Department official.
After Kim burst out of isolation with a visit to China late last month, US officials were briefed by Chinese diplomats on his meetings with the leadership in Beijing.
But they will receive a much closer analysis of Kim's character and intentions after he meets his South Korean counterpart Kim Dae-Jung in Pyongyang on Tuesday.
The two-day summit was scheduled to begin Monday, but North Korea requested a one-day delay late Saturday, citing "technical" reasons.
Reform in Pyongyang and a less confrontational attitude could eventually "pave the way for normalisation (of relations) with the US and ease tensions in Southeast Asia," said Marcus Noland, a Korea expert at the Institute for International Economics.
US relations with North Korea have been highly tense for the half century since US troops fought against Communism with international forces in the 1950-53 Korean War.
Washington's strategic interests on the Korean peninsula are immense and, following China's emergence in the late 20th century, cut to the heart of its East Asia policy.
It still maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea, with tens of thousands more supporting its ally Japan.
Officials here dread the thought of war with North Korea. A Pentagon study forecast that thousands of US soldiers and many more Koreans would be killed in a conflict across the world's last Cold War border.
The benchmark of US-North Korean relations is a 1994 deal known as the Agreed Framework, under which Pyongyang committed to freeze its nuclear weapons program in return for US-built atomic power stations needed to meet a chronic energy shortage.
But after North Korea sparked alarm with a missile launch across the Sea of Japan in 1998, and amid the belief it was selling rockets to US enemies, the US government launched a policy review under former defense secretary William Perry.
Perry recommended offering trade and political incentives to draw North Korea back from confrontation and urged the government to work closely with Japan and South Korea, which under President Kim Dae-Jung adopted a policy of engagement with North Korea.
The three nations formed a joint commission which has so far met 11 times to discuss a unified approach to North Korea.
"We have all been clear that peace and stability on the peninsula cannot happen without an Inter-Korean dialogue," said the State Department official.
The United States has been talking to North Korea on its missile program and the promised limited easing of US sanctions, which an official said Friday would take place before the end of the month.
New talks on missile proliferation are expected to get underway soon.
North Korea is still accused by the United States of sponsoring terrorism and of being involved in drugs trafficking.
North Korean policy is also having an impact on the US domestic scene, as the threat from Pyongyang is often cited as a major justification for a proposed missile defence system, a topic hotly debated in the volatile politics of an election year.
The United States and North Korea have been engaged in other talks, which ended successfully Friday in Kuala Lumpur, on remains of US servicemen still missing from the Korean War.
Investigators will launch five operations lasting 25 days each in North Korea beginning on June 25.
Attention is also turning to what the United States, which has already donated large sums of humanitarian aid to Pyongyang, might do to assist the country further if it embraced reform.
Officials here are as yet unwilling to speculate on what measures might be put forward, stressing that policy cannot be formed until Kim's objectives become clear.
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Clinton's instructive success in Korea
Boston Globe
6/12/2000
By Jonathan Power
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/164/oped/Clinton_s_instructive_success_in_Korea+.shtml
LONDON, Today in South Korea, Kim Dae Jung, a former political prisoner and human rights activist who is now the democratically elected president, will meet his opposite number, Kim Jong Il, president of North Korea, who inherited his position from his notorious father, Kim Il Sung, the Communist warlord who initiated the Korean War 50 years ago.
For this, much of the credit must go to President Clinton.
There have been any number of reasons why over the last six years the United States could have chosen to get tough with a country that gave many indications that it had serious ambitions not just to build a nuclear bomb but to develop a long-distance missile to deliver it. Even today, North Korea is the archdemon for those who advocate the necessity of building an antimissile shield to protect the United States from nuclear attack by a rogue nation.
Yet contrary to many of its basic instincts, the Clinton administration has used the soft glove rather than the mailed fist. Indeed, North Korea is now the main recipient of US aid in Asia. The United States supplies for free much of the country's fuel oil needs and a good part of its food requirements. At the same time, South Korea and Japan are building in North Korea, free of charge, a state-of-the-art light-water nuclear reactor capable of supplying most of the North's electricity needs for years to come.
In retrospect it seems amazing that the debate in Washington six years ago was dominated by those discussing the best way of bombing North Korea. US intelligence had discovered that North Korea was about to remove spent nuclear rods in a cooling pond to recover enough plutonium to make four to six nuclear bombs to add to its supposed (but never proved) stockpile of two or three.
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former CIA chief Robert Gates went loudly public with calls for battle. Fortunately, they ended up shooting themselves in each other's feet. Gates and Scowcroft argued that the United States should immediately bomb the North Korean reprocessing plant before the cooling rods could be transferred to it. This, they said, would minimize the risk of radioactive fallout.
Kissinger advocated immediate tough sanctions and unspecified military action. But his timetable miraculously allowed time - a short three months while the rods cooled - for both a conference of the nuclear haves and for sanctions to work. Military action should occur, he said, only if North Korea refueled its reactor or started to reprocess its plutonium from the cooling rods.
However, this seemed to ignore Scowcroft's and Gates's warnings about the dangers of an aerial bombardment of reprocessing facilities. Nor did any of them appear to worry that North Korea might use the two or three nuclear bombs it supposedly had to repulse an American attack.
In fact, the three of them talked themselves into the ground and made it easier for former president Jimmy Carter to journey to the North Korean capital in Pyongyang on a peace mission and pave the way for a deal in which Kim Il Sung would accept a nuclear freeze. In return, the United States would be committed to working with South Korea and Japan to build two conventional power-producing nuclear reactors.
In the intervening six years there have been all manner of ups and down in the US-North Korean relationship. Congress nearly sabotaged the agreement by reneging on White House commitments to begin liberalizing its trade and investment and ending sanctions. In 1998, when North Korea test-fired a long-range rocket over Japan, it seemed that Pyongyang was determined to play out its role as the world's number one agent provocateur. Later in 1998, US intelligence spotted a massive hole being dug suitable to explode triggers for a nuclear weapon. In the end, for a payment, the United States was allowed to inspect the hole and found that a hole was all it was.
Not without a great deal of political contortion, the United States over the years has managed to convince Pyongyang of its good faith. North Korea, for its part, has reciprocated by drawing in its horns, albeit often at the last moment. Most important, it has honored the freeze.
Meanwhile, Kim Dae Jung in the South has pursued his so-called sunshine policy with the North. Despite immense opposition from the old guard, he has succeeded in sustaining it to a point where the Cold War temperature between North and South has risen enough for this summit to take place.
Everyone knows that holding the summit raises the stakes. There can be no going back. But can the North and the South agree on which way forward is? Also, how much further is the United States prepared to go? Having made so much progress in dampening the North's nuclear ambitions, is it prepared to throw this gentle course to the wind and move into a tougher, more antagonistic, stance, building its antimissile shield and in the process undermining the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and alienating both Russia and China, perhaps triggering a new round of the nuclear arms race between the big powers?
The North Korean peace is one of Clinton's three great positive foreign policy achievements. (The others are his North American Free Trade Area and his recent victory to persuade Congress to give China normal trading status.) If only he had applied the same determination to engagement in disarmament with Russia, detente with Iraq and Iran, and support of the United Nations. Perhaps the problem is that Clinton has not quite digested just how much progress his policy of the carrot more than the stick has made in North Korea. Maybe the summit will provide a measure of his achievement and, although too late to have any influence on his presidency, do something to make sure his successor doesn't imitate his mistakes.
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Korean-Americans hope talks help reunite families
Millions were separated during their civil war
USA Today
06/12/00 Page 13A
By Valerie Alvord Special to USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20000612/2351401s.htm
LOS ANGELES -- Dae In Kang found a brother. Harry Bang still looks for a sister.
They are two Korean-Americans whose families were torn apart when Korea was split after World War II and then fell into civil war.
Fifty-five years after the division, the culture -- and even the language -- are changing, these men say. People like them, who remember their native country the way it was and who have emotional ties to close relatives, are dying off.
If there isn't some kind of reunification soon, there won't be anyone who remembers or cares, Korean-Americans fear.
They, and others in the USA's Korean communities, don't believe significant progress toward reunification of North and South Korea, or even an easing of the tensions between the two countries, will come out of this week's historic meeting between the heads of state of the two countries.
Even so, they hope that amid talk of nuclear disarmament and economic aid, some small agreement might be forged to help unify families before it's too late.
Dae In Kang, 49, a human-rights activist in Los Angeles, had believed his older sibling died in 1951 when their family was separated during the Korean War.
''Friends told us they had seen his dead body,'' Kang says of his brother, Dae Young Kang, now 66. ''But my mother never believed it.'' By the time the Kangs could arrange a family reunion in 1991, their mother had died. The brother was able to attend her funeral in Los Angeles.
In that, the Kangs consider themselves unusually fortunate. It's estimated that as many as 10 million Koreans were separated from family members in the early 1950s by the country's civil war.
Harry Bang, a retired college professor in Oakland, is one of those 10 million.
''I don't know if I would recognize her,'' says Bang, 71, of the sister he desperately hopes is still living. ''I have a picture of her in my mind. But all our photographs were lost during the war.''
If alive, she would be in her 70s. Her children would be in their 50s.
Years ago, an aunt who escaped North Korea told Bang that his sister had almost gotten out, too. In 1953, she made it all the way to the 38th parallel, the line that separates the two countries, Bang says.
''But then one of her two sons became ill with a fever, and she had to go back.'' He worries that the family might not have survived a famine that swept across North Korea recently. Droughts, floods and economic disaster have also devastated the country.
No contact is permitted between North and South Koreans without approval of both governments, which is rarely forthcoming.
Some Korean-Americans have found relatives through church missions or scholarly exchanges, but most of those who were separated don't even know whether their loved ones are still alive.
As for the summit, hope is modest within the Korean-American community.
An agreement on unifying families is possible, says Gi-Wook Shin, a professor of Korean politics at UCLA. But North Korea would want something in return, he says.
''Something fairly big, like economic aid. They'll use family reunification as leverage.''
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N. Korean nuclear menace exaggerated?
USA Today
06/12/00- Updated 10:58 PM ET
By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwsmon09.htm
WASHINGTON - Children in North Korea line the roads and bow when jeeps that carry U.S. charity workers pass.
It's widely known in the North that the United States has been feeding a third of the country's 22 million people for the past three years. The knowledge is so widespread that it dilutes Korean government propaganda that describes Washington as a hostile force, says Kenneth Quinones, a former State Department expert on Korea. He works with Mercy Corps International, a relief and development group.
But in Washington this presidential election year, North Korea remains a bogeyman. Democrats and Republicans say North Korea is unpredictable and irrational. They cite its growing arsenal of ballistic missiles as justification for developing U.S. missile defenses. That could upset long-established policy that the best defense against nuclear weapons is to have no defense.
Fifty years after the start of the Korean War, how big a threat is North Korea and to whom?
Quinones says the menace is being exaggerated and manipulated by U.S. politicians and North Koreans, who have frightened the world into propping up a failed regime.
"In reality over the past decade, North Korea's ability to threaten the United States has diminished, but the U.S. perception of the threat has grown," says Quinones, who has visited North Korea 14 times in the past decade, most recently in March. "North Korea is a threat but primarily to U.S. interests in Northeast Asia."
No one disputes that should another war break out between the Koreas, the North could inflict devastating punishment on the southern half of the peninsula. In a briefing last year, a senior U.S. military official said the North was improving long-range artillery and missiles capable of striking Seoul and the nearly 36,000 U.S. troops that patrol the Cold War's last frontier.
While much of the 1 million-member North Korean army is substandard, the North has 80,000-100,000 special operations troops. They are well-fed in comparison with the rest of the population, which suffered a catastrophic famine three years ago because of floods and government neglect.
"They would use those forces to neutralize airfields and ports in South Korea, so the United States would have trouble bringing in reinforcements," says Joseph Bermudez, a military intelligence expert who writes for the Jane's defense publications.
Han Sung Joo, a former South Korean foreign minister and now director of the international relations institute at Korea University in Seoul, says, "Their equipment is dilapidated for sure. But they have chemical weapons. They have biological weapons. They can wreak tremendous havoc even if they cannot win a war. They can completely paralyze and largely destroy South Korean society."
With the North relying on food from the United States and China and seeking foreign investment to rebuild its crippled economy, experts say North Korea is unlikely to start hostilities, unless it believes its political survival is at stake.
Still, the North has three key reasons for focusing on its military:
Deterrence. Without its ability to inflict hundreds of thousands of casualties, North Korea believes that South Korea and the United States would have staged a pre-emptive strike long ago.
Economics. With North Korea's antiquated civilian factories largely shut, arms production has become the North's main source of hard currency. North Korea is the world's leading seller of ballistic missiles. Its customers include Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Diplomatic leverage. In 1994, the North was able to trade its nuclear program at Yongbyon, which U.S. intelligence believed had produced enough plutonium for one or two weapons, for an agreement with the Clinton administration that included fuel oil and the promise of two modern civilian nuclear reactors. The cost of fuel oil and food aid has totaled $645 million over the past five years; that makes North Korea the largest U.S. aid recipient in Asia.
"The North Koreans have played us like a violin, and we have overreacted massively starting in 1994," says Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador and CIA station chief in South Korea who heads the Korea Society in New York. "At the time, they had maybe two nukes that were deliverable by pushing them off the back of a truck."
William Perry, a former Defense secretary whom the White House named to review U.S. policy toward North Korea and deflect Republican complaints, told Congress last year that the 1994 accord has prevented the North from producing enough plutonium for 10 bombs a year.
But reports, possibly spread by North Korea , suggest the North has clandestine nuclear programs.
The White House, in a diplomatic gesture, waived in February a congressional requirement that it certify that North Korea "is not seeking to develop or acquire the capability to enrich uranium or any additional capability to reprocess spent fuel."
Equally worrisome, the nuclear accord did not freeze the North's missile program, which has accelerated. Two years ago, the North launched a three-stage ballistic missile over Japan.
Even though the third stage failed, outsiders were stunned. An advisory group set up by the House of Representatives' Republican leadership concluded last year that "it became clear for the first time that North Korea could deliver a weapon of mass destruction not just to Seoul but also to Seattle."
While North Korea is not a threat compared with the former Soviet Union, "it has the ability to do things that can wig out the neighborhood," says Henry Sokolski, a former Pentagon official who directs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. "North Korea can be a catalyst for nasty change, such as significant militarization by Japan and an arms race with China."
Since the launch in 1998, the North has forgone further tests. But it has continued to develop expertise by observing launches in countries, such as Iran and Pakistan, to which it has sold missiles.
Will the outside world be able to curb this potential? Or will North Korea change in a way that makes its arsenal less of a concern?
"The jury's still out on both these questions, but with the Korean summit and other events, we're hopeful," says Wendy Sherman, the senior State Department official on policy toward North Korea.
In recent months, North Korea has established diplomatic relations with Australia and Italy and patched up ties with Russia.
"They want to show they aren't a rogue state," says Chung-in Moon, a political scientist from Yonsei University, who will accompany Kim Dae Jung to Pyongyang. "They want to show they can be part of the world community."
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il himself paid an unannounced visit to Beijing earlier this month. It reportedly was his first trip outside North Korea since 1984. Like Chinese leaders in the 1980s, Kim is clearly hoping to modernize the Korean economy without opening a closed society to foreign cultural and political influence. But like China, North Korea will be hard pressed to succeed.
"I don't think North Koreans will all be on the Internet in five years but a pretty good chunk will be watching CNN," says Quinones, who has been asked by North Koreans to bring Disney movies on his next visit. "The pace of change should quicken and broaden."
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History at their shoulder, two Kims to meet today
Sydney Morning Herald
06/12/00
By MICHAEL MILLETT, Herald Correspondent in Seoul
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0006/13/world/world01.html
At a still-undisclosed time today, Kim Dae-jung will make a 180-kilometre journey into both the past and the future.
He will step down from his chartered plane and touch North Korean soil - the first South Korean president to do since the Korean peninsula was carved in two after World War II.
It could prove to be the most decisive event in ending what is, to the rest of the world, an inexplicable remnant of Cold War politics.
But international fascination with the first inter-Korean summit pales in comparison with the emotions being stirred on the peninsula itself.
A South Korean newspaper yesterday described the event as "as dramatic and awe-inspiring event as Neil Armstrong's setting foot on the moon".
The personal dynamics involved in the first-ever meeting promises to be as captivating as the agenda itself.
Apart from their surnames and Korean heritage, the two Kims have almost nothing in common.
Kim Dae-jung is quiet, bookish and soft-spoken, but with a keen interest in his international image.
While assessments of the reclusive Kim Jong-il come third-hand, he is still living down his reputation as a Mao-suited playboy, with a liking for women, Hennessy cognac, tobacco and Hollywood movies. James Bond is said to be a favourite.
For the southern Kim, an outwardly fragile 76 but with an inner steel, it has been a career that would have been rejected as improbable for a Hollywood movie script. He escaped from a North Korean prison during the 1950-53 war and spent the next three decades being harassed by South Korean military regimes.
He narrowly survived two assassination attempts, was sentenced to death in a 1980 court martial (commuted to life imprisonment), won a release on medical grounds and was exiled to the US. He endured two years of house arrest before full political rights were restored.
It took four attempts before he was elected president in December 1997 - the first real postwar transfer of power.
Kim Jong-il, the North's "Dear Leader", Supreme Commander of its People's Army and chairman of the National Defence Commission, was born in straitened circumstances but enjoyed a much smoother run to the top.
Kim, 58, was groomed by his father, the towering Kim Il-sung, to maintain his unique blend of self-sufficient communism and cargo cultism that has held North Korea in an iron grip for 55 years.
Despite mutterings of internal dissent - mainly over chronic economic problems that cost the lives of millions through starvation - there is little evidence of his authority being under threat.
In fact it was the realisation by the southern Kim and other South Korean policymakers that the North was not going to implode that forced them to revise their tactics, making overtures across the demilitarised zone.
Summit euphoria in Seoul has turned normal Korean preconceptions on their head.
Even before he took over in Pyongyang in 1994, following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il was reviled as the epitome of northern evil - a babyfaced assassin believed responsible for masterminding such crimes as the pre-Seoul Olympics bombing of a civilian aircraft.
Kim's brinkmanship over the past few years - most notably his missile testing - has done little to alter the image.
But now Seoul street stalls flog coffee mugs with cuddly Kim caricatures and competitions are held to find lookalikes.
Experts say the new sentiment results from painstaking efforts by Kim Dae-jung to reshape South Korean views of the northern Kim.
"He has never accepted this image of Kim as a maniac, suffering from some genetic defect that made his behaviour completely unpredictable," one Korea watcher said.
"In fact, recent evidence suggests that he is quite methodical in his thinking."
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The meaning in the meeting of the two Koreas. Out of Isolation
Washington Post
Monday, June 12, 2000; Page A21
By Marcus Noland
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-06/12/014l-061200-idx.html
North Korea's self-imposed isolation from the outside world has been so great as to earn it the sobriquet the "Hermit Kingdom," after an earlier Korean dynasty. Tomorrow the leaders of North and South Korea are scheduled to hold their first-ever summit. Analysts have pondered whether this signals a strategic reorientation by North Korea's increasingly confident leader Kim Jong-il or is a ploy designed to extract even more resources from South Korea. The secret visit to Beijing last week by Kim Jong-il supports the argument that this is the real deal and that the North Koreans are serious about opening to the outside world.
In the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the break up of the Eastern Bloc, the North Koreans in general and Kim Jong-il in particular have been scathing in their denunciation of reforms undertaken in Eastern Europe, which have been likened to "germs," "mosquitoes" and other vermin. In 1994 the North Koreans described the Chinese as "traitors to the socialist cause" but toned down the rhetoric as their growing desperation required increasing reliance on Chinese beneficence. When North Korean Supreme People's Assembly Chairman Kim Yong-nam visited Beijing last year, the two countries agreed to pursue socialism according to their respective national characteristics.
During Kim Jong-il's visit last week, the public pronouncements were different. Kim noted the "great achievements" of "opening up the country" by Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping and announced that North Korea "supports the reform policy pursued by the Chinese side." These comments suggest a new receptiveness to economic reform on the part of the North Koreans and open the possibility of the Chinese adopting their natural role as mentors in this regard. A visit to a Chinese computer factory reportedly left Kim's mouth agape.
Intention does not necessarily translate into achievement, however. North Korea is (or was) a more industrialized economy than China when China inaugurated its reforms, and carrying out successful economic reform in North Korea could be considerably more difficult than in China or Vietnam, Asia's other major transitional economy. Moreover, the divided nature of the Korean peninsula means that the North Koreans face a more difficult ideological task than did the Chinese and Vietnamese reformers. As North Korea opens and becomes more like the South, the fundamental ideological underpinnings of the society increasingly could be called into question. The dynastic aspect of the North Korean regime would make this political balancing act harder still.
Yet suppose the North Koreans were to pull off this trick. What would it mean for U.S. interests? The question cuts to the basic intentions of the North Korean regime. If Kim has decided that his regime can be strengthened by greater engagement with the outside world and adherence to international norms, this could pave the way toward normalization of relations with the United States and greatly reduce tensions in Northeast Asia. A growing North Korean economy and a North Korea with a greater stake in external relations presumably could be weaned from missile sales, drug trafficking, counterfeiting and other illicit activities that today earn it considerable sums. Indeed, a "domesticated" North Korea might be willing to reopen its Agreed Framework with the United States and scrap the deal's promised nuclear reactors in favor of far more useful forms of economic assistance.
If, however, the regime funnels economic gains into military modernization, then the United States could be confronted with a stronger adversary on the Korean peninsula, one that through its increased engagement with other powers could constrain U.S. diplomacy. This is not mere paranoid speculation: In the past year, while relying on international assistance to deal with its famine, the North Koreans went on an arms-buying spree and increased spending significantly on costly military training exercises.
Clearly, North Korea's ultimate intentions are ambiguous. But Kim Jong-il's visit to China suggests that the upcoming summit represents more than tactical maneuvering on his part and carries significant implications for the United States whatever his motives.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics.
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Another Divide for Two Koreas: Atmosphere Over Summit Delay
New York Times
June 12, 2000
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/00/06/12/late/12cnd-korea-summit.html
SEOUL, South Korea, June 12 -- For more than 50 years, North and South Koreans have been kept apart by the world's most heavily fortified border, by fiercely hostile ideologies and even by postal and telephone systems that pointedly never connect.
In the final hours before the first summit meeting between their heads of state, South Korea's Kim Dae Jung and North Korea's Kim Jong Il, the two countries were separated by yet another factor today: atmospherics.
In the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, where the summit meeting is to take place, there was no perceptible reaction to the surprise request by the government Sunday that the meeting be delayed a day, according to South Korean officials who monitor the north's state-controlled media. In fact, they said, there has been no public announcement about the delay at all.
In contrast, in the bustling and optimistic city of Seoul, which has been living in a state of heightened anticipation over the three-day summit meeting for at least a week, people paused for a round of obligatory hand-wringing when news of the unexplained delay by the North Korean hosts -- who cited "minor technical reasons" but did not elaborate -- was suddenly announced on Sunday.
Then it was back to the festivities over an event that was already being celebrated as the most significant news here in years.
Two priorities for the long-reclusive leadership of North Korea are givens, and both shine through brightly in the run-up to the summit: strict control over the population, and absolute security for the leadership.
South Korean officials say that the most plausible explanation for the delay in the summit meeting was the increasingly detailed leaks in the scoop-driven South Korean media over the itinerary of Kim Dae Jung during his brief stay in the North.
Details on where the two leaders would meet, the routes they would travel and where the visiting South Korean president would stay are believed by many here to have given the government of Kim Jong Il security jitters.
After all, when the North Korean leader traveled to China last month for his first overseas trip since succeeding his father in 1994, he secretly boarded a special train for Beijing, and kept his itinerary tightly veiled throughout.
The North Korean government has reportedly worked feverishly in recent weeks to beautify Pyongyang, a run-down Stalinist-era show city, dispatching workers to sweep streets, paint public buildings and houses, and plant trees and flowers along expected travel routes.
For security reasons, Pyongyang has remained all but sealed. Business people and tourist groups were banned weeks ago, and even accredited diplomats caught outside of the country during the preparations have been made to postpone their return.
The contrast with Seoul could not be more stark. Here, the summit meeting has been the occasion for mass prayer sessions and parties alike, neither of which the tightly controlled and economically devastated North is particularly known for.
Many South Koreans say their most immediate hope is for a reunification of the 1.8 million so-called first generation separated Koreans, or survivors of the war years whose families were split by the conflict.
For many, though, a close second is a reduction of military tensions on the shared peninsula, where both sides maintain huge armies, and where North Korea has tested ballistic missiles and is suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction, from nuclear warheads to chemical weapons.
"People don't talk about war like they did when I was a child," said Park Kil Tae, a 38-year-old department store employee. "But every now and then you stop to think that Seoul could be destroyed in a matter of minutes. I have a family, and that is no way to have to live."
While people wait expectantly, this city has witnessed the kind of runaway commercialization usually reserved for the Olympics or maybe the Super Bowl, with trinkets in the likenesses of the two leaders for sale everywhere.
Leaving no doubt about its feelings about the event, the government has issued commemorative postage stamps.
The official summit press center, set up at a large downtown hotel, rivals the control room of the Kennedy Space Center with wall-to-ceiling television screens that will broadcast the summit meeting live to journalists seated at row after row of tables equipped with computers and fax machines.
Hotel workers, sensing a captive audience, launched a strike this week, holding loud but disciplined rallies just outside.
North Korea, which only rarely allows foreign journalists in anyway, has rejected all requests to cover the summit, save for a delegation of 50 South Korean journalists who were allowed to travel with Kim Dae Jung only after protracted negotiations. Their movements in Pyongyang, like most everything else there, are expected to be carefully controlled.
In comparison to the reticent and secretive northerners, South Korean officials made no bones about their enthusiasm for the summit meeting, and described the officially encouraged festivities as necessary to encourage the people to think differently about the North and the two countries' shared future.
Some foreign diplomats have suggested that under Kim Dae Jung, a former political prisoner and longtime campaigner for democracy who became president in 1998, South Korea has allowed itself to become slightly intoxicated with the idea of détente and eventual reunification with the North.
This enthusiasm, the diplomats warned, could ultimately bring the relatively rich South to ruinously underwrite the North's badly faltering economy, and perhaps to make unwise political concessions, as well.
Government officials here, however, scoff at that notion.
"What is our alternative to engaging with the North?" said Kim Myong Shik, a government spokesman. "To see Seoul destroyed one day by missiles, or our country attacked by submarines? This summit represents a historic chance for the Korean people, and we must shift our mentalities a bit to seize it."
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North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il
Associated Press
June 12, 2000 Filed at 5:02 a.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Koreas-Kim-Jong-Il.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Little is known about Kim Jong Il, leader of North Korea, the world's most isolated country, which can't feed its own people but produces long-range ballistic missiles.
One thing is known for sure, however. Kim, 58, is exalted at home as a ``greater leader'' and the ``lodestar of the 21st century.''
Kim was communism's first hereditary successor. He took over power from his late father President Kim Il Sung who died in 1994 at age 82 after ruling North Korea, a Stalinist state, for nearly a half century.
His throne owed much to Korea's ancient Confucian monarchies which had inherited power along family lines.
Kim Jong Il is revered in his homeland by a personality cult second in its effusiveness only to that of his late father. The portraits of the two Kims are hung side by side in all homes and buildings.
The junior Kim had been groomed to succeed his father since the 1970s. Since the mid-1980s, he has been head of the 1.1 million-strong People's Army, the world's fifth largest.
When his father died, Kim inherited a government that could not feed its 22 million people without outside help. Some observers estimate that up to 2 million North Koreans have died of malnutrition or related ailments since 1996.
To pull his country out of poverty and diplomatic isolation, Kim is now trying to improve ties with the United States, Japan and other Western countries.
As a bargaining chip, North Korea is developing and test-firing ballistic missiles that can reach Hawaii or Alaska, experts say. In 1994, the country froze its nuclear weapons program under a deal with Washington.
North Korean TV seldom shows Kim or broadcasts his voice. When he does appear on TV, Kim wears a Mao-style jacket and stands with his hands clasped behind his back in his father's trademark stance.
Biographical data on Kim are extremely sketchy. He is short and pudgy at about 5-foot-3. North Korean defectors say Kim wears thick heels and has his hair done in a distinctive puffy bouffant to add another two inches to his stature.
North Korea says he was born Feb. 16, 1942, in a ``secret camp'' at a sacred mountain. Western officials say he was born in the Soviet Union.
South Korean officials have typically described Kim as an arrogant, testy, ambitious, crude and temperamental person with a fondness for drinks and beautiful women.
Today, many South Koreans are beginning to take another look at the man.
``I think he is a man of great insight and he is a pragmatist,'' South Korean President Kim Dae-jung said in a recent television interview.
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End game in Korea?
USA Today
06/12/00- Updated 04:05 PM ET
By Andrew Scobell
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/ncextra1.htm
As the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War approaches, the world anticipates a historic summit this week between the leaders of North and South Korea. The hope is that the meeting between President Kim Dae Jung of the Republic of Korea (ROK) and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will be a meaningful first step in a significant rapprochement between Seoul and Pyongyang.
As Defense Secretary William Cohen noted earlier this year during a news conference with his South Korean counterpart, "Dialogue between Seoul and Pyongyang is a necessary precondition to lower tensions on the peninsula." If such a dialogue were under way, then we could move gradually closer to a day when U.S. forces might no longer be needed on the Korean Peninsula.
It is still far too premature, however, to talk about any withdrawal of the 38,000 U.S. troops in Korea. The 38th Parallel remains the most dangerous and heavily fortified border in the world. As Adm. Dennis Blair, commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific, said earlier this year, the Korean Peninsula is the world's "single biggest flashpoint." North Korea possesses the world's fifth-largest army, with more than 1 million troops in the regular armed forces and millions more men and women serving in the reserves or drilling in the militia.
Pyongyang also possesses a large amount of military hardware and has a ballistic missile development program that threatens not only the ROK but also other countries in the region. And North Korea's military capabilities do not seem to have eroded despite the country's serious economic difficulties.
American men and women in uniform will remain steadfast side-by-side with their ROK allies as long as they are needed. That is to say, U.S. forces will stay as long as it is in the national interests of the ROK and the national interests of the United States. American troops have been stationed in Korea since the armistice was signed in July 1953 to deter an attack by the North Korean People's Army. As the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, Gen. Thomas Schwartz, testified before the Senate this spring, the "No. 1 mission [of U.S. forces] is deterrence." They have been remarkably successful in this mission.
It is often said that North Korea is an irrational and erratic rogue state. Pyongyang is certainly a rogue regime with a penchant for lashing out erratically, but it is not irrational. The most powerful evidence that Pyongyang is a rational actor is that since 1953 no all-out attack has been launched across the 38th Parallel. That's because North Korea's communist rulers believe that such an attack would fail with disastrous and perhaps even fatal results for the regime.
North Korea is without question the most militarized state on Earth. About 70 percent of its active-duty forces are deployed within 100 miles of the Demilitarized Zone. Why does it need such a massive forward-deployed military? Their ultimate goal is to unify the Korean Peninsula by force.
When North Korea no longer poses a grave threat to the ROK and regional stability, it might be possible to consider a decline or departure of U.S. forces. Under what circumstances would North Korea no longer pose a threat to the ROK and regional stability? These scenarios would include the total collapse of the party-state, the complete demilitarization of North Korea or the peaceful unification of th