I am sure if the ROK government funnels enough cash to Kim Jong-un then the decision to have a joint team can be expedited, that is what this current posturing is all about:
Chang Ung (R), an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member from North Korea, shakes hands with fellow IOC member Wu Ching-Kuo of Chinese Taipei (L) during the opening ceremony of the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) World Taekwondo Championships at Taekwondowon’s T1 Arena in Muju, North Jeolla Province, on June 24, 2017. (Yonhap)
A veteran North Korean sports administrator visiting South Korea has expressed his misgivings about forming a joint Korean team for next year’s Winter Olympics south of the border due to the time crunch.
Chang Ung, the North’s lone member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), is in South Korea for the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) World Taekwondo Championships, which opened in Muju, 240 kilometers south of Seoul, on Saturday. He traveled with a delegation from the North Korea-led International Taekwondo Federation (ITF), whose demonstration team performed at the WTF event’s opening ceremony.
Chang crossed the tense border just days after South Korea’s new sports minister, Do Jong-hwan, proposed forming a joint women’s hockey team and holding skiing events at North Korea’s Masikyrong resort during the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.
As an IOC member, Chang has been peppered with questions about Do’s ideas. According to an official with the WTF competition, Chang spoke of his doubts about the South Korean minister’s suggestions. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but according to the article the North Koreans may not have anyone even qualify for the Winter Olympics to have a joint team with. Another thing to keep in mind is that the Kim regime had previously wanted to host some of the Winter Olympics events at their new ski resort. I wonder if this is something else that the current ROK government may try to pursue?
I say this every Olympics, but if the South Africans were banned from the Olympics because of their Apartheid policies than why is North Korea with its far worse human rights violations allowed in the Olympics much less championed like President Moon is currently doing?:
President Moon Jae-in, fourth from left in second row, with taekwondo athletes from North Korea, in the second row, and South Korea, in the first row, at the opening ceremony of World Taekwondo’s World Taekwondo Championships in Muju County, North Jeolla, Saturday. [YONHAP]President Moon Jae-in renewed calls for warmer ties with Pyongyang in his remarks at the World Taekwondo Championships in Muju County, North Jeolla on Saturday, inviting North Korea to participate in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics next year to “fulfill the Olympic spirit of harmony and promote world peace.”
Moon’s latest outreach to Pyongyang came as a 36-member demonstration team from the International Taekwondo Federation (ITF), which included 32 North Korean nationals, touched down at Gimpo International Airport last Friday to participate in the World Taekwondo’s (formerly World Taekwondo Federation) World Taekwondo Championships.
Among members of the delegation were Ri Yong-son, president of ITF, and Chang Ung, former ITF chief and the only North Korean member on the International Olympic Committee (IOC). While welcoming the North Korean taekwondo team, Moon said he was “delighted” to have accomplished the first “inter-Korean sports cooperation” in his administration, adding that he hopes the ITF and World Taekwondo help bring peace to the Korean Peninsula. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but a ban on North Korea competing in the Olympics seems like something President Trump could get traction on if he wanted. It would be very interesting to see which countries would defend North Korea participating that supported a ban on South Africa from 1964-1988. The ban was only removed when the Apartheid system was scheduled for removal. Why can’t the same standard be applied to the Kim regime which has done things far worse than what Apartheid South Africa ever did?
China and the United States agreed that efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula should be “complete, verifiable and irreversible”, Chinese state media said on Saturday, reporting the results of high level talks in Washington this week.
“Both sides reaffirm that they will strive for the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” a consensus document released by the official Xinhua news agency said.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had said on Thursday that the United States pressed China to ramp up economic and political pressure on North Korea, during his meeting with top Chinese diplomats and defense chiefs.
China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi and General Fang Fenghui met Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis during the talks. Yang later met with U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House, where they also discussed North Korea, Xinhua reported.
The consensus document also highlighted the need to fully and strictly hold to U.N. Security Council resolutions and push for dialogue and negotiation, which has long been China’s position on the issue. [Reuters]
A group of laborers holds a rally against the United States in Pyongyang on June 21, 2017, ahead of the Day of Struggles against U.S. Imperialists on June 25. (KCNA-Yonhap)
Here is what US ambassador to North Korea basketball player Dennis Rodman had to say about his recent trip to North Korea:
Rodman also discussed how the country has changed over the course of his visits, saying “we’ve seen a lot of changes,” including “the fact that it is so modernized now.”
“When you go over there, and you hear the radio, and … people are talking,” Rodman said. “They’re so happy now, because it’s more like … it’s civilized again.”
Rodman, who calls North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un a friend, said, “people don’t see … the good side about that country. It’s like going, like, to Asia. It’s like going to like Istanbul, Turkey, or any place like that. It’s pretty much just like that. You’re know, you going to see some poverty. You’re going to see some people that’s not doing too well.”
“I think people don’t see him as … a friendly guy,” Rodman added of the country’s dictator, adding “if you actually talk to him” you would see a different side of him.
“We sing karaoke,” Rodman added of his relationship with Jong-Un. “It’s all fun. Ride horses, everything.”
“It’s the politics that’s the bad thing. If we can try to figure something out, just open the door,” Rodman suggested, saying that he believes “if Donald Trump had a chance,” he would fly to North Korea “and try to make peace.” [Good Morning America]
You can read the rest at the link, but I have to wonder if Rodman actually believes what he says or he is just saying what he has to in order to maintain access to North Korea?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it is always amazing how little shame the North Koreans have even after the most outrageous provocations they commit such as the killing of Otto Warmbier:
North Korea on Friday called itself the “biggest victim” in the death of an American student who was detained for more than a year and died days after being released in a coma.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency denied that North Korea cruelly treated or tortured Otto Warmbier and accused the United States and South Korea of a smear campaign that insulted what it called its “humanitarian” treatment of him.
The comments published by KCNA were North Korea’s first reaction to Otto Warmbier’s death in a U.S. hospital Monday after it released him for what it called humanitarian reasons.
Doctors at the hospital said Warmbier had suffered a severe neurological injury from an unknown cause. Relatives say they were told the 22-year-old University of Virginia student had been in a coma since shortly after he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea in March 2016.
His family and others have blamed North Korea for his condition.
Warmbier was accused of stealing a propaganda poster. Through statements on KCNA, North Korea said it dealt with him according to its domestic laws and international standards.
“Although we had no reason at all to show mercy to such a criminal of the enemy state, we provided him with medical treatments and care with all sincerity on humanitarian basis until his return to the U.S., considering that his health got worse,” the agency quoted an unidentified Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
The spokesman said “groundless” speculation of torture and beatings could be refuted by American doctors who came to North Korea at the time of Warmbier’s repatriation and “recognized that his health indicators like pulse, temperature, respiration and the examination result of the heart and lung were all normal.” The report did not mention Warmbier’s neurological status.
“The fact that Warmbier died suddenly in less than a week just after his return to the U.S. in his normal state of health indicators is a mystery to us as well,” the spokesman said.
“To make it clear, we are the biggest victim of this incident and there would be no more foolish judgment than to think we do not know how to calculate gains and losses,” he said. [Associated Press]
Leave it to the social justice warriors to connect the death of Otto Warmbier to so called “white privilege”:
As shocked as I am by the sentence handed down to Warmbier, I am even more shocked that a grown man, an American citizen, would not only voluntarily enter North Korea but also commit what’s been described a “college-style prank.” That kind of reckless gall is an unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country. Every economic, academic, legal and social system in this country has for more than three centuries functioned with the implicit purpose of ensuring that white men are the primary benefactors of all privilege. The kind of arrogance bred by that kind of conditioning is pathogenic, causing its host to develop a subconscious yet no less obnoxious perception that the rules do not apply to him, or at least that their application is negotiable. (…..)
As I’ve said, living 15 years performing manual labor in North Korea is unimaginable, but so is going to a place I know I’m unwelcome and violating their laws. I’m a black woman though. The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense. He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help. I get it. [Huffington Post via reader tip]
What is interesting is that there have been far fewer white people detained in North Korea than other races which the author makes no mention of in her article. There has been 16 American detainees in North Korea since 1996. Five were white, eight were ethnic Koreans, one black and one hispanic. I have long recommended against traveling to North Korea, but many Americans have traveled there with no issues. The biggest reason Americans have been detained is because of religious reasons, or in the case of Euna Lee and Laura Ling sheer stupidity.
This actually makes Warmbier’s detention very different from all the others. What we don’t know is was Warmbier told by someone in the hotel he could have the poster in order to have an excuse to arrest him? It seems pretty insensitive to me to blame so called “white privilege” when all the facts of why he was detained and what happened to him are not known.
I think the interviewer could have used a better word choice, but I think this is much to do about nothing:
“CBS This Morning” co-host Norah O’Donnell and South Korean President Moon Jae-in
South Korea or its head of state Moon Jae-in does not need permission from the U.S. president or anyone else to engage North Korea in dialogue, Seoul’s presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said Wednesday.
“Resumption of dialogue with North Korea may need to be pursued in close cooperation and consultation with the United States, but South Korea does not need to be allowed by the U.S. to do so,” Kwun Hyuk-ki, a Cheong Wa Dae spokesman, told Yonhap News Agency.
The remarks came in reaction to a question by a U.S. journalist in a recent interview with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, in which the interviewer from U.S. broadcaster CBS stated it was not clear whether U.S. President Donald Trump would “agree to allow” his South Korean counterpart to negotiate with the North Koreans. (…..)
Many South Koreans reacted with anger in online postings.
“The president must have been very offended when given the question. He still managed very well,” one Internet user said on a local internet bulletin board.
Without interpreting what the word “allow” may have intended to mean, the Cheong Wa Dae spokesman flatly dismissed the notion that the South Korean president would ask for U.S. permission to engage with North Korea. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but President Moon’s interview with Norah O’Donnell can be viewed at this link.
