Hopes for Year of Tiger
By Kim Heung-sook
Freelance Columnist
After living 11 months in a country where shocking news replaces headlines every five minutes, it would be natural for someone to look beyond the frontiers in December, wishing to hear some encouraging stories. However, news from the outside doesn't seem very comforting, either.
Most regrettable is the report that the British Defense Ministry shut down its UFO hotline to save money. Being severely near-sighted, I have never spotted any flying objects in my whole life, except for a few airplanes taking off or landing, but the knowledge that some people were seeing and studying such things always cheered me up.
On the busy streets of Seoul, it is extremely hard to find anyone looking up at the sky. The line of vision of pedestrians usually lingers around the level of the head and shoulders of others, unless they are trying to read signs and billboards in search of certain places. The lack of sky watchers in Korea may betray the fact that people here are often preoccupied with everyday life at the cost of imagination and creativity.
As far as I know, Britain is the best nation in terms of providing room for stretching people's imagination. It was, therefore, disappointing to read about the closure and the words of a British Ministry of Defense spokesman in an Associated Press article early this month: ``None of the thousands of UFO sightings reported over the years have ever provided substantiated proof of the existence of extraterrestrials … There is no defense value in investigating UFO reports."
The closure of the hotline may not cause a security threat to Britain, but I wonder if everything will be the same in the country of the Beatles and Stephen Hawking now that the 50-year-old line linking the mundane world with the world of mystery is dead.
More bad news is the planned shutdown of the Goethe Institute in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. After five-and-a-half years of operation, the institute will be closed next summer, according to The Korea Times and Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster. KT and Deutsche Welle quoted Raimund Woerdemann, director of the Goethe-Institute in Seoul, as saying that access to the German ``Reading Room" in Pyongyang was often hindered.
Woerdemann also hinted at censorship as another factor that prompted the decision to close down the institute by saying, ``The Goethe Institute has two principles. One is open access to everyone who wishes to come and the second is no censorship." The institute, a non-profit organization that advances German language and cultural studies around the world, was the first and only Western institution of its kind in North Korea, though its stock was mainly scientific books.
The good news is that the German parliament is strongly against the decision. Phillip Missfelder, parliamentary foreign policy spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said the CDU will make all-out endeavors to reverse the decision, Deutsche Welle reported. The decision signaled ``the end of an important aspect of German foreign policy in the areas of culture and education, which was a ray of light in the darkness of the repressive, totalitarian government in North Korea," Missfelder was further quoted as saying.
It is easy to understand the frustration the Germans must have experienced in their dealings with North Korea. Still, I sincerely hope Berlin will not only reverse the decision to close the institute but rather expand its shelves. Since North Korea is also said to oppose the closure, the Germans may propose including at least some works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, after whom the institute was named.
I hope the British government will revive the UFO hotline, even if it means cutting its operation hours. If the line can't be reactivated, I hope the money saved from its closure will be spent on some valuable causes. The Defense Ministry spokesman said the closure will save about 44,000 pounds ($73,000) a year and that the money will be spent helping British troops in Afghanistan, but Britain must have more creative minds to find much better ways of spending the sum.
I hope the theme of the New Year will be ``re-something.'' Reviving, reopening, reconnecting, recovering ... The tiger is said to be the world's favorite animal. If such words can overpower the closures and shutdowns, the Year of the Tiger will surely add to the creature's reputation.