U.S. terrorism report mistakenly omits NK

By Lee Tae-hoon

The United States admitted Wednesday that a whole section about North Korea, which killed 50 South Koreans in two surprise attacks last year, was excluded by mistake in its Annual Country Report on Terrorism.

“This (North Korea) section was inadvertently omitted in the original publication,” the U.S. State Department said on its website.

Many speculate that Washington may have overlooked the communist North from the congressionally-mandated State Department report released last Thursday due to a shift in its hard-line policy on Pyongyang.

Suspicion grew as the State Department announced the same day that the United States would offer up to $900,000 in emergency flood assistance to the reclusive regime, signaling an ease in tension between Washington and Pyongyang.

Some viewed the two unexpected announcements as an incentive for the North to return to the long stalled six-party talks intended to stop its nuclear program as they came less than a month after North Korean Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan visited New York.

The United States put the North on its list of terrorist countries in 1987 after its bombing of a South Korean airliner that took the lives of all 115 people aboard.

The North was delisted in 2008 with Washington saying that the country had not been associated with any terrorist-related activities for the past 20 years, despite its provocative acts against the South and exports of weapons of mass destruction.

The revised version of the 2010 terrorism report also maintains that the North “is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.”

There have been growing calls to relist the North as a terrorism sponsoring country since its torpedoing of the warship Cheonan in March 2010, which killed 46 sailors, and a surprise artillery attack on a border island, which took the lives of two Marines and two civilians in November.

Washington, however, deemed the North’s deadly attacks against the South were not terrorist acts, but a violation of the armistice agreement that ended the 1950-1953 Korean War in a cease fire.

In June 2010, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley noted that the deadly sinking of the Cheonan “by itself would not trigger placing North Korea on the state sponsor of terrorism list.”

Four countries, Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria were named on this year's terrorism sponsor list.