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Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk has been covering Korean Peninsula issues for decades.

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Donald Kirk

Happy talking with N. Koreans

By Donald KirkThe visit of Donald Gregg, former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, to Pyongyang has got to be a sign of hope for improving relations between North Korea and its two arch foes, the U.S. and South Korea.As head of a delegation from a little known organization called the Pacific Century Institute, Gregg has yet another platform for perpetuating his views on dialogue and reconciliation with the North as he’s been doing ever since serving as CIA station chief in Seoul in the mid-1970s and then as ambassador to South Korea in the early 1990s.Gregg’s message during his tours in Seoul and later as a frequent return visitor and chairman of the Korea Society in New York is that dialogue is needed to overcome differences and that eventually personal contacts and cultural events such as the concert by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in Pyongyang six years ago will pay off.He’s also been known to say the U.S. has no reason to maintain such a large military force in South Korea, and he was an ardent admirer of the Sunshine Policy propounded by Kim Dae-jung during

Feb 13, 2014By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Molding young Japanese minds

By Donald KirkThe Japanese don’t take kindly to people telling them what they should and shouldn’t teach. “As a sovereign nation, any country should be responsible for what to teach and how to teach it,” an experienced teacher in Japan told me when asked about this textbook controversy that so upsets Korea and China. “At the same time, teachers should convey all the facts on what is going on around neighboring countries. What is important is to foster critical ways of thinking with objectivity.”That’s quite difficult considering the constraints imposed on the Japanese school system by new guidelines on how to inculcate a basic understanding of the territorial limits of Japanese power.  Lest impressionable young minds grow up unaware of what Japanese authorities say is rightly Japanese, they’re going to learn with extra clarity that Japan is the legitimate ruler not only of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea but also of Takeshima and the Northern Territories north of the large “mainland” Japanese island, Hokkaido.

Feb 6, 2014By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Memorializing a revolutionary

By Donald Kirk Nowhere does the phrase, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” apply more precisely than to Ahn Jung-geun. Whether you call him a “terrorist,” as do the Japanese, or a heroic Korean revolutionary, as he is viewed in Korea and China, Ahn goes down in history for having assassinated Hirobumi Ito, the first Japanese governor-general of Korea, in Harbin in 1909.Ahn fired the shots that killed Ito as he was about to meet a ranking Russian official on a railroad platform to negotiate relations in the aftermath of two devastating wars ― first the Japanese defeat of the Chinese in 1895 and then their defeat of the Russians in 1905.In both these wars, control over the Korean peninsula had been at the core of the fighting. Japan quickly spread its writ over the Korean Peninsula, caught in the vortex of a much larger regional struggle.Ito, who had been prime minister of Japan during a period of modernization in the late 19th century, preferred improved relations with Russia, which had greeted him with an honor guard in Ha

Jan 23, 2014By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Cyber-spying, for better or worse

By Donald KirkWASHINGTON ― Everybody here is talking about cyberspying. The National Security Agency has never had so much publicity. Until Edward Snowden came along, most people had never heard the initials “NSA.”Now President Obama is getting into the act big-time. In the hours after this newspaper comes out on Friday, he’ll be making a speech in which he addresses the issue. He’s likely to offer assurances, to guarantee the security and freedom of Americans from Big Brother listening in on all their conversations.One thing is pretty certain, though. Obama is not going to come down hard on the NSA. He’s not going to ban cyber-sleuthing. He’s going to tell Americans, and the rest of the world, that monitoring messages is necessary for national security. Without it, he will argue, you lose a major weapon in the war against bad guys ranging from terrorists to drug cartels to petty crooks.It’s more than likely that his words will have real impact internationally. Other heads of state will be saying, if Obama thinks it’s okay, how about us

Jan 16, 2014By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Observing a 'forgotten victory'

By Donald KirkWASHINGTON ― Looking at those tight-knit squares of goose-stepping North Korean troops on TV, you wonder if they’re the same ones every time.Do they hang out at some special base going through their paces day after day so they’ll be picture perfect whenever called on to show off the North’s military might? Presumably analysts at the National Security Agency have been busy studying their faces to see if these highly trained troops are members of elite units reserved for such grand occasions.And what about those missiles and artillery pieces the North loves to show off? Do they keep them painted and polished in a garage somewhere, ready to drag out for the next ceremony? We assume the ones we see on TV are just for stage effect. Surely they’re carrying nothing lethal and are not ready for launching while the real missiles are hidden at or near the North’s launch sites, primed for the next testing.Such random thoughts filtered through my jet-lagged mind as the North Korean media repeated the usual claims of “great victory” that the

Aug 1, 2013By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

A bundle of joyous news

By Donald KirkWASHINGTON ― While North Korea geared up for the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War armistice, much of the western world was consumed by far happier news.“We've just received an important message from London,” said the pilot of a British Airways flight carrying me from London to Washington. What could be so earth-shaking as to get him to break into the quiet of the packed cabin with anything other than dire words affecting the flight, perhaps the plane itself? He followed up a second or so later. “I am delighted to inform you that Kate Middleton has just given birth to a baby boy.” Laughter and a ripple of applause up and down the aisles.For the past few days before I took off there had been news that the baby was overdue, then the revelation that the palace had never given an exact due date and that perhaps everyone had the date slightly wrong. Finally, as I was rushing for the tube to Heathrow came the portentous bulletins ― “breaking news,” proclaimed BBC and CNN: Kate was “in early stages of labor.”&nbsp

Jul 25, 2013By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Fighting for 'food security'

By Donald Kirk NEW DELHI ― Security is definitely a matter of definition. When we talk about security in Northeast Asia, we’re thinking about the threat posed by more than a million North Korean troops, thousands of artillery pieces and the threat of long-range missiles tipped with weapons of mass destruction, probably nuclear.That’s the meaning of security in most places around the world. Think of the National Security Agency in the U.S. We know all about their mission from all the stories we’ve been reading about Edward Snowden. Security also has quite another meaning ― one in which probably many more lives are at stake.That’s food security. You might think the term had come into vogue when considering how many North Koreans are underfed or starving, but I’ve never heard it used in the context of North Korean problems. “Food security” is not at the top of the agenda in Pyongyang. The leaders there seem more concerned about the other type of security.You have to come to India to learn about the dimensions of food security, the reality o

Jul 18, 2013By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Waging holy wars

By Donald KirkNEW DELHI ― It’s axiomatic that religion is the reason for some if not most of the world’s bloodiest wars. In the name of God or Allah or some other deity, soldiers of the Lord have been slaughtering one another since God created the world.Koreans can be thankful that South Korea’s enormous religious groupings – mainly Buddhists and Christians ― have been able to survive and flourish since the days when foreign Christian priests faced execution for daring to penetrate a closed society. Subdivided into innumerable denominations, congregations and factions, Korean Buddhists and Christians may feud and fight but refrain from open warfare.Not so in some of the countries I’ve visited in recent years. In India, home of nearly 180 million Muslims, more than in any other country except Pakistan and Indonesia, the fear of violence always simmers below surface appearances of tolerance. There have been too many bloody episodes since the mass killings that marked the partition of the Indian subcontinent between Hindu-dominated India and Musli

Jul 11, 2013By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Snowden's best option

By Donald Kirk We keep hearing about all the countries where Edward Snowden is looking for asylum ― Russia, China and India are on the shortlist along with the two South American countries, Ecuador and Venezuela, that would love to have him just to show they can’t be intimidated.The U.S.-ROK alliance would seem to rule out South Korea as an option though he’d find plenty of sympathy among people who want to know if Washington has been snooping on Seoul along with all the other “targets” on the list. Oddly, though, North Korea doesn’t seem to have come up as a place where he might find asylum. Surely the North Koreans would like to know, though, about U.S. cyper-spying considering all the cyber espionage charges the U.S. and South Korea have been making against the North.There is, however, another option that Snowden doesn’t seem to have considered. He seems to have forgotten what could be the best idea of all ― taking up the U.S. offer of a one-time travel document enabling him to return to the U.S. as a repentant felon.Except that Snowden wou

Jul 4, 2013By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Talking to the Taliban

By Donald KirkNEW DELHI ― Why do high-powered U.S. diplomats persist in thinking that sitting around a table with the bad guys is going to produce a lasting peace and everyone will then live happily ever after? Apparently Washington never learned from years of yakking that resulted in the “Paris peace” of January 1973 with North Vietnam. While the U.S. withdrew its troops, Hanoi geared for the final offensive ― and victory in April 1975.If all that seems like ancient history, however, we need only hark back to all the misbegotten deals to get the North Koreans to give up their nuclear program beginning with the Geneva framework agreement of October 1994. The payoff for that deal was the revelation eight years later of North Korea’s program to build nukes with highly enriched uranium instead of plutonium.Having not quite absorbed that lesson, the Americans plunged into more talks and two sure-to-fail nuclear deals with North Korea in 2007. Now Washington is tinkering again with North Korea’s call for talks. Just get the North Koreans to say anything slightly co

Jun 27, 2013By Donald Kirk
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