The craziness of Ahmadinejad

The craziness after the forced reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not suprise at all. For those who paid attention in his government it was a certain occasion that Ahmadinejad would steal the election.

This is the kind of guy who never recognize a mistake or the possibility to be wrong. The peaceful outrage of iranian people, according to the state TV, resulted in 7 people died. It is just the beggining.

N. Korea Convicts 2 U.S. Journalists

By Blaine Harden
The Washington Post

TOKYO, June 8 — A North Korean court sentenced two U.S. journalists to 12 years in a labor camp Monday, as the government of Kim Jong Il continued to ratchet up tension with the United States and its neighbors.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, television reporters detained in March along North Korea’s border with China, received harsher sentences than many outsiders had expected. But several experts in South Korea predicted that talks will begin soon to negotiate their release.

The U.S. government said it was “deeply concerned.”

The five-day trial of Ling and Lee was held in Pyongyang’s Central Court, the top court in North Korea. Outside observers were not allowed.

“The trial confirmed the grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing,” the official Korean Central News Agency said. It said the court sentenced “each of them to 12 years of reform through labor.”

The “grave crime,” however, was not explained. The reporters had earlier been accused of unspecified “hostile acts.” Legal analysts in South Korea said the North Korean court may have sentenced the women to the maximum of 10 years of hard labor for hostile acts and added on two years for illegal entry.

The detention and sentencing of the two journalists has coincided with — and become entangled in — a series of provocative acts by North Korea that this spring have angered its neighbors, its historical allies and much of the world.

The heavily armed, secretive state — in the throes of a succession process, as the country’s ailing leader prepares to hand power over to his youngest son — launched a long-range missile in April, detonated a nuclear bomb in May and has renounced the truce that ended the Korean War.

On Monday, North Korea warned fishermen and boat captains to stay away from the country’s east coast, Japan’s coast guard said. The North is planning to launch several medium-range missiles from the region, according to reports in the South Korean press.
ad_icon

The U.S. government, which last year lifted some sanctions against North Korea and delivered large amounts of food aid, has become increasingly exasperated by the North’s behavior. President Barack Obama, who came into office saying he was prepared to meet personally with Kim Jong Il, said Saturday that “we are going to take a very hard look at how we move forward on these issues.”

Led by the United States and Japan, the U.N. Security Council is considering new sanctions against North Korea for exploding a nuclear device in defiance of a U.N. resolutions.

If the sanctions are approved, North Korea threatened Monday that it would retaliate with “extreme” measures. “Our response would be to consider sanctions against us as a declaration of war and answer it with extreme hard line measures,” the North’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary.

“We are deeply concerned by the reported sentencing of the two American citizen journalists by North Korean authorities, and we are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said early Monday.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday the charges against “these young women are absolutely without merit or foundation.”

The verdict cannot be appealed and is final, officials in Seoul have said.

But there is a widespread expectation, at least in South Korea, that the journalists will be released when the North Korean government decides the time is right to talk again to the United States.

In the past, North Korea has released Americans who have entered the country illegally. The government also has a history of brinkmanship, turning confrontation and bluster into negotiations that reward it with food, fuel and other concessions.

“The verdict does not mean much, since they will get released,” said Andrei Lankov, an expert on North Korea who teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. “Unfortunately, right now the North Koreans want to keep tensions high, so it will take many months and perhaps a year or more before the Pyongyang authorities will decide that it’s time to make some friendly gesture to Washington.”

Other North Korean observers were more hopeful of a quicker resolution.

“Now that they are sentenced, we can think and talk about making arrangements for their release,” said Han Seung-soo, a former South Korean foreign minister. “It is ironic but with the sentencing we now have something more tangible to negotiate about.”

Ling and Lee were working for Current TV, a cable and Web network co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, when they were detained March 17 by North Korean soldiers along the border with China. The reporters were working on a story about North Koreans who flee the country, but the circumstances of their arrest are not clear.
ad_icon

The State Department last week did not rule out the possibility that Gore may fly to North Korea to negotiate the reporters’ release. A spokeswomen for Gore contacted by the Associated Press declined to comment.

Ten years ago, Bill Richardson, then a member of Congress and now governor of New Mexico, traveled to Pyongyang to negotiate the release of an American who got drunk and swam across a river into North Korea. Richardson, too, said last week that he did not expect negotiations to begin for the journalists’ release until after their trial ended.

“The sentence can be seen as an indication that North Korea is now expecting a very prominent envoy to come for the negotiations over their release,” said Hong Jung-wook, a lawmaker from South Korea’s ruling party.
This Story

In appearances last week on U.S. television, the families of the women broke months of silence and offered public apologies to the North Korean government for whatever acts the journalists may have committed.

“If at any point the girls went into North Korea, then we apologize on their behalf,” said Lisa Ling, who noted that she had recently received a telephone call from her sister Laura in Pyongyang and that she sounded “extremely scared.”

Laura Ling suffers from an ulcer, her sister said. Lee has a four-year-old daughter.

Both women have been allowed to telephone their families in the United States, which is highly unusual in a state that seals away political prisoners in concentration camps, sometimes for life, without any contact with relatives.

Ling and Lee have been visited three times by the Swedish ambassador, and have been allowed to send and receive letters through him. The United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea.

The women have told their families that they have been treated “fairly” while in North Korea.

Despite the sentence to “reform through labor” analysts said that Ling and Lee would probably not be sent to a labor camp where they would work with other North Korean prisoners.

There are believed to be about 200,000 political prisoners in North Korean camps, where former inmates say conditions are often brutal, hunger is widespread and attempts to escape usually result in a public execution.

“They are very unlikely to be sent to a real prison, since there they would learn too much about things outsiders are not supposed to know,” said Lankov, who has written several books about North Korea and studied there as a student from what was then the Soviet Union. “I am pretty sure that the authorities will keep them in relative comfort, in conditions far better than the average prison, but still perhaps tough for the average American.”