On Day 2, talks enter brainwash territory

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On Day 2, talks enter brainwash territory

American, North Korean and Chinese officials met for a second day in Beijing yesterday, in what officials on the sideline said was likely a session to hammer away at their respective positions on how to begin tackling the tension on the Korean Peninsula created by Pyeong-yang’s drive to possess nuclear weapons.
About the only information available on the meeting is that the talks have not fallen apart and that North Korea is neither confirming nor denying the existence of a uranium-based nuclear program.
Officials speaking publicly about the discussion topics described the second session as a continuation of the first meeting Wednesday, when the three countries laid out their positions ― but perhaps with greater elaboration.
“It is like trying to brainwash the other guys,” a Seoul official said, “by repeating your point over and over, and then again in different terms.”
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, said the talks would be helpful in peacefully resolving the North Korean nuclear problem.
The information blackout ordered by the three countries has taken hold of Seoul’s diplomats with such perfection that officials easily took half an hour just to say they cannot discuss how much information they were spared and why.
A senior South Korean official spent more time trying to argue about the questionable diplomatic protocol being practiced by Tokyo, likely the source for yesterday’s reports on North Korea’s evading questions regarding a uranium enrichment program, than talking about the validity of the reports.
That Seoul is displaying such perfect submission to the gag order may be a natural outcome of the paradoxical position it has put itself in ― having claimed that it would take the “lead role” in the resolution process and then getting shut out of the talks right from the start.
Now that North Korea has sat down with the United States, Seoul may be getting impatient for some solid results. “[South Korea’s] participation itself is not the issue,” President Roh Moo-hyun said Wednesday.
North Korea’s Central News Agency said in an editorial yesterday that the key to the success of the talks is whether the United States is willing to end its hostility toward the North and make a conscientious effort to improve relations.
The piece, otherwise propaganda, was unusual in missing the nagging demand for a U.S. nonaggression treaty.


by Kim Young-sae
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