By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, October 22 -- The theme at the UN on Friday was Korea, Korea, both North and the South.
Alongside a festival of Korean food in the soon to close Delegates' Dining Room -- the shinsunro spicy seafood soup was particularly good -- and a UN Day concert by a Korean symphony, South Korean UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon addressed a closed meeting of member states about the upcoming G-20 meeting in Seoul.
Sources tell Inner City Press that statements of support for a second term for Ban are being solicited to be unveiled in Seoul at the G-20, as they were not at the General Debate last month in New York.
Across the hallway of the UN's North Lawn Building in Conference Room 1, North Korea was the topic of a Third Committee of the GA, on human rights. Numerous western speakers urged North Korea, formally the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, to allow a visit by the Special Rapporteur on human rights in that country, Marzuki Darusman.
Darusman, who is simultaneously the chairman of Ban Ki-moon's strangely silent advisory panel on accountability for war crimes in Sri Lanka, recounted how he has tried to get permission to visit the country.
At the end, North Korea's Deputy Permanent Representative asked for the “right to reply.” The Committee's chairman, the Permanent Representative of Cameroon, said this was an interactive session with no right to reply. A statement, then, the North Korean said.
Transcripts, by Friends on Inner City Press, are at www.innercitypress.com/un1korea102210.html
He said his country had in the past allowed “Amnesty International, NGO's and the European Union” to visit the DPRK. But, he said, as soon as his country dropped out of the NPT nuclear non proliferation treaty, a resolution on human rights was introduced. We cannot accept it, he said.
The North Korean took particularly exception to Japan, bringing up “forced conscriptions” in World War II and what he called broken promises.
On the issue of abductions of Japanese citizens, he said, a nationwide search had been conducted.
Japan asked for the floor and said that only five of 17 had been returned, and there might be more. This seemed a strangely narrow response to what North Korea said, that the whole human rights focus on North Korea was just “political.”
The Cameroonian chair ended the session with what he said were African proverbs, about a star lighting up the darkest night. (There is also the proverb about the UN translators stopping work at 6 pm).
Across the hall, the closed door meeting with Ban Ki-moon continued. Why was it closed? Swiss sources tell Inner City Press that the Swiss office of President of the GA Joseph Deiss said it was the G-20 which asked to close the meeting to the Press.
On Ban's way out, he and his chief of staff chatted amiably with Sri Lanka's Ambassador Palitha Kohona. The North Korean DPR was nowhere to be seen. But the Korean symphony was about to play.
