By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 24 -- During Ban Ki-moon's eight years as UN Secretary General, have relations between North and South Korea gotten better?
Ban was previously foreign minister of South Korea; most recently he named his long time senior adviser Kim Won-soo as head of UN Disarmament, with its North Korea portfolio.” On April 24, Inner City Press ran to the UN's noon briefing and asked Ban's spokesman Stephane Dujarric:
Inner City Press: there's a press conference that was just… still taking place, I believe, by this group called Women Cross DMZ, and added about an upcoming march they intend to go from North to South Korea, and they said they wrote to Ban Ki-moon asking for his response and they got a response from the mission of South Korea which they somehow attributed to him, but did he receive a letter from this group? What does he think of the march?
Spokesman Dujarric: I will check if they received the letter.
Spokesman Dujarric: I will check if they received the letter.
By day's end, nothing. But at the press conference for Women Crossing DMZ, photo here, Hyung-Kyung Chung said clearly that the group has written to Ban Ki-moon but never got any response. She said that the South Korean mission to the UN, “Ambassador Lim” (Kim?) had responded, and even apologized for not being able to attend the press conference, at the Baha'i International center across 48th Street from the UN.
Though the press conference was NOT in the UN, one of the questioners said that “here in the UN” North Korea is called as bad as Nazi Germany and asked why the march's organizers weren't talking about that.
Gloria Steinem, Honorary Co-Chair of the march, asked for the microphone to answer.
“That's such a bananas question,” Steinem said. “Did you say to Reagan when he said, 'Mister Khrushchev [sic], tear down this wall,' why aren't you talking about Siberia and human rights?”
Continuing the analogy, Steinem said of Ronald Reagan, “He was talking about tearing down a wall. We are talking about taking down a wall. There are sins on every side. For instance, left-over in Vietnam, Agent Orange is still buried.”
Inner City Press had wanted to ask a question, but had to leave to get to the UN noon briefing to ask about the group's letter to Ban Ki-moon. We still don't have an answer.
One reason the UN or at least the office of Ban and his officials like Herve Ladsous of UN Peacekeeping feel they don't have to answer is that the supposed “UN Correspondents Association,” far from pushing for press rights, in fact is willing to try to get independent media thrown out of the UN. Click here for an example. The organizers of WomenCrossDMZ did an event in UNCA - a mistake - and on April 24 called it an event “with the UN press corps,” also inaccurate. We'll have more on all this.
