Sixty years after invading S. Korea, Pyongyang presents an invoice: $65 trillion
By Donald Kirk – World Tribune
Now comes the bill. On the 60th anniversary on Friday of the outbreak of the Korean War, North Korea is demanding US$65 trillion by way of compensation for 60 years of American enmity. That demand, relayed by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, no doubt carries as much rhetorical impact as the North’s periodic threat to turn Seoul into “a sea of flames”, but does show the impossibility of a coming to terms on the Korean Peninsula in any foreseeable future.
With equally deft timing, the North declared that it’s holding, as more or less a hostage, an American named Aijalon Gomes, a dedicated Christian who was teaching English in South Korea before entering North Korea from China in January.
The North’s threat to invoke “wartime laws” against Gomes has to be a bargaining ploy in a scenario that will likely end with his release, presumably in a way that will serve some propaganda purpose. However, the stakes have risen since he was sentenced in April to eight years’ hard labor for illegal entry. He’s now been promoted from common criminal to prisoner of war, according to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, while “the question of how to aggravate the sentence remains”.
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