generalspeaking

Ignored and Sullen

Life can be so unfair. Those who are deserving of attention because of their bold audacity, their clever capacity to become a beloved celebrity, their propensity to challenging world authorities ensuring that attention will be focused on them should never be set aside, ignored. At one's peril. At least from time to time. For North Korea and its fondly regarded tyrant, leader upon whom the sun shines, there can never be enough attention on his clever escapades.

What other world leader, after all, remains so famously unconcerned when starvation faces the people whose fate he administers? When he makes the deliberate choice to invest funding in ballistic rockets and nuclear technology rather than importing grains to feed the hungry? It's a reasonable choice, after all, human beings are expendable, they reproduce so readily, and opportunities to advance science and technology are of extreme importance.

The nation's young leader tours a new amusement park with his beautiful bride, smiling and waving to adoring crowds. An everyday image of domestic bliss in high places? Or a carefully choreographed appearance aimed at showing North Korea's Kim Jong-un as a friendly, modern leader, no different from the heads of other countries? Picture: REUTERS/KCNA

And it is just that focus on the advancement of North Korea's science of nuclear weaponry and its military control of the country that motivates Kim Jong-un to express his delightful personality to the world at large. In the process he attracts the attention of other world celebrities like sports figures who invite themselves to North Korea for the splendid opportunity to entertain the basket-ball-loving leader.

For the privileged in North Korea, those whose loyalty can be counted upon, the members of the military, well housed, fed and salaried, life is good. For the wealthy elite whose station in life is so dependent on the goodwill appreciation of their leader in recognition of their unalloyed support of his regime, no expense need be spared to entertain them. Urbanite North Koreas love their leader. The countryfolk perhaps not so much.

Kim Jong-un was in his element, basking in the glow of public attention not all that long ago when the world was transfixed by the threats emanating from him toward neighbouring South Korea. And those threats didn't stop just there; they encompassed his anger against the United States which infuriatingly insisted on treating him as a petty tyrant of an unimportant country. Intolerable, but his threats did fix attention on him.

And then, as often happens, other events around the world, some of them relating to countries like his own which present as fixating concerns to the international community, intervened, to vex him with being set aside for more imminent world mishaps in the making. He had warned, had he not, of his intention to reactivate a nuclear reactor previously agreed for shutdown?

Now the five megawatt reactor at the Nyongbyon nuclear facilities, shut down in 2007 under a disarmament agreement that suited his purposes at the time appears to be in the process of restarting, if commercial satellite images can be believed. The U.S. School of Advanced International Studies takes this as a sign that the Jong-un regime is preparing to continue with its nuclear program.

A conspirator with the Islamic Republic of Iran encouraging its fledgling nuclear program, Pyongyong has become restive, anxious to bring attention and the spotlight back to where it should never have fled from. The U.S. Korea Institute has identified steam rising from a next-door building to the reactor which houses steam turbines and electric generators driven by heat generated by the reactor.

They deem the colour and volume of the steam to be consistent with the electrical generating system in readiness to come back online. Back in April, when North Korea announced its plans to reactivate the nuclear reactor it was considered rhetoric, not to be taken seriously.

The contemplation of the possibility was considered "extremely alarming", but to that was added by the American State Department's Victoria Nuland: "There's a long way to go between a stated intention and actually being able to pull it off."

Well, there you are, North Korea is full of mischief and surprises geared to riveting world attention on its enterprise. They are, it would seem, quite prepared to 'pull it off'.

And, as they do, is President Barack Obama and his advisers prepared to swivel their attention from Syria to North Korea? Will the manufacture of a North Korea emergency situation overtake the focus on Syria at this confused and perilous juncture?

What's that old adage of whatever that can, will go wrong?

A North Korean nuclear plant is seen before demolishing a cooling tower, right, in Nyongbyon, in this photo taken June 27, 2008, and released by Kyodo. (Photo: Reuters / Kyodo)

Labels: Conflict, North Korea, Nuclear Technology, Syria, United States

posted by Pieface @ Friday, September 13, 2013