Oil-for-Food: The Korean Connection, Part III

Score another one for Claudia Rosett:

NEW YORK — Maurice Strong, a prominent Canadian businessman and envoy for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, acknowledged ties yesterday with a South Korean businessman accused of wrongdoing in the oil-for-food scandal. Mr. Strong, Mr. Annan’s special adviser for North Korea, said in a statement that Tongsun Park invested in an energy company with which he was associated in 1997, but denied any wrongdoing.

“Ties,” being the key word. Does this mean that Strong was the “U.N. Official #2” mentioned in the federal complaint, and whose son’s company ended up on the receiving end of $1 million of Tongsun Park’s Iraqi money?

So just what was Maurice Strong’s take on North Korea? About what you’d expect. Try to distinguish his views from those of Selig Harrison, or of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, for that matter, and you’d be at a loss:

“They are watching [the Iraq war] very carefully and with deep concern, and questioning what this means in terms of the U.S. ultimate intentions toward them,” Strong said. Asked whether North Korean leaders feared they would be the next target of U.S. military action after Iraq, Strong said, “Fear I do not believe is in their vocabulary. Concern, yes, real determination to seek a peaceful settlement. At the same time, preparation for war, if necessary.” Strong did not say specify how he knew about the military preparations, and gave no details. He said officials expressed “deep concern for the threats that they perceive to their own security, and a determination to defend their security and their integrity.”

More, via Rebecca at NKZone:

Maurice Strong, Special Adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General, has recently returned from a trip to Pyongyang where he met with North Korean officials. “Both parties will have to show more flexibility” in order to reach an agreement, he said. He believes that the North Koreans “have accepted the fact that they will need to dismantle their capacity”, but will not do so without an “acceptable form of security guarrantee.”

Not counting general discussions about channeling more aid through the North Korean regime, Strong never made a single public statement about human rights in North Korea as Kofi Annan’s special envoy, at least not any that I can find. Indeed, while serving as a panelist at the World Economic Forum, Tim Peters asked all of the panelists, of which Strong was one, to comment on the issue of human rights in North Korea. Strong answered with silence. When asked about the famine in North Korea, Strong was paraphrased as saying that “[t]he core problem was a breakdown of trust and communication with the United States.” As for assessing North Korea’s humanitarian aid needs, he gets his assessments in Pyongyang.

Strong has thus talked his way around the diplomatic and humanitarian problems in North Korea without honestly addressing the root cause of either–the nature of the regime itself. Perhaps in the coming days, we’ll get more insight into why. Nothing yet connects Strong or the U.N. to corruption on the issue of North Korea, and there’s no reason to think it will. Given the prevailing attitudes in the U.N., as Mr. Strong seems to have represented them in the case of North Korea, one suspects that Iraq may well have gotten the same squishy, feckless sympathy from the U.N. without having to pay for it. So might North Korea.