Anju Links for 9/12/07

*   Canadian Oil-for-Food scandal figure Maurice Strong, who took $1 million  from Saddam Hussein as a senior U.N. official and confidant of Kofi Annan, has resurfaced in China.  You’ll remember that Strong was also Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy  to North Korea, and  that the North Korean-born Tongsun Park, now serving a five-year prison sentence, was his bag-man and informal  advisor on North Korea.  All of which may go far to explain why the U.N. stood  around performing a colonoscopy on itself while Kim Jong Il starved 2.5 million people and killed hundreds of thousands more in his killing fields.

*   Also in U.N. scandal news:  former Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth will lead the “independent” panel investigating irregularities in the  UNDP’s North Korea program, and the firing of the whistleblower who revealed them.

*   If you’re going to be in Washington with some free time at 2:30 on September 19th, one of South Korea’s few heroes of the Great Famine will speak — the Venerable Pomnyun, leader of the Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement.  More info and registration here.

*   The South Korean-financed, appeasement-minded, and well-connected  Korea Society  spent last weekend touring  North Korean diplomats and their families  around Washington, D.C.  The Korea Society is led by a former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, whom I debated here, but the State Department assures us that the visit involved no diplomatic contacts.  Bullshit really is  an industry in this city.

*   Meanwhile, North Korean defectors are still showing up in Thailand, and South Korea is apparently still  doing nothing for them.

*   So Roh Moo Hyun wants to have a summit with Kim Jong Il where they won’t talk nukes or human rights.  I could ask why they’re having a summit at all, and I could ask why South Korea has a Human Rights Commission, but those questions are asked well enough  by ruNK, DPRK Forum, The Nomad, and Andy Jackson (don’t miss the Marmot’s comment).  Front-runner Lee Myung Bak is now publicly urging Roh to raise the nuclear issue.

*   What’s a band of wackadoodle 9/11 “truthers” to do if it can march right through Haight-Ashbury without drawing a crowd?

*   If you read Korean, the Epoch Times covers a protest meeting led by Son Jong Hun,  the brother of Son Jong Nam.