Those damn North Koreans PUST us again!

Suckers ….

A monument dedicated to Kim Il-sung was installed on the campus of the new Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). Built with donations from South Korean and US Christians, it could tank intra-Korean relations for good. The 20-metre granite monstrosity embodies the Juche idea, North Korea’s quasi-religious state ideology. [Asia News, Joseph Yun Li-Sun]

For good, he says? Hasn’t this guy ever read the Hankyoreh? As if the likely diversion of funds from Kaesong or Kumgang, or of some unknown percentage of South Korea’s unmonitored food aid, ever mattered to those guys, or to the Unifiction Ministry. For that matter, South Korea’s current government is no paragon of clear principle, either:

[B]uilding the monument has stopped the inauguration of the new university. The delay is due to protests by donors, who coughed up 40 billion North Korean wons (US$ 35 million) to put up the structure.

In the case of South Korean taxpayers who contributed to the project, they will have to rely on their country’s Unification Ministry for a response. An official with the ministry said, whilst “North Korea’s stance is that PUST cannot be an exception” to the rule that all educational facilities in the North have their “Yeong Saeng monument, if “the Yeong Saeng monument becomes a propaganda tool aimed at outside visitors, we will readily respond.

Put differently, what funds have ever been sent to North Korea that weren’t misused? In truth, no one really knows. The defense here, as I might have predicted, is an implicit recognition of North Korea’s “right” to divert some percentage of its education resources toward indoctrination, but that doesn’t answer the question of why South Korean taxpayers and donors must fund this, or how much actual education this “university” is really going to provide.