In a move no one expected, and which puts them squarely at odds with the US, South Korea today announced the provision of a new $8 million aid package for neighboring North Korea. The provision of humanitarian aid is directly in contrast with US calls for “more pressure.”
South Korea’s Unification Ministry says that there is no risk of the aid being diverted to military use, and will not include any cash payments. Rather, the aid is to wholly be in the form of food and medicine for children and pregnant women.
This is particularly timely, as North Korean Ambassador Han Tae Song was complaining to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on Wednesday that the mounting UN-imposed sanctions are endangering local children, and forcing cuts in both health and education for them.
That UN sanctions are predominantly hitting children is hardly a shock, as it’s generally the case with major sanctions against any country. That South Korea is mitigating the worst of this harm risks fueling leading to a US backlash, as the US and South Korea have long been on different pages on North Korea, as to whether to continue escalating tensions or try diplomacy.
Actually there’s little reason this ought to anger the American “armchair strategists”- if this aid is meant to help the most vulnerable, and the sanctions themselves are aimed at the government and financial infrastructure of the country, it’s sort of apples and oranges. Bless the S. Koreans for wishing to help the starving and the impoverished, the pregnant, and those who have the least ability to fend for themselves in Un’s police state. The politics and the sanctions, and China stepping in to support them, are “the patriachy'”s way of lashing out to defend the world from a righteously rotten, evil enemy. But helping those who have no part nor blame in all this can only be commended by right minded people.
“…the sanctions themselves are aimed at the government and financial infrastructure of the country…”
The USG says the sanctions are aimed at the NK government and those who support them, but sanctions like those imposed on NK are aimed ultimately at the people of NK,
North Korea has oodles of people needing help. We were even helping them at one point too, when ‘let’ us dismantle their nuclear station.
Then we stopped helping … and they rebuilt their nuclear station and then built a bomb.
That is incredibly naive. Madeline Albright said that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was a price that she and her fellow neocons were willing to pay (Damned generous of them.) to bring down Saddam Hussein!
If it was “worth it” in the case of Iraq it is certainly “worth it” to them in the case of NK. In fact the other day the WSJ was cheering that so many in NK were already on the edge of starvation – although I do not believe that but they do and it makes them happy. They are closer to their goal, after all.
The idea is to put such pressure on the people that they will overthrow those the US finds unacceptable. Let us not be naive when facts tell us otherwise.
Thanks South Korea for Your Great Humanitarian Gesture towards Children and Vulnerable Women. Your this gesture is A Slap on The Face of Shameless Criminal Partner in American War Crimes, Former Foreign Secretary Madeline Albright justfying “Half Million Innocent Children’s Death in Iraq”.
This should highlight that the South Koreans see the North Korean people as their relatives. They are, quite literally in many cases. They don’t want to kill them all, nor to starve them either.
Once again, a nation of ‘cousins’ that, somehow, we just ‘didn’t get’.
They are cousins, and siblings, and parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles. The split 60+ years ago was down the middle of families.
I can imagine how US officials will be reading the riot act to South Korean officials for not abiding by the policies that Washington has outlined for them.
Financial commerce based in currency is not the same thing as purposeful aid packages. There is nothing at all in the U.S. sanctions that prohibits aid.
I don’t think anyone expects the DPRK to shell Seoul unless we attack them.
Who is you all? Nobody in there right mind expects NK to shell SK. Unless the country of NK is attacked. And who gives the United States the right to attack any country unprovoked. That would turn the Korean Peninsular into a living hell that would kill perhaps Millions.
In english?
Trump volunteers the B2 fleet to deliver it.
Things are moving in the right direction then. Next, South Korea needs to ask US troops to pack their bags.
Te USA always pretends to help its “allies”, yet has often interfered with South Korea’s governments and insists on the THAAD and other provocative acts towards the North. How many other “humanitarian” countries will dare help North Korea?
This action of the ROK (aka, SK) is one small step to regaining sovereignty which the US took away again when they regained it from the Japanese.
Surely Trump will applaud this since he praised sovereignty in his speech.
jw
It’s nice to see the true spirit of Christ alive and well. Sanctions are always evil. They target the weakest citizens of a given nation in a cruel attempt to torture the population into submitting to our demands by overthrowing their own governments. The US has starved millions of women and children to death with this inherently genocidal tactic in Korea, Iraq and Cuba. I’m ashamed to call myself an American sometimes. God bless South Korea and goddamn Donald Trump.