South Korea pushed back firmly Friday on comments by U.S. Ambassador Harry Harris, who called on Seoul to consult with Washington about the South’s attempt to resume individual tourism to North Korea.
Harris said Thursday that South Korea should run the plan through a joint working group to “avoid a misunderstanding later that could trigger sanctions.”
An official with South Korea’s presidential office called those remarks “very inappropriate,” while stressing Seoul continues to coordinate with Washington.
“The issue of [inter-Korean] cooperation is a matter for our government to decide,” the official said.
FILE – Retired Adm. Harry Harris, currently the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, attends a ceremony at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Dec. 7, 2019.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North, refused to directly respond to Harris’ comments, but a spokesperson said the country’s policy regarding North Korea “falls under our sovereignty.”
U.S.-South Korea relations have already been strained by U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand that Seoul pay substantially more of the cost of the U.S. military presence here.
The current military cost-sharing deal expired at the end of the year. A sixth round of talks ended this week without a breakthrough and U.S. officials have warned “residual funds” being used to cover the gap are running out.
The issue has created unusual friction in a nearly 70-year-old alliance that both sides regularly portray as “ironclad.”
Inter-Korean ties
Despite a stalemate in U.S.-North Korea nuclear talks and the consequent retention of sanctions that have prevented implementation of most aspects of inter-Korean agreements, the administration of South Korean President Moon Jae-in has said it is looking for ways to independently improve inter-Korean ties. North Korea has rejected the efforts.
Harris said he thinks Moon’s “continued optimism is encouraging,” adding that it is not Washington’s job to approve South Korea’s decisions.
“I think his optimism creates hope, and that’s a positive thing,” Harris said Thursday. “But with regard to acting on that optimism, I have said that things should be done in consultation with the United States.”
Sanctions are just some of the hurdles that South Korea’s plans for tourism must clear. Another obstacle is North Korea.
“Even if South Korea did attempt to restart tours, North Korea won’t accept the proposal right now,” said Park Won-gon, an international relations professor at South Korea’s Handong Global University. “This effort is one-sided for the time being.”
North Korea last year ruled out any further dialogue with the South, accusing Seoul of prioritizing its relationship with Washington over Pyongyang.
Hundreds of mismanaged infrastructure projects have stalled in Kenya and it will cost around $10 billion to revive them, the IMF said in a report whose findings point to a growing power struggle at the heart of government.
Amid mounting public anger over ballooning state debt and a series of graft scandals, President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday confirmed acting finance minister Ukur Yatani in the post after its previous incumbent, Henry Rotich, was charged with financial misconduct — an accusation he denies.
The government has acknowledged that some past investment projects did not pass muster, and Yatani told a budget preparation meeting on Wednesday that available resources would be “dedicated only to projects and programs that will ensure higher economic and social returns.”
FILE – Kenya’s Finance Minister Henry Rotich, right, arrives at the Milimani Law Courts in Nairobi, July 23, 2019.
Yatani, an ally of Kenyatta while Rotich was closer to Deputy President William Ruto, has won support from voters since provisionally taking over at the ministry in July.
The International Monetary Fund report, published on Wednesday, lays bare the scale of the task Yatani now faces. It said an estimated 500 projects — around half of the total v had ground to a halt due to “non-payment to contractors, insufficient allocation of funds to projects, and litigation cases in court.”
The state would need to raise around 1 trillion shillings ($10 billion) to complete them, the report said.
Kenya has ramped up public investment projects since 2010. But that increase “occurred without enough screening for project viability and readiness before they entered the budget,” the IMF said.
“There has been a subsequent squeeze on ongoing projects in the absence of fiscal space, which is now accruing large costs to the government.”
The fund named no specific projects, but construction of roads, markets and stadiums has stalled all over the country. Unpaid bills from the infrastructure department to suppliers and contractors totaled 78 billion shillings as of June, the IMF said.
Yatani said the government was reconstituting its planning and project monitoring unit to “ensure timely completion of projects and realization of value for money.”
His confirmation as finance minister was part of a government reshuffle that adds to signs of a rift between Kenyatta, who must step down when his second five-year term finishes in 2022, and Ruto, who considers himself the heir apparent but has begun to fall out of favor.
In April, just weeks after his summit with U.S. President Donald Trump collapsed in Hanoi, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un decided to ramp up the pressure on Washington.
“We will wait for a bold decision from the U.S. with patience till the end of this year,” Kim said in a speech to North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly.
Just three weeks later, Kim launched his first missiles in nearly a year and a half and would conduct 12 more rounds of launches in 2019, underscoring the urgency of his year-end deadline.
At one point in early December, North Korean state media published near-daily warnings of Kim’s deadline, including one threat from a Foreign Affairs Ministry official regarding a potentially sinister “Christmas gift” for the U.S.
The top U.S. Air Force general in the Pacific region said he expected North Korea’s gift to be a long-range missile launch. The U.S. increased surveillance flights around the Korean peninsula, apparently on alert for weapons tests.
Maybe, some analysts said, North Korea was waiting for Kim’s annual New Year’s speech to unveil a major, provocative announcement.
That didn’t really happen either. Kim’s New Year’s comments were relatively restrained, striking a more pessimistic than provocative tone.
All of this raises questions. Why did North Korea steadily raise tensions for much of 2019, only to let them apparently fizzle out once the deadline passed, and what does that say about how North Korea will act in 2020?
North Korean ‘strategic patience’
The short answer is that nobody knows.
One big clue is Kim’s New Year’s remarks, which came at the end of an important meeting of ruling party politicians in Pyongyang.
Kim warned the world would soon witness a “new strategic weapon” and said he no longer feels bound by his moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear tests, which he unilaterally declared in April 2018, just as his diplomacy with Trump was beginning.
FILE – A man watches a TV screen showing a file image of North Korea’s missile launch during a news program at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Jan. 1, 2020.
Kim did not formally abandon nuclear talks, though. Instead, he said their progress depends on the U.S. — progress that won’t likely come anytime soon, he added. North Korea, he said, should be prepared for a “long-term” standoff with Washington.
That could be North Korea’s version of “strategic patience,” according to North Korea analyst Koo Kab-woo. That is a reference to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s attempt to apply carefully calibrated economic and military pressure until Pyongyang was ready to make concessions at the negotiating table.
For North Korea, strategic patience includes emphasizing “self-reliance, an increase in its nuclear deterrent, and stronger diplomacy that could bring about the denuclearization [of North Korea] if the U.S. lifts its confrontational policies,” said Koo, a scholar at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, at a recent conference.
While that strategy may include more weapons tests, as hinted at in Kim’s speech, North Korea may be reluctant to cross any “red line” that would prompt a major reaction by Washington, Koo said.
An intercontinental ballistic missile or nuclear test could also upset China and Russia when both countries are pressuring the U.S. to relax sanctions on North Korea, analysts have said.
As a result, North Korea may not fully provoke or fully engage the U.S. in the near future — a policy of intentional ambiguity, Koo said.
Bigger moves coming?
Not everyone agrees with the strategic patience analogy, though.
“Strategic patience implies that North Korea has expectations from U.S.-DPRK diplomacy,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, an analyst for the North Korea-focused NK News online publication, using the abbreviation for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
According to Lee, Kim’s New Year’s comments signaled he has “little to no hope” for a diplomatic breakthrough.
“My feeling is that he is buying time for himself, not because he is hopeful of concessions from the U.S., but because he is not ready to showcase the ‘new strategic weapon’ yet,” she said.
There’s still a possibility that North Korea may act more forcefully this year, Lee said.
“It could be that Kim feels it’s not the right time to provoke. It could be the China factor, it could be that Kim is waiting for the right moment in the U.S. presidential election, or it could be that he wants to see some progress on the problems on the economic front,” she said.
Status quo
If North Korea is reluctant to upset the status quo for now, though, that may be just fine for Trump, who is entering a more intense phase of his reelection campaign and has been focused on other foreign policy issues, such as Iran.
FILE – U.S. President Donald Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, in Panmunjom, South Korea, June 30, 2019.
“As long as North Korea doesn’t launch long-range missiles and doesn’t test nuclear devices, I think Trump can claim that everything is alright,” said Artyom Lukin, an international relations scholar at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia.
Trump’s reelection campaign has portrayed the North Korea talks as a major foreign policy win, and Trump remains publicly optimistic about their eventual success, even as North Korea stormed away from talks and conducted a near-record number of weapons tests in 2019.
However, there does appear to be a limit for Trump. Last month, he signaled he would be disappointed if Kim resumed ICBM or nuclear tests. “He knows I have an election coming up. I don’t think he wants to interfere with that, but we’ll have to see,” Trump said.
Trump may be employing his own version of strategic patience, according to Lukin, describing the approach as: “We are ready to talk when you are ready, but we can wait.”
Who will move first?
If both the U.S. and North Korea are showing signs of “strategic patience,” the big question is: Who can afford to wait longer?
In Lukin’s view, the situation is much more urgent for North Korea.
“Any radical move they make is only going to make their position worse. If they start testing long-range missiles, it will carry all sorts of risks for them. If they start real denuclearization, it’s also a very risky thing,” Lukin said.
“The only thing that’s left for Kim Jong Un is to wait, wait, and wait. But you could wait a long time — you could wait forever and nothing could happen, actually,” he added.
Signs of frustration
One sign of North Korean frustration came last week, when senior North Korean Foreign Affairs Ministry official Kim Kye Gwan accused the U.S. of taking advantage of the relationship between Trump and Kim.
Though the Trump-Kim relationship remains “not bad,” it is also not enough to ensure the talks progress, he said.
“Although Chairman Kim Jong Un has … good personal feelings about President Trump, they are, in the true sense of the word, ‘personal,'” the diplomat said.
Nuclear talks can only resume, Kim said, once the U.S. agrees to totally accept all of North Korea’s demands.
“But we know well that the U.S. is neither ready nor able to do so,” he added.
High on the wall of a German church where Martin Luther once preached, an ugly remnant of centuries of anti-Semitism is now at the center of a court battle.
The so-called “Judensau,” or “Jew pig,” sculpture on the Town Church in Wittenberg dates back to around 1300. It is perhaps the best-known of more than 20 such relics from the Middle Ages, in various forms and varying states of repair, that still adorn churches across Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
Located about 4 meters (13 feet) above the ground on a corner of the church, it depicts people identifiable by their headwear as Jews suckling on the teats of a sow, while a rabbi lifts the animal’s tail. In 1570, after the Protestant Reformation, an inscription referring to an anti-Jewish tract by Luther was added.
Judaism considers pigs impure, and no one disputes that the sculpture is deliberately offensive. But there is strong disagreement about what consequences that should have and what to do with the relief.
A court in the eastern city of Naumburg will consider on Tuesday a Jewish man’s bid to make the parish take it down.
It’s the second round in the legal dispute, which comes at a time of mounting concern about anti-Semitism in modern Germany. In May, a court ruled against plaintiff Michael Duellmann, who wants the relief put in the nearby Luther House museum.
Judges in Dessau rejected arguments that he has a right to have the sculpture removed because it formally constitutes slander and the parish is legally responsible for that. Duellmann appealed.
The relief “is a terrible falsification of Judaism, a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people,” Duellmann says, arguing that it has “a terrible effect up to this day.”
Duellmann, a former student of Protestant theology who converted to Judaism in the 1970s, became involved in the issue in 2017, the year Germany marked the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. He says he joined vigils in Wittenberg against the sculpture and was asked if he would be prepared to sue when it became clear that the church wasn’t prepared to take it down.
‘Culture of remembrance’
Luther is said to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of another church in Wittenberg in defiance of Roman Catholic authorities in 1517, starting the German Reformation. He also is known for anti-Jewish invective, from which Germany’s Lutheran church has distanced itself.
Luther preached at the Town Church, now a regular stop for tourists visiting Wittenberg.
When the church was renovated in the early 1980s, the parish decided to leave the sandstone sculpture in place, and it was also restored. In 1988, a memorial was built on the ground underneath it, referring to the persecution of Jews and the killing of 6 million in the Nazi Holocaust.
In addition, a cedar tree was planted nearby to signify peace, and a sign gives information on the sculpture in German and English.
Pastor Johannes Block says the church is “in the same boat” as the plaintiff and also considers the sculpture unacceptably insulting. The parish, he says, “also is not happy about this difficult inheritance.”
However, he argues that the sculpture “no longer speaks for itself as a solitary piece,” but is embedded in a “culture of remembrance” thanks to the memorial. “We don’t want to hide or abolish history, but take the path of reconciliation with and through history,” he says.
“The majority of the Town Church parish doesn’t want this to become a museum piece, but to warn and ask people to remember history on the building, with the original,” Block says.
Duellmann isn’t impressed. “The ‘Jew pig’ is not weakened” by the memorial, he says. “It continues to have a terrible anti-Semitic effect in the church and in society.”
World Heritage site
There are mixed opinions in the church, too. Last year, the regional Lutheran bishop, Friedrich Kramer, said he favors taking down the sculpture from the church wall and exhibiting it in public at the site with an explanation. He doesn’t favor putting it in a museum. He praised the 1988 memorial but said it has weaknesses, including a failure to address Luther’s anti-Semitism.
If judges do order the sculpture removed, that may not be the end of the story. Block says the church would ask authorities to assess whether it is possible to remove it from a building that is under a preservation order, and more talks with the court would probably follow.
The church is a UNESCO World Heritage site, a status that it gained in 1996.
Plaintiff Duellmann has little sympathy with the church’s preservation order dilemma. He contends that authorities deliberately failed to mention the offending sculpture at the time of the application in order not to endanger it.
Whatever the outcome, Block says he regrets that the case went to court.
‘We are not advocates and initiators” of the sculpture, he says. “We are heirs and are trying to deal very conscientiously with this inheritance.”
The actors in the somber drama of U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment have a long weekend to contemplate their roles and responsibilities, thanks to the Martin Luther King national holiday Monday.
The Senate issued a summons to Trump on Thursday, notifying him of the trial and the charges against him. He must respond in writing by Saturday evening.
Trump’s impeachment comes at a time of profound political schisms in the country and also comes as Democrats, including several senators, are vying to become the candidate to face off against him in the upcoming presidential election.
A government watchdog agency concluded Thursday that Trump violated the country’s spending law last year when he temporarily withheld $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine while at the same time pressing Kyiv to launch investigations to benefit himself politically. The decision gets at the heart of the impeachment case against the U.S. leader.
FILE – Clerk of the House Cheryl Johnson, left, and House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving pass through Statuary Hall at the Capitol to deliver the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate, on Capitol Hill, Jan. 15, 2020.
Trump released the assistance that Ukraine wanted to help fight pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country in September after a 55-day delay, and without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy opening an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s top 2020 Democratic challengers, and his son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company.
But after an investigation, the Government Accountability Office ruled that “faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.” It said that the Trump-controlled U.S. budget agency blocked release of the money “for a policy reason,” which is not allowable under U.S. law.
Formal start of trial
The ruling by the GAO came less than two hours before the formal start of Trump’s Senate trial on two articles of impeachment: that Trump abused the office of the presidency by trying to get Zelenskiy to open the Biden investigations while withholding the military aid and then obstructing congressional efforts to investigate Trump’s Ukraine-related actions.
Seven lawmakers from the House of Representatives, called managers of the case against Trump, formally presented the articles of impeachment at a solemn midday reading in the Capitol. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff read the charges against the country’s 45th president in what is only the third Senate impeachment trial in the 2½ centuries of U.S. history.
House managers have to prepare and deliver legal briefs Saturday and Monday.
Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court was sworn in to preside over Trump’s trial, and moments later he swore in 99 of the 100 members of the Senate to act as jurors to decide Trump’s fate. (Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma was absent, due to a family emergency; he will take the oath next week, when the trial begins.) The oath the lawmakers took said they are to administer “impartial justice,” although a substantial number of the senators have already declared they will either vote to convict Trump or to acquit him.
With the preliminaries out of the way, the impeachment trial is expected to start in earnest next Tuesday at 1 p.m. in the Senate chamber.
Reaction to GAO report
The Office of Management and Budget and the White House rebuffed the GAO’s conclusion.
“We disagree with GAO’s opinion,” an OMB spokeswoman said. “OMB uses its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent consistent with the president’s priorities and with the law.”
A senior Trump administration said the GAO finding was “a pretty clear overreach as they attempt to insert themselves into the media’s controversy of the day.”
With Republicans holding a 53-47 majority in the Senate, Trump is all but certain to be acquitted and remain in office because conviction on either of the impeachment articles and requires a two-thirds majority vote. Some Republicans have criticized Trump’s bid for the Biden investigations, but no Republican has called for his conviction and removal from office less than a year before he faces voters to try to win a second term in the White House.
Some Democrats, however, quickly latched on to the GAO report as more evidence supporting Trump’s alleged abuse of power.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told CNN, “This will definitely be part of the trial. It establishes that the president violated U.S. law. The president abused his power by this illegal action.”
Witnesses
White House officials are predicting a short trial of no more than two weeks and Trump’s quick acquittal. But the proceeding could extend much longer if Democrats can persuade at least four Republican senators to vote with them to call new witnesses who did not testify during the weeks of investigations carried out by the Democrat-controlled House.
Democrats want to question former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney about their knowledge of Trump’s actions pressing Ukraine for the Biden investigations. Some Republican lawmakers say that if that happens, they want to subpoena either or both of the Bidens, as well as the still-unidentified government whistleblower who first disclosed Trump’s July 25 overture to Zelenskiy to “do us a favor” by investigating the Bidens.
Trump’s release of a rough transcript of his conversation with the Ukrainian leader showed that the basic facts of the whistleblower’s complaint against Trump — that he was seeking an investigation of a political rival — proved to be accurate, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.
As the impeachment drama has unfolded in Washington, Trump has almost daily ridiculed the Democrats’ efforts targeting him, calling the investigation unfair and a hoax. But as the House lawmakers prosecuting the case against him at the U.S. Capitol arrived in the Senate, Trump was silent on Twitter about the case.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the final step Thursday is to notify the White House and “summon the president to answer the articles and send his counsel.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed the articles of impeachment at a ceremony Wednesday, moving the process forward after delaying for about a month as House Democrats engaged in a futile effort to get Senate leaders to agree to allow testimony from new witnesses during the trial.
FILE – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., signs the resolution to transmit the two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate for trial on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2020.
McConnell has resisted calling witnesses, saying that a decision on witnesses would come later in the trial.
As Pelosi announced the impeachment managers at a morning news conference, Trump tweeted that impeachment was “another Con job by the Do Nothing Democrats.”
A senior administration official told reporters the White House is ready for the trial “because the facts overwhelmingly show that the president did nothing wrong.”
White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said Trump “looks forward to having the due process rights in the Senate that Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats denied to him, and expects to be fully exonerated.”
This is the third time in the country’s 244-year history a U.S. president has been impeached and targeted for removal from office.
Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 were both impeached by the House but acquitted in Senate trials. A fourth president, Richard Nixon, resigned in 1974 in the face of certain impeachment in the Watergate political corruption scandal.
