Despite recent bellicose rhetoric and provocations aimed at neighbors and the international community alike, former U.S. President Bill Clinton says he still believes that North Korea can be brought into the international community.
Clinton was making the keynote speech at the opening of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in Seoul yesterday, and in a Q&A session following the main event he explained what he feels are the reasons behind the recent plunge in relations between Pyongyang and the international community.
“Whenever people who have power in a closed society have any concerns about losing it,” Clinton pointed out, “things tend to be degenerating to the lowest possible denominator.” However, he said, “There has to be a way to bring the people of North Korea into the modern world, economically and politically.”
Meanwhile, Leon Sigal, the Director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project within the Social Science Research Council believes Bill Clinton could himself be suitable, according to Radio Free Asia news released yesterday. Sigal, repeating the words of an unnamed American government official, confirmed that President Obama intends to send “somebody there.” Sigal put forward Clinton or Henry Kissinger as possible candidates.
However, the envoy may have to wait until the release of the two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who have been held in North Korea since March 17th, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap News. An anonymous South Korean government official was reported as saying on Sunday that U.S. special envoy for North Korea policy Stephen Bosworth would visit Pyongyang “only after the two American journalists detained there are released.”
Furthermore, speaking at the Barnard College Commencement Ceremony in New York on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton underscored her personal opposition to their ongoing detention, encouraged the listening students to use the internet to “let the North Koreans know that we find (their detention) absolutely unacceptable.”
