North Korean Diplomacy: Mysterious and Unpredictable

Financial ^ | 3/4/2012 | Guy de Fontgalland

[U-238]

In mid 1995, I was accorded the privilege of an invitation to travel to Pyongyang, North Korea to discuss, with key North Korean institutions, the feasibility of inviting foreign direct investments into what was then and now a nation that no one really knows or understands. My mission at that time was orchestrated by the North Korean Trade Office in Singapore and the projected outcome was to entice one or more mining companies from Australia to commence exploration. The offers on the North Korean table were extremely appetising. I flew to Beijing and boarded an old Antanov aircraft which was packed with Chinese and North Koreans and with a massive load of machines and other goods in the cargo carriage below. When the plane taxied on the runway for take-off, it took a lifetime to lift and did so at the very last metre of the tarmac. Next to me was a German diplomat travelling to meet his Swiss counterpart as the Swiss were taking care of German interests in North Korea. Somewhat worried about the state of the plane’s noisy and dilapidated condition, I asked him whether we will eventually land in Pyongyang’s Sunan Airport . He was not very helpful. He said, with the typical German sense of dry humour: “let us wait and see”. The plane did land, but I could not see any Airport . It landed some miles away and groaned its way slowly, past numerous sentry points with bunkers and ready-to-fire soldiers, and reached the Airport . My first feelings were that I had made a mistake in coming to Pyongyang and I had wilfully surrendered myself into the security apparatus of a country that the world feared.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

Article is a good read. Thanks!

[Cvengr]

As the German said, “We will wait and see.”

[tlozo]

North Korea “through the years of famine and starvation, has succeeded in fending off South Korean, US and other interventions in their country”

quote from article