Cavanami/coss Sandbox Battleground

[My Penis is hungry]

Didn't the Italians miss out on being in the Soccer World Cup? I wouldn't believe anything he says

[cavanami]

Coss, see you still have your severe case of TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome,,,,

 

President Trump arrives in Singapore for historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un; John Roberts reports on the latest developments.

 

Trump 'feeling good' about summit after arrival in Singapore

 

[Flashermac]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44439700

[Coss]

Ladies and Gents, I am very concerned after having read the following. I post this here not as a criticism of Trump, though the writer slants it that way, but as a revealing piece about the execrable hell hole that is North Korea:

 

It is more than one paragraph, those with short attention spans, may want to try several times to read the whole:

___

 

"The gravity, scale, duration and nature of the unspeakable atrocities committed in the country reveal a totalitarian state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world." - Michael Kirby, chair of the UN commission of inquiry on human rights in North Korea

 

People who argue that US President Donald Trump should set aside the issue of human rights when he meets Kim Jong Un on Tuesday ignore the fact that Kim's regime is not just guilty of the abuses usually chronicled by advocacy groups - torture, disappearances and the like.

 

It is founded on, and sustained by, crimes against its population so massive and monstrous that they almost defy description. Kirby, whose UN commission laid them out in a landmark 2014 report, described four vast compounds where between 80,000 and 130,000 people - including multiple generations of families - are held incommunicado for life and subjected to brutalities comparable to those in the Nazi concentration camps.

 

More recently, an investigation by the International Bar Association led by three internationally respected jurists concluded that Kim and other senior members of his regime could be prosecuted for 10 of the 11 crimes against humanity defined in the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), including extermination, enslavement, torture and sexual violence. The only one deemed not applicable was apartheid.

 

"Much of the inmate population," the bar association reported in December, "has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide." Its chronicle of dozens of individual crimes makes stomach-turning reading. Take this bullet point: "One witness described a torture chamber with blood and flesh on the walls and decaying corpses of past victims placed in the chamber in order to instil fear in the next prisoner."

 

Or this one: "Rape of teenage girls and their subsequent attempts to commit suicide by jumping into the Daedonggang River were so common that prison guards were deployed to the river to thwart them."

 

Presiding over all this is the dictator whom Trump has taken to calling "honourable," and whom he promises to make happy and rich, if only he will give up his nuclear arsenal.

 

Unfortunately, it's not so easy. Kim and his regime are inseparable from their atrocities. It's questionable whether he could survive in power without them. And how could North Korea open to the world and to foreign investors - how could the United States sign a peace treaty with it - while those camps continue to function?

 

This is not to say that Trump's diplomacy with Kim is not worth trying. But it does mean that the regime's vast apparatus of repression has to be addressed from the beginning of the process, alongside its missiles and nukes. The two must be dismantled together.

 

"While past negotiations with the North may have privileged the security issues at the expense of human rights ... the two issues are today intimately tied in unprecedented ways," concluded a 2016 study on North Korea strategy by Robert Gallucci, a former negotiator with Pyongyang, and Victor Cha, who was Trump's first choice for ambassador to South Korea. The two pointed out that practices such as forced labour and severe food rationing "favour the regime and its proliferation practices" by providing resources and suppressing dissent.

 

Cha and Gallucci argued that human rights could be an important source of leverage over Kim. They say the leadership has been rattled by repeated calls by the UN General Assembly for the referral of its crimes for ICC prosecution. This, they said, "might cause the regime to try to deflect pressure with concessions or progress on the nuclear front." That doesn't mean trading human rights for nukes. But it could mean incorporating steps on human rights into an overall political and security settlement.

 

A typical response to such proposals is that adding human rights to an already daunting disarmament agenda will only cause the process to stall. Yet the history of arms control refutes this theory. In seeking limits on the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal in the 1970s, the United States insisted on a human rights "basket"; the resulting Helsinki accords did more to end the Cold War than any of the nuclear deals.

 

Conversely, the Obama administration chose to exclude all non-nuclear issues from the 2015 deal limiting Iran's nuclear programme. The regime's domestic repression and war-making in Syria and Yemen predictably continued, giving Trump more reasons - and more support - for tearing up the accord.

 

It's not clear yet whether Trump intends to raise human rights at Tuesday's summit; given his general disregard for the issue and his zeal for a deal, it won't be surprising if he neglects it. If so, he will be making a mistake that, with the ghosts of the camps, will come back to haunt him.

 

 

https://www.stuff.co...ck-to-haunt-him

 

 

 

for more information on the 2014 report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_of_the_Commission_of_Inquiry_on_Human_Rights_in_the_Democratic_People%27s_Republic_of_Korea#Summary_of_report_findings at wiki woo

[Coss]

Googling images of torture in NK and there're a lot of escapee drawn images like this one:

 

 

 

 

 

America should be invading NK, not playing kiss kiss suck suck

[cavanami]

> America should be invading NK, not playing kiss kiss suck suck

 

Coss you have completely lost the plot!

 

The last thing the USA should do is to invade NK!!!

 

Are you off your meds again? certainly looks like that....

 

The USA should and is taking things step by step....first step, get to the negotiation table....can you follow along so far?

 

Somewhere down the list you talk regarding human rights...

 

Oh, how are the human rights in China going? is NZ doing trade with China even though they violate human rights? is NZ doing trade and selling all that mutton to the Middle East, also human right violators....better get your own house in order before running your brain dead mouth....

[Coss]

And your boy is busy glorifying a despot dictator, whilst making enemies of the USA's allies.

 

Can you step back from the farce that is this POTUS and be an American? Can you support Democracy instead of dictators, oh hang on, Trump is god, I forgot.

[BelgianBoy]

 

America should be invading NK, not playing kiss kiss suck suck

 

suddenly it has to be America, why not NZ then....?

[Coss]

suddenly it has to be America, why not NZ then....?

 

Good question, but suddenly? America is the one giving NK all the glory at the moment, not suddenly.

 

As is well known, the NZ armed forces are too small, to take on any thing like NK, but in a pre Trumpian world, NZ was part the efforts as allies to the USA in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan et al, so we do go to war, when we can as part of right minded efforts.

 

I think you'll find that NZ has a history of condemnatory policies toward NK.

 

I'm not cognisant of Belgian history so I can't comment on the Belgian effort.

[Flashermac]

The UN forces did invade NK in 1950 during the Korea War, driving almost to the Yalu River. The result was that China promptly entered the conflict and dragged the war out until 1953.

 

As an aside, a friend's big brother had been a US Army MP in South Korea when NoKo attacked. The greatly outnumbered US forces were quickly overrun, and big bro was captured. He said the NoKo's treated the prisoners brutally, starving, torturing and even killing many of them. But when the PRC entered the war, China took over the POW camps. He said the Chinese treated them decently, obeying the Geneva Convention. Big bro said he held no resentment against the Chinese, but he hated NK with a passion up to his dying day. NK has been a rogue state from day one.

 

 

p.s. Don't forget that Kim had his own brother murdered. He also realises that if he loses power, the people may well rise up against the "privileged class" that rules the north.