Word: koreans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Park Youn Hee, a 27-year-old in Seoul who is about to enter graduate school, remembers well the rush of hope that overcame her nine years ago during the first summit between North and South Korea. As she watched then South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and North Korea's paramount leader Kim Jong Il shake hands in Pyongyang on television, Park believed the Cold War conflict on the Korean peninsula might finally come to an end. "We all thought that something was going to change right away," she recalls...
...Many South Koreans feel the same way. In recent years, Seoul has tried just about everything - from hard-line demands to generous food and fertilizer aid - to convince the isolated regime to end its controversial nuclear-weapons program and improve ties with its southern neighbor. But relations between the two Koreas have remained more or less unchanged. The stalemate on the peninsula that began after the Korean War of the early 1950s continues, with Pyongyang still regularly hurling threats and insults at the South. The North's stubbornness has left South Koreans feeling helpless and uncertain about what an effective...
...peninsula have escalated. In late May, Pyongyang earned global condemnation by undertaking a second nuclear test, and now Kim Jong Il may be preparing another test of a long-range missile. Seoul's response to Pyongyang's actions has been unusually tough. After the nuclear test, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak agreed to join a U.S.-led effort to crack down on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. North Korea called Lee's decision tantamount to a declaration of war. "Many [South Koreans] now feel that the North has taken it too far," says Yoo Ho Yeol...
...such sentiment holds, it is unlikely that North Korea's saber-rattling will scare Seoul into making new concessions or opening the aid spigot anytime soon. For now, frustrated South Koreans seem content to wait until North Korea shows some signs it is more willing to cooperate. Kim Jong Il "is like a frog in a well living in his own world," complains Kim, the retiree. "If he opens up, the North Koreans would be better off, and we would be better off, too, but he doesn't seem to understand that." Until he does, the conflict on the Korean...
...North (Hwan's grandfather and other family members were also arrested by the security police in North Korea for "crimes" never delineated). The American journalists, employed by Current TV, a San Francisco-based TV network founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, were filming a report about North Korean refugees in China when they were seized by North Korean agents along the border between the two countries. The U.S. government immediately expressed its dismay and called on North Korea to release the two women on humanitarian grounds. But it is hardly a foregone conclusion that the North will comply...