Search Results for: Maurice

I can’t even begin to scratch the detail that Ms. Rosett has added to our knowledge of the Korean Connection with her most recent Oil-For-Food article. For some time, my interest in Oil-For-Food has focused in on Tongsun Park, who was born in North Korea, and Maurice Strong, Kofi Annan’s former Special Envoy to North Korea. Strong resigned from that position last May, after news reports named him as the possible recipient of some of Saddam Hussein’s bribe money, conveyed...

Thanks to an anonymous source for referring this: Canadian Maurice Strong, an influential entrepreneur, withdrew as U.N. envoy for Korea on Wednesday while investigators probed his ties to a lobbyist suspected of bribing U.N. officials with Iraqi funds. Strong, who has served in a variety of U.N. posts since 1947, was a part-time adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the six-party talks aimed at getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.” He is suspending himself with the secretary-general’s...

Thanks to an anonymous source for referring this: Canadian Maurice Strong, an influential entrepreneur, withdrew as U.N. envoy for Korea on Wednesday while investigators probed his ties to a lobbyist suspected of bribing U.N. officials with Iraqi funds. Strong, who has served in a variety of U.N. posts since 1947, was a part-time adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the six-party talks aimed at getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.” He is suspending himself with the secretary-general’s...

Tongsun Park–Arrested in Mexico? That certainly suggests a much higher level of U.S. interest in what he knows, as well as a much lower interest by Park in cooperating. Of course, he ratted everyone out after his Koreagate indictment. Let’s hope the pattern holds up. Update: . . . and on his way from Canada, home of Liberal Party supporter and Oil-For-Food co-suspect Maurice Strong, to God-knows-where, on the very eve of the Canadian national election. If this proves to...

Months after he was indicted by the feds in New York, oil-for-food bag man Tongsun Park has been arrested. Tongsun Park, a lobbyist from South Korea who was a central figure in the Congressional bribery scandal in the 1970’s known as Koreagate, was arrested yesterday in Houston on charges that he worked illegally to secure favorable treatment for Iraq under the United Nations oil-for-food program, federal authorities said. Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan, announced that Mr....

In final the days leading up to Freedom House’s Seoul conference, the movement to put human rights back into the center of South Korea’s policy toward the North appears to be gaining momentum. It is still a fragile moment. The momentum could still be lost to petty factional and interpersonal disputes. If the movement’s leading lights unite, however, it could also shift South Korea’s national debate, across the political spectrum, as Korea’s political parties prepare and adjust their platforms in...

After years of silence about human rights, best embodied by disgraced U.N. Special Envoy Maurice Strong and disgraced U.N.H.C.R. chief Ruud Lubbers, the new face of the United Nations on North Korea is Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn, and what an improvement he is over the other two: “The general sentiment is that the situation in 2005 remains critical. There is a drastic shortfall of food produced in the country and possible humanitarian aid from outside,” the report says. It calls...

Reading this piece in The Guardian will require you to suspend your disbelief that the author is crediting Kofi Annan, who was occupied with his banker in Geneva during the slaughters in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and the engineered famine in North Korea: In the final declaration last week 191 countries, including Sudan and North Korea, went along with a restatement of international law: that the world community has the right to take military action in the case of “national authorities manifestly...

I don’t have much to offer on the various theories about whether the North Koreans are really about to test a nuke, for two excellent reasons. The first of these is that the mother of my two children (also my wife, in case you were going to ask) had the temerity to expect me to pry myself away from the computer over Mother’s Day weekend. We ended up spending most of the weekend eating out, taking long drives in the...

I don’t have much to offer on the various theories about whether the North Koreans are really about to test a nuke, for two excellent reasons. The first of these is that the mother of my two children (also my wife, in case you were going to ask) had the temerity to expect me to pry myself away from the computer over Mother’s Day weekend. We ended up spending most of the weekend eating out, taking long drives in the...