Topic: About This Blog

After running for a bit over a year, UNist is closing its doors, to be folded back into [the palaverist]. This site will hang around as an archive, but if you crave obscure Koreana and semi-insider pontifications on the UN, [the palaverist] is now the place to go.

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Topic: Asia

A little over a year ago, sometime in November of 2004 or so, I started on a reading project intended to give myself a grounding in East Asian history.

I had started on A New History of Korea, by Ki-baik Lee, and quickly found that in order to understand Korean history, I would need a grasp of Chinese and Japanese history as well. So I began to read China: A New History, by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, as well as A History of Japan, by R.H.P. Mason and J.G. Caiger. Then I decided to supplement this reading with four volumes I had kept on my bookshelves since college, when I had largely failed to read them: William Theodore de Bary's indispensible collections, Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume I and Volume II, and his Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume I and Volume II, which provide translations of original materials that trace Chinese and Japanese thought from their earliest origins to modern times. And once I had decided to read the Chinese and Japanese sources, I obviously couldn't neglect the Sources of Korean Tradition, Volume I and Volume II, Columbia University Press's more recent addition to its excellent Sources series (which also includes Sources of Indian Tradition).

Altogether, this added up to 3,829 pages. Considering that I lingered over them for well over a hear — putting them down for stretches of time, especially during the hectic autumn of last year, when I was the sole speechwriter during the busy season of UN committee work and reform efforts — this is not exactly proof of my speed-reading abilities. On the other hand, it's not always easy to face another 40 pages of Neo-Confucian debate on whether the universe is made of principle or force, or another 30 pages of medieval Korean proposals for land reform that not even their authors took seriously.

Still, there is reward in having delved even into these obscure and difficult corners of East Asian thought. And then some sections were genuinely fascinating, like Japan's strange origin myths, the struggle of the Chinese to come to terms with the West, or Korea's furious rejection of Japanese colonialism. And the overall picture is one that will help me greatly in understanding the Koreans I work with and their views of themselves in the world.

Having spent so much time exploring East Asia from the inside out, I have now turned to The Korean War, by Max Hastings, and the shift in perspective is a bit dizzying. To have read Korean accounts of their jubilation when the Americans arrived to liberate them from the Japanese, and then to read of the Americans' utter bafflement at what they found in Korea, is to be reminded how little Korea registered in the consciousness of most people in most parts of the world. When it came into focus, it was as a pawn in Great Power politics — just as it had been earlier, in the wrangles among its neighbors, Japan, China and Russia. It's weird to go back to the American sense of Korea as an alien land, its people at least as baffling as those of Afghanistan and Iraq strike us today. But the combination of perspectives, interior and exterior, will hopefully give me a fuller sense of how Korea's unique history is connected to the broader world.

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Topic: Nepal

Things are going badly for Nepal. The BBC reports on clashes in the streets between security forces and opposition activists who are calling for democracy. The government has set curfews, which have hurt tourism, a crucial business in Nepal.

One wonders what King Gyanendra is thinking.

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Topic: United Nations

Ban Ki-moon, the Foreign Minister of South Korea, is coming to the United States next week for a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (previous meeting pictured). He'll also be swinging through New York next Tuesday and Wednesday for a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose term ends on December 31.

The race to be the next Secretary-General is on, and though Minister Ban is not yet shortlisted, he's beginning to position himself as an alternative to the Sri Lankan and Thai frontrunners, about whom no one is especially enthusiastic. (According to the geographical rotation system, the next SG should come from Asia, though the US has suggested that the rotation is less important than finding a worthy candidate.) Earlier this week, I was asked to edit talking points for Minister Ban to use at the Davos Forum, which involved a lot of "If I were Secretary-General" hypotheticals and answers to questions about multilateralism and UN reform.

It will be interesting to see how this race plays out over the next year, and to watch what becomes of Minister Ban's bid.

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Topic: United Nations

This is a bit out of date, but that General Assembly resolution I was working on passed. The text of the resolution is still not available on the UN website, but I'll post it once it's up.

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Topic: The Mission

Unfortunately, due to the NYC transit strike, I missed last night's marathon holiday banquet. Something new under this ambassador, the banquet consisted of a lavish buffet, a raffle at which dozens of gifts were given out, and a hired master of ceremonies who conducted interviews and game show-like activities in between speeches by just about everyone. The entire affair lasted a grueling four hours, I'm told, and for obvious reasons most of it took place in Korean, so it was hard on my speechwriting colleague.

On a different note, one of the diplomats just dropped by my office with an odd holiday gift: a yearbook-sized, fake-leather-bound 2006 "Cyprus Diary" with gilt pages. Essentially a glorified day-runner, it's obviously a production of the government of Cyprus, and includes a map of the European Union (which Cyprus recently joined), a map of Cyprus itself (undivided), and pages of basic info about the country, including a lengthy section on "The Cyprus Problem," which I haven't read.

So far, though, I'm still waiting on a new wall calendar. Last year we got one from the Korea National Tourism Organization (whose URL, , has a grammatical error) and an even bigger one from Asiana Airlines. With a week to go, though, all I've got is an awkward little "Dynamic Korea" desk calendar from the Korean OverSeas (sic) Information Service.

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Topic: Terrorism

Shameful. Just shameful.

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Topic: Korean Culture

Daniel alerts me to this strange bit of news about why Hong Kong police see the 1,500 South Koreans in town as the major threat to the WTO negotiations there. Most of the piece is about South Korea's rice subsidies, but it begins with a recap of Korean WTO protests past:

At the 2003 WTO summit in Cancun, Mexico, activist Lee Kyung-hae stabbed himself to death after unfurling a banner that declared "WTO kills farmers." Early this year, in November, two more farmers committed suicide by drinking insecticide.

What the hell? I mean, this is not India, where farmers have committed suicide rather than face impossible debts. They may have seen suicide as the only way to get the moneylenders to back off, thus saving their families from starvation. Nor are Korean farmers facing anything like the destruction that confronted Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who immolated himself in 1963 to protest the repression of his religion and his country. It's true that Korean farmers are clinging to a declining way of life, but this has largely to do with South Korea's shift from agrarian poverty to industrialized wealth. I was startled, too, that South Korean protesters would cut off their fingers to protest Japanese claims to Dokto/Takeshima, a tiny hunk of rock in the East Sea/Sea of Japan.

So what motivates Koreans to mutilate or kill themselves for what seem like mid-level political scuffles? I honestly don't know.

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Topic: United States

According to Condoleeza Rice, the Bush administration today changed its position on torture, finally determining that the UN Convention against Torture, which bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners, applies even to US personnel even outside of US territory — an interpretation that has been glaringly obvious to everyone else all along.

Let's just hope that we actually adhere to this new public policy. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover that while we're now officially swearing off such behavior, it's still going on in secret.

Update: Sadly, it looks like I (and much of the media) jumped the gun on this one. My friend Daniel Kleinfeld posted a couple of clarifying links in the comments, including this one, which explains that Condi's language has been in use by the administration for some time and does nothing to stop or prevent the continued torture of those we have imprisoned without anything resembling due process.

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Topic: Society

A group called The Atheist Agenda, out of the University of Texas at San Antonio, has gotten national media attention for its "Smut for Smut" program, in which they set up a table and offered to give pornography to anyone who traded in a Bible or another religious tome. It's a stunt, clearly, but meant to demonstrate that there's a lot of dirty business in the Bible, which makes it a questionable basis for morality.

The group's president, Thomas Jackson, was recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson on MSNBC's The Situation, and it turns out (no surprise) that Jackson has thought through his position more carefully than Carlson. Said Jackson:

Morality is not derived from religious texts. Religious texts actually contradict each other. If you read the Bible, it contradicts itself on nearly every page. And the fact that people can decide which one to go with shows that they are getting their morality from somewhere else ....

[Morality is] based off of things that are good for society. If citizens murder each other, this is bad for society. And you see this across the board in many nations.

Several religions have stumbled upon this, but it's not the religious text that's bringing this to people. They are finding this on their own, and societies that don't find this don't survive.

Brilliant. This is a very clear summation of an argument that I've often had with religious people who believe that morality is only possible if you believe in God. Indeed, this is so obvious that Talmudic rabbis differentiated between those laws between man and man whose purposes could be rationally understood, and those between man and God, which may or may not lend themselves to human understanding.

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