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U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explains a U.S. satellite photo of the Korean peninsula he keeps on his desk on Thursday. He presented GNP chairwoman Park Geun-hye with the same photo, taken on a night in September 2003. Comparison with a satellite photo taken nearly 20 years ago in 1986 makes it clear that nearly all the lights in North Korea have gone out./Yonhap
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Grand National Party (GNP) chairwoman Park Geun-hye and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were reunited on Thursday 31 years after their first meeting. The two first met when Rumsfeld visited Korea with then-president Gerald Ford on November 22, 1974 shortly after Park assumed the role of first lady following the assassination of her mother, Yook Young-soo, on August 15. Rumsfeld was then White House chief of staff.
This time Park heads the largest opposition party in Korea and Rumsfeld is his nation¡¯s secretary of defense.
Rumsfeld said Thursday he still remembered meeting Park for the first time. He said he knew she carried out her role as first lady well, and that she was now handling her role as head of the GNP equally well. Rumsfeld confessed to always keeping a map of Korea in his desk because there was no country in the world quite as dramatic.
What makes it dramatic is that one half is thriving while the other is poor, one totalitarian and the other a democracy, he said. He presented to Park a photograph taken of the Korean Peninsula by a U.S. satellite on a night in September 2003 -- the same picture he keeps in his desk.
Asked what she thought of her government¡¯s decision to do away with designating North Korea its ¡°main enemy¡± at a discussion prior to her meeting with Rumsfeld held at Georgetown University, Park said North Korea continued to be South Korea¡¯s main military enemy. She said that even if the designation disappeared, the South Korean military would continue to protect the nation.
Meanwhile, Park called "exaggerated" her country's response to a bill by Japan's Shimane Prefecture aimed at boosting Japan's claim to Korea's Dokdo Islets. She said it was unreasonable for the entire nation to get up in arms over the action of one small prefecture. In a meeting with Korean correspondents in Washington, she said it was nonsense for Japan to claim sovereignty over the Dokdo islets, but a more balanced response would have been for Ulleung County to raise objections, not Seoul.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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