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A senior Korean Embassy official in Washington told Korean correspondents there on Monday, "The president told U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the protracted investigation into Banco Delta Asia accounts has a negative impact on the resumption of six-nation talks. He asked for an early conclusion of the investigation.ˇ± The official also said, "The South Korean government requested that the U.S. delay enforcing additional sanctions against North Korea because it might make resumption of the talks impossible."
But a Cheong Wa Dae spokesman said the president ˇ°merely told Paulson of a need for harmony between U.S. execution of its domestic law and efforts to resume the six-nation talks; he didn't ask for an early conclusion of the BDA investigation. Neither did the government ask the U.S. to delay additional sanctions against the North."
The embassy official did his diplomatic duty in America, took part in the president's meeting with Paulson, and knows what happened better than anyone else. Cheong Wa Dae, too, ought to know what the chief executive said. Nonetheless, the two tell diametrically different stories about the same incident.
The Korean president, if he feels that U.S. sanctions against Pyongyang will not help resolve the North Korean nuclear standoff, is free to ask for existing sanctions to be lifted or additional sanctions to be put off. But such a request is only any good when the president is convinced he can move his counterpart in the direction he wishes. But if the president made an impossible request when the U.S. has no intention either to lift or to delay sanctions, it is a diplomatic blunder and a disgrace to the nation.
The fact that the South Korean government takes a negative view of Washington's additional sanctions against North Korea, and that the president got a negative response from the U.S. treasury secretary when he asked for an early conclusion of the BDA investigation, was already reported by the media during the presidential visit, based on confirmation by U.S. officials. Yet since the messenger has already been shot, all that remains to do is examine the causes of the mistake and learn from it so it does not happen again.
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