Japan initially voted against Ban Ki-moon's election at U.N.: Bolton

Posted on : 2007-11-06 10:15 KST Modified on : 2007-11-06 10:15 KST

The single early vote opposing former South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon's election as U.N.

secretary-general came from Japan, which later changed its mind to "no opinion," according to a former U.S. envoy to the United Nations.

John Bolton recounts in his new book, "Surrender Is Not an Option," the process leading up to Ban's eventual election to the top U.N. post and his views of the North Korean nuclear issue.

The former ambassador said he personally suspected that the "discourage" vote against Ban had come from Japan and persuaded Tokyo's envoy, Kenzo Oshima, to change his government's mind.

Ban had suspected Ghana of voting against him after Oshima flatly denied casting the disapproval vote, according to the book.

But Bolton said when he met with Oshima and urged him to reconsider Japan's "discourage" vote, he did not deny it.

"I took it that Japan could not yet vote 'yes,' but might at least shift to 'no opinion,' which was in fact what happened," Bolton wrote.

Regarding North Korea, the former ambassador claimed evidence indicating uranium-enrichment activity extended well back into the 1990s and called it "the hammer I have been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework."

The Agreed Framework, reached in 1994 between the U.S. and North Korea, froze Pyongyang's nuclear activities in return for giving the North a set of light-water reactors. The deal collapsed when Washington confronted Pyongyang in October 2002 with accusations that the communist regime violated the agreement by engaging in a clandestine uranium enrichment program, an alternative to using plutonium in making nuclear weapons.

Up until mid-August of 2002, there was still no consensus that North Korea had violated the Agreed Framework, according to Bolton.

This suited people at the U.S. State Department's East Asia and the Pacific Bureau, whom he called "EAPeasers," who were in denial and wished to postpone any decision until after the December presidential election in South Korea, Bolton wrote.

The book details his visit to Seoul in August of that year, when he briefed then-South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Tae-sik about the information on the North's uranium enrichment.

"Lee was not happy with what I told him, because he understood even without my saying so that the North's actions would plunge the Agreed Framework into crisis," Bolton said.

It was on September 10, 2002, that the principals at the White House National Security Council finally concluded that North Korea had effectively killed the Agreed Framework, he said.

The former envoy reiterated his opposition to the current U.S.

approach to North Korea, insisting that the communist regime is bound to cheat again.

"In fact, the only true way to resolve the DPRK nuclear weapons problem is the reunification of the Korean Peninsula," he wrote, naming the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"If I were Kim Jong-il, I would not be optimistic," he said of North Korea's top leader.

"His death will be dirty and contemptible, like his life and his regime, and it will be exactly what he deserves."


WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 (Yonhap)

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