Does North Korea have G-20 plans?

An ominous report: North Korean leaders headed by Kim Jong-il’s son and heir apparent Jong-un met to discuss disrupting the G20 summit in November in Seoul, Radio Free Asia claimed Wednesday. It cited an unnamed source who was in Pyongyang to attend an extraordinary congress of the Workers Party, which was supposed to be held ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

An ominous report:

An ominous report:

North Korean leaders headed by Kim Jong-il’s son and heir apparent Jong-un met to discuss disrupting the G20 summit in November in Seoul, Radio Free Asia claimed Wednesday. It cited an unnamed source who was in Pyongyang to attend an extraordinary congress of the Workers Party, which was supposed to be held in early September but is now set for Sept. 28, as telling a defectors’ group that the North’s powerful National Defense Commission held an emergency closed-door meeting early this month to disrupt the summit.  The North apparently believes the G20 summit is a political conspiracy of global financial powers to isolate the North internationally, the source was quoted as saying.

Poor South Korea. All Canada had to worry about when it hosted the last G-20 summit was anti-globalization protesters.

Update:  A reader cautions: "Wild rumors about North Korea are regularly made up to feed the Asian media, this is hardly trustworthy. If true then I have to wonder if the North Koreans remember that China and Russia are both part of the G20 and probably wouldn’t be too amused at having their work disrupted."

 

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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