Hermit Tyranny Makes Rare P.R. Move

UNITED NATIONS — In a rare public relations effort, the North Korean foreign minister, Choe Su-Hon, yesterday invited a group of hand-picked reporters for a chat after he addressed the U.N. General Assembly.

At the 13th-floor offices of North Korea's U.N. mission, Mr. Choe railed against America and Japan, boasted that his country initiated the Korean Peninsula's new thaw, and dismissed international aid to his cash-strapped communist regime as nothing but a "small amount of money." Pyongyang will refuse entry to any auditors the U.N. Development Program sends to investigate allegations of rules violations in the agency's North Korean program, he said.

A polite, smiling official who introduced himself as Song kept the doors of the North Korean offices closed to most reporters. He said little beyond disclosing that he learned English at the Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages and that he started smoking Danish cigarettes when he began working for the foreign office. He rebuffed further inquiries into the brand of cigarettes most of his fellow countrymen smoke. "I can't talk to you anymore," he told The New York Sun.

The reporters allowed to "interview" Mr. Choe at the mission, according to the official, were invitees from three press agencies: Xinhua of China, Itar-Tass of Russia, and the German press agency DPA, whose correspondent Tuyet Nguyen is the president of the U.N. Correspondents Association. A recording of Mr. Choe's interview was made available to the Sun and others.

In it Mr. Choe called on Japan to apologize and compensate North Korea for its "hooliganism and robbery" during "42 years of occupation," and he accused Japan's armed forces of shifting the current military balance in East Asia. Since 1945, he added, America has conducted a "hostile policy" toward Pyongyang. Once America ends the military threat it poses to North Korea, Pyongyang's nuclear disarmament will be "solved," he said.

Mr. Choe said the UNDP auditors, recently appointed to investigate allegations of violations of the agency's rules in its Pyongyang office, would not be allowed into his country. A preliminary audit concluded that UNDP violations indeed occurred — including hiring of employees who also worked for the North Korean government and payments in foreign currency. But Mr. Choe said yesterday that the initial findings "prove" that the allegations, first made by American diplomats, were "groundless."

"Our dignity and integrity has been hurt," he said, and dispatching a new team of auditors would further "offend our dignity."

The United Nations does not need to send more auditors, he said, because "the amount of money" in the UNDP North Korean program "was so small." The UNDP estimated the size of its North Korean program at $3 million a year, but other published reports claimed it has reached upward of $100 million since 1998. "We don't care about such a small amount of money," Mr. Choe said.

"We think it is in everyone's interest for the auditors to visit North Korea," a UNDP spokeswoman, Christina LoNigro, told the Sun. "However, if the auditors are not given visas, we will bring our documents out of the country and make them available to the auditors elsewhere."

A U.N. spokeswoman, Michele Montas, said Mr. Choe and Secretary-General Ban, who met here yesterday, discussed Korean diplomacy. The issue of visas for the UNDP auditors was not raised at the meeting, she said.