DPRK embassy: Finland violated human rights of the diplomatic couriers

The affair of the North Korean diplomatic couriers forcibly removed from train in Kouvola, Finland after violently resisting cooperation with authorites continues as a tragicomedy. The DPRK embassy in Stockholm haa submitted a diplomatic note to the embassy of Finland, accusing Finland of violation of human rights when dealing with the couriers. The daily Helsingin Sanomat had a longish story on the case today, with comments from a representative of the DPRK embassy in Stockholm. As for the reason for taking a train from St Petersburg to Helsinki in order to carry mail to Stockholm, the representative told that the two men wanted to experience the famous ferries that operate between Helsinki and Stockholm. I'll return to the article tommorow. Update: • Helsingin Sanomat has translated quite a lot into English, but there is still more to come about the incident: North Korea files official complaint over Kouvola train incident. • YLE (the national broadcasting corporation) has the outlines of the Helsingin Sanomat story in English: North Korea Issues Diplomatic Note to Finland. • Time has made available an article from Nov 1, 1976 on the activities of DPRK diplomats which led to twelve embassy staffers expelled from Nordic countries: Smuggling Diplomats. [...] International politics had nothing to do with the abrupt action by the Scandinavian governments. What had happened was that North Koreans in all three countries* had been caught red-handed in a massive smuggling racket involving liquor, cigarettes and dope —apparently instigated by the financially hard-pressed government of President Kim II Sung. Officials in Norway estimated that their branch of the Kim gang had smuggled into the country at least 4,000 bottles of booze (mostly Polish vodka) and 140,000 cigarettes, which were then given surreptitiously to Norwegian wholesalers for distribution on the black market. In Denmark, the illegal goodies impounded so far included 400 bottles of liquor, 4.5 million cigarettes and 147 kilos of hashish, which police confiscated two weeks ago from two Danes who had just bought the drug from North Korean embassy staffers. [...] Update, March 5, 2007: • B.R. Myers' article "The Obsessions of Kim Jong Il" in The New York Times (May 19, 2003) is one that I should have referred to right from the start, and his notion of the "glorification of spontaneous violence" in North Korea was somewhere in the back of my mind. (Link to the article.) Myers notes: The Soviets considered the spontaneity of the common people, especially their tendency to violence, to be a dangerous force unless tempered with political consciousness. In North Korea, the people's spontaneity is seen as one of the country's greatest strengths. Categories at del.icio.us/hunjang: DPRK ∙ Korea-Finland