North Korea appeasement?

This sounds like the LA Times... but I like the 'it's not our fault, it America's' tenor.

"There's never been a positive article about North Korea, not one," he said. "We're portrayed as monsters, inhuman, Dracula … with horns on our heads."

Or here's the closet Capitalist:

He said better relations with the United States were key to turning around his nation's economy, which has nearly ground to a halt over the last decade amid famine, the collapse of industry and severe electricity shortages. "For basic life, we can live without America, but we can live better with" it, he said.

And I like this one:

While Westerners tend to stress the rights of the individual, he said, "we have chosen collective human rights as a nation…. We should have food, shelter, security rather than chaos and vandalism. The question of our survival as a nation is dangling."

Or this, blaming this Admin for packs create in the `90s:

But he faulted the United States for the collapse of a 1994 pact under which North Korea was supposed to get energy assistance in return for freezing its nuclear program. The agreement fell apart after Washington accused North Korea in 2002 of cheating on the deal, and the U.S. and its allies suspended deliveries of fuel oil.

"Electricity is a real problem. We have only six hours a day," said the North Korean, who lives in an apartment in a choice neighborhood of Pyongyang, the capital. "When you are watching a movie on TV, there might be a nice love scene and then suddenly the power is out. People blame the Americans. They blame Bush."

But what get's me is the tenor of the article, I'd call it a bit soft or even sympatheic.

As for international negotiations aimed at getting North Korea to give up its nuclear arms program, he said he thought Pyongyang would probably show up at the next round of talks. But his country would prefer to negotiate directly with the United States, he said, rather than in six-party discussions that also include China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

He said the Americans' insistence on including six countries had caused undue complications.

"If we sort out the problems with America, everything else will fall into place. The problems with Japan can easily be sorted out," he said.

The North Korean criticized some Japanese politicians' efforts to link the nuclear talks to the question of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.

"This was something done by a few overly enthusiastic people long ago," he said. "We tried to make amends.

"Now people like Shinzo Abe [deputy secretary-general of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party] are using it for political purposes and destroying the interests of millions of people."

The most important point the North Korean said he wanted to convey in the conversation was that his nation was a place just like any other.

"There is love. There is hate. There is fighting. There is charity…. People marry. They divorce. They make children," he said.

"People are just trying to live a normal life."