미국의 조지 W. 부시 행정부에서 실질적 권력자로 불리기도 했으나 무리한 이라크 전쟁을 일으킨 장본인으로 지적되기도 했던 리처드 브루스 체니(Richard Bruce Cheney), 애칭 딕 체니 제46대 미국 전 부통령이 4일 84세로 타계했다.

그는 지난 대선에서 카멀라 해리스에게 투표할 것이라고 공언하기도 했다.(사진 왼쪽. 더 가디언.)

북한 외교에서 중책을 맡았던 김영남 전 최고인민회의 상임위원장이 3일 12시 97세의 일기로 사망했다고 4일 조선중앙통신이 보도했다.

김정은 북한 국무위원장은 이날 새벽 1시에 최룡해, 조용원, 박태성, 박정천, 노광철, 최선희 등을 데리고 김영남의 시신이 안치된 평양시 보통강구역 서장회관을 찾아 조문 했으며, 김 위원장은 “깊은 애도의 뜻을 표시한다"고 한 것으로 보도되었다. 또한, 국장 거행이 결정되었다.

그는 북한의 형식상의 헌법상 국가원수였다. (사진 왼쪽)

미국의 조지 W. 부시 행정부에서 실질적 권력자로 불리기도 했으나 무리한 이라크 전쟁을 일으킨 장본인으로 지적되기도 했던 리처드 브루스 체니(Richard Bruce Cheney), 애칭 딕 체니 제46대 미국 전 부통령이 4일 84세로 타계했다.

그는 지난 대선에서 카멀라 해리스에게 투표할 것이라고 공언하기도 했다.

한편, 북한 외교에서 중책을 맡았던 김영남 전 최고인민회의 상임위원장이 3일 12시 97세의 일기로 사망했다고 4일 조선중앙통신이 보도했다.

김정은 북한 국무위원장은 이날 새벽 1시에 최룡해, 조용원, 박태성, 박정천, 노광철, 최선희 등을 데리고 김영남의 시신이 안치된 평양시 보통강구역 서장회관을 찾아 조문 했으며, 김 위원장은 “깊은 애도의 뜻을 표시한다"고 한 것으로 보도되었다.

또한, 국장 거행이 결정되었다.

그는 북한의 형식상의 헌법상 국가원수였다.

▶ 북한에서는 국가주석직이 폐지되고 1998년부터 김정일 헌법이 통과되는 2009년까지, 북한의 형식상 국가 수반의 지위 자리를 김영남이 역임했다. 김정일은 특히 일대 기근의 곤궁기에 정권의 안정화를 꾀하여 자신이 당수로서의 총비서겸 군 통수권자인 국방위원장에 올라 권력을 집중하면서도 국가수반은 최고인민회의 상임위원장에게, 정부수반은 내각 총리에게 위임하는 형식으로 표면 상 권력을 분산하였다.

북한의 김정은 국무위원장은 비공개된 김영남 시신 안치소를 찾아 아직 매장되기 전의 그의 시신과 관에 조문했다.

▷ 아래는 먼저, The Gardian 지에 게재된 딕 체니 전 부통령 타계에 관련 기사이며, 그 아래 The New york Times에 게재된 김영남 전 최고인민회의 상임위원장에 대한 관련 기사이다.

번역은 다른 기회로 미룬다. (궁금한 대목이 있으면 연락 바란다.)

Dick Cheney, vice-president and giant of Republican politics, dies aged 84

Cheney, who served under presidents from Nixon to George W Bush, will be remembered for key role after 9/11

The former White House chief of staff, member of congress, secretary of defense and US vice-president Dick Cheney has died, his family has said. He was 84.

A Yale dropout who avoided service in Vietnam, Cheney nonetheless became a giant of Republican politics.

He was a White House aide under Richard Nixon; the youngest ever White House chief of staff, to Gerald Ford; a member of congress under Ronald Reagan; secretary of defense to George HW Bush, and vice-president to George W Bush.

When the younger Bush plucked him from the corporate giant Halliburton to be his running mate in the 2000 presidential election, Cheney had already survived three heart attacks. Nor was he immune to mishap: once, while vice-president, he shot a hunting partner in the face.

But he became one of the most powerful vice-presidents, widely reported to wield great influence over the less experienced Bush.

In office on 11 September 2001, Cheney took charge after the attacks on New York and Washington while Bush was hurried to safety. Hugely experienced and with no department to run, working with the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, an ally from the days of Nixon and Ford, he assumed policy control.

Cheney sought international co-operation but also thought, he later wrote, the Bush administration “had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America”.

Troops were soon in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and hunting al-Qaida. But Cheney’s place in history will be dominated by the decision to invade Iraq.

He was defense secretary during the first Gulf war, in 1990 and 1991, a swift campaign to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. A decade later, Bush and Cheney’s public rationale for war was that the Iraqi dictator was linked to al-Qaida and thus 9/11, and possessed weapons of mass destruction. By March 2003, when US and coalition forces invaded, no proof had been found for either charge. They were soon proved false.

By February 2021, the official US death toll in Iraq was 4,431, with nearly 32,000 wounded. The toll in Afghanistan, where US troops still fought, was 2,352 with more than 20,000 wounded.

The violence spread. According to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, since 2001 “at least 800,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan”.

The treatment of prisoners taken by the US in its so-called war on terror proved hugely controversial. Out of office, Cheney continued to defend the use of torture against detainees after 9/11.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2018, on the release of Vice, a darkly comic biopic starring Christian Bale, the Cheney biographer Jake Bernstein said: “There has been some rehabilitation with George W Bush. In comparison with Donald Trump, everyone starts to look better. But Dick Cheney liked the fact everyone called him Darth Vader. I don’t think there’ll be an effort on his part to soften his image.”

Dick Cheney, A Yale dropout, dies aged 84

Kim Yong-nam, Longtime Ceremonial Leader of North Korea, Dead at 97

In a country where political purges are frequent, Mr. Kim was a notable exception and served three generations of its dynastic rulers.

Kim Yong-nam, North Korea’s long​time former ceremonial head of state whose loyalty shielded him from frequent political purges and enabled him to serve the country’s​ ruling family for three generations, died on Monday.

He was 97 and died of multiple organ failure caused by cancer, the country’s official Korean Central News Agency reported on Tuesday. North Korea’s top leader, Kim Jong-un, visited Mr. Kim’s bier early Tuesday to lay a wreath and express deep condolences, the news agency said.

Mr. Kim stood apart for his ability to stay in favor of the ruling Kim family, to which he was not related and which has ruled North Korea ​as a totalitarian dictatorship since its founding at the end of World War II. Mr. Kim served on the ruling Workers’ Party’s Politburo from 1978 to 2019, when he retired from public service.

His career spanned the governments of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea; his son, Kim Jong-il; and his grandson, Kim Jong-un. Mr. Kim’s longevity was even more remarkable because in the monolithic tenure of the ruling family, senior officials outside ​the top leader’s immediate kin are ultimately considered expendable and are frequently purged and sent to labor camps.

By the time he retired in 2019, Kim Yong-nam had also served as president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament​, for 21 years.

That post made Mr. Kim the ceremonial head of state for North Korea. During the reign of the reclusive Kim Jong-il, who was North Korea’s top leader from 1994 until his death in 2011, he often led government delegates overseas. He also received credentials from foreign diplomats newly posted to Pyongyang. When the then-South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, visited North Korea in 2007, he and Mr. Roh rode through central Pyongyang in an open limousine, as hundreds of thousands of spectators were mobilized to line the streets waving paper flowers and shouting “Hurray!”

But Mr. Kim always operated in the shadow of the ​ruling Kim family. His behavior offered a model for North Korean officialdom, according to defectors​ from the county.

In 2018, he appeared openly deferential to a junior colleague — Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of Kim Jong-un — while he was leading a North Korean delegation to South Korea to attend the Winter Olympics. He was seen asking Ms. Kim to sit on a sofa in an airport V.I.P. lounge before he did. He sat first only after Ms. Kim, 60 years his junior, indicated that he could do so.

“I found Kim Yong​-nam a puzzling figure. In greetings before business began, he was cordial and relaxed, but once at work, he relentlessly followed his script​,” Don Oberdorfer, the late American journalist who had met ​Mr. Kim, wrote in ​his book “The Two Koreas.”

Mr. Oberdorfer quoted a former North Korean diplomat as saying​, “If Kim Il​-sung was pointing to a wall and said there is a door, Kim Yong​-nam would believe that and try to go through it​.”

“Yet by all accounts,” Mr. Oberdorfer wrote, “he is highly intelligent and, due to his high position and prestige within the system, an important behind-the-scenes figure in Pyongyang.”

Mr. Kim was born in 1928, when Korea was ​still a colony of Japan. He joined North Korea’s foreign service in the 1950s after studying in Moscow. He rose through the ranks of the party, becoming party secretary for international affairs in 1975 and foreign minister in 1983. He survived​ many crises in North Korean diplomacy, including the Russian and Chinese decisions to establish diplomatic ties with rival South Korea in the early 1990s.​

He ​helped Kim Jong-un​ establish his leadership in the wake of his father’s death.​ When he read a eulogy at the funeral of Kim Jong-il in 2011, he urged North Koreans to rally around the dead leader’s son. Later that year at a huge rally in Pyongyang, it was Mr. Kim who announced that Kim Jong-un was the new “supreme leader of our party, military and people.”

When he led the North Korean delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics, Mr. Kim became the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit the South at the time.​ His trip helped thaw inter-Korean relations, which lay the groundwork for Kim Jong-un’s meetings with the former South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in, in 2018 and President Trump in 2019, for which the North Korean leader stepped onto South Korean soil.

“Comrade Kim Yong-nam​ lived a life of glory and honor in the bosom of the party, and the leader and his life shined with clean loyalty and high competence​,” state media said on Tuesday.

Chung Dong-young, a South Korean Cabinet minister in charge of relations with North Korea, issued a statement of condolences on Tuesday, recognizing Mr. Kim’s role in creating an inter-Korean rapprochement in 2018.

Kim Yong-nam, Longtime Ceremonial Leader of North Korea, Dead at 97