Tag: North Korea

This seemed unlikely considering that President Trump appears to only want to meet if Kim Jong-un commits to real denuclearization:

 U.S. President Donald Trump has no plans to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during his trip to South Korea later this week, a senior U.S. administration official said Monday.

Trump will visit Seoul on Saturday and Sunday after attending a Group of 20 summit in Japan, prompting speculation that a Trump-Kim meeting could be arranged at the inter-Korean border.

“There are no plans for the meeting that you just mentioned,” the official told reporters on background in a phone call.

“The president’s there to see President Moon (Jae-in),” he said.

On a Trump visit to the Demilitarized Zone, the official said the details of the president’s schedule have yet to be finalized.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The so called experts are again weighing in and recommending that President Trump reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex to create “momentum” in the denuclearization talks whatever that means:

North Korea raked in more than $120 million a year from a symbolic cross-border industrial zone that Pyongyang and Seoul are pushing to re-open as part of nuclear negotiations, a report said Monday.

The Kaesong Industrial Complex — where around 55,000 North Korean workers churned out products ranging from watches to clothes for some 125 South Korean companies — was one of the most visible signs of reconciliation that followed the first inter-Korean summit in 2000.

But it was shuttered by the South’s then-conservative government in 2016 in response to a nuclear test and missile launches by the North, saying profits from Kaesong were funding Pyongyang’s provocations.

The South’s current President Moon Jae-in has dangled re-opening the complex as an incentive for Pyongyang to engage in denuclearisation talks, but doing so is complicated by the web of international sanctions imposed on the North over its weapons programmes.

At their Pyongyang summit in September, Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed to “normalise” operations at Kaesong when conditions were “ripe”, but negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington are now deadlocked and Northern media have pressed the South to implement joint economic projects.

The International Crisis Group called on Monday for the complex to be reopened with “a modest deal involving sanctions relief”.

Doing so would create “much needed momentum for stalled peace talks and serve as a reminder to both North and South Korea of the benefits of building a sustainable peace on the peninsula”, it added in a statement.

AFP

You can read more at the link, but this is just more “pretend denuclearization” and something that the expert class has been calling for now for decades. These concessions to the Kim regime never work and I believe it actually makes it harder to reach a denuclearization deal because they use the funding to further their weapons programs.

It looks like President Trump is continuing the messaging that he is open to talks on North Korea’s denuclearization while simultaneously increasing sanctions to further pressure the Kim regime:

President Donald Trump will make a two-day visit to South Korea this weekend, officials said Monday, as the U.S. administration said it’s ready to resume nuclear talks with the North “at a moment’s notice.”

Trump’s visit, which will be his second trip to the divided peninsula as president, comes amid new optimism for the stalled diplomatic push to persuade the North to abandon its nuclear weapons.

The president sent a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that was welcomed by the communist state, raising hopes for efforts to break the deadlock that followed the February summit between the two men, which ended without agreement in Vietnam.

“I can confirm that that letter was, in fact, sent,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday. “And I am hopeful that this will provide a good foundation for us to begin to continue the important discussions with the North Koreans to denuclearize the peninsula.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

A country that can afford nuclear weapons, ICBMs, and a space program cannot afford to buy rice?:

South Korea will send 50,000 tons of domestically produced rice as humanitarian aid to North Korea through the World Food Programme (WFP), according to the Unification Ministry on Wednesday.

The food aid package, which is believed to be worth around 27 billion won ($22.9 million), follows Seoul’s donation of $8 million won to the WFP and Unicef earlier this month, which is to be used for emergency nutritional and medical assistance for children and pregnant women in the North. 

This will be the first time in nine years for South Korea to send rice to the North and the first time rice harvested from South Korean paddies will be provided to Pyongyang through the WFP. On earlier occasions when Seoul went through the WFP, its aid packages largely consisted of corn, mixed grains or flour. 

“The government hopes that the food it provides through the WFP rapidly makes it into the hands of the North Korean people,” read a Unification Ministry press release. “The timing and amount of any further food aid to North Korea will be decided after the results of this assistance package are monitored.”

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but it will be interesting to see if this rice ends up on the North Korean blackmarket or not.

It looks like Emperor President Xi has decided to crack down on North Korean defectors before his trip to North Korea this week:

A decade after leaving her family behind to flee North Korea, the defector was overwhelmed with excitement when she spoke to her 22-year-old son on the phone for the first time in May after he too escaped into China.

While speaking to him again on the phone days later, however, she listened in horror as the safe house where her son and four other North Korean escapees were hiding was raided by Chinese authorities.

“I heard voices, someone saying ‘shut up’ in Chinese,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her son’s safety. “Then the line was cut off, and I heard later he was caught.”

The woman, now living in South Korea, said she heard rumours her son is being held in a Chinese prison near the North Korean border, but has had no official news of his whereabouts.

At least 30 North Korean escapees have been rounded up in a string of raids across China since mid-April, according to family members and activist groups.

It is not clear whether this is part of a larger crackdown by China, but activists say the raids have disrupted parts of the informal network of brokers, charities, and middlemen who have been dubbed the North Korean “Underground Railroad”.

“The crackdown is severe,” said Y. H. Kim, chairman of the North Korea Refugees Human Rights Association of Korea.

Reuters

You can read more at the link.

Alternative headline: 6150 South Korean citizens want to give their money to an enemy regime that enslaves millions of their fellow kinsmen because they want to take selfies at a mountain. https://t.co/dBk6hsUvmg

— John Lee (The Korean Foreigner) (@koreanforeigner) June 14, 2019

People best watch President Trump’s actions more than what he says. He is clearly talking nice about Kim Jong-un in an effort to keep dialogue open while at the same time continuing to enforce sanctions on them to pressure them into a deal:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday appeared to downplay North Korea’s recent missile launches amid assessments that they violated international sanctions.

In a phone interview with the Fox News program “Fox & Friends,” Trump said North Korea is “not testing nuclear and not testing anything.”

He said the North sent some short-range missiles out which he said “everybody else does too.”

Regarding alleged sanctions violations by Pyongyang, such as illicit ship-to-ship transfers of oil, Trump said in the interview that “everybody tries to break sanctions” but that the sanctions are hurting North Korea badly and the U.S. “never took the sanctions off.”

Trump continued to note the U.S. has a “good relationship” with the North and that he is in no rush to resume negotiations for a nuclear deal.

KBS World Radio

The suspense will become unbearable. https://t.co/yZLWtX4lFM

— 🇰🇷Edward Oh🇺🇸 (@EdwardHBOh) June 11, 2019

This is something that has been speculated on before and if true it would explain why the Kim regime took such risky measures to kill him inside a busy international airport:

“Several former U.S. officials said the half brother, who had lived outside of North Korea for many years and had no known power base in Pyongyang, was unlikely to be able to provide details of the secretive country’s inner workings,” the Journal said.

The former officials also said Kim Jong Nam had been almost certainly in contact with security services of other countries, particularly China’s, the Journal said.
Kim Jong Nam’s role as a CIA informant is mentioned in a new book about Kim Jong Un, “The Great Successor,” by Washington Post reporter Anna Fifield that is due to be published on Tuesday. Fifield says Kim Jong Nam usually met his handlers in Singapore and Malaysia, citing a source with knowledge of the intelligence.
The book says that security camera footage from Kim Jong Nam’s last trip to Malaysia showed him in a hotel elevator with an Asian-looking man who was reported to be a U.S. intelligence agent. It said Ki’s backpack contained $120,000 in cash, which could have been payment for intelligence-related activities, or earnings from his casino businesses.

Reuters via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.

This is a good idea that hopefully will lead to more ship seizures:

The U.S. State Department has pledged up to five million dollars for informants on North Korea’s violations of sanctions, including its illegal transshipment of coal and oil. 

According to Radio Free Asia on Tuesday, the State Department announced to offer rewards for information that leads to the disruption of financial mechanisms of persons engaged in certain activities that support North Korea, including money laundering, sanctions evasion, cyber-crime, and WMD proliferation on the Rewards for Justice (RFJ) website run by the department. 

The State Department has run the RFJ program since 1984 to obtain information about international terrorists. The newly announced reward prioritizes information about maritime illicit transshipment by North Korea for its export of coal and import of crude oil. In particular, a wanted poster with a caption to urge people, especially Chinese maritime workers, to stop North Korea’s illegal maritime activities was produced in both English and Chinese. The detection of maritime illicit transshipment is a challenging task as it requires a large scale oversight and North Korea has adopted ever more elaborate schemes to avoid sanctions. 

Those who provide a critical piece of information to identify hackers who have stolen data or spread malicious codes under the orders of North Korea will be rewarded as well.

Donga Ilbo

You can read more at the link.