Remember the 12 North Korean restaurant workers that defected to South Korea that infuriated the Kim regime? Well it appears the Moon administration may be laying the ground work to send them back:
North Korea runs dozens of restaurants in other countries as a valuable source of income
South Korea says it will look closer into the circumstances surrounding the arrival of a dozen North Korean restaurant workers in 2016 after a television report suggested some of the women might have been brought to the South against their will.
Unification Ministry spokesman Baik Tae-hyun on Friday did not provide a clear answer on whether the women could be sent back to the North if it’s confirmed they didn’t want to come to South Korea.
Seoul had previously said it sufficiently confirmed the women’s free will in escaping from the North and resettling in the South. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but I am not sure what else there is to examine on this issue. The 12 defectors have been resettled in South Korea and nothing is stopping them from going to a local television station and claim they were kidnapped. The Kim regime has been using their leftist lawyer allies in South Korea, the group call Minbyun, to claim that the the 12 restaurant workers were kidnapped by the ROK National Intelligence Service (NIS). Since their defection Minbyun has been making life very hard for the refugees anyway they can.
Now it appears that the Moon administration may be putting pressure on these 12 restaurant workers to return to North Korea as well. I would not be surprised if the Moon administration is also putting pressure the other high profile defector Thae Yong-ho to keep silent during the Kim regime’s current charm offensive as well.
This is just another example of something that North Korea can do that makes it look like they are making a concession when in fact it is easily reversible at a time of their choosing:
This Reuters file photo shows an Air Koryo airplane arriving at Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport. (Yonhap)
North Korea has promised to not carry out unannounced missile tests and to abstain from other activities hazardous to commercial aviation in a recent meeting with officials of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), an American media report said Friday.
North Korean authorities recently delivered such promises to visiting officials of the international aviation body while disclosing they have completed their nuclear weapons program, Voice of America (VOA) reported, citing ICAO spokesman William Raillant-Clark.
The spokesman told VOA that high-ranking officials of ICAO visited Pyongyang from May 7-9 for a meeting with officials at the North’s General Administration of Civil Aviation.
The meeting came after the Pyongyang regime decided to halt additional nuclear and intercontinental missile experiments at a plenary session of the ruling Workers’ Party on April 20. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but I guess we will see what the North Koreans get in return for doing something they can reverse at any time.
Here is the statement put out after the trilateral summit in Tokyo:
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, left, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, center, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, pose for photographs prior to their summit in Tokyo Wednesday. [YONHAP]Leaders from South Korea, Japan and China on Wednesday adopted a special statement in support of the Panmunjom Declaration, which was signed at the inter-Korean summit last month and confirmed the shared goal of the two Koreas of complete denuclearization.
The special statement was made following a trilateral meeting in Tokyo of President Moon Jae-in, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and Premier Li Keqiang of China, the first of its kind in more than two years. The last such three-way summit was held in November 2015 in Seoul. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Here is what was agreed upon that really matters during the trilateral summit:
At the Moon-Abe talks, the latter made it clear that sanctions imposed on the North should not be lifted unless Pyongyang demonstrates concrete denuclearization measures, emphasizing that the closing down of a nuclear testing site and a halt in the firing of ballistic missiles were not sufficient for sanctions relief.
“It is the timing that matters when it comes to easing or withdrawing sanctions altogether on North Korea,” the prime minister was quoted as saying by the Blue House during the bilateral summit talk with Moon in the afternoon.
“We should not reward the North for just shutting down the Punggye-ri nuclear site or stopping the test-firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles. We need additional and substantive actions from the North,” said Abe.
On the matter of easing sanctions, Moon stressed Seoul could not move to ease sanctions unilaterally, noting that sanctions were international agreements in which Seoul took part.
“There could be worries that South Korea could make a unilateral move to ease sanctions independent of the international consensus. There is no need for such worries,” he said. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Basically Prime Minister Abe is making the case that North Korea was rewarded in past agreements for doing little to nothing in return. This time they should not be rewarded until they take real measures to denuclearize.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will take place in Singapore June 12.
“The highly anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th,” Trump tweeted. “We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!”
Trump’s tweet came just hours after three American citizens were brought home from imprisonment in the communist country.
Their release cleared a major obstacle for the upcoming meeting, which will be the first between sitting leaders of the two countries.
Trump and Kim are expected to discuss the dismantlement of the regime’s nuclear weapons program.
Trump’s aim is the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea. Kim has repeatedly expressed his commitment to denuclearization, but it’s unclear on what terms. [Yonhap]
I wonder how many Americans had to look on a map after hearing this news to figure out where Singapore is?
President Trump is as expected getting bashed for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal with claims that it will impact his ability to negotiate with Kim Jong-un:
President Donald Trump announces Iran nuclear deal withdrawal. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal is a major setback to US negotiating credibility and will complicate efforts to reach an agreement with Pyongyang over its own more advanced weapons programme, analysts say.
Trump is set to hold a much-anticipated and unprecedented summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the coming weeks to negotiate over Pyongyang’s arsenal, after it last year carried out by far its most powerful nuclear test to date and launched missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.
But the US president Tuesday pulled Washington out of the 2015 accord with Teheran, pouring scorn on the “disastrous” agreement and describing it an “embarrassment” to the United States ― although European signatories and the IAEA say Iran has complied with its obligations.
Antony Blinken, who was deputy secretary of state under Barack Obama, said the White House move “makes getting to yes with North Korea that much more challenging”.
“Why would Kim … believe any commitments President Trump makes when he arbitrarily tears up an agreement with which the other party is complying?” he asked on Twitter. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but it can be argued that if the Obama administration thought the Iran nuclear deal was so great why did they not try and lobby the Senate to consent to the treaty as the Constitution requires? Consent from the Senate would have made it much harder for the President to withdraw from the treaty. This is what I will be looking for if President Trump is able to strike a deal with the North Koreans; will he try to get consent from the Senate?
As far as impacts to negotiating with Kim Jong-un, I think it is arguable that Trump is sending a message that North Korea will need to agree to denuclearize or there will not be a deal.
It looks like Kim Jong-un has paid the price for admission to a summit with President Trump:
People watch a TV news report on screen, showing portraits of three Americans, Kim Dong Chul, left, Tony Kim and Kim Hak Song, right, detained in the North Korea at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, May 3, 2018. (Photo: Ahn Young-joon/AP)
President Trump announced on Wednesday that three Americans who were being held by North Korea have been released.
“I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting,” Trump tweeted early Wednesday. “They seem to be in good health.”
Pompeo flew to Pyongyang on Tuesday to meet with Kim Jong Un ahead of Trump’s planned summit with the North Korean leader. Trump described it as a “good meeting” and said a date and time for his summit with Kim has been set. [Yahoo News]
I am glad these guys are back and I am sure it is a relief for all the families involved, however I hope the media does not treat them as some kind of heroes. I have said this repeatedly, but I have little sympathy for people stupid enough to travel to North Korea in the first place. Anyone going to North Korea takes the chance of the regime detaining at anytime for the most arbitrary things in order to use them as political pawns.
Here are the three Americans that were detained and I would not be surprised if the real crimes all three of them committed was promoting Christianity in North Korea:
Kim Dong-chul: Supposed Christian missionary that North Korea accused of spying for South Korea.
Tony Kim: He worked at a university in China and was teaching a course at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) for a few months before being detained at the airport when he attempted to fly back to China. He was accused of the crime of trying to overthrow the government.
Kim Hak-song: He is an ordained as an evangelical Christian pastor affiliated with the Oriental Mission Church in Los Angeles. Like Tony Kim, he was working as a professor at PUST before being detained on unspecified charges.
How many people over the years have claimed that sanctions against North Korea won’t work? Sanctions against North Korea work if everyone enforces them. Now that the North Koreans are back to negotiate what we will see next is whether the ROK and the US will relieve the Kim regime of the economic pressure they are facing with some kind of nuclear agreement:
The economic pinch is almost certainly why Kim Jong Un is suddenly so eager to talk to the outside world, traveling to Beijing in March and then crossing the demilitarized zone to meet Moon.
“Why would he be doing this unless he was being constrained by sanctions,” said Stephan Haggard, professor of Korea-Pacific studies at the University of California at San Diego and a close monitor of sanctions. “I think he’s sweating.” (….)
But analysts generally agree that the sanctions must be inflicting serious pain on North Korea, a desperately poor country with a highly inefficient economy. (….)
The sanctions are probably putting a chill through both these economies. That has to be a huge concern for Kim, who once declared that North Korean people “would never have to tighten their belts again.”
“If I were Kim, I’d be much more worried about textile workers out of work, milling around doing nothing, than I would be about an American attack,” said William Brown, a former intelligence analyst focused on North Korea who now teaches at Georgetown University. Citing the kind of discontent that brought down communist regimes in Eastern Europe, he said, “The real dangers to the regime are internal.”
But Moon could pursue very little economic engagement without sanctions relief.
Not only has the U.N. Security Council imposed waves of sanctions on North Korea, but South Korea imposed its own direct punishment following two deadly North Korean attacks on South Korea in 2010.
Those measures are still in place, and conservative politicians are urging Moon to leave them there. Even if Moon overturned his predecessor’s order to close the Kaesong industrial park, an inter-Korean factory complex on the northern side of the border, transferring money or equipment to it would be almost impossible in the current sanctions environment. [Washington Post]
This all goes back to why the Moon administration is buttering up Trump with promises of a Nobel Peace Prize by getting on the peace train and believing that North Korea is really going to denuclearize this time.
The national flags of South Korea (R) and North Korea (2nd from R) are raised next to each other at the medal ceremony of the World Team Table Tennis Championships in Halmstad, Sweden, on May 5, 2018, in this photo from the Korea Table Tennis Association. The two Koreas formed a unified team during the championships and won a bronze medal. It was the second time that they played as a single squad after the championships in Chiba, Japan, in 1991. (Yonhap)
A mysterious North Korean aircraft caused speculation that Kim Jong-un was visiting China:
Japanese and South Korean media are speculating that a high-ranking North Korean official, possibly even leader Kim Jong Un, is visiting China after an airliner from the North landed in the Chinese port city of Dalian.
The South’s official Yonhap News Agency said the plane arrived Monday amid tight security. Japanese broadcaster NHK ran a picture of the Air Koryo plane that it said had been taken Tuesday afternoon at Dalian airport.
There are no regularly scheduled flights between North Korea and Dalian, although North Koreans are frequent visitors and its port has been instrumental in two-way trade. [Fox News]
It turned out that Kim Jong-un was in fact in China getting his marching orders from Emperor President Xi before Kim’s summit with President Trump:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping held their second summit in about 40 days in northeast China, the two nations’ state media reported Tuesday, ahead of an anticipated summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump.
In a dispatch from the Chinese city of Dalian, China’s Xinhua news agency reported that Kim and Xi held talks on Monday and Tuesday. The second summit between Kim and Xi appears to highlight efforts by the allies to restore ties that have been chilled by the North’s nuclear and missile development.
Kim and Xi “had an all-round and in-depth exchange of views on China-DPRK relations and major issues of common concern,” Xinhua said. DPRK is an acronym for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. [Yonhap]
