North Korea-US summit on track, says Moon, after candid talks with ’friend’ Kim Jong-un

South Korean president says North still committed to denuclearisation after surprise talks requested by Kim.

Kim Jong-un is committed to meeting Donald Trump and complete denuclearisation, South Korean president Moon Jae-in said a day after a surprise meeting with the North Korean leader.

Amid hugs and smiles, Moon met Kim on the North Korean side of Panmunjom, the “truce village” on the border, which was the site of their first meeting just a month earlier. The atmosphere was “just like an ordinary meeting between friends” and the two held “candid talks”, Moon said. A video released by the South Korean presidential office had the audio replaced with dramatic music, showing the two men embracing, both with wide smiles.

The spontaneous offer by Kim to meet, and Moon’s quick acceptance, shows how close the two leaders have become in a short period of time. It capped a whirlwind 24 hours of diplomacy as Moon scrambled to salvage a 12 June summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore after Trump abruptly cancelled the meeting on Thursday.

But on Saturday evening in the US as Moon was briefing reporters on his meeting with Kim, Trump suggested the US-North Korea summit could go ahead as originally planned.

“We’re doing very well in terms of the summit with North Korea,” Trump said at the White House. “It’s moving along very nicely. So we’re looking at June 12^th in Singapore. That hasn’t changed. So, we’ll see what happens.”

Kim “once again committed to complete denuclearisation”, Moon said. But he repeatedly refused to answer questions on the specifics of how North Korea would relinquish its nuclear weapons or if they would allow international experts to inspect nuclear facilities. The thorny issue of how exactly the North would give up its nuclear weapons has consistently hung over discussions between Washington and Pyongyang.

US officials have demanded North Korea unilaterally disarm before concessions are granted on economic sanctions or a pledge of non-aggression, while Pyongyang prefers a phased negotiations and concessions from the US.

Kim expressed “his fixed will on the historic” meeting with Trump, according to the North’s state run Korean Central News Agency. Photos of the Moon-Kim meeting were printed on the front page of the Rodong Sinmun, the ruling Workers’ party newspaper.

No one should expect Trump to fly to Singapore and leave with all of North Korea’s nukes.
Jenny Town, monitoring group 38 North

“It’s strategically smart for Kim to invite Moon for a face to face meeting, it helps portray him in the public eye as a very friendly, diplomacy-oriented statesman,” said Jenny Town, managing editor of monitoring group 38 North. “It really offsets the tone Kim’s regime has put forward with statements threatening nuclear war.”

But she warned there was still a chasm between Washington and Pyongyang on core issues, saying there was little point in holding a US-North Korea summit that lacked substance.

“This is not diplomacy, it’s political theatre,” Town said. “There is no trust between the two right now, so why would Kim trust any US security guarantee on paper? Trust on both sides need to be built over time and no one should expect Trump to fly to Singapore and leave with all of North Korea’s nukes.”

“The path to complete denuclearisation and full peace was never going to be an easy one,” Moon said. But he added, “I’m sure we will succeed”.

Moon also said he hoped there could be a meeting between North Korea, South Korea and the US to formally end the 1950-53 Korean war, which ended in an armistice rather than a full peace treaty. He praised Kim for announcing a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests, as well as the closing of the country’s nuclear test site this week.

The two sides would hold “high-level talks” on 1 June as well as military discussions to reduce tensions and efforts to set up reunions between divided families.

Benjamin Haas in Seoul
@haasbenjamin

* The Guardian. Sun 27 May 2018 04.21 BST First published on Sun 27 May 2018 03.19 BST:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/27/north-korea-us-summit-on-track-says-moon-candid-talks-friend-kim-jong-un

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 North and South Korean leaders meet as US indicates summit may yet happen

Moon Jae-in crossed into the north at the border village of Panmunjom, where the two met for the first time in April, the South Korean president’s office said. The two leaders discussed the US-North Korea summit, as well as implementing the joint statement released at the end of their earlier meeting.

The surprise meeting highlighted Moon’s efforts to get the historic US-North Korea talks back on track, and showed inter-Korea relations are in a far better state than those between Washington and Pyongyang.

The North’s state-run KCNA news agency said the two leaders agreed to “meet frequently in the future to make dialogue brisk and pool wisdom and efforts, expressing their stand to make joint efforts for the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.

Specifically, Moon and Kim will hold “high-level talks” on Friday, the agency added.

Seoul’s presidential Blue House said in a statement: “They exchanged views and discussed ways to implement the Panmunjom Declaration [on improving inter-Korean ties] and to ensure a successful US North Korea summit.”

On Friday, Trump made a partial climbdown, saying the summit could still be held in Singapore on 12 June if conditions are right. On Saturday, press secretary Sarah Sanders said White House staffers and state department officials would still travel to Singapore for a logistics meeting, “in order to prepare should the summit take place”.

In a pair of angry tweets, Trump said there was “ZERO disagreement” within his administration about North Korea but “if there was it wouldn’t matter”. He also disputed a report in the New York Times about the issue, claiming the “senior White House official” citied in the story “doesn’t exist”.

Reporters from outlets including the Times pushed back, noting that the quote to which Trump appeared to be objecting was from a background briefing on North Korea that was fully sanctioned by the White House.

Moon Jae-in … must keep his people safe from war. Each of Trump’s whims shakes the walls of the Blue House
Adam Mount, Federation of American Scientists

Trump has faced fierce criticism over his inconsistency as a partner in the high-stakes talks. Adam Mount, director of the Defense Posture Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said on Saturday Moon’s “bold but risky” meeting with Kim was a “clear demonstration of how dangerous Trump’s temper tantrum was”.

“When Kim Jong-un was allowed to split the negotiations into separate tracks with Trump and Moon, he gained leverage over both,” Mount wrote on Twitter. “Moon was sitting too alone at the table today, without the full weight of the United States.

“Trump says ‘everybody plays games’,” Mount added, referring to Trump’s response when asked about North Korea’s posture on Friday. “Moon Jae-in is not playing a game: he must keep his people safe from war. Each of Trump’s whims shakes the walls of the Blue House.”

Photos released by the South Korean presidential office showed the two leaders embracing, shaking hands and holding intimate talks, accompanied by a single aide each. Moon was expected to announce further details on Sunday.

In their first summit in April, Kim and Moon announced vague aspirations for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula and peace, which Seoul tried to sell as a breakthrough to set up the summit with Trump. But relations chilled as North Korea canceled a high-level meeting over South Korea’s military exercises with the US.

The South was caught off guard by Trump’s abrupt cancellation of the Singapore summit, citing hostility in recent North Korean comments. Moon said Trump’s decision left him “perplexed” and was “very regrettable” and urged Washington and Pyongyang to establish “more direct and closer dialogue between their leaders”.

Trump’s behaviour has fanned fears in South Korea regarding a rival intent on driving a wedge between Washington and Seoul and a US president who thinks less of a traditional alliance than his predecessors. The decision to pull out of the summit came just days after Trump hosted Moon in a White House meeting where he cast doubts on the Singapore summit and offered no support for inter-Korean progress.

In his letter to Kim cancelling the summit, Trump objected to a statement from senior diplomat Choe Son Hui, who referred to vice-president Mike Pence as a “political dummy” and said it was up to the Americans whether they would “meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown”.

North Korea issued an unusually restrained response, saying it was still willing to sit for talks with the US “at any time, (in) any format”.

“The first meeting would not solve all, but solving even one at a time in a phased way would make the relations get better rather than making them get worse,” vice-foreign minister Kim Kye Gwan said in a statement carried by Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency.

Notably, the statement did not appear in Saturday’s edition of Rodong Sinmun, the mouthpiece of the ruling party. The newspaper focused on Kim’s visit to Wonsan to inspect a beachfront tourist complex.

Analysts say Kim’s outreach after nuclear and missile tests in 2017 indicates he is eager for sanctions relief and international legitimacy. Earlier this month, Kim released three US citizens. This week, Pyongyang invited international journalists to observe what it claimed was the dismantling of its only known nuclear test site. The regime has also declared that it no longer needs to conduct tests.

There is also skepticism whether Kim will ever agree to relinquish his nuclear weapons, which analysts believe he sees as his only guarantee of survival. Comments in state media indicate Kim sees any meeting with Trump as a negotiation between nuclear states. The North has said it will not participate if it is pressured to give up its arsenal.

In Washington, a cadre of Trump’s most fervent Republican supporters in Congress have nominated the president for a Nobel peace prize. The Trump administration also issued an official but widely mocked summit commemorative coin, featuring profiles of Trump and Kim against the backdrop of their countries’ flags.

Benjamin Haas in Seoul, Lauren Gambino in Washington and agencies

* The Guardian. Sun 27 May 2018 01.16 BST First published on Sat 26 May 2018 12.59 BST:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/26/kim-jong-un-moon-jai-in-korean-leaders-hold-surprise-meeting

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 North and South Korean leaders meet again at border

Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in meet as Donald Trump expresses willingness to reinstate talks with Pyongyang.

Less than a month after their historic summit, the leaders of North and South Korea have met again at a border village amid hopes that the on-again-off-again talks between Pyongyang and Washington will actually happen.

US President Donald Trump on Thursday announced the cancellation of his planned meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, originally scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, citing “tremendous anger and open hostility” from North Korea.

He has since said he is open to reinstating the talks.

Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met in April in what was only the third meeting between the leaders of the two states.

On Saturday, they spoke for two hours on the North Korean side of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone and discussed how to implement their declaration following their April 27 meeting, as well as the proposed talks between Kim and Trump.

“There is no reason why we should fight each other - we are one nation,” Kim said in a joint statement with Moon after that meeting.

Pyongyang and Seoul also pledged to formally end the state of war between the two, which has been ongoing since a 1953 ceasefire agreement that brought to a halt large-scale hostilities.

The office of the South Korean president said the outcome of Saturday’s surprise meeting will be announced on Sunday.

’Get summit back on track’

Reporting from South Korea’s capital, Seoul, Al Jazeera’s Andrew Thomas said it was “symbolically important” that the talks were held on the north side of Panmunjom.

“This is the first time that a South Korean leader has crossed over into the North for substantial talks in 11 years,” he said.

“In the context of the on-again-off-again-maybe-on-again US-North Korea summit, it looks as though Moon has wasted no time. He’s hit the ground running and he’s doing everything he can to get that summit back on track.”

Se-Woong Koo, publisher of the online magazine, Korea Expose, said he was “astonished” the surprise meeting took place.

“It shows very clearly that the two Koreas are committed to engaging with each other and also with the US in hopes of bringing about peace here on the peninsula,” he told Al Jazeera.

“After Trump cancelled the summit in Singapore, there was a lot of damage here in South Korea to [Moon’s] political capital, because it was seen that he was actually not holding so much influence over what was happening.”He’s certainly done his job to correct this perception."

The meeting on Saturday is the latest chapter in a long-running diplomatic effort to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.

Concerns grew earlier this month after North Korea responded to the US calling for the denuclearisation of the peninsula and a complete dismantling of the nuclear programme by threatening to pull out of the summit unless Washington offered something in return.

Following Trump’s cancellation of the summit, North Korea issued a statement declaring it was still open to talks.

“It was a very nice statement they put out,” Trump said at the White House.

“We’re talking to them now. They very much want to do it. We’d like to do it,” he added. “We’ll see what happens - it (the summit) could even be the 12^th [of June].”

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Trump said on Saturday that a White House team is still heading to Singapore this weekend to work on logistics for the Trump-Kim summit, in case the meeting is reset.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the “pre-advance team for Singapore will leave as scheduled in order to prepare should the summit take place”.

AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

* AL JAZEERA, 26 July 2018 :
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/north-south-korean-leaders-meet-border-180526111636210.html

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