Category: Kim Jong Un

Ex-diplomat defector says North Korea will never fully give up nuclear weapons

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North Korea will never completely give up its nuclear weapons, a top defector Thae Yong-ho said ahead of Kim Jong Un’s landmark summit with Donald Trump next month.

The current whirlwind of diplomacy and negotiations will not end with “a sincere and complete disarmament” but with “a reduced North Korean nuclear threat”, said Thae, who fled his post as the North’s deputy ambassador to Britain in August 2016. “In the end, North Korea will remain ‘a nuclear power packaged as a non-nuclear state’.”

North and South Korea affirmed their commitment to the goal of denuclearization of the peninsula at summit last month, and Pyongyang announced at the weekend it will destroy its only known nuclear test site next week.

Washington is seeking the “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID)” of the North and stresses that verification will be key.

Thae, one of the highest ranking officials to have defected in recent years, said: “North Korea will argue that the process of nuclear disarmament will lead to the collapse of North Korea and oppose CVID.”

The North wanted to ensure Kim’s “absolute power” and its model of hereditary succession, he added, and would oppose intrusive inspections as they “would be viewed as a process of breaking down Kim Jong Un’s absolute power in front of the eyes of ordinary North Koreans and elites”.

At a party meeting last month when Kim proclaimed the development of the North’s nuclear force complete and promised no more nuclear or missile tests, he called its arsenal “a powerful treasured sword for defending peace”.

“Giving it up soon after Kim Jong Un himself labelled it the ‘treasured sword for defending peace’ and a firm guarantee for the future? It can never happen,” Thae said. In his memoir that hit shelves Monday, Thae added: “More people should realize that North Korea is desperately clinging to its nuclear program more than anything.”

[AFP]

North Korea details plans to dismantle nuclear test site this month

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North Korea outlined steps Saturday to dismantle its nuclear testing site — and confirmed that international journalists, including from the United States and the United Kingdom, would be invited to watch this month as its tunnels are blown up.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un previously had announced the conclusion of North Korea’s nuclear testing program and the intended shuttering of the Punggye-ri complex. He said on April 20 that his nation already had “completed its mission” to test its weapons capability. (Located in mountainous terrain in the northeast of the country, Punggye-ri is less than 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, from China.)

The latest developments come a day after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters that he’d had “warm” and “good” conversations with Kim.

President Trump announced: “We are starting off on a new footing — I really think we have a very good chance of doing something very meaningful. A lot of very good things have happened. … I really think [Kim Jong-Un] wants to do something and bring the country into the real world,” he added.

[CNN]

Trump-Kim Jong-un summit set for Singapore on 12 June

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US President Donald Trump will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on 12 June.

The pair had previously exchanged insults and threats. A breakthrough came after landmark talks between North and South Korea.

No sitting US president has ever met a North Korean leader. The White House said the release of three Americans was a gesture of goodwill ahead of the summit, which Mr Trump earlier said he thought would be a “big success”.

“I really think we have a very good chance of doing something very meaningful,” he said.

The key issue expected to be discussed is North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme – over which Mr Trump and Mr Kim furiously sparred in 2017. The US wants Pyongyang to give up its weapons programme completely and irreversibly.

But analysts caution that Mr Kim is unlikely to easily abandon nuclear weapons that he has pushed so hard to obtain, and that “denuclearisation” means something quite different to both sides.

[BBC]

Trump greets 3 American hostages freed by North Korea

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Three American prisoners freed from North Korea arrived in the US  early Thursday to a personal welcome from President Trump, who traveled to an air base in the middle of the night to meet them.

Waving their hands and flashing peace signs, the freed prisoners — Kim Dong-chul, Tony Kim and Kim Hak-song — descended the stairs of their plane, flanked by the president and senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had flown to Pyongyang, the North’s capital, to secure their release.

Their return to the United States removed a delicate obstacle as the president prepares to sit down with the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, for a landmark nuclear summit meeting on June 12 in Singapore.

But as Mr. Trump basked in the glow of floodlights and TV cameras, he indicated that the most difficult part of the negotiations, which include persuading North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, still lies ahead.

North Korean defectors challenge the ban on border propaganda

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During the historic inter-Korean summit last week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in pledged to end all hostilities and work towards peace on the peninsula.

North Korean defectors in South Korea have decided to challenge an agreement between the two Korean leaders banning the launch of propaganda leaflets across the border and have called for a day of action on May 5. Police presence is expected at the event, with officers instructed to break out the protest if needed, the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh reported.

The North Korean defectors do not trust Kim’s intentions and want to keep fighting for the rights of their former compatriots. “We will keep doing this for the people of North Korea,” Fighters for a Free North Korea leader Park Sang-hak told Yonhap news agency.

The launch of balloons filled with propaganda leaflets or other media content banned in North Korea has been a source of tension between the two countries.

[Newsweek]

North Korean defectors find refuge in New Zealand

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When Park Sung Il set foot in New Zealand last week, he felt like his prayers had been answered. Park, who defected from North Korea about 10 years ago when he was 23, is one of nine escapees from the Kim Jong Un regime who arrived in Auckland last week as part of a Christian mission.

David Cho, an Auckland-based Korean Christian organizer, said many of the defectors managed to escape the North with the help of evangelical organizations. Cho said there were plans to set up a proper base and school in Auckland for North Korean defectors.

Pastor Kwang Choi, who is heading the mission, works with North Korean refugees and has heard some harrowing tales of survival and of life in North. One of the worst, Choi said, was from a man who said he camped at his father’s grave for four days to prevent people from digging and eating his father’s corpse. “I have also come across others who went crazy from starvation and saw their own children as food.”

Park, now 33, remembers clearly the hazardous journey he had to make to escape the North. “It was a freezing Korean winter’s evening in March, and I had to cross frozen Amrok River to get to China,” he said. “I … nearly died when a sharp sheet of floating ice floated towards me and pierced my body.”

Growing up in North Korea, Park claimed, he was denied education because some of his other family members were known to be defectors. As a result, he found it difficult to find work or integrate in South Korea once he managed to get there.

As to upcoming summit between Kim Jong Un and President Trump, Choi has deep suspicion of Pyongyang’s true intentions for wanting closer relations with the South, and said many defectors felt the same.

[New Zealand Herald]

North Korean defectors urge President Trump to raise human rights with Kim Jong-un

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For ten unbearable months, Jung Gwang Il was hung upside down or waterboarded until he confessed to being a spy. He was then forced into hard labor at North Korea’s notorious Yodok detention camp for another three years.

“In that first ten months, I dropped from 75kg to 36kg,” he said. “In camp 15 I worked from 4am to 8pm every day, either logging or farming maize. We were given daily three lumps of corn mixed with beans, and slept on the floors of tiny cells crammed with 40 prisoners.”

Jung survived and escaped to South Korea in 2004. On Saturday he, and other North Korean defectors, expressed sorrow that their homeland’s ongoing dire human rights situation was ignored in an unprecedented summit between Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Jung plans to appeal personally to US President Donald Trump to raise human rights violations at his own summit with Kim in May or June.  Jung, who represents the Association of North Korean Political Victims and their Families, once smuggled flashdrives of a Trump speech denouncing North Korean “tyranny” into the reclusive state. The president thanked him for doing so when the two men met in the White House in February.

A second meeting is slated for May. Mr Jung will give the president the names of ten North Korean prisoners, urging him to ask Kim for their release.

[The Telegraph]

North Korean defectors watch Kim Jong-un’s visit to South Korea with skepticism

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On the eve of a historic summit of the leaders of North and South Korea, the prospect of a diplomatic thaw and improved relations vexes many of North Korean defectors who have made new lives in South Korea.

The skepticism comes amid a wave of more general optimism.

Choi Jung-hoon, a former North Korean army officer, who defected to the South in 2006 and who survived a North-driven assassination attempt in 2013, insists the Moon-Kim meeting will to do little to change his mind about the country he fled. “No matter the outcome of these summits, our goal will still ultimately be regime change,” Mr. Choi said in an interview recently.

Mr. Choi grew up never thinking of himself as an opponent of the regime but his views changed in 2006 after unintentionally running afoul of the government when he sought money in exchange for helping a South Korean family locate a kidnapped relative in the North.

[Washington Times]

Korean leaders hold historic summit

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The leaders of North and South Korea embraced on Friday and pledged to work for the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” on a day of smiles and handshakes at the first inter-Korean summit in more than a decade.

The two Koreas announced they would work with the United States and China this year to declare an official end to the 1950s Korean War and establish a permanent peace agreement, removing an important vestige of the conflict.

“The two leaders declare before our people of 80 million and the entire world there will be no more war on the Korean peninsula and a new age of peace has begun,” the two sides said.

But their commitments were short on specifics and failed to clear up key questions about Pyongyang’s intentions over its nuclear arsenal ahead of an even more critical summit, with U.S. President Donald Trump, that is expected in coming weeks.

[Reuters]

From brink of war to hopes of peace: Kim Jong Un heads south for summit

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For the first time in over a decade, the leaders of a divided Korea will sit down to negotiate an end to a decades-long rivalry which has threatened at times to plunge the world into nuclear war.

In a meeting heavy with history and symbolism, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will hold talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Peace House on the southern side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ).

Moon and Kim will meet for the first time at 9.30 a.m. local time on Friday (8.30 p.m. Thursday ET), with cameras from around the world fixed on the moment Kim steps across the demarcation line that runs through the demilitarized zone between the two countries.

It is the third summit between the leaders of North and South Korea — the last was in 2007 when then-South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun met Kim’s father Kim Jong Il. (At the time, President Moon was Roh’s chief of staff and a close personal friend.) Both previous meetings were held in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

[CNN]