by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Singapore : US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed a “comprehensive” document at the end of their historic summit here on Tuesday, vowing to forge a new partnership and reverse decades of American policy toward the rogue regime.
The content of the agreement was not immediately clear although both sides touted it as a significant achievement, reports The New Straits Times.
“Today we had a very historic meeting, overcoming our past history and embarking on a new beginning… The world will see a major change,” Kim said before leaving for the St. Regis hotel after the summit.
Trump said he had invited Kim to the White House.
The summit took place at the British colonial style Capella Hotel in Sentosa Island, a tourist paradise.
Kim and Trump became the first leaders of their countries to ever come face to face. Trump said the US relationship with North Korea will be different from the past.
“We’re both going to do something, and we’ve developed a very special bond… We’re going to take care of a very big and dangerous problem for the rest of the world.
“It worked out far better for both of us than anybody could have expected,” he added.
When asked about denuclearisation, Trump said: “We are starting the process very quickly.”
In response to a question on whether the two leaders will meet again, Trump said: “We’ll meet again, we’ll meet many times.”
He said the two leaders learned a lot about each other since they shared a historic handshake for the first time earlier this morning.
Trump described Kim as a “very worthy, very smart negotiator”.
During the signing ceremony, the two leaders sat side by side at an expansive wooden table decorated with white flowers and were flanked on either side by American and North Korean flags, The new Straits Times reported.
The signing came after a one on one meeting between Kim and Trump which was followed by an expanded bilateral meeting with their aides and a working lunch.
They even went for a stroll.
Before the signing, Kim said the summit was a “great prelude to peace”.
“Of course there will be difficulties along the way, but as of today, a day that a good start has been made, I am determined to start a grand undertaking together,” he added.
They began their summit in a carefully choreographed encounter at 9 a.m. The two leaders then shared a 12-second handshake against a backdrop of American and North Korean flags.
They reached Singapore on Sunday followed by their individual meetings with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
Trump and Kim will depart Singapore later on Tuesday.
The summit, which was almost scrapped by a mercurial Trump last month, comes after a flurry of diplomatic activities and barrage of invective and insults traded between the US President and an equally aggressive Kim.
It also marks a diplomatic landmark between the two countries with a long history of tense ties.
The 1950-53 Korean War ended without an official peace treaty. Previous US Presidents have made several attempts to get Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons, without success.
Two major diplomatic efforts – an agreement in 1994 and the six-party talks in the 2000s – were ultimately abandoned, with both sides either failing to agree or accusing the other of not abiding by the terms of the agreements.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Social Round-up, World
By Arul Louis,
New York : US President Donald Trump is proposing phased negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, starting with the planned June 12 summit in Singapore during which he does not expect a complete deal on denuclearisation.
At the same time, Trump has also set an ambitious goal for his interactions with Kim aiming for an end to the official 70-year state of war between the US and North Korea.
After a meeting Kim Yong-chol, the North Korean leader’s emissary, in Washington on Friday, Trump confirmed that the Singapore summit he had canceled last week was back on track.
“I think we’re going to have a relationship, and it will start on June 12th,” the President said.
Kim Yong-chol traveled to Washington after two days of negotiations with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York to hand over a letter from Kim Jong-un to Trump.
Trump said that “it ended up being a two-hour conversation with the second most powerful man in North Korea” during which they discussed a whole range of subjects.
Tamping down hopes of an imminent breakthrough, Trump said: “We’re not going to go in and sign something on June 12th and we never were. We’re going to start a process. And I told them today, ‘Take your time. We can go fast. We can go slowly’. But I think they’d like to see something happen.
“You’re talking about years of hostility; years of problems; years of, really, hatred between so many different nations. But I think you’re going to have a very positive result in the end.”
As a goodwill gesture, Trump said that he will not be putting any more sanctions on North Korea, but the existing ones will continue.
Pompeo, however, has asserted that the US won’t budge from the ultimate goal of denuclearising North Korea.
“I have been very clear that President Trump and the United States objective is very consistent and well known: the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula,” he sad on Thursday.
North Korea poses a major threat with the nuclear devices as well as missiles capable of reaching the US mainland that it has developed.
After it tested them last year, the two leaders traded threats and abuses, while the US succeeded in tightening the UN sanctions on North Korea.
Later this year they cooled down and agreed to talk.
While preparations were going on for the talks, there was a burst of “tremendous anger and open hostility” coming out of Pyongyang last month, which Trump cited to call off the talks.
They were provoked by comments from Trump’s new National Security Adviser John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence invoking a “Libyan model” for dealing with North Korea.
It upset Pyongyang because after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shutdown his nuclear programme in 2003 after which he was overthrown and killed in 2011 following attacks by US and its European allies.
Bolton and Pence have been sidelined and Pompeo, whom Trump has praised for negotiating with North Korea, has taken centre stage.
While Trump would score points internationally and domestically by pulling off the summit and soften his hardline image by having the summit, Kim Jong-un appears to be equally invested in the denuclearisation talks that could translate to economic development for his impoverished country that is under severe economic sanctions.
Trump said that if the nuclear issue is resolved, he expected South Korea, Japan and China to provide aid to North Korea, without any cost to the US for rebuilding it.
Trump said that during the meeting with Kim Yong-chol they talked about ending the Korean War which continues formally.
“And there is a possibility of something like that,” he added.
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Social Round-up, World
Washington : US President Donald Trump said on Friday that a nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un could still take place as scheduled on June 12, just one day after he cancelled it blaming Pyongyang’s “open hostility”.
“We’ll see what happens. It could even be the 12th,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before leaving for the US Naval Academy to deliver a commencement address.
“They very much want to do it. We’d like to do it. We’re going to see what happens,” he was quoted as saying by the US media.
Earlier, North Korea issued a conciliatory statement in response to Trump’s decision to scrap his meeting with Kim.
“We reiterate to the US that there is a willingness to sit down at any time, in any way, to solve the problem,” said a top official at the North Korean Foreign Ministry.
Trump, in a morning tweet, hailed Pyongyang’s statement, saying: “Very good news to receive the warm and productive statement from North Korea.”
“We will soon see where it will lead, hopefully to long and enduring prosperity and peace. Only time (and talent) will tell!”
Asked earlier whether the North Koreans were playing games, the US President acknowledged they were — and suggested he was too, CNN reported.
“Everybody plays games. You know that,” he said when asked about the ongoing talks. “You know that better than anybody.”
Minutes before his Friday tweet, Trump claimed Democrats were “rooting” against his administration in its negotiations with North Korea.
“Democrats are so obviously rooting against us in our negotiations with North Korea… Dems have lost touch!”
He wrote a letter on Thursday to Kim informing him that their June 12 meeting in Singapore was off due to Pyongyang’s “open hostility” towards Washington.
After the news the summit was called off, Democrats criticized Trump for the decision. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters that the cancelled summit was “a good thing for Kim Jong-un”.
Republicans, however, hailed the President’s action as a tough negotiating move.
Trump’s comments fuelled the uncertainty and confusion surrounding his attempts to broker a nuclear agreement with North Korea.
A senior White House official said that it would be extremely difficult to hold the summit on the original date, especially because North Korea cut off contact with the US regarding planning and logistics.
“June 12 is in 10 minutes,” the official said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
South Korean President Moon Jae-in (R) and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (L) (file photo)
Seoul : South Korea on Thursday urged North Korea to fulfil the agreements reached during the inter-Korean summit and to resume talks a day after Pyongyang cancelled a high-level meeting with Seoul and said it was reconsidering its participation in the upcoming summit with the US.
The message was issued by the standing committee of South Korea’s National Security Council (NSC) after North Korea cancelled Wednesday’s talks for implementing the Panmunjom Declaration signed on April 27 between its leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Efe news reported.
“While reaffirming their stance that the declaration… must be carried out without any disruption, the members agreed to continue consulting with the North side to hold the high-level talks at an early date,” the committee said in a statement.
In the declaration, the two Koreas had agreed to work for establishing peace and denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.
The council, headed by top security advisor Chung Eui-yong, also backed the summit between Kim and the US President Donald Trump, on June 12 in Singapore, although Pyongyang’s statements on Wednesday raised doubts about its future.
The NSC said it would boost cooperation between Seoul, Washington and Pyongyang to make the summit a success “under the spirit of mutual respect”.
North Korea had announced that it was reconsidering its participation in the summit, alleging that the US wanted to pressurize it to accept a complete unilateral nuclear disarmament, a condition which it termed unacceptable.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Pyongyang : North Korea on Wednesday threatened to abandon planned talks between leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump in June if Washington continued to insist on pushing it “into a corner” on nuclear disarmament, media reports said.
A statement published by the state-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) said Pyongyang would never accept economic assistance from the US in exchange for unilaterally abandoning its nuclear program, CNN reported.
Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea’s First Vice Minister of on Foreign Affairs said the US has said “it would offer economic compensation and benefit in case we abandon (nuclear weapons)”.
“We have never had any expectation of US support in carrying out our economic construction and will not… make such a deal in future,” he added.
“If they try to push us into a corner and force only unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in that kind of talks and will have to reconsider…the upcoming summit.”
South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-hwa spoke with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier on Wednesday (Seoul time).
According to a statement, Pompeo was quoted as saying that preparations would continue for the Trump-Kim summit, “keeping in mind this action of the North”, CNN reported.
The two have agreed to continue close cooperation to achieve a complete denuclearisation and peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula, the South Korean statement said.
The statement also referred to comments made by Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton about Libya being a potential model for North Korean denuclearisation.
Bolton’s comments, Kim said, were indicative of “an awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers”, the CNN reported.
“It is absolutely absurd to dare compare (North Korea), a nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development,” he added.
“World knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate.”
After weeks of improving ties on the Korean Peninsula, capped by the dramatic image of Kim shaking hands with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, things took a sudden step backwards on Wednesday.
In a missive delivered to the South in the early hours during the day, the North said it was suspending high-level talks scheduled for Wednesday in view of “provocative military disturbances with South Korea.”
North Korea’s anger, which took both Seoul and Washington off guard, came as the two allies were conducting annual “Max Thunder” air force drills, which Pyongyang has always objected to in the past and accused of destabilising the situation on the Peninsula, the CNN reported.
In a statement, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said it was regrettable that the North unilaterally postponed the talks due to the annual (South Korea-US) joint air combat drills.
“Such action by the North is inconsistent with the fundamental spirit and purpose of the Panmunjeom Declaration agreed by the South and North leaders on April 27,” it added.
An earlier KCNA report said the Max Thunder 2018 air combat drill was against the declaration — signed last month between the Koreas — wherein they agreed to cease all hostile acts against each other, the CNN reported.
In March though, North Korea had said the drill were necessary it understood.
—IANS
