US: No plans for Pompeo, Kim to meet
WASHINGTON — The US State Department has said that it neither plans nor expects a possible meeting between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Kim Jongun, the top leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, during Pompeo’s upcoming visit to Pyongyang.
“We don’t have that schedule. We have no expectations of meeting with Chairman Kim,” State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said at a news conference.
“I think what’s important is that we are regularizing these meetings and these conversations with a government that we have had very, very little interaction with over the past decade or so,” Nauert said.
“The consultations will continue, and I imagine you’ll see more meetings and trips ahead,” she added. “We look forward to having those conversations.”
She also said the newly appointed special envoy for the DPRK issue, Stephen Biegun, will pick up “some of those meetings that perhaps the secretary normally would have gone on or would have conducted. So I think this is just sort of the more — more of a normalization of our types of conversations.”
Earlier on Thursday, Pompeo said that he had appointed Biegun as the new special envoy for the DPRK.
He also said that he and Biegun would travel to Pyongyang next week “to make further diplomatic progress toward our objective”.
Pompeo has visited the DPRK three times — in April, May and July.
US President Donald Trump on Monday said he would “most likely” meet with Kim for a second time and believed Pyongyang had taken specific steps toward denuclearization, adding that he has “great chemistry” with Kim.
Meanwhile, the second group of separated families from the Republic of Korea and the DPRK left for Mount Kumgang in the DPRK on Friday morning for three-day reunions.
Eighty-one ROK citizens, mostly in their 80s or older, departed in buses from the coastal city of Sokcho in the ROK to meet DPRK relatives they never saw since the Korean War (1950-53) ended with an armistice that left the Korean Peninsula divided.
The DPRK and the ROK agreed in June to hold the humanitarian event, the first in nearly three years. The latest was held in October 2015.
Their meeting, arranged after decades of separation, will be painfully short. They will be granted permission to meet for only 12 hours in group and private gatherings during the three-day reunions.
It could be the only chance for the separated families to meet face-to-face. The eldest ROK participant for the second session is a 100-year-old grandmother, Kang Jeong-ok, who will meet her younger sister from the DPRK.