DPRK grants visas to S. Korean media

A GROUP of foreign journalists departed by train yesterday to watch the dismantling of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear test site after eight reporters from South Korea received last-minute permission to join them.

The remote site deep in the mountains of the DPRK’s sparsely populated northeast interior is expected to have a formal closing ceremony in the next day or two, depending on the weather. The closing was announced by DPRK leader Kim Jong Un ahead of his planned summit with US President Donald Trump next month.

The train trip was expected to take eight to 12 hours, followed by several hours on a bus and then an hour hike to the site itself. The journalists were put in sleeping cars on the train, four bunks in a compartment. The compartments had windows covered with blinds, and the journalists were told not to open the blinds during the journey.

Media have to pay their own costs for the trip. The train fare was US$75 per person round trip. Each meal was US$20.

The DPRK had earlier refused to grant entry visas to the South Korean journalists after Pyongyang cut off high-level contact with Seoul to protest joint US-South Korean military exercises. But the DPRK accepted the list of the South Korean journalists to attend via a cross-border communication channel.

The journalists from the MBC television network and News1 wire service took a special government flight later yesterday to go to the DPRK’s northeastern coastal city of Wonsan. The other journalists from China, the United States, the UK and Russia arrived in Wonsan on Tuesday.

The DPRK’s eleventh-hour decision to allow the South Koreans to join came just after Trump met South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Washington to try to keep the Kim-Trump summit from going off the rails.

Trump indicated he believes the meeting will take place, but left open the possibility it would be delayed or even canceled if a fruitful outcome doesn’t seem likely.

The summit could offer a historic chance for peace on the Korean Peninsula.

But there has been increasing pessimism about the meeting after the DPRK scrapped the inter-Korean talks and threatened to do the same for the Kim-Trump summit in protest of the South Korea-US military drills and what it calls Washington’s push for “one-sided” disarmament.

Trump yesterday said the fate of the summit with Kim will be decided “next week,” as aides traveled to Singapore on a preparatory mission.

“On Singapore we’ll see. It could very well happen,” Trump said of the on-againoff-again June 12 meeting.

“If we go, I think it will be a great thing for North Korea,” he said at the White House.