Placid Singapore braces for Trump-Kim storm
SINGAPORE: Hotel rooms are being snapped up, police are preparing to lock down the city and thousands of journalists are set to jet in for the greatest media circus on Earth — the United States-North Korea summit.
Top officials are scrambling to salvage the historic meeting between US President Donald Trump and the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, planned for June 12 in the city-state.
If the summit, already cancelled once by Trump before plans got back on track, does go ahead, then tiny, placid Singapore will be the unlikely ground zero for one of the biggest geopolitical events of recent times.
The delegations of US and North Korean officials, along with their security details, are expected to be huge. But they are likely to pale in comparison to the gigantic media pack set to swarm the tropical city-state.
Some 3,000 people are expected to apply for media accreditation, said sources involved in planning the event who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It should easily eclipse the contingent of journalists at the last comparable event in Singapore — the 2015 meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s then-leader Ma Ying-jeou.
There was a foretaste of the coming invasion this week as reporters camped out at the upscale Fullerton Hotel to get a glimpse of Kim Chang-son, Jong-un’s de facto chief of staff, who is here to lay the ground for the meeting.
Top hotels rumoured to be summit venues — the frontrunner is the five-star Shangri-La, where the Xi-Ma meeting took place — are almost fully booked.
But while world leaders hold their breath amid rising hopes a summit could lead to Pyongyang permanently abandoning its nuclear weapons programme, some Singaporeans were more concerned about the potential disruption to their peaceful lives.
Security will be onerous, with large numbers of police set to be deployed and extensive road closures expected around the venue.
But Lim Tai Wei, a fellow at the National University of Singapore’s East Asia Institute, played down fears that the event could cause widespread disruption.
“You have to bear in mind that the country has the experience of hosting the Xi-Ma meeting in 2015, and also previously having hosted past US presidents.”