SUMMIT ANNIVERSARY WITHOUT N. KOREA?
Pyongyang no-show won’t deter Seoul from holding ceremony to mark first anniversary
SOUTH KOREA will this week celebrate the first anniversary of a landmark summit between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — but Pyongyang may not take part, Seoul said yesterday.
The pair held their first meeting on April 27 last year in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) dividing the peninsula amid a rapid diplomatic thaw, paving the way for a historic summit between Kim and US President Donald Trump in Singapore in June.
But one year later, little
progress had been made on North Korea’s denuclearisation, with Pyongyang and Washington deadlocked since a second summit between Trump and Kim in Hanoi in February broke down without a deal.
Moon, who brokered the first meeting between the two mercurial leaders, had tried to salvage the diplomacy although the North had remained largely unresponsive.
Since Hanoi, the North had not attended any of the eight regular weekly meetings of the heads of their joint liaison office in Kaesong, and had not taken part in other joint projects, such as excavations in the DMZ.
Seoul will hold a ceremony on Saturday in Panmunjom — where Moon and Kim exchanged warm smiles and brotherly hugs — the unification ministry said, but Pyongyang’s attendance remained unclear.
“When we notify the North (about the event), we will provide additional details,” ministry spokesman Lee Sang-min said.
Moon and Kim met three times last year — including a second impromptu encounter after Trump threatened to cancel the Singapore summit just weeks before it was due.
But exchanges between Seoul and Pyongyang have significantly decreased since the failure to reach agreement in Hanoi.
Kim slammed the South in a speech to his country’s rubber stamp legislature earlier this month, saying it should not “pose as a meddlesome ‘mediator’ and ‘facilitator’” between the US and the North.