South Korea’s Moon to send special envoy to N. Korea next week

SEOUL: South Korean President Moon Jae-in will send a special envoy to Pyongyang next Wednesday to discuss plans to hold a summit with the North’s Kim Jong Un and nuclear disarmament, Moon’s office said yesterday.

The unnamed envoy will visit the North’s capital on Sept 5, Moon’s spokesman Kim Euikyeom told reporters, adding it had not been decided yet who the envoy would be. Seoul proposed the envoy’s visit yesterday morning and Pyongyang accepted it a few hours later, he said.

Potential candidates include South Korea’s spy chief Suh Hoon and Moon’s national security advisor Chung Euiyong, according to multiple local media reports.

“The envoy will have broad discussions over a detailed schedule for the inter-Korea summit, development of bilateral ties ... and nuclear disarmament of the Korean peninsula,” the spokesman said.

Moon and Kim have met faceto-face twice now, the first during a historic summit at the border truce village of Panmunjom in April. It was the first time a North Korean leader had ever crossed into the South after the 1950-53 war that divided the Korean peninsula.

They met a second time in Panmunjom as they scrambled to salvage a summit between Kim and US president Donald Trump in Singapore, which eventually went ahead.

They have since agreed to hold a third summit in Pyongyang at an unspecified date in September. Yesterday’s announcement came as US efforts to tame the isolated, nuclear-armed North have stalled for weeks.

In June, Trump and Kim vowed to work towards the ‘complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula’, although their joint statement was short on details for how that was to be achieved.

But Pyongyang has since slammed Washington for its ‘gangster-like’ demands for complete, verifiable and irreversible disarmament, and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency recently reported there were no indication that the North had stopped its nuclear activities.

Last week, Trump ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel a planned trip to Pyongyang, saying he did not believe China – the impoverished North’s sole major ally and economic lifeline – was helping in the denuclearisation process due to Washington’s tougher stance on trade.

Pompeo said Tuesday that Washington remains ready to engage “when it is clear that Chairman Kim stands ready to deliver on the commitments that he made at the Singapore summit... to completely denuclearise North Korea.”