N. KOREA RETURNS US ARMY ‘REMAINS,’ BOOSTS DIPLOMACY
Trump thanks Kim for ‘fulfilling a promise;’ US Defense official says N. Korea’s move is a good step toward agreements
President Donald Trump thanked North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for “fulfilling a promise” to return the remains of US soldiers missing from the Korean War, as a US military plane made a rare trip into North Korea to retrieve 55 cases said to contain remains.
Close to 7,700 U.S. soldiers remain unaccounted for from the 1950-53 Korean War, and about 5,300 of those were lost in North Korea.
North Korea’s move signals a positive step in Trump’s diplomacy with Pyongyang, and may restart efforts to send US teams into the country to search for additional war dead.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis cautioned that the transfer of remains “is separate” from what has so far been troubled efforts to negotiate the complete denuclearization of North Korea. But he said it was a step in the right direction following the TrumpKim summit in Singapore.
“This is obviously a gesture of carrying forward what they agreed to in Singapore and we take it as such,” Mattis told reporters Friday. “We also look at it as a first step of a restarted process. So we do want to explore additional efforts to bring others home.”
Despite soaring rhetoric about denuclearization before the Singapore meeting, the summit ended with only a vague aspirational goal for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing when and how that would occur.
Subsequent talks between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and senior North Korean officials got off to a rocky start earlier this month, with the North accusing the Americans of making “unilateral and gangster-like” demands on denuclearization. On Wednesday, Pompeo said a great deal of work remains ahead of a North Korea denuclearization deal, but he declined to provide any timeline.
Trump, addressing reporters on the South Lawn, said Vice President Mike Pence would greet the families and the remains of the soldiers.
“We have many others coming, but I want to thank Chairman Kim in front of the media for fulfilling a promise that he made to me, and I’m sure that he will continue to fulfill that promise as they search and search and search,” Trump said.