Trump, Kim big news in N Korea
PYONGYANG: North Koreans got their first big dose of news yesterday that their leader Kim Jong-un had arrived in Singapore for what even the state-run media was calling a historic meeting with US President Donald Trump.
People crowded around poster stands at subway stations around the capital to read the news and gathered at noon in front of the city’s main train station to watch a big screen display of images of Kim getting off the special Air China flight that took him to Singapore.
A report by the Korea Central News Agency said the summit would have “wide-ranging and profound talks” and noted that it is being held “under the great attention and expectation of the whole world”.
The relative speed with which the state media got the news of Kim’s arrival in Singapore out to the North Korean public suggests a certain level of confidence that the meeting will go well – or at least well enough. For the North, Kim has already won a huge propaganda bonus by merely having the summit and sitting down as an equal with the US president, an accomplishment his father and grandfather sought but could never realise.
By prominently showing the Air China jet that flew Kim to Singapore, the reports also made no secret of China’s important role behind the scenes. That might not bode so well for Trump, who has expressed concern about China’s influence.
Even so, the summit continues to be a highly sensitive topic in North Korea.
The media reports yesterday followed months of only the scantest of coverage of the plans for Kim to meet Trump, although his summits with South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and China’s President Xi Jinping received major coverage soon after they had ended.
North Korea has so far presented Kim’s sudden diplomatic overtures to his neighbours and to the US as a logical next step following what Kim has claimed was the completion of his plan to develop a credible nuclear deterrent to what Pyongyang has long claimed was a policy of hostility and “nuclear blackmail” by Washington.
Those points were echoed in yesterday’s media coverage, which stressed that the talks with Trump would be focused on forging a relationship that was more in tune with what it called changing times – most likely meaning the North’s new status as a nuclear weapons state – its desire for a mechanism to ensure a lasting a durable peace on the Korean Peninsula and, finally, denuclearisation.
What exactly it has in mind for any of those broad topics remains to be seen. – AP/African News Agency (ANA)