Historic summit moves ever closer
TRUMP DOES ABOUT-TURN AND WILL MEET KIM Singapore meeting seen as landmark opportunity.
Plans for a landmark summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un are moving “very nicely”, US President Donald Trump said yesterday, as the South’s leader said Kim told him the talks would be an historic opportunity to end decades of confrontation.
The latest conciliatory declarations capped a turbulent few days of diplomatic brinkmanship.
Trump rattled the region on Thursday by cancelling a planned June 12 meeting with Kim in Singapore, citing “open hostility” from Pyongyang.
But within a day, he reversed course, saying it could still go ahead after productive talks were held with North Korean officials.
“It’s moving along very nicely,” Trump told reporters. “We’re looking at June 12 in Singapore.”
Trump’s unpredictability sparked a surprise meeting on Saturday between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in – only the fourth time leaders from the two countries have met.
Moon said Kim reached out to him to arrange the hasty meeting “without any formality”. There, the North Korean leader described the Singapore summit as a landmark opportunity.
Kim said the two Koreas should “positively cooperate with each other as ever to improve relations and establish mechanism for permanent and durable peace,” Pyongyang’s state-run KCNA news agency said. It added South and North Korea would hold another round of “high-level” talks on June 1.
Trump’s original decision to abandon the historic summit initially blindsided South Korea, which had been brokering a remarkable detente between Washington and Pyongyang.
Last year, Trump and Kim were trading war threats and insults after Pyongyang tested its most powerful nuclear weapon to date.
Tensions were calmed after Kim extended an olive branch by offering to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics in South Korea, sparking a rapid detente that led to Trump agreeing to hold talks.
Moon won the election last year partly by vowing to be open to dialogue with the North and finding a solution to a Cold War-era sore that is blighting the region.
Washington wants North Korea to give up all its nukes as quickly as possible in return for sanctions and economic relief.
Pyongyang has a different view of what denuclearisation might look like and remains deeply worried that abandoning that deterrent would leave the country vulnerable to regime change.
Saturday’s meeting between Moon and Kim took place on the North Korean side of Panmunjom, a heavily fortified village that lies between the two countries where the 1953 armistice was signed.
Only last month, the two leaders met in the same village, with Kim famously inviting Moon to step briefly into the North before they both held talks in a building on the South’s side.
Footage showed Moon arriving in a convoy of cars and first shaking hands with Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong. – AFP