NKorea resented visit by Warmbier’s dad
TOKYO — Fred Warmbier clearly struck a nerve in North Korea when he traveled to South Korea last week to remind the world, amid an Olympic-inspired detente, of the horrors of the Kim regime.
The regime has again insisted that Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student who was detained in North Korea for 17 months, was nothing but a “criminal.” Warmbier spent most of his captivity in a coma, before dying shortly after being released to his family in Ohio.
“The United States is again kicking up a defamation campaign against the DPRK, intentionally attributing Warmbier’s death to the latter,” an official in the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s Institute for American Studies was quoted as saying Friday, using the abbreviation for the state’s official name.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier, Otto’s parents, were guests of first lady Melania Trump during the State of the Union address, when President Donald Trump called them “powerful witnesses to a menace that threatens our world.”
Then Vice President Mike Pence invited Fred Warmbier to accompany him in South Korea, where he was attending the opening of the Winter Olympics.
“I’m telling the truth about the regime’s treatment of my son. But guess what, they do this to countless other people,” Warmbier said in an interview with NBC News on the sidelines of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
“This isn’t defiance. This is telling the truth. This is standing up and being the voice of Otto.”
North Korea clearly did not appreciate Warmbier’s efforts, or the broader efforts by the Trump administration, to remind the world of its rampant human rights abuses just as it was trying to paper over them with a charm offensive at the Games.
“It is not accidental that there is an assessment coming from the U.S. that the present administration’s increased move of taking up the DPRK’s ‘human rights’ issue amounts to an attempt for ‘regime change,’” the unnamed official said in the statement, published by the North’s Korean Central News Agency on Friday.