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Kim promises to denuke

Two-man show: United States President Donald Trump makes a statement before saying goodbye to North Korea leader Kim Jong-un after their meeting at the Capella resort on Sentosa Island in Singapore on Tuesday

Tama Salim (The Jakarta Post)
Singapore
Wed, June 13, 2018

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Kim promises to denuke

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wo-man show: United States President Donald Trump makes a statement before saying goodbye to North Korea leader Kim Jong-un after their meeting at the Capella resort on Sentosa Island in Singapore on Tuesday. Trump and Kim became the first sitting US and North Korean leaders to meet, shake hands and negotiate to end a decades-old nuclear stand-off. (AFP/ Susan Walsh)

United States President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un came away from an historic summit on Tuesday with an agreement to work toward a “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”, although how this would be achieved remains unclear.

Trump has committed to provide security guarantees to North Korea, while Kim “reaffirmed his unwavering commitment” to complete denuclearization, according to a statement signed by both leaders at the end of the summit in Singapore.

The statement does not go into details on how either can be achieved and leaves out other issues that complicate tensions in the region. It only says the US and North Korea would “join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula.

At a press conference held after the summit, details on how North Korea is expected to follow through on its commitment remained scarce, with President Trump saying that the “denuking” process would be verified by Americans and other foreigners.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency welcomed the statement and said it was prepared to undertake verification activities.

However, Trump said denuclearization takes a “scientifically and mechanically” long time to complete, but added that international sanctions against Pyongyang would only come off if nuclear weapons “are no longer
a factor”.

The declaration made no mention of the economy-crippling sanctions imposed on North Korea for pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton are to hold follow-up negotiations with their North Korean counterparts next week, Trump said.

Before signing what the US president described as a “pretty comprehensive document”, Kim, through a translator, said: “The world will see a major change. I would like to express my gratitude to President Trump for making this meeting happen.”

Both leaders emerged from a half-day of private talks both individually and with their respective teams to sign the document that Trump said would “take care of a very big and very dangerous problem for the world”.

“We were very proud of what took place today, I think our whole relationship with North Korea and the Korean Peninsula is going to be a very much different situation than it has been in the past,” Trump said after the signing ceremony at the Capella Hotel.

However, the document contained no reference to a peace treaty, although both reaffirmed the Panmunjom Declaration signed during the Inter-Korean Summit and agreed to recover the remains of prisoners of war and of those missing in action and repatriate them. North Korea and South Korea are technically still at war since hostilities between them ended in 1953 with an armistice only. China, the third party to the truce in addition to North Korea and the UN, said it hoped North Korea and the US could reach a basic consensus on denuclearization.

“At the same time, there needs to be a peace mechanism for the peninsula to resolve North Korea’s reasonable security concerns,” China’s top diplomat, State Councilor Wang Yi, told reporters in Beijing, as quoted by Reuters.

At least one expert was disappointed with the summit because of its narrow scope and because it could be counterproductive for wider aims.

“The signed agreement is very weak and does not contain much new,” said Muhadi Sugiono, a nuclear disarmament expert and Indonesian campaigner with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize by insisting that global denuclearization could only be solved through the implementation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Muhadi said that although the US wants North Korea to denuclearize, it did not declare any intention to get rid of its own nuclear weapons, which he said likely means Trump and Kim do not have a common definition of denuclearization. That, as well as the lack of a timeline, suggests that the outcome of the meeting was no more than a general statement of intent, Muhadi said.

“ICAN of course supports diplomatic efforts and we prefer this to nuclear war, but this whole meeting also runs the danger of legitimizing North Korea as a nuclear-armed state, sending a signal that ‘nuclear weapons equals power and respect’,” he said.

On the other hand, Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo welcomed the outcome. “We hope that the results of the summit would make contributions to peace, whether on the Korean Peninsula or globally for world peace,” he said at the Bogor Palace on Wednesday.

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