Donald Trump confirms second meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un will be in Hanoi
- North has been pushing for Hanoi, home to an embassy where quick and secure communication with Pyongyang will be possible
- Tweet about eagerly anticipated meeting came after three-day trip to North Korea by US special envoy Stephen Biegun
“North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Jong-un, will become a great Economic Powerhouse,” Trump added. “He may surprise some but he won’t surprise me, because I have gotten to know him & fully understand how capable he is. North Korea will become a different kind of Rocket – an Economic one!”
There has been speculation the meeting would be in Da Nang. But South Korea’s former unification minister Chung Sei-hyun told the Post the North had been pushing for Hanoi – home to its embassy where officials will be able to communicate quickly and more securely with Pyongyang.
Le Hong Hiep, a fellow at the Singapore-based ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, explained the significance of the chosen city.
Concessions must be made if North Korea is to take new path
“The venue of the summit implies that the US has made a concession to North Korea, given President Trump’s stated preference for the summit to be held in Da Nang,” he said.
“The choice of Hanoi will make even more sense if the two parties are joined by the Chinese and South Korean delegations in case they reach an agreement to make a declaration to formally end the Korean war, as there will be more available resources in Hanoi to meet security, logistic and media needs of such a big event.”
“We feel that Vietnamese economic and political environments are balanced, and when it is hosted in Vietnam, we feel that we can have some contribution in the process and can enhance our international position,” he said.
“We hope that North Korea can consider the example of economic development of Vietnam … If they can develop some kind of reforms like in Vietnam that would offer more opportunities and will accelerate the development of North Korea.”
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The US State Department announced that the special US envoy for North Korea will meet again with Pyongyang officials before the second summit – hours after he returned to Seoul from talks in the North on the summit’s agenda.
In a statement, the State Department said talks during Stephen Biegun’s three-day trip explored Trump and Kim’s “commitments of complete denuclearisation, transforming US-DPRK relations and building a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula” in preparation for the much-anticipated summit.
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Biegun landed at Osan US Air Base on Friday evening, foreign ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-duk said.
The State Department confirmed Biegun agreed to meet his North Korean counterpart Kim Hyok-chol again before the summit.
On Saturday, Biegun met South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha and Seoul’s chief nuclear envoy Lee Do-hoon to brief them on his negotiations with North Korea.
“Our discussions were productive,” Biegun said. “President is very much looking forward to taking next steps. We have some hard work to do with DPRK between now and then. I am confident if both sides stay committed we can make real progress here,” he said, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Attention will focus on whether the US team have offered to lift some economic sanctions in return for Pyongyang taking concrete steps towards denuclearisation.
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Discussions on declaring an end to the 1950-53 Korean war could also have been on the table, with Biegun last week saying Trump was “ready to end this war”.
The three-year conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas still technically at war, with the US keeping 28,500 troops in the South.
The US envoy was also likely to have discussed with his counterpart protocol and security matters for the upcoming Trump-Kim summit.
At their landmark summit in Singapore last year, the mercurial US and North Korean leaders produced a vaguely worded document in which Kim pledged to work towards “the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”. But progress has since stalled, with the two sides disagreeing over what that means.
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Experts say tangible progress on Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons will be needed for the second summit if it is to avoid being dismissed as “reality TV”.
North Korea has yet to provide any official confirmation of the summit and Kim Jong-un appeared to make no mention of it during a meeting on Friday with the top brass of the Korean People’s Army.
As reported by state media, the meeting focused on the need to modernise the military while maintaining party discipline in the ranks.
Reporting by Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Lam Le and Park Chan-kyong