The one thing that won’t be discussed at the Korea summit

WHEN LEE KA-YEON RECALLS growing up in North Korea in the 1990s, she remembers meals of wild grasses and tree bark that her mother would boil to make thin soups. At the time, she believed her hardship would be temporary, and that it was caused by North Korea’s outside enemies. 

The conditions of her life were starkly at odds with the propaganda stories she read in school, which depicted North Korea as a land of abundance that was the envy of the world. Lee grew up at a time of economic crisis in North Korea, and she remembers seeing countless gaunt and starving people in public places. Once she reached adulthood, feeling stifled by the repressive system in her homeland, she decided to flee to South Korea. 

The report also found that in 2012 alone, amid widespread poverty and malnutrition in North Korea, leader Kim Jong-un, the North’s representative at the upcoming summit with South Korea, spent an estimated US$645 million on luxury goods, including handbags and premium liquor. 

It may therefore be surprising to some that, next week, when the leaders of South and North Korea sit down for their first face-to-face summit meeting in more than a decade, none of this will be on the agenda, or even mentioned out loud. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, whose background is in human rights law and has spent his career agitating for rights improvements in South Korea, will be photographed smiling and shaking hands with Kim, the person responsible for many of these documented abuses.