Irked by War Games, North Korea Scraps Meet with South Korean

Provoked by the start of another joint military exercise by the US and South Korea, North Korea cancelled a high-level meeting that was to be held with South Korean officials on Wednesday morning at a border village.

Hours later, North Korea’s first vice-minister of Foreign Affairs Kim Kye Gwan warned that if US President Donald Trump yields to his National Security Advisor John Bolton’s insistence on applying the “Libyan model” of denuclearization to North Korea, the latter might withdraw from the historic summit meet between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.    

Last month, 11,500 American and 290,000 South Korean troops were involved in the annual joint military exercises, which simulate the invasion of North Korea. North Korea has consistently criticized these exercises as a preparation for an invasion. However, the Koreas continued the peace process with a historic joint statement by the countries’ leaders on May 27.  North Korea is also set to dismantle its only known nuclear site between May 23 and 25, and had released three detained US citizens.

Meanwhile, on May 11, the US and South Korea began another military drill which will last till May 25. ‘Max Thunder 2018’ will involve about a 100 warplanes, including eight F-22 radar-evading fighters, an unspecified number of B-52 bomber aircrafts and F-15K jets of the South Korean air force.

Deliberate provocation

This “show of formidable air power”, South Korea’s news agency Yonhap reported, “appears aimed at further pressuring the North to give up its nuclear ambitions”. North Korea’s state news agency KCNA termed the drill a “deliberate military provocation to the trend of the favorably developing situation on the Korean Peninsula,”

Referring to the joint declaration promising peace in the peninsula, the KCNA’s report said, “However, even before the ink of the historic April 27 Declaration got dry, the South Korean authorities and the US started such a drill against the DPRK”.

Under these circumstances, the report said, North Korea was compelled to cancel the high-level meeting scheduled with South Korean officials.    

Only hours after the meeting with South Korean officials was called off, a statement by Kye Gwan said North Korea might also consider cancelling the summit meet with Donald Trump if the US “is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment.”

High-ranking US officials such as the National Security Adviser John Bolton, Kye Gwan complained, “are letting loose the assertions of so-called Libya mode of nuclear abandonment, "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization", "total decommissioning of nuclear weapons, missiles, biochemical weapons". etc, while talking about formula of "abandoning nuclear weapons first, compensating afterwards”.”       

Kim Jong-un assumed state power about the same time when Muammar Gaddafi - after conceding to American demands of denuclearization and allowing the US to verify that the nuclear programme had been completely dismantled - was brutally killed by US-backed rebel forces. In the aftermath of his murder, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had said, “We came, we saw, he died.” Libya has since plunged into anarchy and violence.

“A sinister move”

Bolton’s insistence that North Korea must concede to this Libyan model, Kye Gwan said, “is essentially a manifestation of [an] awfully sinister move to impose on our.. state the destiny of Libya or Iraq.” He further added, “It is absolutely absurd to dare compare the DPRK, a nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development.”

Clarifying that North Korea was not seeking any economic assistance or investment from the US in exchange for denuclearization, Kye Gwan concluded his statement by saying, “If the Trump administration takes an approach to the DPRK-U.S. summit with sincerity for improved DPRK-U.S. relations, it will receive a deserved response from us. However, if the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit.”