Media: Moon may attend Trump-Kim summit

US team has arrived in DPRK to prepare for the anticipated meeting

The Republic of Korea said on Monday that holding a three-way summit between the ROK, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the United States will depend on the outcome of the DPRKUS summit.

The remarks, by an unidentified official from the presidential Blue House, were carried in local media reports.

Possibilities ran high for top DPRK leader Kim Jongun and US President Donald Trump to hold the first DPRK-US summit in Singapore on June 12 as scheduled.

Media speculation arose that the ROK President Moon Jae-in may visit Singapore around that date to declare an end to the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice. The Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war under this agreement.

Pre-summit talks between working-level officials from the DPRK and the US were reportedly underway to arrange the Kim-Trump summit.

At the Panmunjom truce village on Sunday, US diplomat Sung Kim crossed the demarcation line into the DPRK for pre-summit negotiations with DPRK Vice-Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui, in what was the latest sign that both sides were working to bring the first meeting between a sitting US president and a DPRK top leader back on track.

The diplomat was summoned from his current post as US Ambassador to the Philippines. He also served as top US envoy to the ROK and was the chief negotiator for denuclearization talks with Pyongyang during the George W. Bush administration.

ROK's Yonhap reported on Monday that the three-way summit could be possibly held in Singapore "if all issues, including the agenda, are to be perfectly dealt with at the working-level talks between Pyongyang and Washington".

Zhu Feng, dean of the School at International Relations of Nanjing University, said that to hold a three-way summit meets Seoul's intention as the coordinator between Pyongyang and Washington, which is to avoid confrontation and failure to achieve pragmatic results between the two.

'Firm resolve'

Moon and Kim met on Saturday on the DPRK side of the border village Panmunjom, the second inter-Korean summit in a month after the April 27 summit on the ROK side of the village.

In a nationally televised address on Sunday, Moon confirmed the willingness of Kim and Trump to hold the Singapore summit as scheduled.

Kim "again made clear his commitment to a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula", Moon said in the address, adding that Kim said he's willing to cooperate to end confrontation and work toward peace for the sake of the successful summit with Trump.

Moon also said he told Kim that Trump has a "firm resolve" to end hostile relations with Pyongyang and initiate economic cooperation if Kim implements "complete denuclearization".

"What Kim is unclear about is that he has concerns about whether his country can surely trust the United States over its promise to end hostile relations and provide a security guarantee if they do denuclearization," Moon said.

Gregory Koblentz, associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, said the key outcome of the DPRK-US meeting is to specify what the US and DPRK mean by "denuclearization" and if there is any overlap between these definitions. "If not, then the summit is still in doubt," Koblentz said.

Xinhua contributed to this story.

panmengqi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/29/2018 page12)