hankyoreh

An image of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during on-the-spot guidance of facilities at the Myohyangsan Medical Appliances Factory released by the Korean Central Television network on Oct. 27. (Yonhap News)

“The US is seriously mistaken if it [means to pass the end of this year in peace] by exploiting the close personal relations between its president and the Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK [North Korea] [as] delaying tactics,” Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) Central Committee Vice Chairman Kim Yong-chol said.

In the statement, which was released by the Korean Central News Agency on Oct. 27, Kim accused the US of intending “to isolate and stifle the DPRK in a more crafty and vicious way than before, instead of complying with our call for a change in its calculation method.” The statement credited Kim as chairman of the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee (KAPPC).

The only thing sustaining the current level of North Korea-US relations, the statement said, is “the close personal relations between Chairman of the State Affairs Commission Kim Jong-un and President Trump.” But the statement added that their relationship does not justify ignoring popular sentiment, nor does it guarantee the prevention or reversal of a downturn in North Korea-US relations. The takeaway here is the implication that even Kim Jong-un can’t disregard popular sentiment.

The statement included some ominous warnings: “There is a limit to everything. [. . .] My hope is that the diplomatic adage that there is neither permanent foe nor permanent friend does not change into the one that there is a permanent foe but no permanent friend.”

In terms of its message, the statement reconfirms the end-of-the-year deadline expressed by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in his policy speech at the Supreme People’s Assembly on Apr. 12. During that speech, Kim said that he would wait patiently until the end of the year for the US to make a bold decision, which would require devising a new methodology acceptable to both sides (referred to as a “new calculation”).

Kim Yong-chol’s statement basically sends the same message to the US, though in different wording, as the Oct. 24 statement in which Kim Kye-gwan, advisor to North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said, “We want to see how wisely the US will pass the end of the year.

The difference between the two statements is that Kim Kye-gwan stressed Kim’s “appeal” to Trump with the hopeful proverb, “Where there is a will, there is a way,” while Kim Yong-chol focused on pressuring the US with the warning message that “there is a limit to everything.”

Workers’ Party of Korea Central Committee Vice Chairman Kim Yong-chol delivers a personal letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to US President Donald Trump at the White House on Jan. 20. (Hankyoreh archives)

Even more notable, however, is the fact that the statement was attributed to Kim Yong-chol. It was generally assumed that Kim Yong-chol had bowed out of the negotiations with the US following the two sides’ failure to reach an agreement in their second summit, held in Hanoi this past February. This statement suggests that Kim may still have some degree of involvement in the talks with the US, even if he’s no longer the point man.

It’s important to infer Pyongyang’s intentions behind releasing a statement under the name of Kim Yong-chol at a delicate point in North Korea-US negotiations. After the Hanoi summit, the official negotiating framework between the two countries shifted to the channel of communication between North Korea’s Foreign Ministry and the US State Department. But little progress has been achieved through that channel, which could have led to the quiet reopening of the three-way communication channel linking Kim Yong-chol with South Korean National Intelligence Service Director Suh Hoon and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the very channel that organized two North Korea-US summits and the three inter-Korean summits.

Future developments will prove whether or not Kim Yong-chol’s attribution in this statement is tangible evidence that this channel is in operation once again. The statement refers to Kim Yong-chol as “chairman of the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee,” the very title he used during meetings with Trump on two visits to the US as special envoy for Kim Jong-un.

“The statements by Kim Yong-chol and Kim Kye-gwan are cut from the same cloth. This is evidence that elder statesmen still have a role to play,” said a key official from the South Korean government.

“We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions about what Kim Jong-un intended by issuing the Kim Yong-chol statement. Even so, we ought to take this as a good opportunity to look into ways of reactivating the channel of communication between Suh Hoon, Kim Yong-chol, and Mike Pompeo,” suggested a former high-ranking government official.

But the dominant view is that this statement shouldn’t be taken as meaning that Kim Yong-chol is likely to return to the prominent role he had in the North Korea-US negotiations prior to the Hanoi rupture.

On a related story, Kim Jong-un sharply criticized officials in the party’s central committee for not being on the same page as him during a visit to the Myohyangsan Medical Appliances Factory, North Korea’s state-run newspaper the Rodong Sinmun reported in a front-page story in its Oct. 27 edition.

Kim returned to the same factory he’d slammed as looking a little better than a stable during an on-the-spot guidance there in August 2018. Fourteen months later, Kim said that “the modernization project [at] the factory is being done as planned by the Party in general” and that “the factory was given a complete facelift” but also pointed out “some drawbacks when seen in detail.”

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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