North Korea welcomed former US president Bill Clinton to Pyongyang with flowers and hearty handshakes yesterday as he arrived on a surprise mission to bring home two jailed US journalists.
Clinton landed in an unmarked jet. On arrival he shook hands with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-kwan and the deputy speaker of parliament.
Footage from TV news agency APTN showed Clinton bowing and smiling as a young girl presented him with flowers.
PHOTO: AP/KYODO NEWS
The unusually warm exchange between North Korean officials and the former leader of a wartime foe comes amid heightened tensions between the US and Pyongyang over the North’s nuclear program.
Clinton was making his first trip to North Korea in hopes of securing the release of Laura Ling (凌志美) and Euna Lee, reporters for former US vice president Al Gore’s California-based Current TV media venture who were arrested along the North Korean-Chinese border in March.
The visit could reap rewards beyond the women’s release, with Clinton and North Korean officials broaching the nuclear impasse, diplomatic relations and other long-standing issues, analysts said.
Kim also serves as North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator.
“This is a very potentially rewarding trip. Not only is it likely to resolve the case of the two American journalists detained in North Korea for many months, but it could be a very significant opening and breaking this downward cycle of tension and recrimination between the US and North Korea,” Mike Chinoy, author of Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, said in Beijing.
North Korea accused Ling, 32, and Lee, 36, of sneaking into the country illegally in March and engaging in “hostile acts,” and the nation’s top court sentenced them in June to 12 years of hard labor.
The US and North Korea do not have diplomatic relations, but officials were believed to be working behind the scenes to negotiate their release.
Clinton, Gore and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who in the 1990s traveled twice to North Korea to secure the freedom of detained Americans, had all been named as possible envoys to bring back Lee and Ling. The decision to send Clinton was kept quiet.
A senior US official confirmed to reporters traveling to Africa with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the former president was in Pyongyang to secure the journalists’ release, but said the White House would not comment until the mission was complete.
“While this solely private mission to secure the release of two Americans is on the ground, we will have no comment,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement. “We do not want to jeopardize the success of former president Clinton’s mission.”
North Korea’s official state media said leader Kim Jong-il met Clinton yesterday.
The Korean Central News Agency and other outlets reported the two men met in Pyongyang and that Clinton had “courteously” conveyed a verbal message from US President Barack Obama.
The report says Kim Jong-il expressed his thanks, and that the two shared a “wide-ranging exchange of views” at a dinner for Clinton at the state guest house.
In Washington, however, the White House was quick to say that Clinton had not carried a message from Obama for Kim Jong-il.
“That’s not true,” spokesman Gibbs told reporters.
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