Travis King defected to North Korea to escape “mistreatment and racial discrimination in the US Army,” Pyongyang’s state media said yesterday, in its first official confirmation that it is holding the US soldier.
A private second class with a checkered disciplinary record, King was due to fly back to the US last month, but instead slipped out of South Korea’s main airport, joined a tourist trip to the demilitarized zone and ran across the border into North Korea.
The US has previously said that King crossed the border at the Joint Security Area in the demilitarized zone separating the North and the South “willfully and without authorization.”
Photo: AFP
Following a North Korean investigation, King “admitted that he illegally intruded,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
“Travis King confessed that he had decided to come over to the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] as he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the US Army,” KCNA said.
King “came to be kept under control by soldiers of the Korean People’s Army” after he crossed the border, it said.
“He also expressed his willingness to seek refuge in the DPRK or a third country, saying that he was disillusioned at the unequal American society,” KCNA said, adding that a government investigation was still ongoing.
The UN Command, which oversees the armistice that ended fighting in the Korean War, last month confirmed it had begun a conversation with North Korea over King.
However, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the time that while contact had been made with Pyongyang, Washington still had no idea where King was or in what condition.
KCNA did not provide any details about King’s health or location, or about what they planned to do with him.
North Korea’s first official comment on King was pure propaganda, said Soo Kim, policy practice area lead at LMI Consulting and a former CIA analyst.
“King’s crossing into North Korea provided the Kim [Jong-un] regime an opportunity in several ways, the first of which is, of course, the potential for negotiations with the US over King’s release,” she said, adding that Pyongyang has “tough negotiators,” so it would not be easy for Washington to secure his release.
Pyongyang has a long history of detaining Americans and using them as bargaining chips in bilateral negotiations.
“It’s also an opportunity for the regime propaganda to do its thing — to spin the situation in such a way as to criticize the US and express Pyongyang’s deep-rooted hostility towards Washington,” she added.
Just before it issued its comments on King, KCNA put out a statement criticizing discussion of Pyongyang’s rights record at the UN, describing the US as “the anti-people empire of evils, totally depraved due to all sorts of social evils.”
“Not content with conniving at and fostering racial discrimination, gun-related crimes, child maltreatment and forced labor rampant in its society, the US has imposed unethical human rights standards on other countries and fomented internal unrest and confusion,” the statement read.
LONG FLIGHT: The jets would be flown by US pilots, with Taiwanese copilots in the two-seat F-16D variant to help familiarize them with the aircraft, the source said The US is expected to fly 10 Lockheed Martin F-16C/D Block 70/72 jets to Taiwan over the coming months to fulfill a long-awaited order of 66 aircraft, a defense official said yesterday. Word that the first batch of the jets would be delivered soon was welcome news to Taiwan, which has become concerned about delays in the delivery of US arms amid rising military tensions with China. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said the initial tranche of the nation’s F-16s are rolling off assembly lines in the US and would be flown under their own power to Taiwan by way
CHIP WAR: The new restrictions are expected to cut off China’s access to Taiwan’s technologies, materials and equipment essential to building AI semiconductors Taiwan has blacklisted Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), dealing another major blow to the two companies spearheading China’s efforts to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip technologies. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ International Trade Administration has included Huawei, SMIC and several of their subsidiaries in an update of its so-called strategic high-tech commodities entity list, the latest version on its Web site showed on Saturday. It did not publicly announce the change. Other entities on the list include organizations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as companies in China, Iran and elsewhere. Local companies need
CRITICISM: It is generally accepted that the Straits Forum is a CCP ‘united front’ platform, and anyone attending should maintain Taiwan’s dignity, the council said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it deeply regrets that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) echoed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China” principle and “united front” tactics by telling the Straits Forum that Taiwanese yearn for both sides of the Taiwan Strait to move toward “peace” and “integration.” The 17th annual Straits Forum yesterday opened in Xiamen, China, and while the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) local government heads were absent for the first time in 17 years, Ma attended the forum as “former KMT chairperson” and met with Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Huning (王滬寧). Wang
CROSS-STRAIT: The MAC said it barred the Chinese officials from attending an event, because they failed to provide guarantees that Taiwan would be treated with respect The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Friday night defended its decision to bar Chinese officials and tourism representatives from attending a tourism event in Taipei next month, citing the unsafe conditions for Taiwanese in China. The Taipei International Summer Travel Expo, organized by the Taiwan Tourism Exchange Association, is to run from July 18 to 21. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮) on Friday said that representatives from China’s travel industry were excluded from the expo. The Democratic Progressive Party government is obstructing cross-strait tourism exchange in a vain attempt to ignore the mainstream support for peaceful development
RSS