Youtube daily report May 23 2018

Summits give aged North Korean spies hope of returning home

GWANGJU, South Korea — Hes spent nearly six decades trapped on enemy soil, surviving 29 years in a prison where he was tortured by South Korean guards before being released to a life of poverty and police surveillance.

Now, 89 years old and bedridden with illness, former North Korean spy Seo Ok-yeol just wants to go home.

People have a need to die in a place where they are respected, Seo said, though he worries it could be too late to finally be reunited with the wife and children he left behind.

Seo is among 19 Cold War-era North Korean spies and guerrillas who have served their time in South Korean prison and are pushing to return to the North.

Though they are officially free now, Seoul has refused to let them return as it seeks commitments from Pyongyang for the return of hundreds of South Koreans thought held there.The Associated Press recently spoke with seven of the former spies, all men in their 80s and 90s who insist North Korea is their ideological homeland. Though they have seen past efforts to negotiate their return fall apart, the men are filled with renewed optimism after the leaders of the Koreas held a summit last month and pledged to resolve all humanitarian issues caused by their nations 70 years of division.

I wept tears of joy, 82-year-old Yang Hee-chul, a former spy, said of the summit.

I have a ray of hope that our issue could be resolved..

In 2000, during a previous thaw in North-South relations that also saw their leaders meet, South Korea sent back 63 North Korean spies and guerrillas.

Dozens of other North Koreans who had served time in prison later applied for repatriation, but it never happened and some have since died.

In a written response, South Koreas Unification Ministry said it was not at this time considering sending back the former spies, adding that the North has not recently asked for them to do so.

Seo was born on a small island off the southwestern coast of the Korean Peninsula, when Japan was its colonial overlord.

During the 1950-53 Korean War he volunteered for the Norths Korean Peoples Army.

After the war ended, he settled in North Korea, and eventually became a spy.

He was captured in 1961, after he had swam across a river into the South for what he said was a mission to promote Korean unification.

Park Hee-seong was the chief engineer for a North Korean spy boat in 1962 when he and three others traded gunfire with a South Korean navy ship off the east coast.

He was shot twice and eventually taken into South Korean custody.

I tried to blow myself up with a reserve grenade, but it didnt explode.

so Im still living here like this, the 83-year-old said, showing an arm bent from a gunshot wound.

Most of the spies spent decades in prison.

While in custody, they say they were tortured to get them to abandon their communist beliefs.

Kim Young-sik, who worked as a radio man on a North Korean spy ship before his 1962 capture, said he broke under torture in 1973.

He said a fellow inmate tied him to a board, put a thin towel on his face and poured water from a kettle on his face.

I felt like I was dying, the 85-year-old recalled.

Im still very angry, he said.

How could they torture me to force me to give up an ideology that I believe is correct?.

Guards also forced Kim and others to eat off the floor with their hands cuffed behind their backs, while others said they were spun while hanging from the ceiling, their hands again cuffed behind their backs.

Not all cracked.

The 63 men repatriated in 2000 were chosen by Seoul because they never disavowed communism during their decades in prison.

They received a heroes welcome in Pyongyang, with hundreds of thousands of people pouring into the streets.

A number of North Korean spies were released from prison after South Korea achieved democracy in the late 1980s following decades of authoritarian rule.

The ex-convicts were given South Korean citizenship, but to this day some are required to report who they meet and what they talk about to police every two months.

Most have eked out a living as manual laborers.

Those North Koreans who were born in the South say their estranged relatives were often harassed by the police and blackballed so they couldnt work in the government.

Three of Seos brothers and a sister, who had all stayed in South Korea after the war, served time in prison for not reporting their meetings with him.

I feel sorry to them because they couldnt have happy lives because of me, Seo said.

The former spies describe an isolating existence in which they are often looked at with suspicion by neighbors.

I hate my birthday and holidays the most, Park said.

I used to stay in my home all day on those days because I knew I would miss my family more if I saw people having a good time outside..

Park had a young wife and a 16-month-old son in North Korea at the time of his 1962 arrest.

Like many of the spies, Seo couldnt say goodbye to his wife and two baby sons because his mission required strict confidentiality.

Seo, whose wife would be 87 if shes alive, never remarried.

Others did.

Yang married a South Korean woman about a year after he was set free following 37 years of imprisonment.

He didnt apply for repatriation in 2000, though he thinks hell go back if given a second chance.

My wife understands me but my daughter doesnt.

She keeps asking me why Id go, he said.

For most the reason is simple.

Despite their decades in South Korea, all of the men who spoke to the AP were unrepentant communists.

Communism, they say, is the only system that will take care of the Korean working classes.

Some are proud that North Korea successfully punished colonial-era pro-Japanese collaborators while South Koreas pro-U.S.

government let them stay in power.

When the men entered prison, North Korea was wealthier than South Korea.

They emerged into a world where South Korea was a regional economic power and a vibrant democracy, while the North struggled to recover from a devastating famine and has long been seen as a one of the worlds worst abusers of human rights.

Still they remain unbowed in their support for the ideals they fought for so many years ago.

Communism is for the masses of people, not just a few rulers, Seo said.

That philosophy remains the same..

For more infomation >> Summits give aged North Korean spies hope of returning home - Duration: 10:00.

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Can Trump Still Claim Victory if Kim Jong-un Keeps His Nuclear Arms? - Duration: 8:35.

Can Trump Still Claim Victory if Kim Jong-un Keeps His Nuclear Arms?

TOKYO — From the moment President Trump accepted an audacious invitation to meet Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader, he raised expectations that he would finally do what none of his predecessors had: get North Korea to abandon its nuclear arsenal.

Yet, as a warning last week from the North made clear — and as most experts on the country have long declared — Mr Kim may have no intention of giving up his nuclear weapons any time soon, if ever.

Now the question is how Mr Trump will redefine success, if the summit meeting actually takes place as planned.

If Mr Trump and Mr Kim do sit down in a room in Singapore on June 12, it is clear that denuclearization is all but off the table in the short term.

But analysts suggested Mr Trump would have no trouble finding other ways to claim victory.

"The reality is that the summit will be a success because Trump will package, sell, and call it a success to his supporters," said Duyeon Kim, a visiting senior fellow at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum in Seoul, the South Korean capital.

"It unfortunately won't matter what the experts think.".

In a sign that plans were still moving forward, the South's president, Moon Jae-in, arrived in Washington for a meeting with Mr Trump on Tuesday to discuss details of the coming talks.

Experts — many of whom have sharply criticized Mr Trump's improvisational approach to diplomacy and apparent lack of knowledge about the history of prior, failed deals with North Korea — said one realistic outcome could be a simple declaration stating that denuclearization is an eventual goal.

With the memory of North Korea's missile and nuclear tests and Mr Trump's "fire and fury" rhetoric still fresh in most minds, analysts said even a vague deal could be more desirable than a return to the rising tensions of last year.

Coupled with a North Korean agreement to extend its moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests, and a promise not to export nuclear arms, analysts said such a deal would be an important starting point for future negotiations.

"That's not what the president is promising or what everybody is hoping for, but it would be really good and they should take it," said Jeffrey Lewis, a Korea expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

"You're not getting rid of the weapons, but putting yourself on the path where someday they might not be needed.

Maybe not in Kim Jong-un's lifetime, but it is still worth making that progress, especially because 2017 was really scary.".

Mr Trump's desire for a quick, tweetable triumph could leave room for professional diplomats and nuclear experts to hammer out a longer-term agreement with North Korean officials, some analysts say.

"He will come out and say, 'Where is my peace prize?' " said Suzanne DiMaggio, a director and senior fellow at the New America research group who has been involved in unofficial talks with North Korea.

"He really just wants to emerge from the summit as saying, 'I got them to do what no other president could,' and I think then he will probably lose interest.".

"The less President Trump is involved in that process," Ms.

DiMaggio said, "the better.".

A vague promise to denuclearize would probably disappoint many in Washington, where there are memories of the North Koreans' reneging on deals before.

It would also fall far short of the demands of hawks like John R.

Bolton, Mr Trump's national security adviser, who has called for total and immediate denuclearization.

And having recently pulled out of the Iran nuclear accord because it was a "horrible one-sided deal," Mr Trump has set expectations that he could get a better agreement from North Korea.

Some analysts said North Korea was also unlikely to be satisfied by vague proclamations.

Mr Kim is likely to demand a clear guarantee that the United States would never attack, as well as quick relief from international sanctions.

Mr Trump has praised those sanctions for bringing Mr Kim to the table in the first place.

But even if Mr Trump tries to hold firm on them, analysts said, he may already have lost that leverage, as both South Korea and, more crucially, China have indicated that they are willing to lower the pressure on the North.

The North "will count on the fact that they have opened up a track with the Chinese and the Chinese are not in a favorable mind towards Trump right now," said Christopher R.

Hill, who negotiated with Pyongyang for several years during the George W.

Bush administration.

"There's a problem with U.S.-Chinese relations that the North Koreans will seek to exploit in the coming months.".

Given the North's negative reaction last week to South Korea's joint military exercises with the United States, Mr Kim may also use the talks with Mr Trump to call for scaling back the number of American troops in South Korea.

It would be a mistake to concede that right away, analysts said.

"If Trump puts significant sanctions relief or a rollback of U.S.

military forces in the region on the table too soon, he may not have enough leverage to incentivize North Korea to take steps down the road to continue dismantling its nuclear program," said Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association in Washington.

In his meeting with Mr Trump on Tuesday, Mr Moon of South Korea may also push again for signing a peace treaty with North Korea to formally end the Korean War after more than 60 years.

Such a deal could be appealing for Mr Trump, because it would give him a clear opportunity to declare a success that no other president has achieved.

Yet even that could compromise the security of American allies if a deal were signed without negotiating a drawdown of North Korea's conventional weapons, particularly the thousands of artillery pieces it has pointed at the South, and its short- and medium-range missiles that can reach Japan.

"If you just sign a treaty because it sounds Nobel Peace Prize-worthy, but you don't address the threat, then you've created a more dangerous situation," said Bruce Klingner, a specialist in Korean and Japanese affairs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.