The visit to South Korea of Kim Jong Un amid hopes of a peace treaty after a 65-year-old war shouldn’t fool President Donald Trump ahead of his own historic summit with the North Korean leader, a defector from the North says.
In an interview with the Sunday Times of London, defector Na Min Hee, who in 2010 was among the performers at a parade in Pyongyang when Kim made his public debut as the ruling dynasty’s new leader, said Kim will just use the meetings for propaganda for his own agenda.
“Kim is just trying to find a way out of the dilemma’s he’s facing right now,” she told the Sunday Times. “There is no genuine intent to negotiate. He wants to buy time for his nuclear program. For my whole life, his father, Kim [Jong Il] and now Kim [Jong Un] have not been interested in any real change. That would only lead to the demise of him and his regime.”
Na added that she hopes “Trump does not waver from his previous position on North Korea.”
“The country is not changing,” she said. “I hope he will remember that [Kim Jong Un] is a criminal violating the human rights of the North Korean people. North Korea is a wasteland of human rights and it is so disappointing that Kim is being taken seriously.”
The North Korean leader will meet South Korea’s Moon Jae-in Friday morning at the Peace House in a demilitarized zone on the divided peninsula — a sit-down that could lay the groundwork for Kim and Trump’s meeting planned for early June.
Na claims the Kim regime sees the visits far differently than the rest of the world.
“North Koreans are being told that these summits are only taking place because the [United States] is afraid of the country’s nuclear weapons,” she told the Sunday Times. “These summits will be used as propaganda in Pyongyang to prop up the glorious reputation of Kim Jong Un as leader.”
And she thinks many North Koreans are secretly alarmed at the prospect of a peace that would mean Kim remains in power.
“The situation is so terrible in the North that some people there would hope for war if it brought a change in society,” she said, the news outlet reported.
Na’s background in a “good family” offered her an apparent escape route, the news outlet reported. She’s now in Seoul preparing to attend a university with the support of Teach North Korean Refugees, a charity that helps defectors adjust, the Sunday Times reported.
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