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发帖数: 897 | 1 SINGAPORE — At an island resort off the coast of Singapore, U.S. event
planners are working day and night with their North Korean counterparts to
set up a summit designed to bring an end to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons
program.
But a particularly awkward logistical issue remains unresolved, according to
two people familiar with the talks. Who’s going to pay for Kim Jong Un’s
hotel stay?
The prideful but cash-poor pariah state requires that a foreign country foot
the bill at its preferred lodging: the Fullerton, a magnificent
neoclassical hotel near the mouth of the Singapore River, where just one
presidential suite costs more than $6,000 per night.
The mundane but diplomatically fraught billing issue is just one of numerous
logistical concerns being hammered out between two teams led by White House
Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and Kim’s de facto chief of staff, Kim
Chang Son, as they strive toward a June 12 meeting.
After weeks of uncertainty, President Trump called off the summit last week,
blaming “open hostility” from North Korea. But a flurry of diplomacy
across two continents got the meeting back on track, and Trump announced
Friday that he would attend as initially planned.
When it comes to paying for lodging at North Korea’s preferred five-star
luxury hotel, the United States is open to covering the costs, the two
people said, but it’s mindful that Pyongyang may view a U.S. payment as
insulting. As a result, U.S. planners are considering asking Singapore, the
host country, to pay for the North Korean delegation’s bill.
“It is an ironic and telling deviation from North Korea’s insistence on
being treated on an ‘equal footing,’ ” said Scott Snyder, a Korea
expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert on Saturday did not rule out the
possibility that the United States would arrange for Singapore’s
government to pay for the North Korean delegation’s accommodations, but
said the United States “is not paying the costs of accommodations in
Singapore for the DPRK delegation.”
The State Department initially declined to comment on the issue.
The heavily sanctioned and isolated regime has a long history of making bold
monetary demands.
During the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea set aside $2.6 million
to cover travel accommodations for a North Korean cheering squad, an art
troupe and other members of the visiting delegation.
At the same Games, the International Olympic Committee paid for 22 North
Korean athletes to travel to the event.
In 2014, when then-U. S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper
Jr. visited North Korea to retrieve two prisoners, his North Korean hosts
served him an “elaborate 12-course Korean meal,” the veteran intelligence
official said, but then insisted that he pay for it.
“These norms were laid in the early 2000s, when Seoul’s so-called sunshine
policy took off,” said Sung-Yoon Lee, an expert on Korea at Tufts
University, referring to a policy of rapprochement associated with former
South Korean president Kim Dae-jung. “North Korea can build nukes and ICBMs
, but claim they are too poor to pay for foreign travel costs.”
Any payment for North Koreans’ accommodations would run afoul of Treasury
Department sanctions, said Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former Treasury official.
The transaction would require the Office of Foreign Assets Control to “
temporarily suspend the applicability of sanctions” through a waiver, she
said.
The United States is expected to request these waivers from Treasury and the
United Nations for a range of payments associated with North Korea’s
travel, but a long list of exemptions could draw scrutiny.
“There are legitimate mechanisms built in for exemptions depending on the
circumstance, but this could run into public and political criticism and
send the wrong message to North Korea,” said Duyeon Kim, a visiting fellow
at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum, a nonpartisan think tank in Seoul.
Figuring out how to pay Pyongyang’s hotel tab will not be the only unusual
planning obstacle that comes with hosting an event with the isolated regime.
The country’s outdated and underused Soviet-era aircraft may require a
landing in China because of concerns it won’t make the 3,000-mile trip — a
visit that would probably require a plausible cover story to avoid
embarrassment. Alternatively, the North Koreans might travel in a plane
provided by another country.
Many of those issues have been secondary to the major decision of selecting
a venue space for the two leaders to meet. For that, the two sides are
believed to have settled on the Capella hotel on the resort island of
Sentosa, the people familiar with the talks said. Situated off Singapore’s
southeast coast, the hotel boasts a mix of colonial-style buildings and
curvy modern edifices.
On Wednesday, a Washington Post reporter witnessed construction crews
erecting tents and other facilities required for a large event. The reporter
was later instructed to leave the premises after interacting with the U.S.
planning delegation, which is staying at the resort. The resort’s relative
seclusion appealed to security-conscious U.S. and North Korean officials.
During Trump’s visit to Singapore, he is expected to stay at the Shangri-La
, a 747-room hotel that is accustomed to high-security events. It hosts the
annual -Shangri-La Dialogue, a security conference that attracts dozens of
ministers of defense and state.
White House and State Department officials repeatedly declined to comment on
the advance team planning, keeping those discussions more opaque than the
substance of the negotiations.
Rexon Ryu, a former White House official who dealt with the North Korea
nuclear issue, said the North Korean side in particular has an interest in
keeping those discussions quiet.
“These talks go to the question of security, and if anything, that’s
probably most immediately paramount to Kim,” he said. “I think for many
folks on the North Korean side, this is more important than the content of
the negotiations.” | f**********n
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