Junior Digest

SEOUL,Jan 20,2021: South Korea’s president on Wednesday nominated a former national security adviser who was partly blamed for a failed summit between North Korea and the United States in 2019 as the country’s next foreign minister.

FILE PHOTO: South Korean presidential national security director Chung Eui-yong speaks to the media after returning from Panmunjom at the Inter-Korean Transit Office in Paju, South Korea, June 12, 2019. Lee Jin-man/Pool via REUTERS

The nomination of Chung Eui-yong, 74, to replace Kang Kyung-wha as foreign minister was seen as a bid to help revive stalled denuclearisation talks with North Korea, just hours before Joe Biden takes office as the U.S. president.

Chung had sought to mediate between the two countries as President Moon Jae-in’s top security adviser, making a surprise announcement on the White House lawn in March 2018 that U.S. President Donald Trump would hold a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

But Chung was accused of misleading both sides about the potential for agreement after their second summit in 2019 in Vietnam failed to produce a deal.

The reshuffle came two days after Moon called for Biden to hold dialogue with North Korea to build on progress made by Kim and Trump at their first meeting in Singapore.

Chung’s nomination is to “breathe new life into the lineup of diplomats and regroup their forces in time for the inauguration of the Biden administration,” a presidential official told reporters.

Kim and Trump agreed in Singapore to foster new relations and work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

But their Vietnam summit collapsed when Trump rejected Kim’s offer to abandon North Korea’s main nuclear facility in return for lifting some sanctions, an idea that Moon had trumpeted on hopes for a restart of inter-Korean economic projects.

Dec 25,2020:The United States has started the process of establishing a consulate in Western Sahara, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday, just weeks after Donald Trump’s administration formally recognised Morocco’s claim to the disputed territory.

In a brief statement on Thursday, Pompeo said it was “inaugurating a virtual presence post for Western Sahara, with a focus on promoting economic and social development, to be followed soon by a fully functioning consulate”.

A virtual presence post allows US consular officials and staff to conduct remote, diplomatic engagement without maintaining a physical location in a designated city or region.

The State Department said the Western Sahara virtual presence post would be managed by the US embassy in Rabat, the Moroccan capital.

The Trump administration on December 10 announced it recognised Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara as part of a US-brokered deal that saw Morocco and Israel agree to establish formal diplomatic relations.

Morocco is the fourth country to sign a normalisation deal with Israel in the past months at the behest of the US, after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.

The first direct commercial flight between Israel and Morocco took place this week, as an Israeli delegation left from Tel Aviv and landed in Rabat on Tuesday. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, accompanied the Israeli delegation.

In a statement, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI said the US’s recognition of the country’s claim to Western Sahara is a “historic turning point” and described the normalisation deal with Israel, which was rejected by Palestinians, as a “promising development for peace in the Middle East”.
Decades-long fight

Moroccan forces and the Algeria-backed breakaway movement Polisario Front have been fighting over the Western Sahara – a vast area bordering Morocco, Mauritania and Algeria that was previously under Spanish control – for decades.

Washington’s recognition of Morocco’s claim to the area drew condemnation from the Polisario Front, which slammed it as “a blatant violation of the United Nations charter and the resolutions of international legitimacy”.

“This will not change an inch of the reality of the conflict and the right of the people of Western Sahara to self determination,” the Polisario’s Europe representative Oubi Bchraya said on December 10. “The Polisario will continue its struggle.”

The US was the first country in the world to recognise Morocco’s claim.

The US said it continues to support a Moroccan proposal to grant limited autonomy to Sahrawis under overarching Moroccan control.

“The United States looks forward to this increased engagement and we will continue to support political negotiations to resolve the issues between Morocco and the POLISARIO within the framework of Morocco’s autonomy plan,” Pompeo said in Thursday’s statement.

New Delhi, Jan 1 ,2021: India on Friday returned to the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member, wishing to be an agent of hope and change in the post-Covid world.

This is the eighth time that India takes a seat in the 15-member Council as an elected member.

The last time the country served a two-year stint at the global high table was in 2011-12.

The Narendra Modi government has said India would play “a positive role” at a time when the global community is beset by multiple challenges.

It will be guided by the five priorities — new opportunities for progress, effective response to international terrorism, reforming multilateral systems, comprehensive approach to international peace and security and technology with a human touch.

“We seek to move towards a new orientation for reformed multilateral system,” External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said, besides “concrete and result oriented action for an effective response to international terrorism.”

India assumes a seat at the council at a time when the “normal process of international governance has been under increasing strain as friction has increased and traditional and non traditional security challenges continue to grow unchecked and global institutions remain unreformed and under-represented.

India has pitched for reformed multilateralism, including a revamp of the United Nations, stating that its credibility and effectiveness were being called into question because of its “narrow” leadership.

“You do need reform multilateralism you need to make it representative. You refresh your phone regularly, someone needs to press that refresh button on the UN,” Jaishankar said at the global technology summit in Bengaluru last month.

The nuclear summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Hanoi ended without an agreement Thursday, the White House said after the two leaders cut short their discussions.

They had “very good and constructive meetings” and “discussed various ways to advance denuclearisation and economic driven concepts”, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

But she went on: “No agreement was reached at this time,” adding that their “respective teams look forward to meeting in the future,” No joint communique was issued, despite high expectations beforehand for progress.

In the original White House programme, a “Joint Agreement Signing Ceremony” was scheduled as well as a working lunch for the two leaders.

In the event, both men left the summit venue without a public signing ceremony and Trump moved up his news conference by two hours, sparking doubts about the progress made at the summit.

The Hanoi summit was supposed to build on their initial historic meeting at Singapore that critics said was more style over substance.

In Hanoi, the smiles and bonhomie remained as Trump touted the “special relationship” between the two but concrete statements were vague.

From the outset, Trump had appeared to downplay expectations of an immediate breakthrough in nuclear talks, saying he was in “no rush” to clinch a rapid deal and was content if a pause in missile testing continued.

He frequently dangled the prospect of a brighter economic future for a nuclear-free North Korea, at one point saying there was “AWESOME” potential.

As in Singapore, the two men put on a show of bonhomie, appeared to share jokes in front of reporters.

Looking relaxed but appearing to say little, they indulged in a poolside stroll Thursday around the gardens of the luxury Metropole Hotel, a colonial-era building that has played host to stars ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Brad Pitt.

It echoed a garden walkabout in Singapore, where the two men bonded over Trump’s hulking car — the “Beast” — with the US president allowing the younger man a glimpse inside.

It was a far cry from the height of missile-testing tensions in 2017 when Trump slammed Kim as “rocket man” and the younger man branded the American president a “mentally deranged US dotard”.

In apparently unprecedented scenes, Kim answered unscripted questions from foreign reporters, saying that he would welcome the establishment of a US liaison office in Pyongyang, which would be a step on the way to diplomatic normalisation.

The Pyongyang strongman is looking for relief from sanctions imposed on the North because of its weapons programmes, which saw tensions soar in 2017 before a wave of detente.

He said there were “people who hold a sceptical view of our meeting” but pledged to seek “great, ultimately good results”.

“I think watching us have a great time will be like watching a scene from a fantasy movie,” he added.

Before the summit, there was talk that there could be a political declaration ending the 1950-53 Korean War which finished technically with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

There were also hopes Kim could pledge to destroy North Korea’s decades-old Yongbyon nuclear complex, which has long been at the heart of Pyongyang’s atomic development but remains shrouded in secrecy — and North Korea has promised to mothball it twice before.

A patent distraction from the summit was a scandal back home in Washington with Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen calling him a “racist” and a “conman” during a congressional hearing.

The president already showed he had the testimony at the back of his mind when he tweeted about it before his first meeting with Kim, saying Cohen — who has been sentenced to three years in jail — was “lying in order to reduce his prison time”.

The summit itself is shrouded in secrecy and there was still no official word even on the venue when Trump touched down in Air Force One late Tuesday. The two leaders were expected to have an informal dinner on Wednesday before more formal talks on Thursday.

Moscow , January 19,2021: The freshly-declassified US strategic framework for the Indo-Pacific region will not hamper the special partnership between New Delhi and Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.
Last week, the White House declassified the Indo-Pacific strategic framework that guides the United States’ policies in the region. The document was supposed to remain classified until 2042. Among other things, it provides for stronger assistance to India, including in its territorial dispute with China.
“We are friends with India, and we are doing the utmost to make sure that India and China, our two great friends and brothers, live in peace with one another. This is our policy, which we promote not only in the context of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and not only in the format of BRICS, but we have a special trilateral format – the troika of Russia-India-China,” Lavrov said at the yearly press conference.

The Russian foreign minister described India as a “very close, very strategic, very special and very privileged partner,” with which Moscow has a close partnership across such areas as economy, innovations, high tech and military cooperation, as well as close coordination in international organizations, such as the United Nations and BRICS.
“I think that we all are wise enough to understand and to see that if a strategy is indeed intended as being not inclusive but rather divisive, then the wisdom of our countries would certainly prevail. And in no way our closest cooperation and partnership with India is going to be affected,” Lavrov said.
According to the Russian minister, the key to preserving good interstate relations even on issues where there is no absolute understanding is a “sincere, open and frank dialogue.”
Another peculiarity that many spotted in the declassified document was that it did not describe Russia as a threat as opposed to the public document on the US national security strategy.