“Juche” is usually translated as “self-reliance” and is the official political ideology of North Korea.
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A South Korean soldier walks by barricades on the road leading to North Korea’s Kaesong joint industrial complex at a military checkpoint in the border city of Paju, August 21, 2015.
The meeting in itself was an achievement after a period of stop-start communication between the Koreas – it was the product of an agreement reached in August following a spike in hostilities.
The cash-strapped North wants the South to resume lucrative tours to its scenic Mount Kumgang resort, which Seoul suspended in 2008 after a female tourist was shot dead by a North Korean guard.
Seoul in turn was expected to try to get Pyongyang to agree to hold reunions of war-separated families on a regular basis, a top humanitarian priority for the South, where more than 60,000 mostly elderly people are looking for relatives in the North. Hwang Boogi, second from left, South Korea’s vice minister of unification and the head negotiator for high-level talks with North Korea, talks as his North Korean counterpart Jon Jong Su, second from right, listens during th… Pyongyang denies any involvement.
“The information that we have access to calls into serious question those claims, but we take very seriously the risk and the threat that is posed by the North Korean regime in their ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon”, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in Thursday’s press briefing.
“The North’s denuclearisation needs to be seen as the ultimate goal of inter-Korea dialogue, not a pre-condition of it”, said Kim Keun-Shik, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
Three generations of North Korean leaders – Jong-un as well as his father and grandfather – have visited the site, which has developed everything from firearms to bombs.
Although human rights are not typically a subject discussed at the UNSC, the debate on the DPRK was expanded to include this topic a year ago as the UN General Assembly urged the Council to consider referring North Korea to the International Criminal Court (ICC) after a UN Commission of Inquiry detailed wide-ranging abuses in the hermit Asian state.
South Korea’s intelligence community was skeptical about the North’s H-bomb capability, with an intelligence official saying that the North is not believed to have such capabilities when it has not yet mastered the technology to miniaturize nuclear warheads. “North Korea will not achieve the prosperity and security it seeks and will remain isolated until it abandons its illicit weapons programs and abides by its worldwide obligations and commitments”, she said.
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The United Nations Security Council will discuss the human rights situation in North Korea on Thursday, as defectors and victims of torture complain that not enough has been done since the publication of a landmark report in 2014.
