North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he would move the country’s clocks 30 minutes forward to unify with the South’s time-zone as a conciliatory gesture after Friday’s inter-Korean summit, Seoul said Sunday.
The two countries on the divided peninsula have had different time-zones since 2015 when the North suddenly changed its standard time to 30 minutes behind the South.
Pyongyang cited a nationalistic rationale, saying it would return the North to the time-zone used before Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the peninsula to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation from Tokyo.
But Mr. Kim promised to change the time-zone back during the historic summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Mr. Moon’s spokesman said. The pair held the summit — the third such meeting between the two Koreas — at the border truce village of Panmunjom, during which Mr. Kim set the foot on the south side of the border for the first time and the two leaders pledged to pursue denuclearisation and a permanent peace.
‘Heartbreaking scene’
Mr. Kim said he found it “heartbreaking” to see two wall clocks hanging at the summit venue showing different times for the two neighbours, the spokesman Yoon Young-chan said.
“Since we were the ones who made the change from the standard time, we will go back to the original time. You can announce it publicly,” Mr. Yoon quoted Mr. Kim as saying.
Inviting international experts to oversee the closure of the Punggye-ri test site in May, Mr. Kim also slammed speculation that the site was already unusable after an underground tunnel there reportedly collapsed.
“As they will see once they visit, there are two more tunnels (at the test site) that are even bigger... and they are in good condition,” he was quoted as saying.
The remarks are likely to be seen as a sweetener ahead of Mr. Trump’s eagerly-awaited summit with Mr. Kim, which the U.S. President said would take place “in the next three or four weeks”.
Mr. Trump touted his ability to achieve a nuclear deal with the regime at a campaign-style rally in Michigan to cheers and chants of “Nobel! Nobel!”
But he also sounded a note of caution, saying he was prepared to walk away if U.S. demands for North Korea to relinquish its atomic arsenal were not met.
Trump calls Moon, Abe
Mr. Trump held phone calls earlier on Saturday with both Mr. Moon and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, declaring “things are going very well”, as CBS News reported that Mongolia and Singapore are the final two locations under consideration for his meeting with Mr. Kim.
Pyongyang has demanded as-yet-unspecified security guarantees to discuss its arsenal, but Mr. Kim could use the Trump meeting to agree on “the range of nuclear weapons and facilities to be dismantled and specific time-frame to do so”, said Hong Min, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification.
Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon said at their summit that they had a “common goal of realising, through complete denuclearisation, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”
But the phrase is a diplomatic euphemism open to interpretation on both sides.
Pyongyang has long wanted to see an end to the U.S. military presence and nuclear umbrella over the South, but it invaded its neighbour in 1950 and is the only one of the two Koreas to possess nuclear weapons.
The two leaders also pledged in a joint statement to formally end the Korean War, which ceased in 1953 with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
