Going ballistic: North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-un celebrates a recent missile launch. His envoy to South Africa
Threatening your friends with “fire and fury” is not nice. Calling them “short and fat” is even worse. It’s the kind of thing that, well, may leave your friends wanting to unfriend you. Or maybe even sentence you to death.
Thus fares the relationship between United States President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
If only they could follow the example of former African Union Commission chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who was in a decidedly chipper mood and shared a chuckle with the Supreme Leader’s representative attending the ANC’s 54th congress.
The ANC extended an invitation to the entire diplomatic corps in South Africa, which also included the US, but it was the North Korean officials who gained access to the upper echelons of the party when delegates met to discuss policy.
The North Korean government’s foremost representative in Southern Africa, Yong Man-ho, has spent the last week in discussions with the ANC’s top leaders, including Dlamini-Zuma and senior international relations department officials.
Seated at a table at the Nasrec expo centre with Dlamini-Zuma on Friday afternoon, Yong was accompanied by three other embassy staff and laughed during his discussion with the former African Union chairperson, an official in the ANC’s international relations sub-committee said.
South Africa established bilateral relations with North Korea in 1998 after hosting the Non-Aligned Movement Summit and, in 2013, international relations deputy minister Ebrahim Ebrahim travelled to the country to strengthen the ties.
But the US believes that North Korea is systematically depriving its citizens of democracy — calling on the ANC to join its campaign to isolate the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“It is, of course, up to ANC leaders to invite whomever they wish to an internal party event. That said, isolating the North Korean regime is a top priority for the United States, and a key element to maintaining peace and stability worldwide,” acting US embassy spokesperson Caroline Schneider told the Mail & Guardian.
She added that the US government looks forward to “working with all the new ANC party leadership on this and other issues of common interest”.
“As the ANC celebrates this week’s exercise in democracy, we note that democracy has been systematically denied to the people of North Korea, as have their basic freedoms and human rights,” the US embassy spokesperson noted.
In response, the ANC’s former international relations sub-committee chairperson, Edna Molewa, said it “regularly invites the diplomatic corps to its programmes and events” and “continues to monitor developments in North Korea”.
ANC spokesperson Khusela Sangoni said “the US will not dictate to us who our friends will be” and that the ANC “continues to monitor developments in North Korea”.
Sangoni added that the December conference would be the perfect place for decisions on North Korea to be made.
Yong Man-ho flew to Mozambique in October when a North Korean embassy official was arrested there after being found in possession of rhino horn.
Two years before that, in December 2015, a high-ranking North Korean diplomat was expelled from South Africa for allegedly using his diplomatic bag, supplied by the embassy, to smuggle rhino horn out of the country.