…As South Koreans see gamble in trusting Kim Jong Un over nuclear weapons***
Thousands of Iranians on Sunday marked the 39th anniversary of the takeover and hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran that riveted America.
The 444-day crisis after the fall of the U.S.-allied shah played out on television with recurring images of blindfolded hostages prior to their release just after President Jimmy Carter left the White House.
On Sunday, hard-liners vented their rage at President Trump, who pulled America out of the nuclear deal struck by his predecessor that the United Nations says Tehran still honors. With crippling sanctions on Iran’s vital oil industry set to take effect Monday, Iran’s already-damaged economy likely will suffer more, though politicians and protesters struck a defiant tone.
“Today the Iranian nation will show that Mr. Trump is too small to be able to bring Iran to its knees,” said Ali Larijani, Iran’s parliament speaker.
The annual commemoration marks when student demonstrators climbed over the fence at the embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, angered about Carter allowing the fatally ill Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to receive cancer treatment in the United States. The students soon took over the entire, leafy compound. A few staffers fled and hid in the home of the Canadian ambassador to Iran before escaping the country with the help of the CIA, a story recounted in the 2012 film “Argo.”
While the commemoration annually sees American flags burned and cries of “Death to America” rise up, it also has a carnival-like atmosphere for the students and others taking part. Some waved massive inflatable ballistic missiles. Others held signs lampooning Trump, including images of him contorted into a Nazi swastika or as a missile chasing after a dove.
Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander-in-chief of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, gave a speech vowing that Iran “can overcome this economic war and failure of the sanctions project is imminent.”
“Mr. Trump! Never threaten Iran because moans of the frightened U.S. forces in Tabas can still be heard,” Jafari said, referring to the failed American mission to rescue the hostages known as Operation Eagle Claw.
He added: “Still the moans of your terrified sailors and your British friends in the Persian Gulf can be heard,” referring to times the Guard have held sailors captive there.
On Friday, the Trump administration announced the restoration of sanctions on Iran’s shipping, financial and energy sectors, the second batch of penalties to be restored.
Iran is already in the grip of an economic crisis. Its rial currency now trades at 145,000 to one U.S. dollar, down from when it traded 40,500 to $1 a year ago. The economic chaos sparked mass anti-government protests at the end of last year which resulted in nearly 5,000 reported arrests and at least 25 people being killed. Sporadic demonstrations still continue.
The U.S. has said the sanctions are not aimed at toppling Iran’s government, but at changing its policies, including its support for militant groups and development of long-range missiles.
Another demonstrator Sunday, Jamshid Zarei, waved a banner in English quoting Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saying: “America can’t do a damn thing.”
“The Iranian people are feeling the economic pressure at their dinner tables and we complain about this, but it will not make Iranian people give up Islam, their values and the (Islamic) Revolution because of rising prices,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “Anyone who thinks that way is really a fool.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump says he has a warm relationship with Kim Jong Un, once declaring he “fell in love” with the young North Korean dictator.
Kim Eunsun, a North Korean defector, has reason to be more cautious about her homeland. And this feeling is reflected widely across her adopted country.
Kim was just 9 when her class was taken to watch men being executed by firing squad for supposed “wrongdoings.”
Later, she watched as her father starved to death, becoming one of the more than 1 million North Koreans estimated to have died in a famine that swept the country in the 1990s.
The family’s desperate search for food motivated Kim and her mother to escape North Korea, initially to China in 1998 before they settled in South Korea nearly nine years later.
Now 32, living in Seoul and raising a family of her own, Kim is watching warily as Kim Jong Un and other world leaders pursue a possible deal to help resolve the long-running dispute over the isolated regime’s nuclear weapons.
“I actually do not have any big expectations about the North Korean regime,” she told NBC News.
But she allows herself to feel faint optimism that, this time, the North Korean government is serious about making concessions.
“I hope the changes become real,” she said. “I hope this time they can do what they promised to the world.”. 8, 201800:41
Many South Koreans are also wary. While a recent poll commissioned by South Korea’s JoongAng Daily newspaper showed that seven out of 10 respondents were satisfied with President Moon Jae-in’s recent three-day trip to Pyongyang, more than half did not trust Kim on denuclearization.
Trump signaled that he wants to meet with Kim again soon, building on their June summit in Singapore at which the North Korean leader promised to “work toward” complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
However, progress on this front has been slow, and U.S. officials recently said the next Trump-Kim summit may not happen before 2019. On Friday Pyongyang warned it could resume nuclear development if the U.S. does not lift economic sanctions.
In the meantime, North and South have worked to reduce military tensions. In recent weeks, the neighboring nations — together with the United Nations Command — have withdrawn firearms and military posts from Panmunjom, the border town where troops from both sides stare at each other along the demarcation line.
Shin Beomchul, a senior research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies and a former director-general for policy planning at South Korea’s foreign affairs ministry, warned that Moon has taken “a big risk” in so aggressively pursuing inter-Korean cooperation even without meaningful concessions from the North on its nuclear weapons.
“I think Moon Jae-in’s gamble is: trust in North Korea first, and verify later,” he said. “Trust-building is important, but the most important trust-building on the Korean Peninsula is denuclearization.”
Shin said North Korea would gain trust if it allowed credible inspections and provided a full description of its nuclear weapons, the amount of enriched uranium in its possession and all of its related facilities.
He said: “I think we must watch North Korea’s real action on denuclearization and expand our cooperation with the North step by step. I think that trust-building is too fast, compared to the denuclearization effort of North Korea.”
That is not a view shared by South Korea’s foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, who argued recently that demands for a full nuclear inventory could complicate negotiations at this stage. She said the U.S. should first consider trust-building steps such as a declaration ending the Korean War, which paused with an armistice in 1953.
U.S. officials fear an end-of-war declaration could ultimately pave the way for North Korea to demand the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea.
Shin warned that if the denuclearization talks broke down, it could cause “friction” in the relationship between South Korea and the U.S., partly because of the key role Seoul has played in communicating Pyongyang’s agenda.
Jenny Town, a research analyst at the Stimson Center in Washington and managing editor of the influential 38 North website, said she believed Moon had oversold the significance of Kim’s commitments to date.
Town told a conference in Seoul that if Trump felt fooled or frustrated, the response “could get ugly very fast.”
However, experts close to Moon say he has managed the risks.
Handong Global University professor Kim Joon-hyung, who is a member of a presidential planning committee on security and foreign policy, said Moon was “very cautious” about his role as a mediator between the U.S. and the North on the nuclear issue. If South Korea pushed too hard, the U.S. would feel pressured, he said.
At the same time, Moon is acting as an “accelerator of the Korean peace process” and trying to “break 70 years of distrust” on the peninsula. “We should be critical, not cynical — I think this time is different,” the professor said.
Kim, the North Korean defector, said she believes there has been a change in the mood.
She said Kim Jong Un had previously seemed “like a stranger” to many South Koreans, but the recent summits had allowed the world to hear his voice and see him move, making him seem more like a human being.
“But it doesn’t mean what Kim Jong Un does is good,” she said at the Seoul office of Teach North Korean Refugees, a nonprofit that helped her improve her English skills enough that she has become a confident public speaker.
While she hopes for closer integration between the two Koreas, she really wants an end to human rights abuses in the North. Having already written a book about her experiences, she plans to begin a master’s degree in sociology.
“My story is not finished,” she said. “I hope change comes true. However, I don’t trust the Kim regime.”
Fox News with additional report from NBC
