Alek Sigley: Why Sweden helped free Australian student in N Korea - BBC News

When Australian student Alek Sigley went missing in North Korea last week, Canberra turned to a country more than 15,000km (9,320 miles) away for help.

The Scandinavian nation of Sweden has a long history of acting as diplomatic intermediary in the isolated dictatorship - a so-called "protecting power" for several Western nations.

On Thursday, it emerged that negotiations to free the 29-year-old had been successful. It's still unclear why he was detained.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison thanked Sweden for its help, expressing his "deepest gratitude to the Swedish authorities for their invaluable assistance."

Australia, like most Western nations, doesn't have its own embassy in the closed-off country. But Sweden does and has for nearly 50 years.

In fact, it became first Western country to establish formal diplomatic relations with North Korea in 1973. The UK, in comparison, first sent an ambassador to North Korea only in 2002.

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Negotiating the release of Mr Sigley - who studies Korean literature at Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang - is not the first time Sweden has helped other countries with tricky diplomatic affairs.

It has in the past represented British interests in Iran when relations with Tehran have broken down, including in 1989 when Iran's supreme leader issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the novelist Salman Rushdie.

A history of neutrality

Stockholm's special role is based on a long tradition of neutrality. This dates back to the early 19th Century, when Sweden took the position that it was best to be free of military alliances in peacetime so it could stay neutral if war broke out.

That meant that during the Cold War between the communist eastern and capitalist western blocs, Sweden tried to take a neutral middle position.

It similarly took a neutral position on the Korean peninsula. At the end of the Korean War in 1953, the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission - comprised of Sweden, Switzerland, Poland and Czechoslovakia - was set up to oversee the armistice that ended the Korean war.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, North Korea expelled the Polish and Czechoslovakian observers in the 1990s.

"[But] the Swiss and Swedes [were] still there. This [caused] both countries to take a greater role in Korea than otherwise," Fyodor Tertitskiy, an expert on North Korea, told the BBC.

Prisoner releases

Sweden's role as an intermediary with Pyongyang has included handling consular affairs for the United States.

"Sweden has agreed with the US to represent the consular interest of [its] nationals in the DPRK," former deputy head of mission at the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang Martina Aberg Somogyi told specialist North Korea site NK News last year.

"If it comes to our attention that a US national is in need of support we will offer this to the best of our ability and work as hard we can to resolve that situation."

Washington - like Canberra - has no North Korean embassy or consulate and Sweden acts as what is known in diplomatic parlance as a "protecting power".

Ahead of the landmark Trump-Kim summit in Singapore in 2018, North Korea's foreign minister even flew to Sweden for talks.

Sweden has also often helped with the release of US citizens held by the North.

The most high-profile recent case was that of US student Otto Warmbier, who was jailed in North Korea in 2016 after being accused of stealing a propaganda sign during an organised tour.

He spent 17 months in detention, and later died days after he was returned to the US in a coma.

Ms Somogyi said helping foreign citizens had "definitely been some of the most challenging work that me and my colleagues have engaged in on a professional but also personal level".

Diplomatic life in Pyongyang

Sweden's role in North Korea is not limited to helping Westerners in distress. It also performs other functions, such as following up on Swedish humanitarian assistance to North Korea and issuing visas to North Korean residents travelling to Europe's Schengen area.

There are currently two Swedish diplomats based full-time in Pyongyang.

But those who have worked in the embassy say that there is still a lack of mutual understanding between North Koreans and Swedes.

"New initiatives and ideas are always met with deep suspicion," Swedish diplomat August Borg told NK News in 2015.

"Even if we just want to visit a project that Sweden is financing, preparations need to be made a long time ahead."

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2019-07-04 11:38:37Z
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Oil supertanker bound for Syria held in Gibraltar by UK Marines - Aljazeera.com

British Royal Marines and officials in Gibraltar have stopped a supertanker suspected of carrying crude oil to Syria, in breach of European Union sanctions, the government of Gibraltar said.

The Grace 1 vessel was halted early on Thursday by Gibraltar police and customs agencies, aided by a detachment of British Royal Marines.

In a statement, the Gibraltar government said it had reasonable grounds to believe that the vessel was carrying its shipment of crude oil to the Banyas Refinery in Syria.

"That refinery is the property of an entity that is subject to European Union sanctions against Syria," Gibraltar's Chief Minister Fabian Picardo said. EU sanctions against the government of Syria took effect in May 2011.

"With my consent, our port and law enforcement agencies sought the assistance of the Royal Marines in carrying out this operation."

The government published regulations on Wednesday to enforce the sanctions against the tanker and its cargo.

Acting Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said Gibraltar detained the supertanker after a request by the United States to Britain.

Spain was looking into the seizure of the ship, and how it may affect Spanish sovereignty as it appears to have happened in Spanish waters, Borrell said. Spain does not recognise the waters around Gibraltar as British.

Refinitiv Eikon mapping indicates the ship sailed from Iran, and if the cargo is confirmed to be Iranian crude, its attempted delivery to Syria could also be a violation of US sanctions on Iranian oil exports.

The mapping data shows the ship has sailed a longer route around the southern tip of Africa instead of via Egypt's Suez Canal.

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The Grace 1 was documented as loading fuel oil in Iraq in December, although the Iraqi port did not list it as being in port and its tracking system was switched off. The tanker reappeared near Iran's port of Bandar Assaluyeh fully loaded.

Shipping data shows the ship is a 300,000-tonne Panamanian-flagged tanker managed by Singapore-based IShips Management Pte Ltd.

The EU has imposed sanctions on 277 Syrian officials including government ministers over their role in the "violent repression" of civilians.

It has frozen the assets of some 72 entities and introduced an embargo on Syrian oil, investment restrictions and a freeze on Syrian central bank assets within the EU.

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2019-07-04 11:25:00Z
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Australian detained in North Korea has 'safely left the country,' PM says - CNN

Alek Sigley, a 29-year-old student at Kim Il Sung University living in the North Korean capital Pyongyang, was reported missing by his family last month.

Landing in Beijing airport Thursday, Sigley gave reporters the peace sign and said he was "good, very good," adding he felt "great." Asked to explain what happened in Pyongyang, he paused before a companion urged him to "leave it for the moment."

He is currently in the Australian embassy, a government statement said, and is expected to leave China later Thursday.

Speaking to parliament, the country's prime minister, Scott Morrison, said he was delighted Sigley was "safe and well."

"The Swedish authorities advised the Australian government they met with senior officials from (North Korea) yesterday and raised the issue on Australia's behalf," Morrison said.

Sweden is one of the few western countries with an embassy in North Korea and often acts as a go-between for foreign governments and Pyongyang.

Morrison thanked Sweden for the country's "invaluable assistance" in securing Sigley's release, saying it was an example of the effectiveness of inter-government cooperation and behind the scenes diplomacy.

NK News, a news site focused on North Korea for which Sigley has written in the past, reported separately that he was in China and will travel to Tokyo later Thursday.

As well as writing for NK News, Sigley tweeted regularly about life in Pyongyang, and founded Tongil Tours, a business handling visits to North Korea. He first visited North Korea in 2012, his family said in a statement, and is fluent in Korean and Mandarin.

Sigley's parents raised the alarm after he was not heard from for two days, saying he had previously been in regular contact and such a break was "unusual for him."

CNN's Paula Hancocks and Joshua Berlinger contributed reporting.

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2019-07-04 08:07:00Z
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Hong Kong protests: Jeremy Hunt warns China against 'repression' - BBC News

The UK foreign secretary has continued to warn China not to "repress" violent protesters in Hong Kong.

A group of activists occupied Hong Kong's parliament on Monday over a controversial extradition bill.

Jeremy Hunt told the BBC he "condemned all violence" but said the Chinese government should listen to the "root causes" of protesters' concerns.

It comes after China warned the UK not to "interfere in its domestic affairs" and labelled the UK "hypocritical".

Mr Hunt repeated his warning that China would face serious consequences if it failed to honour Hong Kong's high level of autonomy from Beijing.

"The heart of people's concerns has been that very precious thing that Hong Kong has had, which is an independent judicial system," Mr Hunt told Radio 4's Today programme.

"The United Kingdom views this situation very, very seriously," he added.

• The background you need on the Hong Kong protests
• Did Hong Kong violence sway public opinion?

China's ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Office on Wednesday following "unacceptable and inaccurate" remarks.

Liu Xiaoming said relations between China and the UK had been "damaged" by comments by Mr Hunt and others backing the demonstrators' actions.

He said those who illegally occupied the Legislative Council building and raised the colonial-era British flag should be "condemned as law breakers".

He added that it was "hypocritical" of UK politicians to criticise the lack of democracy and civil rights in Hong Kong when, under British rule, there had been no elections nor right to protest.

'Very serious'

In response to accusations he had sided with the protesters, Mr Hunt said: "I was not supporting the violence, what I was saying is the way to deal with that violence is not by repression."

"It is by understanding the root causes of the concerns of the demonstrators, that freedoms that they have had for their whole life could be about to be undermined by this new extradition law," he added.

Critics have said the extradition bill could be used to send political dissidents from Hong Kong to the mainland.

A think tank analyst branded the diplomatic row as a "very serious flaring up of tensions between Beijing and London".

Victor Gao, vice-president of the Centre for China and Globalisation in Beijing, called Monday's occupation of parliament "anarchism" adding "this is to be protested and to be condemned by any government leader with any level of conscience".

Mr Gao urged the UK to condemn the violence. He said the "crux of the matter" was "the UK no longer has a say in [how] Hong Kong should be run and managed".

A 1984 treaty between the UK and China paved the way for sovereignty over the territory to pass back to Beijing.

The Joint Declaration, signed by Margaret Thatcher and the then Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, set out how the rights of Hong Kong citizens should be protected in the territory's Basic Law under Chinese rule.

Since 1997, Hong Kong has been run by China under an arrangement guaranteeing it a level of economic autonomy and personal freedoms not permitted on the mainland.

Mr Hunt said: "It is very important that the 'one country, two systems' approach is honoured."

The foreign secretary would not detail what consequences China might face if it did not honour the treaty, but said the UK had "always defended the values we believe in".

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2019-07-04 07:55:15Z
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As Protests Rock Hong Kong, Xi Jinping’s View of History Shows He Will Dig In - The New York Times

BEIJING — When protesters in Hong Kong became more forceful on Monday, the People’s Daily reprised a recent speech of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calling on party cadres to carry forward the struggle of the Communist revolution fought 70 years ago.

“We must overcome all kinds of difficulties, risks and challenges,” he said.

It was the latest signal that Mr. Xi has no intention of bowing to the protesters’ demands for greater rights. On the contrary, the storming of Hong Kong’s legislature on Monday night seems to have given ammunition to hard-liners and prompted the sharpest denunciations in Beijing so far, suggesting the ruling Communist Party’s patience was wearing thin.

“I think they have realized it is time to take measures” to restore order, Song Xiaozhuang, a professor in the Center for Basic Laws of Hong Kong and Macau at Shenzhen University, said in a telephone interview, referring to the authorities in Beijing.

“This does not mean there is no patience, or that they want to get it done promptly, but it does mean that they cannot wait for long.”

Mr. Xi has not publicly addressed the political tumult in Hong Kong. Nor have officials disclosed any options they might be considering. But there is little doubt about Mr. Xi’s convictions, which are shaped by history and a deeply felt sense of the perils of popular uprisings.

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Protesters used a steel cart to breach the doors of the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong on Monday.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times

“I have heard him talk at length, and passionately, about the challenges of governing China, and the need to maintain order in order to keep the country together,” said Ryan L. Hass, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as the director for China at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

He noted that the mass protests that toppled authoritarian governments in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 coincided with Mr. Xi’s ascent to the presidency and were “seared into his brain.”

Mr. Xi’s stance is not without risks, but he has governed with a millenarian sense of destiny, regularly exhorting the Communist Party to return to its original mission to transform a once-humiliated nation into the global power it is meant to be.

While the events in Hong Kong have generated considerable sympathy for the protesters, forcing the city’s leader to back down and suspend the bill, Mr. Xi still has most of the advantages of power on his side.

Those include time and influence. The central government can still mobilize a vast network of supporters in Hong Kong, including civil servants and business people beholden to the central government, economically or politically.

In a last resort, there is also the Chinese military. Few analysts expect that Mr. Xi intends to use force, but few doubt that he would if security significantly deteriorated in the city.

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The newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army disclosed that troops from its Hong Kong garrison had conducted training exercises last week.CreditPeople's Liberation Army Daily

The People’s Liberation Army disclosed on Tuesday — certainly not by coincidence — that troops from its Hong Kong garrison had conducted training exercises last week. One photograph accompanying an article in the official military newspaper showed soldiers aboard a gunboat in Victoria Harbor, weapons drawn, with the city’s skyline in the background.

After weeks of relative restraint, officials in Beijing have also begun to warn of grave repercussions. A spokesman for the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, warned that the defacing of the legislature was “a blatant challenge” to Beijing’s red line: its sovereignty over the territory.

The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid controlled by the Communist Party, called for “a zero-tolerance policy,” warning that more violence could open a Pandora’s box.

That the protests in Hong Kong took place shortly following the 30th anniversary of the bloody suppression of the protests in Tiananmen Square and other cities in China has only hardened official views. This year is also the anniversary of the popular movements that swept Eastern Europe in 1989, toppling not only the Berlin Wall but also, ultimately, the Soviet Union itself two years later.

“There has also been a tendency to present these struggles — and Tiananmen was presented this way — as not being spontaneous expressions of the popular will,” Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an email, “even in cases when that is clearly what they are.” Rather, he wrote, Beijing describes such protests as “illegitimate efforts by small sets of malcontents spurred on by mysterious foreign forces.”

Mr. Xi, who has steadily amassed greater power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, is acutely aware of that history.

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Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Hong Kong on Monday.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he asked in a secret speech in 2013 that later leaked. “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered.”

He belittled the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, for allowing it to happen on his watch. “In the end, nobody was a real man,” he said then.

Weeks before the bloody crackdown protests in Tiananmen in 1989, Mr. Xi delivered a warning about the folly of popular mass movements, according to research by Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at American University in Washington who is currently writing a book about Mr. Xi’s father.

“This kind of ‘big democracy’,” Mr. Torigian quoted Mr. Xi as saying then, “‘is not in accord with science, not in accord with the rule of law, but is instead in accord with superstition, in accord with stupidity, and the result is chaos.’” Mr. Xi, a city official at the time, was speaking of the Cultural Revolution, but the message carries resonance today.

“Without stability and unity, nothing is possible!”

As the party’s leader, he has sought to extend its grip over virtually every corner of Chinese society, underscoring his view that stability can only be by eliminating threats to the party’s rule.

Hong Kong has become such a symbol of China’s success in reclaiming “lost” territory, Julian G. Ku, a law professor at Hofstra University, said, that the government today would be “loathe to admit any kind of limits to its sovereignty of this territory, lest it tarnish its success in recovering.”

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Protesters who stormed Hong Kong’s legislature on Monday left pictures of local officials.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times

When Britain’s foreign minister this week called on China to honor its commitments under the treaty that ceded British control of the city in 1997, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs pointedly replied that Britain no longer had any say in the matter.

Mr. Ku, who has written on China’s adherence to the treaty, said the spokesman’s bluntness was striking. “They might have always had this legal position but they never, as far as I recall, said this sort of thing out loud.”

Allowing Hong Kong a greater degree of autonomy over its own affairs, as even some pro-Beijing lawmakers suggested, could open the Pandora’s box, the Global Times warned. Hard-liners would argue that it would be seen as rewarding civil disobedience, which security officials on the mainland act quickly to snuff out, at times ruthlessly.

To be sure, Mr. Xi’s record of increasingly authoritarian rule — not least the detention of more than 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang — has raised alarms internationally about the direction he is taking China.

In Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing also considers part of China, the unrest in Hong Kong has further undermined the appeal that Mr. Xi made in January to unify under the same “one country, two systems” arrangement.

President Tsai Ing-wen, who is seeking re-election next January, has styled herself as a defender of Taiwan’s sovereignty. Her standing in the polls rose following the Hong Kong police’s heavy-handed response to protesters on June 12.

The protesters’ brief siege of the city’s Legislative Council had echoes of the much longer occupation of Taiwan’s Parliament in 2014, which helped catapult Ms. Tsai to the presidency.

Mr. Wasserstrom said that the Communist Party’s old saying, “Today, Hong Kong; Tomorrow, Taiwan,” now “has a very ominous meaning.”

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2019-07-03 16:03:34Z
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Boeing dedicates $100 million to victims of 737 Max crashes - CNN

The company said the money will be given to local nonprofits and community groups who will help distribute the funds. They'll be used to support education, including college tuition or other schooling expenses for children of victims, and "hardship or living expenses for impacted families," Boeing (BA) said in statement.

Victim families that accept funds from this pool of money will not be required to give up the right to pursue legal action against the company, a Boeing spokesperson said. The company is facing several lawsuits over the 737 Max incidences.

"We at Boeing are sorry for the tragic loss of lives in both of these accidents and these lives lost will continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and on our minds for years to come. The families and loved ones of those on board have our deepest sympathies, and we hope this initial outreach can help bring them comfort," said Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing's chairman, president and CEO.

Boeing's 737 Max jets were grounded worldwide in March after one of the vehicles, flown by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed shortly after takeoff. It followed a crash in late 2018 of a 737 Max flown by Indonesian airline Lion Air.

The grounding has forced airlines to cancel hundreds of flights, and it's not clear when the 737 Max, which is Boeing's top-selling plane, will be cleared to fly again.

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2019-07-03 17:30:00Z
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Boeing sets aside $100 million for families of 737 Max crash victims - CNBC

Boeing, still reeling from the two deadly 737 Max crashes, is setting aside $100 million to assist the families of victims and communities impacted by the accidents in October and March that killed 346 people.

The funds will be available over the next several years and are not part of any compensation Boeing may have to pay to those who sue the company for damages related to accidents.

Days after the second 737 Max jet crashed in Ethiopian, the FAA and other aviation regulators around the world grounded the airplane until the company could fix defects in the aircraft and prove it is safe for commercial flights. The plane has now been grounded for more than three months and Boeing has said it is unlikely questions about the plane's safety will be resolved until sometime in the September time frame.

"We at Boeing are sorry for the tragic loss of lives in both of these accidents and these lives lost will continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and on our minds for years to come," Boeing Chairman and CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a release announcing the funds. "The families and loved ones of those on board have our deepest sympathies, and we hope this initial outreach can help bring them comfort."

The victims' families won't have to waive their right to sue Boeing if they take money from the fund, the company said.

The move comes as Boeing continues to feel backlash for how it designed the 737 Max earlier this decade. Critics say the company rushed to build the plane and did not fully disclose issues regarding the the 737 Max MCAS flight control software. That software is suspected of causing the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. In both accidents, investigators have not determined an official cause of the crash.

"We are focused on re-earning that trust and confidence from our customers and the flying public in the months ahead." Muilenburg said in a statement announcing the fund.

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2019-07-03 15:42:50Z
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