N. Korea says no to Tokyo Games participation

SEOUL – North Korea will not attend this year’s Tokyo Olympics because of the coronavirus pandemic, said Pyongyang’s Sports Ministry, putting an end to the South’s hopes of using the Games to restart talks with its nuclear-armed neighbour.

The isolated North’s participation in the last Winter Games, in Pyeongchang, South Korea, was a key catalyst in the diplomatic rapprochement of 2018.

Leader Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, attended as his envoy in a blaze of publicity, and the South’s President Moon Jae-in seized the opportunity to broker talks between Pyongyang and Washington that led to a series of high-profile meetings between Jong-un and then United States president Donald Trump.

However, Pyongyang’s announcement puts an end to Seoul’s hopes of using the postponed Tokyo Games, due to begin in July, to trigger a reset in the now deadlocked talks process. 

At a meeting, North Korea’s Olympic Committee “decided not to participate in the 32nd Olympic Games in order to protect players from the world public health crisis caused by Covid-19”, said the Sports in the DPR Korea website run by the Sports Ministry.

The announcement, dated yesterday, reported a meeting of the national Games committee on March 25.

The North’s official KCNA news agency previously carried a dispatch on the committee meeting without mentioning the Olympic decision.

Pyongyang is subject to multiple international sanctions over its banned weapons programmes, and is more isolated that ever after imposing a strict border lockdown more than a year ago in an effort to protect itself from Covid-19, which first emerged in neighbouring China and went on to sweep the world.

It insists that it has had no infections, although experts doubt the assertion.

The new US administration led by President Joe Biden is in the final stages of a review of its North Korea policy, with officials widely expected to support a resumption of lower-level talks rather than high-stakes, high-drama summits.

The North regularly excoriates Olympic host nation Japan over its brutal 20th-century annexation, with KCNA carrying a report on Sunday condemning new Japanese history textbooks as a “persistent and shameless distortion of history”. – AFP, April 6, 2021