US Military Suspends Efforts to Recover Korean War Remains in North Korea

I hope no one really thought a deal on this issue was going to be reached because I never did:

 In a new sign of troubled relations with North Korea, the Pentagon said Wednesday it has suspended its efforts to arrange negotiations on recovering additional remains of U.S. servicemembers killed in the North during the Korean War.

In a statement Wednesday, the Pentagon’s Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency said it has had no communication with North Korean authorities since the Hanoi summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in February. That meeting focused on the North’s nuclear weapons and followed a June 2018 summit at which Kim committed to permitting a resumption the recovery of U.S. remains, which had been suspended by the U.S. in 2005.

“As a result, our effort to communicate with the Korean People’s Army regarding the possible resumption of joint recovery operation for 2019 has been suspended,” the agency said. “We have reached the point where we can no longer effectively plan, coordinate, and conduct field operations in the DPRK during this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2019.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but the only way a deal was getting done was if the US paid North Korea an exorbitant amount of money to recover the remains as has been done in the past.

The North Koreans know exactly where the bulk of the remains are because the US military buried a large number of casualties in marked cemeteries before evacuating North Korea after the Chinese intervened in the war.

To be able to repatriate these remains to their family members the North Koreans have been demanding inflated prices which just shows how low the Kim regime is willing to go to make money.  The work to recover the remains ended in 2005 and so far does not look like it will begin again any time soon.