SEOUL, South Korea — North Koreans welcomed Jimmy Carter back to Pyongyang with smiles, salutes and hearty handshakes Wednesday as the former U.S. president arrived on a mission to bring home a Boston man jailed in the communist country since January.
U.S. officials have billed Carter’s trip as a private humanitarian visit to try to negotiate the release of Aijalon Gomes, 31, sentenced to eight years of hard labor in a North Korean prison for entering the country illegally from China.
However, visits such as Carter’s — and one former President Bill Clinton made a year ago to secure the release of two U.S. journalists — serve as more than just rescue missions. They also offer an opportunity for unofficial diplomacy.
Paik Hak-Soon, a North Korea analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank near Seoul, predicted Carter would meet with leader Kim Jong-Il and that Kim would ask him to relay a positive message to Washington on the resumption of nuclear-disarmament talks. He said the trip has a “positive” aspect, given Carter’s popularity and symbolic role in defusing the first nuclear crisis in 1994, which led to a landmark disarmament deal.
