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| North Korea's President of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, Kim Yong Nam, speaks during a ceremony to unveil a new bronze statue depicting the late leader Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung at Mansudae Art Studio in Pyongyang in this file photo. Kim will visit Indonesia and Singapore in an effort to bolster trade with Singapore — the reclusive country's third largest trading partner — and to learn about mining from Indonesia. (AP Photo) |
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Indonesia
inked a media deal on Tuesday to swap news, journalists and television shows
with North Korea, a nation with one of the worst press freedom records in the
world.
The deal,
signed ahead of top North Korean official Kim Yong Nam's visit this weekend,
will facilitate an exchange of information between the two countries, which
already share close diplomatic ties, said P.L.E. Priatna, director of
information and media at Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry in a press release.
The
secretary general of the Indonesian Communications and Information Ministry,
Basuki Iskandar, met with North Korea's Jong Yong Choi in Yogyakarta on Tuesday
to hash out the details of the agreement in the nations' first Joint
Information Commission meeting.
"This
meeting is expected to improve already tight bilateral relations between
Indonesia and North Korea," Priatna said. "The forum is expected to
serve as a bridge to expand the government-to-government, government-to-people
and people-to-people contacts between the two countries."
Under the
agreement, Indonesia and North Korea will exchange television shows, photos and
news, Priatna said. In the near future, the two nations will also swap
journalists.
North Korea
was ranked as the second most censored country in the world by the Committee to
Protect Journalists (CPJ) in 2012. According to CPJ reports, news in North
Korea is controlled by the government's Korean Central News Agency and is
saturated with anti-United States propaganda and glowing reports of life in one
of the most isolated nations on earth.
Foreign
journalists have been detained while reporting in North Korea, including the
American reporter Laura Ling, who was held for 140 days while reporting for
Current TV. And North Korean citizens critical of the Kim regime are allegedly
sent to one of the nation's numerous forced labor camps, according to assembled
reports from North Korean defectors.
Kim Yong
Nam, the president of North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly, will be in
Jakarta, visiting with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono from May 13 to 16,
according to the Korean Central News Agency and the Indonesian government. Kim
and Yudhoyono are expected to discuss Indonesia's economic development and the
nation's management of its natural resources, according to Bloomberg reports.
JG/Bloomberg
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