The capital city of Bangkok has been infamous for its traffic congestion since the Thai economy took off in the late 1980s.

Nothomb, who was the Belgian ambassador to Bangkok between March 1985 and October 1988, recalled the suggestion made by his then commercial attache to offer Bangkok an iron bridge that had been dismantled in Brussels. He managed to convince the Belgian government that it would be good for relations to ship the for the 2,000-tonne iron bridge from its home to Bangkok.

The bridge when it was in Brussels before being dismanteled and removed to Bangkok in late 1980s. 

The next major challenge was how to quickly install the heavy structure across the Rama IV and Sathorn-Wireless Road intersection, since the traffic condition there was already the city’s worst. A long construction period would cause repercussions.

Chavarat, who runs the Sino-Thai construction firm, made it possible. “I was here in this room for a kind of reception party and the ambassador called me and said, ‘Khun Chavarat can do it’,” he said. “I took the job and spent only a weekend holiday for the bridge erection.”

Nothomb said, “I was very anxious and excited if it would be done on time, as we had already invited HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhon to inaugurate the bridge.”

The erection work began at 6pm on Friday, April 23, 1988 and finished 56 hours later, 4 hours earlier than scheduled, Chavarat said.

The Thai-Belgian bridge later became not only the role model for how to ease congestion at many intersections in the capital as the Bangkok authority erected eight additional bridges in the 1990s, but also a symbol of diplomatic relations that saw Japan donate a viaduct along the traffic axis in 1989.

The Thai-Belgian Bridge has stood as a symbol of the relations between the two countries since then, and this year authorities have decorated the bridge to commemorate its 30th anniversary and the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, according to Belgian Ambassador to Thailand Philippe Kridelka.

In order to commemorate the 150th anniversary of ties, the embassy, with collaboration from many agencies of government and non-government organisations, has organised seminars and workshops on various issues.

The first workshop was on LGBT issues and held in February, as Thailand seeks a legal instrument to handle the issue and Belgium has particular experience with same-sex marriage, Kridelka said. Two workshops are to be held in November on road safety and smart cities to exchange knowledge and views, he said.

The road safety workshop would look at how children could be encouraged to wear helmets while sitting on a motorbike, he said, noting that Belgian company Solvey every year contributes helmets to schools to raise awareness.

To forge cooperation for human resource development, Thammasat University and The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven have signed an agreement to kick off next year a programme in which 20 young Thai engineers will be chosen yearly to go to Leuven and continue their training as engineers. “We hope that when they come back to Thailand they will contribute to economic development,” he said.

“That issue is not on the table here in Singapore on the 12th (of June), nor should it be,” he said at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a security summit in Singapore, referring to the scheduled date of the Trump-Kim meeting.

There are currently some 28,500 US forces based in the South.

Trump said Friday he will meet Kim for the historic summit as originally scheduled after extraordinary Oval Office talks with a top envoy from Pyongyang.

Trump told reporters that denuclearisation — and a formal end to the decades-old Korean war — would be on the table in Singapore.

However, Mattis stressed that “any discussion about the number of US troops in the Republic of Korea is subject to… the Republic of Korea’s invitation to have them there, and the discussions between the United States and the Republic of Korea, separate and distinct from the negotiations that are going on with DPRK (North Korea).

“That issue will not come up in the discussion with DPRK.”

But he added: “Obviously if the diplomats can do their work, if we can reduce the threat, if we can restore confidence building measures with something verifiable, then of course these kinds of issues can come up subsequently between (South Korea and the US).”

Last month, South Korean President Moon Jae-in dismissed claims that US troops stationed in the country — based on Seoul’s alliance with Washington — would have to leave if a peace treaty was signed with the North.

Trump said after meeting with a senior North Korean official at the White House that the summit will go ahead in Singapore to discuss the dismantlement of the North’s nuclear weapons program.

US President Donald Trump speaks with Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the central committee of North Korea`s ruling Workers` Party, at the White House on Friday. Yonhap

“We’ll be meeting on June 12th in Singapore,” Trump told reporters on the White House grounds after seeing off Kim Yong-chol, a close aide to the North Korean leader.

“And I think it’ll be a process. I never said it goes in one meeting. I think it’s going to be a process. But the relationships are building, and that’s a great positive.”

The two sides have been at odds over how far North Korea will go to dismantle its nuclear weapons program and what security guarantees the regime would receive in return.

The US wants to see the North quickly and “irreversibly” dismantle the program before providing significant concessions, but the North has rejected “unilateral” abandonment.

“I think they want to do that. I know they want to do that,” Trump said when asked if North Korea is serious about denuclearizing.

“They want other things along the line. They want to develop as a country. That’s going to happen, I have no doubt.”

Still, he refused to say whether the North agreed to the US demand for complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.

“We talked about a lot of things. We really did,” he said. “But the big deal will be on June 12th. And again it’s a process … we’re not going to go in and sign something on June 12th, and we never were. We’re going to start a process.”

The US president said he told the North Korean delegation that they could take their time.

“We can go fast. We can go slowly. But I think they’d like to see something happen, and if we can work that out, that’d be great,” he said.

Kim Yong-chol, the top North Korean to enter the White House in nearly two decades, traveled from New York following two days of meetings with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on a possible summit between their leaders.

Pompeo said after the meetings that “real progress” was made toward “setting the conditions” for a summit, but he also said there remains “a great deal of work to do.”

The US president said the North Korean official handed him a “very nice” and “very interesting” letter from Kim, but later added that he hadn’t opened it.

“I didn’t open it in front of the director,” Trump said.

“I said, ‘Would you want me to open it?’ He said, ‘You can read it later.’ I may be in for a big surprise, folks.”

Trump called off the summit in an open letter to Kim last week, citing “open hostility” from the regime. Following a conciliatory statement from the North, he put the summit back on track, and officials from both sides have been continuing meetings on the inter-Korean border as well as in Singapore to hammer out the substantive and logistical details.

On Friday Trump said he doesn’t want to use the term “maximum pressure” anymore, a term his administration has coined to describe its sanctions campaign against Pyongyang.

There were “hundreds of new sanctions ready to go,” he said, but they won’t be imposed “until the talks break down.” Trump added that he looks forward to the day the sanctions can be lifted.

His words mark a turnaround from last year when he engaged in a war of words with Kim over the regime’s testing of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Fears of war escalated as Trump threatened to “totally destroy” the regime and the North responded with a threat to detonate a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean.

A mood for reconciliation set in this year after Kim Jong-un expressed an interest in sending a delegation to the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in South Korea in February.

At a historic summit in April, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim agreed to pursue “complete denuclearization” and a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War. The conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty, leaving the North technically at war with both the South and the US.

Trump said the issue could be discussed at his meeting in Singapore.

“We talked about it. We talked about ending the war,” he said.

“That’s something that could come out of the meeting. I think, really, that’s something that maybe could come out of the meeting.”

North Korea’s abysmal human rights record could also be addressed

“Could be, yes, could be,” Trump said. “I think we probably will, and maybe in great detail. We did not talk about human rights (today).”

Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the central committee of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, is the highest-ranking North Korean to visit the US since 2000.

That year Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok visited the White House and met with then President Bill Clinton.

Kim is under US sanctions for his alleged role in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and other illicit activities, including the 2010 sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors.

Speaking at a high-profile security summit in Singapore, the Pentagon chief also said the US military continues to support diplomats pushing for the “complete, verifiable and irreversible” denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

Mattis said Beijing had deployed a range of military hardware — including anti-ship missiles, surface-to-air missiles and electronic jammers — across the South China Sea, where it has built islets and other maritime features into hardened military facilities.

Beijing has also landed heavy bombers on Woody Island in the Paracel Islands.

“Despite China’s claims to the contrary, the placement of these weapon systems is tied directly to military use for the purposes of intimidation and coercion,” Mattis told the Shangri-La Dialogue.

A jet black US government Chevrolet Suburban rolled through the South West gate of the White House, up the scorching driveway and pulled to halt.

Hurriedly, and slightly anxiously, a phalanx of wiry North Korean security personnel disgorged — one accidently closing the door on his colleague in the rush.

Then exited the more composed, much smaller and slightly less trim figure of Kim Yong Chol.

Spymaster, military general, envoy and apparatchik, the 72-year-old had become the most senior North Korean official to set foot at the White House in two decades.

Standard protocol would suggest an official of his rank — particularly one who is under sanction and who represents a geopolitical adversary — would be whisked, out of sight, into the bowels of the building for a closed door meeting.

Not in Trump’s White House.

A fellow general was on hand to greet him — John Kelly, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff — who escorted him along the White House colonnade and into the Oval Office for a presidential meeting, a rare honor for a non-head of state, much less one from a brutal regime.

White House aides had expected the sit-down with the president, if it happened, to be short, just long enough to exchange pleasantries and a letter from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

“That is something that had been considered from the beginning” one White House official said. “The president wanted to keep his options open.”

In the end it ran almost 90 minutes. “We talked about almost everything. We talked about a lot,” said Trump.

“It went very well. It’s really a get-to-know-you kind of a situation.”

Kim’s White House visit was not on the official presidential schedule, but had been rumored for days.

Then, shortly after midday, a small group of White House pool reporters — including AFP — received a cryptic email to meet at a designated point for an unspecified reason in seven minutes.

If allowing coverage of Kim’s arrival was designed to send a signal, so too was the decision about who participated for the US side.

As Kim arrived, peering through a nearby glass door, was the familiar silvery mustache of John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national security advisor.

Having offended North Korea with comments that hinted at regime change, he largely stayed away from the cameras and stayed out of the Oval meeting, aides said.

A White House official cautioned against reading too much into Bolton’s absence, but you can be certain Pyongyang got the message: Trump wants to play nice.

The president underscored that message again and again, when he was asked whether his campaign of “maximum pressure,” which included sanctions and threats of annihilation, was over.

“I don’t even want to use the term ‘maximum pressure’ anymore because I don’t want to use that term because we’re getting along,” Trump said. “You see the relationship. We’re getting along.”

“We had hundreds of new sanctions ready to go on,” he added. “I’m not going to put them on until such time as the talks break down.”

Trump even admitted that he had not raised the issue of human rights, as he said he was looking forward to the Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un.

But as he stood side-by-side smiling with Kim Yong Chol outside the Oval Office, before waiving him goodbye, there was a small but poignant reminder of the scale of Trump’s task.

On Kim’s chest, just in front of his heart, sat a red flag pin featuring images of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, the previous two leaders of the Kim dynasty and the current leader’s father and grandfather.

One started North Korea’s nuclear program, the other refused to give it up.

Trump is betting he can make a deal and that North Korea’s current ruler will break with decades old family tradition. Friday’s meeting showed he is willing to stake America’s reputation on it.

The Vietnamese delegation is led by Defence Minister Ngo Xuan Lich, who will address the third session, focusing on the changing security order in Asia, the state-run Vietnam News Agency reports.

The delegation would express its concern at military operations in the South China Sea and promote a mechanism for cooperation in resolving disputes and regional conflicts by peaceful means on the basis of international law, said a Vietnam delegation official.

Vietnam is among several Asean member states who are at loggerheads with China over territorial disputes in the sea. Hanoi has for years voiced concerns over militarisation in the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands, where China has built fortresses and reportedly installed missiles.

The three-day security and defence conference, held annually at the Shangri-La hotel since 2002, will also focus on nuclear tensions on the Korean peninsula, as Singapore prepares to host a summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un on June 12.

The Shangri-La meeting features five sessions: on US leadership and the challenges of Indo-Pacific security; de-escalating the crisis in North Korea; shaping new dimensions of terrorism and counter-terrorism; and raising the bar for regional security co-operation.

The event also features side sessions covering such issues as new strategic technologies and the future of conflict, maritime security enhancement, strategic implications of military capability development in the Asia-Pacific and the management of competition in regional security cooperation.

US Defence Minister James Mattis will join the dialogue to offer his view on global and regional security matters.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, meanwhile, is attending the Shangri-La Dialogue for the first time, as his country seeks to carve a role in Indo-Pacific security arrangements.

New Delhi and Hanoi have forged closer ties in recent years as a balance against the rise of China’s influence in the region.

The Vietnam News Agency hailed the Shangri-La meet as a good opportunity for Hanoi to voice its views on regional security issues relating to “legitimate” national interests, towards achieving peaceful settlement of disputes in line with international law, especially the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.