Clinton trip to help promote Korean peace

Clinton trip to help promote Korean peace

ELMENDORF AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska (Reuter): U.S. President Bill Clinton said yesterday as he flew to East Asia for talks with South Korean President Kim Young-sam that the United States was promoting an "ultimate reconciliation" between South and North Korea.

Air Force One, carrying Clinton on the first leg of a week- long, around-the-world trip, landed at Alaska's Elmendorf Air Force Base shortly after 2 a.m. local time (1000 GMT). After a refueling stop he was to fly on to Cheju Island, South Korea, for talks and lunch with Kim.

Clinton said U.S. policy toward controlling North Korea's nuclear program had been successful since a 1994 agreement between the United States, South Korea, Japan and other nations to provide Pyongyang with light-water reactor technology.

But of more immediate concern are the incursions by North Korean troops across the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in violation of the armistice agreement that ended the 1950-53 war between the south and communist north.

"We are working on ways to not only keep the nuclear problem under control and to eventually eliminate it, but also to do what we can to promote an ultimate reconciliation and an end to the conflict. If that can happen, then the world would be a much safer place," Clinton told reporters on arrival in Alaska.

After spending the day at Cheju-Do, Clinton flies on to Tokyo for a state visit to Japan that had been scheduled for last November but was postponed because Clinton was entangled in a budget impasse at home.

His key objective there is to shore up a four-decade-old security alliance with Japan at a time when people in Okinawa are outraged at what many feel is an overbearing U.S. military presence, personified by the rape last September of a 12-year-old Japanese schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen.

The United States agreed yesterday to shed military facilities in Japan. A fifth of the total area occupied by the U.S. military will be returned to Okinawans.

Japan hosts 47,000 of the estimated 100,000 U.S. troops in the Pacific and Clinton wants to make sure they are welcome as a stabilizing force in an area not only dealing with North Korea but China's aggressive moves toward Taiwan as well.

Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto are to sign a security declaration reaffirming the two countries' security ties. Christopher said it would signal U.S. determination "to maintain our forward-deployed presence and our existing force levels in the region, and certainly will underscore our effective defense cooperation with Japan."

The two leaders were not expected to delve deeply into U.S.- Japanese trade tensions over access to Japan's market for insurance, film and computer chips.

After a day of sightseeing in St. Petersburg, Russia, Clinton moves on to Moscow for a nuclear safety and security summit featuring Russian President Boris Yeltsin as well as leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan. Ukraine is to participate as well.

The leaders are expected to agree on a concrete program to prevent illicit trafficking in nuclear materials and to adopt a process of cooperation to dispose of large amounts of plutonium no longer needed for defense purposes.

Clinton said the leaders would also work toward their shared goal of reaching a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty later this year.

"We've got a big job to get a comprehensive test ban treaty passed, then deal with the aftermath of the Cold War -- deal with all those nuclear materials that are out there. We want to make that they don't fall into the wrong hands and some day get put to the wrong uses," he said.

Afterward, Clinton and Yeltsin, who faces re-election June 16 and is behind in opinion polls, will hold a one-day summit of their own to discuss ongoing issues such as Bosnia and NATO enlargement.