Korean summit
The Korean summit began on Tuesday after a one-day delay caused by problems with Pyongyang's technical preparation. Concrete results that could end the animosity between North and South Korea and enable the 70 million people in the peninsula to coexist and live harmoniously are expected.
All eyes, particularly those in the region, are on Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, where the three-day landmark summit is being held, because any peace deal achieved in the meeting will obviously reduce tensions and help create stability.
South Korea's President Kim Dae-jung, showing his commitment to achieving peaceful coexistence, has pledged to make every effort during his talks with his opposite number from the north, Kim Jong-il, to make sure that families that were separated during the 1950-1953 war could be reunited.
By visiting Pyongyang, the South Korean president -- accompanied by 180 people comprising government ministers, military officers, business people and journalists -- has offered an olive branch to the leader of the country that has been enemy to South Korea for 50 years. To receive this offering, Kim Jong- il must relax the Stalinist closed-door policy of the North, a task made no easier by several years of drought, crop failure and famine. Clearly North Korea has no wish to be perceived as seeking favors from their democratic enemies with a thriving economy.
Kim Dae-jung's peace overtures, obviously, deserve reciprocity from the Pyongyang government. More has to be done than just removing hostile propaganda signs against the South Korean government, which according to foreign news reports, has been done in several North Korean provinces. Encouraging people in the North to have friendlier ties with, if not to love, their fellow Koreans in the South can help pave way to peaceful reunification.
No less important is the transparency of Pyongyang's nuclear energy program which has worried not only South Korea, but also Japan and the United States because of its potential as a disguised weapons program. This coupled with North Korea's massive conventional weapons arsenal and secretive ballistic missile program are formidable obstacles to the current peace initiative.
In our opinion, the South Korean government in Seoul should take definitive steps to convince Pyongyang of its sincere wish for peaceful reunification, such as encouraging its people to invest in the North to help bolster the economy and narrow the wide gap between people in the North and the South, while persuading the investors that their investment will not yield a quick return.
The Korean people may well learn from the Germans that reunification of former East Germany into the German Federal Republic proved to be costly and that the much wealthier German people in the west had to pay dearly for boosting the living standard of their compatriots from the east so that they could live together peacefully under a united Germany.
Things are far more complicated for the Koreans, given that they fought each other on bloody battlefields during the war half a century ago and that it will take some time before they can dispel their mistrust of each other.
It is clear that this summit is hugely important for the Koreans to begin to resolve their differences, one at a time, in a brotherly way that benefits people in the North as well as in the South.