N. Korea really wants reconciliation this time

By Zeno Park

SEOUL (AFP): North Korea appears to be a genuine partner in peace and determined to honor the joint agreement on reconciliation reached at the historic inter-Korean summit in June, officials and analysts here say.

Culture-Tourism Minister Park Jie-won, who led a delegation to Pyongyang last week, said he felt seismic shifts were taking place in the secretive and unpredictable Stalinist state.

"I felt drastic changes were taking place in the North in the aftermath of the summit," he said in an interview with MBC TV late Monday, ahead of Tuesday's exchange of family visits between the two sides.

Park and 46 media bosses paid an eight-day visit to Pyongyang at the invitation of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il exactly 50 days after the June summit with President Kim Dae-jung.

The unprecedented summit triggered a wave of euphoria here, but there has also been lingering concern whether the North's desire for rapprochement was genuine or motivated by dire economic straits.

Analysts here said the North appeared to have taken a policy shift on the issue of relatives separated for decades because of the Cold War division of Korea.

A total of 100 relatives from each side will be reunited with long-lost families in separate meetings in Pyongyang and Seoul on Tuesday, the first such reunions since 50 relatives were exchanged 15 years ago.

But analysts believe these reunions will be different from last time, which turned into a one-off event which opened more scars than it healed.

The emotional issue of reunions affects millions of families on the peninsula, and Kim Jong-il made a commitment last week to keep the process alive.

"Let's have more exchanges of separated families in September and again in October," a TV footage showed Kim telling the media chiefs.

"And for next year, let's study this issue more broadly and carry on with it so that separated family members visit homes of their relatives," he said.

The current exchanges are highly controlled -- meetings are confined to hotels in Pyongyang and Seoul, apparently because of North Korea's concern about the social impact of contact with southerners.

Since the division of Korea in 1945, South Korea has developed into one of Asia's most prosperous countries but the North, which was better off than the South until the mid-1970s, has slipped to poverty and hunger.

Analysts here agree this softening of stance on the issue of separated families is significant.

"For North Korea, allowing home visits amounts to a revolutionary change," said Lee Jong-seok of the private Sejong Institute.

Analysts noted the North has in the past branded North Koreans living in the South traitors.

Kim Jong-il also said that despite objections from the North's military, he would allow the opening of direct air routes between Pyongyang and Seoul.

"This kind of direct air route was unthinkable for the North in the past," Defense Analyst Suh Ju-seok told the Joongang Daily.

Some 65 percent of the North's one-million-strong armed forces are deployed between Pyongyang and the demilitarized zone dividing Korea.

Kim also promised to allow the opening of a land route between Seoul and Kaesong, an ancient capital near the inter-Korean border, in addition to a key railway which will be re-linked across the border.

"We have to isolate Panmunjom, the symbol of confrontation," Kim Jong-il said, referring to the UN-controlled truce village where an armistice was signed in 1953 and which is the only direct point of contact between the two sides.

South Korean viewers were then stunned as Kim Jong-il accused both Pyongyang and Seoul of exploiting the reunification issue in the past for political purposes.

"I think both the North and the South exploited the reunification issue for the purpose of maintaining power and I think this is something wrong," Kim said in a 210-minute-long conversation with the media representatives.

But analysts here said Kim Jong-il was stressing the importance of new thinking rather than intending to discredit the past government of his father Kim Il-sung, the founder of the communist state.