North Korean leader to visit Seoul for second summit
North Korean leader to visit Seoul for second summit
SEOUL (AFP): South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung and North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-Il will meet in Seoul this year, a top minister said on Tuesday, ending doubts over the planned summit in the South's capital.
Although Kim Dae-Jung has said he expects his communist Northern counterpart to visit South Korea sometime in the spring, the exact venue has never been given.
Speculation had been rampant that the two Kims would hold their second summit on the South's southern resort island of Cheju for the safety of the North Korean leader, who has rarely traveled abroad.
But in a New Year speech, Unification Minister Park Jae-Kyu, the South's chief North Korea policy maker, said: "We should perfectly prepare the summit to be held in Seoul this year."
He urged ministry officials to put a high priority on preparing the follow-up to last June's historic summit between the two Kims, the first between leaders of the rival states.
Park said it should be the "most important task" of the New Year to consolidate improvements in relations. "To write a new history of inter-Korean relations, we must carry out the tasks that are supposed to be done one by one," Park stressed.
Kim Jong-Il's visit to Seoul is one of South Korea's key interests for this year amid a logjam of inter-Korean peace projects.
Bringing a new thaw to the Korean peninsula, the inter-Korean summit in June led to a series of rapprochement talks and projects between the rivals who fought the 1950-53 Korean War.
Through the follow-up peace talks, both Koreas organized two rounds of temporary reunions for family members torn apart for decades following the war and agreed to re-link a cross-border railroad and highway.
But inter-Korean peace talks have showed signs of losing steam over the past weeks with the North accusing the South of issuing a defense ministry report calling Pyongyang as Seoul's "main enemy."
The North has repeatedly complained during a recent series of talks with the South that the report undermined the peace mood. In return the South accused the North of failing to meet Seoul's demands to set up a center for more family reunions and mail exchanges.
The economic cooperation talks last week also faltered over the energy-starved North's request for 500,000 kilowatts of free electricity from the South, which reserved its final response.
The scheduled military talks to discuss the reconstruction of a cross-border railroad and a highway could not take place last week either.
The cross-border land routes, cut off by the war, would re- connect Seoul and Pyongyang and reach the city of Shinuiju on the North's border with China.
Soldiers on both sides will have to clear a corridor through the four kilometer wide border, which is littered with landmines, concrete bunkers and guard posts.
South Korean troops began removing landmines from the southern border following the ground-breaking ceremony in last September.