Summit offers best bet for Korean peace

By Andrew Steele

SEOUL (Reuter): The historic meeting of North and South Korean presidents next month offers the best chance ever of reconciliation on the divided peninsula, but Pyongyang may only be buying time in the row over its nuclear ambitions, political analysts said on Wednesday.

Negotiators meeting on Tuesday on the heavily fortified inter- Korean border agreed South Korean President Kim Young-sam and North Korean leader Kim Il-sung would meet for a three-day summit on July 25 in the North Korean capital.

"It is the beginning of the beginning. I suppose we are being cautiously optimistic, but pragmatic," said a senior Seoul government spokesman.

The summit is due to end on the anniversary of the armistice agreement that brought a three-year war between North and South Korea to an inconclusive end in 1953. The two states are still technically at war.

It will be the first time Korean presidents have met since 1945, when the nation was divided after World War II.

"The fact that both sides stuck through 10 hours of negotiation to reach the outcome they did is significant," said Michael Breen, a leading North Korea watcher and consultant with the Seoul-based Merit Communications.

"For the North Koreans, the medium is the message -- the fact of the meeting itself speaks volumes. It will bring about change even if they don't talk about very much," he said.

Seoul has used pragmatism as its basis for negotiations with North Korea. It was only when the South Koreans dropped a key demand over fixing the time and place of a second summit in the South that Pyongyang agreed to the talks.

But analysts said South Korea would be pushed only so far. Clarity over North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons program would be an unshakeable requirement in future negotiations, they said.

South Korea and its allies believe the North has developed several nuclear weapons. Pyongyang denies this, but has refused International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors full access to ostensibly civilian nuclear plants.

"It will be impossible for North Korea to avoid the nuclear issue, much as I suspect they would like to," Breen said.

"But the two sides will not destroy the negotiating process because of the nuclear problem. I suspect that issue will be the subject of hard negotiations with the United States," he added.

In another diplomatic breakthrough for the isolated Stalinist state, Washington agreed last week to hold high-level talks with North Korea from July 8 in Geneva.

"It will be interesting to see how Pyongyang juggles the two negotiations. I think the nuclear issue will feature highly on the agenda with the United States, but less so at the North-South summit," said a senior Western diplomat.

Analysts said North Korea could be considered the victor in negotiations so far.

"North Korea has not made a single concession over nuclear concessions or human rights, yet it has succeeded in stalling any decision on UN sanctions, it has won a new round of talks with Washington and Kim Il-sung will be in the spotlight during his talks with Kim Young-sam," the Seoul-based diplomat said.

UN-backed sanctions against North Korea were looming as possible punishment for its refusal to allow full nuclear inspections.

Both South Korea's ruling and opposition politicians welcomed the summit.

"We hope ... the two Koreas can put an end to their age-old enmity and confrontation and unfold a new age of peaceful co- existence and mutual cooperation," said ruling Democratic Liberal Party spokesman Park Bum-jin.

"The summit should be a precious opportunity to resolve the North Korean nuclear row peacefully through dialogue," said opposition Democratic Party spokesman Park Jie-won.

But there were some dissenting voices, particularly from the older generation, which remembers the horrors of the Korean War. "If North Korea said they were halting their nuclear program and would like to have a summit, that would be great," said Hahn Ki- shik, professor of political science at Korea University.

"But (Kim Young-sam) is not going to get anything out of North Korea because they have nothing to give. Why is he going to Pyongyang to see the troublemaker?" he asked.