New York Times
Normitsu Onishi
8/8/2007
The two Koreas announced Wednesday morning that they would hold a summit meeting later this month, the first since a groundbreaking meeting in 2000 began an ongoing reconciliation process on the Korean peninsula.
President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea will meet the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, during a three-day meeting Aug. 28 to Aug. 30 in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, the two Korean governments said in coordinated announcements.
The North said the meeting will carry “weighty significance in opening a new phase of peace,” according to the government’s Korean Central News Agency. The South, using similar language, added that the meeting would “provide momentum to settle the North Korean nuclear problem.”
Neither side released details about the agenda, and it was not clear how much can realistically be accomplished because the deeply unpopular Mr. Roh has only a few months left in office.
The meeting, which had been rumored for months, was immediately criticized by South Korea’s political opposition as a ploy to influence the presidential election in December. The trip by Mr. Roh is widely expected to boost the popularity of liberal presidential candidates who share his engagement policy toward the North.
While the main opposition Grand National Party also favors engaging North Korea, its candidates call for tougher concessions from the North. Two Grand National Party candidates, Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, lead in polls for the election.
“This summit is about politics between North and South Korea,” Nam Sung-wook, a North Korea expert at Korea University, said in a telephone interview from Seoul. “It is unlikely to solve the nuclear problem because North Korea has consistently argued that it is a problem between North Korea and the United States.”
Still, South Korea said the North had agreed to the meeting because of the recent progress in negotiations over the North’s nuclear program. The North shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon last month, and talks are continuing over its entire nuclear program.
In 2000, Kim Jong-il and the previous South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, met in Pyongyang in sessions that inaugurated a policy of reconciliation between the two cold war enemies, which remain technically at war. That meeting led to a profound change in relations between the two countries.
