S. Korea to Seek Wider Role for North, Roh Says

President Roh Tae Woo, enunciating a major shift in policy, said Friday that South Korea will no longer seek to isolate North Korea but will ask the United States and other allies to help integrate the Communist country into the international community.

In a lengthy interview, Roh said that his country has the self-confidence and the economic and military strength to deal with North Korea in friendlier fashion.

“The basic policy in the past was to try to change the North Korean position by isolating them further,” Roh said. “We have changed this. We think that by encouraging them to be more open we can have peace in this part of the world.”

Roh’s new posture toward the North reflects a deep and widespread yearning here for progress toward reunification of the bitterly divided Korean Peninsula.

No Ties With Pyongyang

Roh’s policy of integration rather than isolation would appear to call for a corresponding shift in U.S. policy toward North Korea. The United States has had no diplomatic relations and hardly any contact with the Pyongyang regime, which Washington has labeled a terrorist state.

Acknowledging an increased degree of anti-American feeling here, Roh said part of the trouble is that many young people, who lack any memory of the 1950-1953 Korean War, blame the United States and the Soviet Union for dividing the peninsula and the Korean people between rival communist and capitalist regimes after World War II.

He said American economic pressure to open Korean markets is exacerbating public mistrust, and he particularly chided U.S. tobacco companies for “pushing too impatiently” to insist on sales here of American cigarettes.