S. Korean Leader to Visit North for Historic Summit

The North and South Korean governments each announced today that South Korean President Kim Dae Jung will travel to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, for a first-ever summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il from June 12-14.

If it comes to pass--and analysts counseled caution in assuming that it will--the summit would be the first meeting between top South and North Korean leaders since the peninsula was divided in 1945. The symbolism of the summit date, almost exactly 50 years since the Korean War began June 25, 1950, raised hopes that direct negotiations between the two Koreas might at last begin to melt the hostile standoff that has continued unabated since the end of the Cold War.

“It’s extremely significant,” said Joel Wit, a former U.S. State Department official who is now a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It probably indicates that we’re at a turning point in North Korea’s policy toward the outside world, and specifically toward South Korea. It’s an enormous change in direction.”

The stunning announcement came at 10 a.m. today local time, three days before South Korea is scheduled to hold key parliamentary elections in which Kim Dae Jung’s party is expected to fare poorly.

The United States and Japan immediately welcomed the announcement and pledged their support. But an outraged South Korean opposition blasted the Kim government, accusing it of trying to time a diplomatic breakthrough for use as a campaign card. One party, the United Liberal Democrats, suggested that Kim might be compromising South Korea’s national interests for quick political gain.

“We suspect that in order to realize this meeting, the government must have made large concessions, which may damage national security,” said a statement by the United Liberal Democrats read on Korean television.

The secretary-general of the opposition Grand National Party took a slightly softer line, however. “We welcome the summit meeting, but we regret that the announcement was made immediately before the election,” Lee Bu Young said.

North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, had agreed to a summit with former South Korean President Kim Young Sam in 1994, but he died before the meeting could take place. Relations between the two sides deteriorated, and North Korea’s isolation appeared to deepen as Kim Jong Il quietly moved to consolidate his grip on his father’s mantle. The reclusive Kim Jong Il has not left the country since his father’s death.

Southern President Kim Dae Jung has made improved relations with North Korea a cornerstone of his foreign policy during his two years in office. But until very recently, North Korea has rebuffed all efforts at direct talks, calling Seoul a U.S. puppet and insisting instead on negotiating with what it considers to be the puppet master, the United States, which still has 37,000 troops stationed in South Korea. A number of spy incidents and a major naval clash between the two sides last year made it clear that North Korea would not be a partner to Kim Dae Jung’s engagement policy.

In recent months, however, North Korea has been reaching out of its isolation in an attempt to forge better diplomatic relations with a number of countries, including Japan, which held a round of normalization talks in Pyongyang last week that ended with only an agreement to meet again.

During a trip to Berlin on March 9, Kim Dae Jung announced that South Korea was willing to provide support in restructuring the North Korean economy and its crippled agricultural system, based on the principles of reciprocity. The North was interested, and the two sides met in Shanghai on March 17 and then had several subsequent meetings in Beijing, said Unification Minister Park Jae Kyu, who announced the summit.

On Saturday, the two sides agreed to the summit meeting, and agreed to announce it today, said a government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said that the timing was not dictated by the election, but that the two sides agreed to announce it promptly because “nowadays, it’s very difficult to keep that kind of information secret for a long time.”

Park’s statement said President Kim had agreed to visit Pyongyang June 12-14 at the invitation of Kim Jong Il. As had been agreed, the North Koreans made an almost identical announcement, but the text of the statement read on Pyongyang television began by saying that it was South Korea’s Kim who had issued the invitation.

U.S. State Department counselor Wendy Sherman said the U.S. has worked to support dialogue between the two Koreas in every possible way, including the dispatch of former Secretary of Defense William Perry to Pyongyang as part of a review of U.S. policy toward North Korea.

“We welcome and strongly support this announcement of a summit,” Sherman said.

Unification Minister Park said the two leaders would “frankly and candidly discuss ways to establish peace on the Korean peninsula, South-North cooperation and the future of the Korean people, and this will create a new chapter in Korean history.”

South Korean officials said details of the summit arrangements will be finalized in meetings that begin later this month. These include guarantees of Kim Dae Jung’s safety, and whether the South Korean president will travel through the demilitarized zone that separates the two countries or travel by air.

However, Scott Snyder, a North Korea specialist and representative of the Asia Foundation in Seoul, noted that today’s announcement amounts to a “package deal” that could easily be derailed on any number of pretexts, including Thursday’s election results.

“Anybody who has anything to do with North Korea knows that you have to take it a step at a time,” Snyder said.

“Based on what we’ve heard so far, there is no indication that the North Koreans have changed their public position yet in terms of the need for U.S. troop withdrawals as a condition for North-South reunification,” he added. “That could become a big issue in the preparatory talks.”

Asked why North Korea, which has continued its rhetorical invective against Kim, would agree to an announcement whose timing appears to help the South Korean leader, the government official who requested anonymity replied, “North Korea desperately needs external assistance.”

“If the [Kim Dae Jung] government becomes weak because of failure in the election, it is not in their own interest to have a weak government as a negotiating partner for a long time,” the official said.

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Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Washington and researcher Chi Jung Nam in Seoul contributed to this report.