South's Kim Arrives to Cheers in N. Korea

By SONNI EFRON

June 13, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SEOUL —

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung received a hero’s welcome today when he landed in Pyongyang and unexpectedly found North Korean leader Kim Jong Il waiting to shake his hand at the airport.

With a goose-stepping honor guard and a crowd of thousands waving plastic flowers and chanting “Kim Dae Jung!” and “10,000 Years!” the North Korean leadership honored the symbolism of the historic first meeting between leaders of the bitterly divided country.

“I think this is the first time Kim Jong Il has ever come out to the airport to meet anybody,” said Yoon Sock Joong, a spokesman for the Southern president, who was watching the live televised footage from Seoul. “It’s a very good start.”

Kim Dae Jung departed this morning from a South Korea gripped by summit fever and the hope that the visit will be a first step toward reconciling the rival Koreas.

“I am going with the warm hearts of our people and a cool head to see reality,” Kim said before he departed. As his plane took off, an emotional crowd sang a North-South unification song that has become popular in both nations.

After landing at Sunan Airport following a 67-minute flight north and walking down what must be one of the world’s longest red carpets, Kim was driven together with the North Korean leader in a black limousine down Pyongyang streets lined with tens of thousands of cheering people. Many women were wearing traditional hanbok robes.

“It looks like all 3.5 million Pyongyang residents are out on the street today,” said a commentator for South Korea’s state-run KBS television. However, North Korean radio and television were not broadcasting news of the South Korean president’s arrival.

The two Kims held the first of two private meetings at the Baekhwawon State Guest House and were shown on television chatting amicably.

The South Korean government has been playing down expectations of what might be achieved at this first summit. But hopes for something more concrete began rising the minute Kim Jong Il was spotted at the airport. A whoop rose in the Seoul Press Center, where the world press corps--barred from Pyongyang--saw the North Korean leader clad in an unadorned khaki military-style suit and raised heels.

“We will not be able to resolve all at once the bitterness that has accumulated over the past half-century. But well begun is half done,” Kim Dae Jung said in an arrival statement released from the guest house.

“What we cannot solve this time, we will solve during second and third meetings. . . . We are one people. We share the same fate. Let us hold hands firmly. I love you all,” the statement concluded.

Kim Dae Jung carries the hopes of the estimated 1.2 million surviving refugees who fled to the South during the Korean War. Most have had no word of the fate of relatives left in the North since the truce ending the fighting was signed in 1953.

The South hopes at least to get a deal to allow visits among the aging separated families and a reduction in tensions on the heavily armed peninsula. Kim Dae Jung also might raise the issue of North Korea’s missile program, and Kim Jong Il could reiterate the North’s long-standing demand that the U.S. withdraw its 37,000 troops from South Korea--an issue the South says is nonnegotiable.

Economic aid and cooperation are expected to top the agenda for hungry North Korea. As a goodwill gesture, the South agreed to send 200,000 tons of fertilizer, half of which has already been delivered. Starved for electricity, the North is reportedly seeking coal to fire its aging generating plants.

But aid issues between the old enemies are fraught with politics. South Korea recently offered to send surplus electricity to the North, but the North Koreans refused, fearing dependence on a neighbor that could pull the plug if relations sour, according to a government source.

Last week, South Korea’s unification minister suggested that economic aid could be linked to permission for family reunions. But a presidential spokesman Sunday denied that aid would be conditioned on such progress.

The South Korean president is traveling with his wife, Lee Hee Ho; 130 delegates, including government officials, academics, and business and cultural leaders; and 50 South Korean reporters, all of whom are invited to a massive state banquet tonight. It was not clear whether Kim Jong Il, who has in the past made scant public appearance, would attend.

Details of Kim Dae Jung’s itinerary leaked to the South Korean press despite a North Korean request to keep the schedule secret. That indiscretion was reportedly one of the “technical difficulties” that led the North on Saturday to ask that the summit be postponed for one day. North Korean leaders’ movements are never disclosed in advance, and Kim Dae Jung’s schedule suggests Kim Jong Il’s, sending North Korean security officials into “hysterics,” sources said.

The itinerary for the three-day visit shows that the 76-year-old South Korean president will visit a performing arts school for children and the ancient gate to Pyongyang, and eat North Korea’s famous cold noodles. However, he will not pay respects at the birthplace of Kim Il Sung, the North Korean founder and father of Kim Jong Il--a required pilgrimage for most foreign visitors.

The U.S. is anxious to stay on the sidelines during the summit but is rooting for success.

“This is, after all, the Koreas’ summit, and we should be respectful of that,” said a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

American officials have said that some of the U.S. sanctions that restrict trade and investment in North Korea will be lifted after the summit. The U.S. had pledged to lift the sanctions in September in exchange for North Korea’s promise to impose a moratorium on test-firing long-range missiles. But the U.S. has been taking its time, presumably due to concerns over the fuzzy definition of the moratorium. North Korea has accused the Americans of insincerity.

“It’s not a reward because we don’t know if there’s anything to reward yet,” the U.S. official said. “It’s the U.S. trying to do what it can to support this positive movement by North and South Korea.”

Japan, China, Russia and the U.S.--the four great powers whose geopolitical jockeying has determined Korea’s fate for most of the last century--have all welcomed the North-South summit.

In a plan brokered by former President Carter, former South Korean President Kim Young Sam was scheduled to visit Pyongyang in the summer of 1994 to commemorate the liberation from Japanese occupation 49 years earlier. But Kim Il Sung died July 8, 1994, summit plans broke down and relations between the two Koreas then took a dive.

Since taking office in February 1998, Kim Dae Jung has pursued a “sunshine policy” of engagement, while demanding reciprocity from the North.

The political opposition has accused him of being soft on North Korea and of making possibly dangerous concessions in exchange for the summit. The summit was announced three days before key South Korean parliamentary elections in April.

On the eve of the summit, the mood in South Korea was joyful. The Pyongyang circus played for 10 days to acclaim in a sold-out stadium seating 13,000. Audiences sobbed as they sang a unification song together with the acrobats in an emotional finale. Religious groups staged prayer ceremonies for a successful summit.

Several Internet companies decided that Kim Jong Il, 58, could now be used as an unwitting pitchman for products ranging from electronic money to downloadable digital music. A Seoul department store was mobbed when it gave away 612 free T-shirts with a fake photo of Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae Jung, and a dating company sponsored a two-Kims look-alike contest whose winners were featured in nearly every major newspaper Monday.

The Korean Dog Assn. announced that at the government’s request, it had selected a pair of Jindo dogs, famed for their loyalty, for Kim Dae Jung to present to Kim Jong Il. The female puppy is named “Peace” and the male is named “Unification.” In return, the Northern leader is expected to give his Southern rival a pair of northern Poong San dogs, also legendary for their loyalty and courage.

The South Korean press immediately began to speculate about cross-breeding a Jindo-Poong San “unification dog,” forcing the head of the dog association to declare that the two breeds could not be successfully mated.

Western analysts warned against euphoria, though not against hope.

“The summit is not the moral equivalent of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall,” said Ralph Cossa, executive director of the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies in Honolulu. “It more closely resembles the early days of the Helsinki process, which began the long and difficult road to German reunification.”

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Comparing the Koreas

North and South Korea are scheduled to begin their historic summit today. It will be the first meeting between leaders of the two Koreas since the peninsula was divided in 1945. The United States has 37,000 troops in South Korea.

NORTH KOREA

Capital: Pyongyang

Population: 21 million

Size: 46,540 sq. miles

Terrain: Hills and mountains with narrow valleys. Mountainous interior

is almost inaccessible.

GDP (1998): $21.8 billion

* Agriculture: 25%

* Industry: 60%

* Services: 15%

Exports: $743 million

Telephones: 1.4 million