N. Korea Seeks Emergency Meeting With South

North Korea has proposed an emergency meeting with South Korea next week in an apparent effort to enlist the nation’s support in the international standoff over its nuclear weapons program, officials in Seoul said today.

Breaking a long impasse, the North Koreans called for the meeting to take place Monday and Tuesday in Kaesong, a city north of the demilitarized zone where the two countries are developing an industrial park.

The ostensible topic of the meeting is relations between the Koreas, but the view in the South is that the North is reaching out for allies in the escalating nuclear crisis.

In previous confrontations with the United States, North Korea has tried to mend fences with South Korea.

“At this time, North Korea feels it needs South Korea to be some sort of mediator with the United States,” said Lee Duk Haeng, a senior official with South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which is in charge of relations with North Korea. He said South Korea would most likely be represented at the meeting by Rhee Bong Jo, deputy unification minister.

With the exception of working-level talks last month over how to contain an outbreak of bird flu in the North, Pyongyang has boycotted formal meetings with South Korea since July. The chill was prompted by South Korea’s admission of a large group of North Korean defectors that month and its refusal to allow left-wing South Koreans to attend ceremonies last year marking the 10-year anniversary of the death of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung.

According to a statement released by South Korea today, North Korea said in its invitation to meet next week that it was interested in “putting inter-Korean relations on a normal track” for the approaching fifth anniversary of the landmark June 15, 2000, summit in Pyongyang between North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and then-South Korean President Kim Dae Jung.

The North Koreans are also believed to be eager to receive 500,000 tons of fertilizer South Korea promised this year but has yet to deliver because of the nuclear tensions.

Representatives of the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, China and Russia have met about Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

No substantive progress was made.

Since then, the regime in Pyongyang has taken several steps that have provoked alarm. In February, it declared for the first time that it possessed nuclear weapons, and this week it reported it was removing fuel rods from its main nuclear reactor, a key step toward harvesting plutonium to produce weapons.