Seoul | Friday
NORTH KOREA’S supremo Kim Jong-Il held ”cordial” talks with an envoy from South Korea, the North’s official media said on Friday after what could be a breakthrough in negotiations between the two rivals.
South Korean presidential envoy Lim Dong-Won met and dined with Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang late on Thursday and handed him a message from South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung.
South Korean unification ministry representative Kim Hong-Jae said that President Kim’s message called ”for peace on the Korean peninsula and inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation”.
”The special envoy courteously conveyed a personal letter from Kim Dae-Jung to Kim Jong-Il,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.
”Kim Jong-Il expressed thanks for it and had a cordial conversation with him,” the North’s agency said in a brief dispatch.
The North Korean news agency did not elaborate on exactly how the leader in Pyongyang reacted to the peace overtures from Seoul.
Although the meeting was expected to take place, Kim Jong-Il’s notoriously unpredictable nature meant it was not a certainty.
Lim, who flew to Pyongyang on Wednesday for a three-day visit aimed at reviving peace talks between the communist state and South Korea, the United States and Japan, was due to return on Friday afternoon.
Officials in Seoul took the Kim-Lim meeting as a sign of some progress towards peace on the Korean peninsula.
The meeting followed tense low-level contacts on Thursday where North Korean officials held Seoul and Washington responsible for raising tension.
The leaders of the two Koreas held an historic summit in June 2000 at which they agreed to move toward a permanent peace and the eventual reunification of the Korean peninsula, which has never formally ended the 1950-53 Korean War.
After the summit there were reunions of families separated since the war and an accord to reconnect a cross-border railway.
But the Korean peace process faltered last year when US President George Bush took office. This year, Bush branded the North as part of ”an axis of evil” with Iran and Iraq spreading weapons of mass destruction.
The United States has about 37 000 troops in South Korea. – Sapa-AFP