South Korea, the US and China plan to propose to Pyongyang the resumption of long-stalled four-power talks aimed at establishing peace on the divided Korean peninsula, President Kim Dae-jung said yesterday.
The last four-way talks in Geneva in August 1999 broke off because of North Korea's insistence on a withdrawal of US troops from South Korea, Kim said.
But he said North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had dropped this precondition when the two met at a landmark summit in Pyongyang in June and agreed to work for reconciliation and eventual reunification.
The two Cold War foes are still technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armed truce, not a permanent peace treaty.
Answering questions after a speech to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, Kim said he had raised the issue of the four-party talks with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基) during an Asian leaders' meeting in the city-state that ended on Saturday.
"He very much agreed that it should be revived. We already have an agreement with the US that the talks should be revived, and so our plan at this point is to make the proposal to North Korea that the four-party talks resume," Kim said through an interpreter.
The South Korean leader, who will receive the Nobel peace prize next month for his efforts to end the Cold War divide on the heavily militarized peninsula, did not say when he thought the talks might resume.
Kim also held out the prospect of improved relations between North Korea and Japan.
"With advances in South-North Korean relations and advances in US-North Korea relations, I believe this will be a very positive stimulus for things to progress between Japan and North Korea as well," Kim said.
He said he had been acting as a "kind of errand boy," passing messages between the two sides, but cautioned that historical animosities were holding up the normalization of relations.
"On both sides the colonial past is still a very big barrier," Kim said.
Japan is a former ruler of the Korean peninsula and Pyongyang wants an apology and compensation for its harsh rule.
Kim said public resentment in Japan over the alleged abduction of 10 Japanese citizens in the 1960s and 1970s by North Korea was also a thorny issue barring the establishment of ties.
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