Former US president Jimmy Carter said yesterday he hoped to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his son and presumed heir during a visit this week that would concentrate on Pyongyang’s nuclear program and food aid needs.
The Nobel Peace prize laureate is leading a delegation of former state leaders — from a group known as The Elders — on a three-day visit to the country, which is under wide-ranging international sanctions.
“I don’t know with whom we’ll be meeting in North Korea. We would like very much to meet with Kim Jong-il and also Kim Jong-un,” Carter told a news conference in Beijing, referring to the leader’s son and handpicked successor.
“We have no indication that we will do so, but it would be a pleasure if we could do so,” he said.
“Concerning the nuclear issue, we will report as accurately as we can after we visit North Korea of what they had to say, but we’re not pre-judging in advance what our experiences in Pyongyang will be,” he said.
North Korea quit six-party nuclear talks with the US, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, in 2009 after new UN sanctions following Pyongyang’s second nuclear and long-range missile tests.
In 1994, Carter brokered a deal which pulled Washington and Pyongyang back from the brink of war over the North’s nuclear program, but he said he was not going in as anyone’s envoy.
“The Elders are not in a position to negotiate, we’re not mediators. We’re going to learn what we can and share what we find with the leaders with whom we have contact in the future,” he said.
Their visit comes as the six-party envoys step up their shuttle diplomacy to search for ways to restart nuclear talks. China’s special representative for Korean Peninsula affairs, Wu Dawei (武大偉), will visit Seoul today.
The main regional powers agree inter-Korean dialogue must precede the resumption of regional nuclear talks.
Carter and his team, which includes former Irish president Mary Robinson, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari and former Norwegian prime minister Gro Brundtland, will also be looking at the country’s parlous food resources.
More than 6 million people in North Korea urgently need food aid because of substantial falls in domestic production, food imports and international aid, the UN said last month.
“The World Food Programme reports that the distribution of food to the people in North Korea has been dropped from 1,400 calories per day to about 700 calories per day, and that’s an average,” Carter said.
“So it’s a horrible situation there that we hope to help induce other countries to alleviate, including South Korea, which has cut off all supplies of food materials to the North Koreans,” he said.
“In almost any case when there are sanctions against an entire people, the people suffer most and the leaders suffer least,” Carter said.
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