Former US president Jimmy Carter and three other former state leaders arrived in Pyongyang yesterday, hoping to defuse tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula and revive long-stalled nuclear talks.
The “Elders” delegation want to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his son and heir apparent, Kim Jong-un, to press for a resumption of dialogue between the two Koreas. They will also discuss ways to help alleviate the North’s food shortages.
In a brief report, without comment, the North’s KCNA state news agency said the group had arrived by chartered plane.
Carter’s visit comes as momentum builds toward a resumption of aid-for-disarmament talks, which the North quit in 2009, but now wants to rejoin. The six-party talks involve the two Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia.
“The outlook for the diplomatic engagement is the best it has been in two years, but the prospects for a satisfactory outcome have never looked worse,” said Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Few people believe the secretive North will ever give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, saying they serve as a deterrent against attack, as well as being the ultimate bargaining chip.
“All sides are now preparing propaganda campaigns to portray their stances as more reasonable than those of the other countries involved,” Paal wrote on the Carnegie Web site.
Both Seoul and Washington are skeptical about the North’s sincerity about denuclearizing, and have demanded Pyongyang take concrete actions to show it is willing to ditch its nuclear weapons program.
Experts say the North could do this by allowing international nuclear inspectors back into the country.
South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan played down the Elders’ visit, but said he would meet the delegates in Seoul at the end of the week when they conclude their three-day visit to Pyongyang.
“Personally, I don’t see why North Korea would send a message through a third party or civilians when various channels for dialogue are open,” Kim Sung-hwan told a news briefing.
Nobel Peace prize winner Carter brokered in 1994 a deal that 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 this week.
“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 in Beijing on Monday.
Shuttle diplomacy between the six-party envoys has increased in recent weeks, and China’s representative Wu Dawei (武大偉) was due in Seoul yesterday. Experts say this signals they could be close to a breakthrough.
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 isolated state’s food shortages.
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