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Finally two Kims unite: Hope two Koreas will |
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June 14, 2000
SEOUL, (AP) - The leaders of South Korea and North Korea greeted each other for the first time Tuesday, clapping, chatting and holding hands during a limousine ride into the North's capital in a step toward ending the Cold War on the divided Korean Peninsula.
Arriving for a historic three-day summit, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's jet landed at an airport on the outskirts of Pyongyang. His counterpart, Kim Jong Il, greeted him along with a military brass band, goose-stepping soldiers with fixed bayonets and women dressed in traditional, billowing Korean gowns.
The North Korean leader's appearance at the airport was unexpected, and South Korean officials said they were delighted with the elaborate reception. |
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RETRANSMISSION WITH CORRECTING THE PLACE--South Korean President Kim Dae-jung smiles as he is seen off by wellwishers during a stop in the street on his way to his airport departure for Pyongyang for the historic meeting ever to be held with his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-il, Tuesday, Jun 13, 2000. The first ever talks between the two countries will pave the way to normalize the Korean peninsula which has been devided since the end of the Korean war in 1953. On the bottom reads "President Kim Dae-jung."(AP Photo) |
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The two men rode together in a motorcade into Pyongyang, where at least 600,000 orderly North Koreans lined block after block of broad avenues, waving bouquets of pink paper flowers. The population of Pyongyang is two million people.
The frantic spectators appeared to direct their adulation at Kim Jong Il, whose name they chanted in unison as the motorcade passed a huge stone arch and other imposing monuments.
Kim Jong Il, who enjoys a personality cult in the closed-off, communist north, often receives such displays from his people.
The pudgy Kim Jong Il normally shuns publicity and rarely meets visiting dignitaries, but he appeared relaxed and was dressed in a khaki, open-necked shirt and trousers. He welcomed Kim Dae-jung, wearing a dark suit, at the foot of his plane. "They sometimes held hands in a show of personal intimacy" and exchanged views in the limousine during a 40-minute ride into Pyongyang, said Park Joon-young, South Korea's presidential spokesman.
At a guesthouse, the two Kims posed for photographs in front of a mural of crashing waves and sat side by side in armchairs. Kim Dae-jung told Kim Jong Il that he hoped the two Koreas "will end hostility and open a new era of reconciliation and cooperation," according to South Korean pool reports. Kim Jong Il said his goal was the same. Kim Dae-jung later met North Korea's ceremonial head of state, Kim Yong Nam, watched an arts performance and was scheduled to attend a state dinner before holding more talks with Kim Jong Il on Wednesday.
The summit offers the greatest hope for peace on the divided Korean peninsula in more than 50 years. Leaders of South Korea and North Korea have never met since the two countries were founded in 1948 in the Cold War's infancy, and the conflict between two populations that speak the same language and share the same ethnic roots has been bitter and bloody.
During the summit, Kim Dae-jung is expected to ask Kim Jong Il to agree to reunions of separated families, a summit sequel in Seoul and other conciliatory gestures in exchange for economic resources from the South. Though endowed with long-range missile capabilities, North Korea was unable to feed its own people in the late 1990s and today is reliant on food aid from its traditional foes: South Korea, Japan and the United States.
Before leaving Seoul, Kim Dae-jung said he planned to talk candidly with Kim Jong Il and hoped to learn about the thinking of the reclusive head of the totalitarian regime. He warned that the reconciliation process will be lengthy.
Reunification - the stated goal of both nations - also is likely to be a lengthy and difficult process. The first summit between leaders of East Germany and West Germany was held in 1970, two decades before the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
Animosity and suspicion remain fresh in the Koreas a half-century after the communist North, backed by the Soviet Union and joined by Chinese troops, fought the pro-Western South and its U.S.-led allies. The 1950-53 Korean War left up to 5 million people dead, injured or missing. Its legacy lingers most vividly at the Demilitarized Zone, a buffer area that separates hundreds of thousands of troops, tanks and artillery pieces on both sides of the border.
In 1994, concerns over the North's purported nuclear weapons program nearly triggered a military conflict. And North Korea's totalitarian government - based on a personality cult that virtually deifies Kim Jong Il and his late father and national founder, Kim Il Sung - had been reclusive for so long that reconciliation seemed a doubtful dream.
Yet driven partly by desperation for economic aid to rebuild its dilapidated economy, the North embarked on a new course over the last year, seeking diplomatic contacts with the outside world that culminated in the decision to host an inter-Korean summit. The celebratory mood now is such that The Korea Times, an English-language daily, compared the summit to the 1969 landing of a man on the moon. "One small step for reconciliation, one giant leap for reunification," the newspaper declared.
North Korea barred non-Korean reporters from traveling to the summit, allowing only 50 South Korean journalists to join Kim Dae-jung's entourage. Kim's arrival was televised live in the South.
Korea's leaders have a host of touchy issues to resolve, among them North Korea's missile and nuclear programs and the 37,000 U.S.troops deployed in South Korea. Their role has been to deter the North, which is believed to have stockpiles of chemical weapons and one of the world's largest standing armies. The summit pairs two men whose careers reflect the political gulf that separates democratic South Korea and communist North Korea. As an opposition leader, South Korea's Kim was jailed, sentenced to death and, he says, the target of four assassination attempts. He won election to the nation's top office on his fourth attempt, and he has received international acc olades as a defender of human rights. The North's Kim, on the other hand, was reared from childhood to succeed his father as head of a totalitarian state. He is suspected of masterminding terrorist attacks on South Korean targets, including the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air plane that killed all 115 people on board.
The two governments have agreed not to use national flags and anthems to avoid political or ideological frictions.
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