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North Korea ready to open ties with U.S. |
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August 14, 2000
SEOUL (AP) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Il said he is ready to open ties with the United States as soon as the latter removes his country from a list of nations that sponsor terrorism, South Korea's state Yonhap news agency said Sunday. "The U.S. is putting a cap of a terrorist nation on us. As soon as they remove it, we would open ties with the U.S. - even tomorrow," Kim Jong Il was quoted as saying. He made the comment when he met executives of 46 South Korean media organizations visiting the reclusive, Stalinist North last week. Kim Jong Il invited them after a historic June summit with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang, which provided the best chance yet for peace on the divided Korean peninsula. The Korea were divided into the communist North and the pro-Western South in 1945. Their three-year war in the early 1950s ended in an armistice, not in a peace treaty. They share the world's most heavily armed border. Pyongyang was put on the U.S. list because of alleged involvement in the bombing of a South Korean airliner in the skies near Myanmar, also known as Burma, in 1987. All 115 people aboard the Korean Air plane died. The two sides recently held talks on possibly removing the North from the list. The U.S. State Department called the Pyongyang meeting "productive," but did not disclose details. North Korea is one of seven countries branded by the U.S. State Department as a sponsor of terrorism. Under U.S. law, this bars all but humanitarian aid to the Pyongyang government and rules out bank loans from international financial organizations, which are heavily influenced by Washington. |
