DPRK delegation meets with ROK president

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-08-23 14:12

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak (R) greets Kim Ki Nam, Secretary of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), at the presidential Blue House in Seoul August 23, 2009. [Agencies]

SEOUL: A high-level delegation from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) conveyed a message from their leader Kim Jong-il to the president of the Republic of Korea (ROK) during a rare meeting Sunday in the latest sign of warming ties on the tense Korean peninsula.

President Lee Myung-bak and three DPRK officials discussed inter-Korean cooperation during the half-hour meeting at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, Lee spokesman Lee Dong-kwan said. He said the message from Kim Jong-il, conveyed verbally, addressed "progress on inter-Korean cooperation" but refused to provide further details.

The Blue House meeting — the first since Lee took office about 18 months ago — took place just hours before the funeral of Kim Dae-jung, the former ROK president who met with Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang in 2000 for a historic Korean summit.

The late Kim, a longtime dissident-turned-president who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to reach out to the DPRK with his "Sunshine Policy" of reconciliation, died Tuesday at the age of 85.

The DPRK and the ROK remain in a state of war because their three-year conflict ended in 1953 in a truce, not a peace treaty. Tanks and troops still guard the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone dividing the two sides.

Kim Dae-jung, who served as president from 1998 to 2003, advocated engaging the nuclear-armed DPRK, and sought to ease reconciliation by plying the nation with aid. At their breakthrough 2000 meeting, he and Kim Jong-il agreed on a series of reconciliation projects that saw a flowering of relations between the rivals.

But ties have been tense since President Lee, a conservative, abandoned the Sunshine Policy when he took office in February 2008 and conditioned aid to the DPRK's commitment on nuclear disarmament.

Pyongyang, in response, abandoned the reconciliation talks and most of the inter-Korean projects. The DPRK also has been locked in an international standoff with the US and other nations over its atomic ambitions after launching a rocket, test-firing missiles and conducting an underground nuclear test.

However, there have been signs of an easing of tensions on the Korean peninsula in recent days. After welcoming former US President Bill Clinton during his mission to secure the release of two jailed American reporters, the DPRK freed a South Korean citizen held for four months.

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