adminTies between the North and South have been frozen since the election of conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in 2008, who cut aid in a bid to force the North to abandon a nuclear programme and bring it to the negotiating table.
A thirteen-member delegation, led by Lee Hee-ho, the widow of former president Kim Dae-jung who masterminded the so-called “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with the North, crossed the border by car and will
pay their respects at the bier of Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang.
“I hope my visit to North Korea will help improve South-North Korea relations,” Yoon Chul-koo, an aide to Lee, quoted her as saying at an immigration office at the southern border of the De-Militarized Zone.
Lee, who met Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang in 2000 in the first inter-Korean summit since the end of the Korean War in 1953, will stay for two days and will not attend the funeral tomorrow.
Most South Koreans are banned from going to the North under the current government’s policy, and South Korea, which remains technically at war with the North, is not sending an official delegation to mourn Kim, who died earlier this month.
Asked by reporters at the crossing point whether the delegation plans to meet North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, Yoon said the visit was for “pure condolence.”
Kim Jong-un, who is in his late 20s, is the third of his line to rule the North, although he is likely to share power with a coterie.
A second group of mourners from South Korea led by the widow of one of South Korea’s biggest conglomerates that has investments in the North was also headed to Pyongyang.
Hyun Jeong-eun, the widow of the Hyundai business group’s late former chairman Chung Mong-hun, led a delegation of five people.
Hyun’s father-in-law was Hyundai founder Chung Ju-yung, who established Hyundai Asan Corp in 1999 as a major investor in North Korea’s Mt. Kumgang tourist resort.
The business has been suspended since the fatal shooting in 2008 of a South Korean tourist at the resort.
Hyundai Asan is also involved in the Kaesong Industrial Park project in the North, one of the impoverished North’s few sources of foreign currency.
Meanwhile, Yoshihiko Noda, the Japanese prime minister, has reached Beijing for a bilateral meeting, but regional security — after the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il — is expected to be high on the agenda.
“I would also like to make sure that Japan and China will work closely so that the peace and stability on the Korean peninsula will not be negatively impacted,” the Japanese prime minister said on Sunday.
Noda will hold talks with China’s President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during the visit, his first since coming to power in September.
Ties between the two regional powers have been dogged by economic and territorial disputes, but Kim’s death has shifted the agenda to global worries about nuclear-armed North Korea, where Kim’s young son
Kim Jong-Un appears to be taking the reins of the state.
Noda is the first foreign leader to meet China’s leaders since Kim’s death, and he will emphasise the need to get stalled six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme back on track.
The six-party talks, chaired by China and also involving the two Koreas, the US, Russia and Japan, have been at a standstill since December 2008.
Pyongyang walked out of the talks in 2009, and conducted a second nuclear test, but now wants to re-engage in return for food aid from Washington.
Last year, Pyongyang also was blamed for two military attacks on South Korea that heightened tensions on the peninsula.
Japan, having no ties with the North, needs China’s support to engage Pyongyang. China backs the regime and supplies it with food aid and much of its energy resources.
Yang Jiechi, the Chinese foreign minister, this week held telephone talks with his counterparts in the US, South Korea, Russia and Japan after Kim’s death.
The two neighbours are also expected to discuss issues including territorial and energy field disputes in the East China Sea, particularly the development of gas fields near the disputed islands called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese.
“I would like to hold discussions so as to deepen the strategically mutually beneficial relations between Japan and China,” Noda told reporters in Tokyo.
Japan has repeatedly expressed concern over China’s widening naval reach in the Pacific and over what it calls the “opaqueness” of Beijing’s military budget.
North Korea has lashed out at the South for a perceived lack of respect towards Kim Jong-il, as it reported more scenes of mass grieving in the isolated communist state for the late leader.
Saying the whole world is in mourning for “a peerlessly great man”, the North, for the second time in three days, blasted the South over its response to Kim’s sudden death on 17 December.
There would be “unpredictable catastrophic consequences” for cross-border relations unless Seoul eases restrictions on condolence visits by South Koreans to Pyongyang, it said. — Al Jazeera.
Online Reporter