North and South Korea ‘to end 65-year war’
Historic Kim-moon summit likely to happen next week with denuclearisation of peninsula top of the agenda
By Nicola Smith ASIA CORRESPONDENT and Ben Riley-smith US EDITOR SOUTH and North Korea are said to be discussing plans to announce an official end to their 65-year-old military conflict at a landmark summit on Friday of next week, only the third interkorean summit of its kind. Citing an unnamed official in Seoul, the Munhwa Ilbo newspaper said that a joint statement may be released during the meeting between Moon Jae-in, the South’s president, and the North’s Kim Jongun, pledging to seek to ease military tension and end confrontation.
A peace treaty was never signed to replace the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War, and tensions last year over Pyongyang’s advancing nuclear and weapons programme led to fears that military conflict was inevitable.
It came as Donald Trump last night suggested that his highly-anticipated meeting with Mr Kim had moved a step closer. He said the US was talking with North Korea at “extremely high levels”. There were reports that some US officials had even talked to Mr Kim.
The US president said that five different locations were being considered for his much-anticipated meeting with Mr Kim, though an American site is not among them.
Im Jong-seok, Mr Moon’s chief of staff, yesterday said Mr Kim was committed to denuclearising the peninsula. In a sign of the high stakes nature of the summit ahead, Mr Moon was attending a Buddhist service at a Seoul hotel to pray for its success.
“The complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula is the most urgent task that lies before us and a task we must complete peacefully,” he said, according to Yonhap, a news agency.
“I ask you to pray with a sincere hope to remove confrontation and division,” said Mr Moon.
The two leaders will meet at Panmunjom on the highly militarised border zone that separates their two countries, close to the site where a young North Korean soldier was shot by his colleagues as he made a dramatic dash for freedom at the end of last year.
Intense preparations are under way for the first inter-korean summit in over a decade, and the first time a North Korean leader has ever stepped foot on the South’s soil.
Mr Im said South Korean security officials may visit North Korea to finalise details ahead of the first summit since 2007. A direct telephone hotline is expected to be functional later this week, said Mr Im. Next week’s negotiations will pave the way for an even more extraordinary face-to-face encounter between Mr Kim and the US president, possibly in late May or early June.
Mr Trump yesterday hosted Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, at his Mar-a-lago golf resort in Florida for a two-day visit.
The summit comes as the number of North Korean refugees finding safety in the South has dropped sharply this year. Only 192 refugees made it south in the first quarter of 2018, 31 per cent down on the same period in 2017, a year that overall saw the lowest annual number of escapees since 2001.