MOON, KIM VISIT SACRED VOLCANO
S. Korean president fulfils dream to visit Mount Paektu on final day of talks
SOUTH Korean President Moon Jae-in cleared a top item off his bucket list yesterday: climbing Mount Paektu in North Korea with its leader, Kim Jong-un.
After the two leaders pledged new steps aimed at salvaging nuclear talks on Wednesday, Jae-in and Jong-un decided to use the final day of their three-day summit to go up the symbolic mountain on the Chinese border.
Jae-in is known for his love of mountain climbing and has trekked in the Himalayas at least twice.
The president has long stated that visiting Mount Paektu, which is spelled Baekdu in the South and is known as Changbai in China, was a “long unfulfilled dream”.
“Many people in the South would go to Mount Paektu from the China side, but I decided not to, pledging myself that I would go stepping on our soil,” Jae-in told Jong-un after reaching the peak of the mountain.
“But time flew so fast, and I thought my wish may not come true, but it did today.”
As Jae-in arrived at an airport near the mountain, some 1,000 North Koreans greeted him, waving flowers and chanting “Motherland! Unification!”
Jae-in and Jong-un took a cable car together to Heaven Lake, a caldera at the top of the mountain, and walked around the area with their wives and officials from both sides.
Pictures showed Jae-in and Jong-un smiling and posing with their wives, and Jae-in filling a bottle with water from the lake.
“The Chinese envy us because they can’t go down to the lake from their side but we can,” Jongun said.
“We should write another chapter of history between the North and the South by reflecting our new history on Heaven Lake.”
Some senior South Korean officials accompanying Jae-in suggested inviting Jong-un and his wife to Mount Halla, the highest mountain and a scenic tourist resort in the South.
“There is our old saying that we greet the sun at Paektu, and greet the unification at Halla,” Jong-un’s wife, Ri Sol-ju, said.
Jong-un said on Wednesday he would visit Seoul in the near future, in what would be the first trip to the southern capital by a North Korean leader.
He also wanted a second summit with United States President Donald Trump soon to hasten denuclearisation, but a key goal was declaring an end this year to the 1950-53 Korean War, Jae-in said yesterday.
He said he and Jong-un spent most of a three-day summit discussing how to break an impasse and restart nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington, which are at odds over which should come first, denuclearisation or ending the war.
Jong-un, who recently proposed another summit with Trump after their unprecedented June talks in Singapore, said the North was willing to “permanently dismantle” key missile facilities in the presence of outside experts, and the Yongbyon main nuclear complex, if the US took corresponding action.
The joint statement from the summit stipulates his commitment to a “verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of the nuclear programmes, and ending the war would be a first US reciprocal step, Jae-in said.
“Chairman Kim expressed his wish that he wanted to complete denuclearisation quickly and focus on economic development,” Jae-in said here, shortly after returning from the summit with Kim in Pyongyang.
“He hoped a second summit with Trump would take place in the near future, in order to move the denuclearisation process along quickly.”
Jae-in said Jong-un was also open to inspection of a nuclear test site in the northwest town of Punggye-ri, which he called the North’s sole existing facility for underground detonations.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday he had invited the North’s foreign minister to meet in New York next week and other Pyongyang officials to Vienna for talks with nuclear envoy Stephen Biegun.