North, South Korea to hold summit in Pyongyang next month

TOKYO: The leaders of North and South Korea would hold a summit next month, the governments announced yesterday, as their peace process moves steadily forward despite signs of a growing impasse between Washington and Pyongyang.

The summit will take place in Pyongyang. It will be the third between South Korean leader Moon Jae-in and his North Korean counter- part Kim Jong-un this year, and only the third time that a South Korean leader has travelled to the North Korean capital for such a meeting.

The Trump administration appears to have run into slightly rougher waters in its attempts to convince North Korea to denuclearise in recent weeks, but in Korea the two sides appear to be making more progress in their gradual rapprochement – even if the issue of North Korea’s denuclearisation remains far from clear.

The announcement came after North and South Korean government officials held talks on the northern side of the border village of Panmunjom.

In remarks before the talks got under way, Ri Son Gwon, the leader of the North Korean delegation and chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, said he hoped the planned summit would help give “concrete answers” to the problems people were facing.

Afterwards, he said a date had been fixed, but not announced, “to keep reporters wondering”.

“It is a different story than US-North Korea, which seems to have become bogged down,” said John Delury, an assistant professor at Yonsei University in Seoul.

“The two Koreas are more in stride, and the process has ‘taken’ better.”

That’s not to say that the peace process across the divided Korean Peninsula is plain sailing.

On Sunday, a North Korean propaganda website blamed Seoul’s “blind obedience” to US-led sanctions for what it called the failure to make progress since Moon and Kim met on the border in a blaze of publicity in April. Some South Korean reporters also pointed out a mismatch in the make-up of the two delegations yesterday: North Korea brought officials in charge of railways, land and environmental protection and economic co-operation to the talks, whereas the South Korean side was made up of officials from the Unification Ministry, national security office and prime minister’s office. – The Washington Post