Park meets U.S. House minority leader

SEOUL, April 2 (Yonhap) -- South Korean President Park Geun-hye met with U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, an official said Thursday. No details of the meeting were immediately available. Presidential spokesman Min Kyung-wook told reporters before the meeting that Park planned to seek cooperation from the U.S. Congress on major pending issues between the two countries. The meeting comes as South Korea is struggling to walk a diplomatic tightrope between the U.S., Seoul's key ally, and China, Seoul's largest trading partner, over whether to allow the U.S. to deploy its advanced missile-defense system to South Korea. Washington hopes to deploy the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense in South Korea to counter ballistic missile threats posed by North Korea. Still, China has repeatedly expressed its opposition to the possible deployment of a THAAD battery in South Korea, suspecting it is part of U.S. attempts to contain a rising China. Pelosi, who is leading a 10-member bipartisan delegation to South Korea, was also to meet with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se later in the day. Pelosi was the House Speaker when the House of Representatives adopted a landmark 2007 resolution on Japan's wartime sexual slavery that called on Tokyo to formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility for the atrocity. South Korea hopes to help the U.S. lawmakers better understand the issue of Japan's wartime sex slaves ahead of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress later this month. South Korea has repeatedly pressed Japan to face up to history, especially over the elderly Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Still, there is no sign of progress in resolving the issue that hinders close relations between South Korea and Japan, two key U.S. allies in Asia. Abe described the sex slave issue as "human trafficking" without specifying the perpetrator in a recent interview with the Washington Post. (END)