U.S. supports plans by Lee MB to hold summit with Kim Jong-il: State Dept.

By Hwang Doo-hyong
WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 (Yonhap) -- The United States Monday expressed support for
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's plans to meet with North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il over the nuclear dismantlement of the reclusive communist state.
"We have had our own discussions with North Korean officials," State Department
spokesman Philip Crowley said. "We understand our partners in the six-party
process likewise have had conversations, and we encourage dialogue."
Crowley was responding to Lee's announcement last week that he is ready to meet
with Kim this year to help resolve the North Korean nuclear impasse and other
issues.
The proposed inter-Korean summit, with precedents in 2000 and 2007, would be
aimed at luring the North back to the multilateral nuclear talks and thawing
inter-Korean ties. Relations between North and South Korea chilled after the 2008
inauguration of the conservative South Korean president and the North's missile
tests and second nuclear detonation last year.
Crowley echoed Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg.
"We strongly support President Lee and the very clear path he set forward about
what is necessary to achieve peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula,"
Steinberg said last week. "I am confident whatever form of engagement the South
Korean government achieves, we will do this through close cooperation. We will be
very supportive of the measures President Lee takes because we know that we are
pursuing the same goal."
Stephen Bosworth, special representative for North Korea policy, visited
Pyongyang in December in the first high-level contact in the Obama
administration, but failed to secure a commitment from the North to come back to
the six-party talks.
North Korea has boycotted the talks since early last year, when the United
Nations imposed sanctions over its nuclear and missile tests. Pyongyang demands
the sanctions be lifted and a peace treaty be signed to replace the armistice
that ended the three-year Korean War in 1953 before it returns to the table.
The U.S. has insisted on North Korea returning to the nuclear talks first to
discuss those issues.
Steinberg said Friday, "Current sanctions will not be relaxed until Pyongyang
takes verifiable, irreversible steps towards complete denuclearization," adding,
"Its leader should be under no illusion that the United States will ever have a
normal and free relationship with a nuclear armed North Korea."
Neither the U.S. nor its allies will provide "material benefits to North Korea
simply to return to the six-party talks," he said.
Crowley said the proposed inter-Korean summit will help facilitate the resumption
of the nuclear talks.
"We would assume that should such a meeting take place, we have a message from
South Korea," he said. "It'd be the same message as the message from the United
States and others within the six-party process, about what North Korea should do
to return to the six-party process and to begin to take steps towards
denuclearization."
In an interview with the BBC, Lee said that the North should not set any
preconditions for the summit.
But Lee has said that he will not meet with Kim unless the North Korean leader
agrees to discuss nuclear weapons and technology, an issue that Pyongyang has
said has nothing to do with South Korea and merits only U.S. attention.
Lee suspended hefty aid to North Korea after his inauguration in early 2008,
citing a lack of progress in the North's denuclearization through the six-party
talks. The negotiations involve the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and
Russia.
Lee's liberal predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, provided hundreds of
thousands of tons of food and fertilizer every year to the North despite a lack
of progress in denuclearization.
Kim and Roh met with the North Korean leader in 2000 and 2007, respectively, but
skirted the nuclear issue, inviting criticism that they provided aid
unconditionally only to help the North's nuclear weapons development project.
hdh@yna.co.kr
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