Diplomats from both Koreas to sit at Havana forum

By Lee Chi-dong
SEOUL, April 20 (Yonhap) -- South and North Korean government officials will
attend an international gathering to be held in Cuba next week, an opportunity
for the first encounter between the two sides on the global stage since the
North's rocket launch early this month, officials here said Monday.

Amid their frozen ties, the two Koreas recently staged diplomatic battles during
international events to get their own views reflected in closing statements.
The North is known to be planning to send Pak Ui-chun, its foreign minister, to
the Ministerial Meeting of the Coordination Bureau of the Movement of Non-Aligned
Countries (NAM), which will be held in Havana from April 27 through April 30.
North Korea is a member of the organization of more than 110 states considering
themselves not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc.
South Korea, not a member of the NAM, said it will dispatch a director
general-level official at its foreign ministry as an observer to attend the
opening and closing ceremonies only.
The Havana conference will be the first major international event North Korea
will attend since its controversial rocket launch on April 5. The North claims
the launch was part of its peaceful space program, while some regional powers,
including South Korea, view it as a pretext for an intercontinental ballistic
missile test.
After days of heated dispute, the U.N. Security Council last week adopted a
presidential statement condemning the North's rocket firing.
"There is a possibility that North Korea will use the upcoming meeting to protest
the international community's punitive step, reiterating its stance that the
launch was aimed at sending a satellite into orbit," a South Korean foreign
ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
South Korea is expected to try to counter the North's move to include its claim
into a formal statement to be issued at the end of the meeting.
In the previous NAM meeting in Tehran and at the ASEAN Regional Forum last July,
North Korea sought to drum up global support for its position that the South's
conservative administration should abide by all summit deals signed by its
liberal predecessors.
South Korea's Lee Myung-bak government wants to implement the existing
inter-Korean summit agreements on a selective basis in pace with the North's
denuclearization efforts.
lcd@yna.c