(LEAD) N. Korea to send Workers' Party secretary to Kim DJ's funeral: KCNA

(ATTN: UPDATES with more details, background throughout)
SEOUL, Aug. 19 (Yonhap) -- North Korea will send a secretary of its ruling
Workers' Party to Seoul Friday to pay respects to the late former South Korean
President Kim Dae-jung, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said
Thursday.

"Upon authorization of Kim Jong Il, chairman of the DPRK National Defence
Commission, a special envoy group led by Kim Ki Nam, secretary of the Central
Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, will visit Seoul from August 21 to 22
to mourn over the death of ex-President Kim Dae Jung," the KCNA said in a
one-sentence dispatch from Pyongyang.
Kim died of pneumonia and its complications Monday at 85. A state funeral will be
held Sunday at the National Assembly in central Seoul.
Kim Ki-nam, one of closest aides to Kim Jong-il, handles propaganda and history
education, but has also accompanied the North Korean leader on his outdoor
activities.
The secretary also visited Seoul in 2005 for a festival to celebrate Korea's
liberation from the Japanese colonial rule and called on Kim Dae-jung at the
Severance Hospital, where the former president was hospitalized for pneumonia.
Kim Dae-jung had a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim in June 2000, the
first ever inter-Korean summit since the separation of the two Koreas after the
peninsula's liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, to produce rapprochement
measures.
Among them are tour projects that bring South Koreans to North Korea's scenic
eastern Kumgang Mountain and its medieval capital city of Kaesong, and a joint
industrial park in Kaesong, near the South Korean border.
The cross-border tour programs have been suspended since last summer when North
Korea shot dead a South Korean tourist in a military zone at the Kumgang resort,
and the operations of the industrial complex have faltered as North Korea
demanded a massive hike in rent and wages for more than 40,000 North Korean
employees at about 100 South Korean firms there.
The KCNA report did not release the names of other delegates to the funeral.
The visit is seen as a possible catalyst to break the ice in inter-Korean ties
after the inauguration of hardline South Korean President Lee Myung-bak early
last year.
Lee stopped providing hundreds of thousands of tons of rice and fertilizer and
other aid to impoverished North Korea, which it had received for 10 years under
his liberal predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. Roh also had a summit
meeting with Kim Jong-il in late 2007 in his waning months.
Lee has linked any aid and economic cooperation to the North's denuclearization
measures.
North Korea conducted its second nuclear test in May, after one in 2006.
Tensions have eased recently as Kim Jong-il invited former U.S. President Bill
Clinton to Pyongyang and released two American journalists detained for illegally
entering the North.
On Sunday, the North Korean leader also met with Hyun Jung-eun, chairwoman of
South Korea's Hyundai Group, to allow resumption of the cross-border tour
projects being operated by Hyundai, the biggest investor in the North, and
reunions of families separated by the Korean War.
hdh@yna.co.kr
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