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Korean leaders agree to end war
NORTH Korean leader Kim Jong-il and the South's President, Roh Moo-hyun, have ended their summit, agreeing to seek a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War after a 54-year armistice, along with a Seoul-funded development package for the economically moribund North.
Major milestone here, I'd say.
Mr Kim and Mr Roh ended their ballyhooed North-South summit, only the second in history, promising the divided nation's leaders would "meet together often". The peace undertaking is the symbolic centrepiece of the North-South new deal which Mr Roh and Mr Kim signed yesterday in Pyongyang and then celebrated with a clasped-hands salute and a champagne toast.

Like most of the eight-point agreement, the peace plan and proposed ongoing leaders' meetings are open-ended and deliberately vague. The development proposals were not costed in yesterday's documentation. However, if Mr Kim keeps faith with the new reconciliation pact, as he did not with much of the agreement he and then-president Kim Dae-jung signed in 2000, this week marks a potentially significant turning point in the tortured relationship between the two Koreas and between Pyongyang and the US, the adversary the isolated regime most distrusts.

On Wednesday, North Korea agreed in the Beijing six-party negotiations to begin dismantling nuclear facilities, principally at Yongbyon, used to create the North's atomic weapons program. The Beijing interim agreement followed four years of escalating crisis until the dangerous dispute over Pyongyang's alleged highly enriched uranium project boiled over last August when the North exploded a plutonium bomb - its first known nuclear test.

The agreement in Pyongyang for the two Koreas "to closely co-operate to end military hostility and ensure peace and easing of tension on the Korean peninsula" depends ultimately on US co-operation. The US, North Korea and China signed the 1953 armistice agreement and Mr Kim's regime is absolutely set on Washington signing a peace treaty before it normalises relations with the South. So far, the George W.Bush administration is insisting North Korea make substantial progress towards dismantling its nuclear weapons before Washington signs any permanent peace deal.

As well as agreeing to work jointly to bring the US and China to a peace treaty conference, Mr Roh and Mr Kim undertook their governments would "put an end to hostile military relations and ensure detente and peace", particularly across the Demilitarised Zone and the adjoining disputed waters of the West Sea. "Two Koreas agreed not to antagonise each other but to ease military tension and settle disputes through dialogue and negotiations," the agreement states. "Both sides agreed to oppose any war on the peninsula and faithfully honour the commitment of non-aggression."
Posted by: Fred 2007-10-05
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=201307