President Kim Dae-Jung of South Korea said yesterday that he would seek a package deal with North Korea to ease Cold War tension on the Korean peninsula, declaring that the communist North was changing, albeit slowly.
"North Korea at first treated our policy with suspicion but it is now changing slowly, offering to have talks with us," Mr Kim told a group of parliamentarians on their return from a trip to the US.
"I have proposed that the issues related to North Korea's mass destruction weapons should not be handled on a case-by-case basis but in a package with other issues in order to resolve those issues once and for all," he said.
He made the statement after foreign ministry officials said South Korea had presented a package aimed at easing the confrontation on the Korean peninsula to its allies and to China. Mr Kim hinted that Seoul would actively pursue the package, saying: "Although we have to think about the possibility of Pyongyang rejecting (the package), we also have to reflect on whether we have done what we have to do."
The parliamentarians, led by the former foreign minister Mr Park Chung-Soo, said that US politicians expressed deep concern over the North's reportedly seeking to push ahead with test firing of new missiles.
Mr Li Kun, a North Korean deputy ambassador to the United Nations, has said it would be "a matter of course" for Pyongyang to launch more missiles, insisting on their development being a sovereign right. "It is a matter of course to continue with second and third launches," he was quoted as saying in a telephone interview with the Mainichi Shimbun, published on Thursday.
North Korea launched a rocket on August 31st last year that flew over Japan, prompting an angry reaction in Tokyo.
A South Korean foreign ministry official said the package was presented to the US, Japan and China by Mr Lim Dong-Won, senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and national security.
"The package deal contains phased approaches aimed at removing the vestiges of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula," he was quoted as saying by Yonhap News Agency.