October 03, 2007	Wednesday	Ramazan 20, 1428

SEOUL, Oct 2: North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Il gave visiting South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun an unscheduled welcome on Tuesday, raising hopes for a summit aimed at ending half a century of hostility.

Kim, stiff and unsmiling in his trademark military-style brown jumpsuit, greeted Roh with a handshake in the North’s capital Pyongyang, where tens of thousands of people dressed in their finest lined the streets to cheer.

“Long life! Long life!” they chanted, waving artificial bouquets of the national flower known as Kimjongilia.

Roh, paying only the second visit to Pyongyang by a South Korean leader since the peninsula’s division some six decades ago, was originally scheduled to be greeted only by de facto head of state Kim Yong-Nam.

“This is a good sign,” a South Korean presidential official told AFP in Seoul. “With Chairman Kim showing up in person to greet the president, the North side showed its sincerity toward the summit.”

Roh urged the neighbours, which remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended only with an armistice, to shed their historical legacy of mistrust.“It is up to us whether we can play a leading role in establishing a new order of peace in Northeast Asia,” he told a dinner hosted by Kim Yong-Nam.

“Let’s shake off any feelings of distrust and bridge the gap of distrust we have inherited from the past as soon as possible.”

Roh has said his push for permanent peace will top the agenda of talks starting on Wednesday with Kim Jong-Il. But any declaration they make will be largely symbolic since former adversaries China and the United States must also sign on to any formal treaty ending the war.

North Korean state media said the meeting aims at “opening up a new phase for achieving peace on the Korean peninsula, prosperity common to the nation and national reunification”.

However, the biggest potential obstacle to peace, the North’s nuclear weapons programme, may not figure prominently in discussions.

Roh, who leaves office next year, has already said he is unlikely to focus on the issue since it is being handled at multinational talks and because it could spoil the summit atmosphere.

The summit comes amid an upbeat mood in the six-nation negotiations on disarming North Korea, which tested an atomic bomb a year ago.

Unlike his predecessor Kim Dae-Jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for paying the first visit by a South Korean leader to Pyongyang in 2000, Roh travelled by land.

In a carefully choreographed ceremony Roh walked across a yellow strip in the Demilitarised Zone dividing the two Koreas, stepping over the world’s last Cold War frontier.

“After I return home, many more people will do likewise. Then this line of division will finally be erased and the barrier will break down,” he said.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans waited on roads and waved as Roh’s entourage drove into Pyongyang.

Hundreds of civilians -- men in dark suits and women in colourful hanbok traditional gowns -- attended the formal welcoming ceremony, where a military honour guard goose-stepped with fixed bayonets.

Roh was expected to deliver gifts for Kim, including giant flat-screen TVs and DVDs made in the vastly more prosperous South.

Economic cooperation will be a major focus of the summit, with newspapers saying that multi-billion-dollar projects may be on the table.

Critics say both leaders want the summit to boost the chances of a liberal candidate in Seoul’s December presidential election. The conservative opposition, which takes a stronger line with the North, is far ahead in opinion polls.

South Korean conservative activists and defectors from North Korea staged small protests against the summit, branding Roh a pro-Pyongyang leftist.

The best-selling Chosun Ilbo newspaper warned in an editorial that Kim “may use his old tactic to wrest only economic support from South Korea while putting aside important issues for talks with the United States”.—AFP