The two Koreas announced Monday that their leaders have agreed to hold their third meeting this year, seeking to preserve a detente tested by disputes between North Korea and the U.S.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in will visit the North Korean capital next month, according to the plans, in the first such trip for a South Korean leader since 2007. A joint statement issued after envoys' talks included neither a date nor a detailed agenda, other than to advance the agreement that Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reached in April during their first meeting in the border village of Panmunjom.
"The South, together with the North, reviewed the progress of implementing the Panmunjom declaration, and discussed further methods to fulfill the declaration in a sincere manner," the statement said. The document called for "establishing a permanent and peaceful Korean Peninsula peace regime" and "complete denuclearization."
Ri Son Gwon, the head of the North Korean delegation, told pool reporters at the end of Monday's talks in Panmunjom that officials agreed on a specific date for the summit, but he refused to share it, saying he wanted to "keep reporters wondering."
The South Korean unification minister, Cho Myoung-gyon, told reporters after the meeting that officials still had some work to do before agreeing on when exactly the summit would happen. He said the two sides will again discuss when the leaders would meet but didn't say when.
It wasn't clear why Ri and Cho differed on the issue of the date, and Cho wouldn't answer a specific question about the discrepancy.
The challenge of scheduling such a meeting between Kim and Moon in September underscored the fraught history between the sides. North Korea proclaimed the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on Sept. 9, 1948, and has previously marked the occasion with displays of military might, including nuclear detonations.
This year, North Korea is commemorating the 70th anniversary of its founding as a communist state, and it has been trying to invite foreign dignitaries to the country for the occasion.
Last week, the North's Foreign Ministry accused the U.S. of telling other countries not to send high-level delegations to the celebrations in Pyongyang. No sitting South Korean leader has attended the North Korean anniversary events.
Moon's spokesman, Kim Eui-keum, said Monday that holding a meeting in early September would be "practically difficult."
Whenever the summit is held, Moon will face a tricky balancing act: maintaining momentum for inter-Korean dialogue while also nudging Kim Jong Un to make progress in denuclearization talks with the U.S., an ally of South Korea.
In their April meeting, Kim and Moon reached a broad agreement on easing military tensions and improving their countries' ties. That meeting, and a second meeting in Panmunjom on May 26, helped to lay the groundwork for Kim's talks with President Donald Trump in June, the first time sitting leaders of the United States and North Korea have met.
At the meeting in Singapore, Trump and Kim signed a joint statement in which Kim committed to work toward "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" while Trump promised to provide the North with security guarantees and to help build relations between the two countries.
But since that meeting, the two sides have failed to make much headway on eliminating North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
North Korea is thought to have a growing arsenal of nuclear bombs and long-range missiles and is believed to be closing in on the ability to reliably target the U.S. mainland. A string of North Korean weapons tests last year, during which Pyongyang claimed to have completed its nuclear arsenal, had many in Asia worried that the U.S. and North Korea were on the brink of war.
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Pyongyang to urge the country to take concrete steps toward denuclearization, including disclosing an inventory of its nuclear weapons and facilities and dismantling some of them. But North Korea later called the Trump administration's behavior "gangster-like," accusing Washington of demanding a "unilateral" denuclearization while offering little in return.
Pompeo has pressed other countries to continue enforcing international sanctions against Kim's regime while seeking a concrete time frame for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons.
The United States opposes lifting any sanctions until the North completely denuclearizes. Seoul has been preparing for possible economic collaboration with Pyongyang that could go ahead when sanctions are lifted.
Cho said after Monday's negotiations that the two sides also "talked a lot" about the sanctions, but he didn't elaborate.
Cho said he also urged the North Koreans to accelerate the nuclear negotiations with the U.S. The North said it was making efforts to disarm, but Cho said there were no new details on those efforts.
In opening statements as the talks got underway Monday, both sides emphasized friendship and rapprochement as priorities.
"In a realistic sense, this is the major transformation in the inter-Korean relationship," Ri said. "That we are meeting to exchange talks in such a friendly mood like right now, signifies that the communication is working."
The agreed-upon summit between Kim and Moon could also set the stage for a second meeting between the North Korean leader and Trump. The news site Axios reported that such a meeting may come during United Nations meetings in September. While the White House hasn't confirmed plans for a second meeting, Trump tweeted Aug. 2 that he looked forward to seeing Kim "soon."
Information for this article was contributed by Jihye Lee of Bloomberg News; by Youkyung Lee of The Associated Press; by Choe Sang-Hun of The New York Times; and by Simon Denyer and Min Joo Kim of The Washington Post.
A Section on 08/14/2018