South Korea calls for early peace summit with North

SOUTH KOREA, South Korea's President Roh Moo-Hyun called Tuesday for an early summit to declare peace on the Korean peninsula, even before North Korea has completely scrapped its nuclear weapons programmes.

US administration officials have cast doubt on the value of such a meeting, saying the hardline communist state must fully denuclearise before any treaty is signed formally to end the 1950-53 Korean War.

"North Korea has an obvious willingness to abandon its nuclear programme," Roh told an international peace forum in the southeastern city of Busan. "I want to emphasise again that we should not fight over the priority (of the peacemaking procedures)," he said, adding dialogue is the only way to settle the North Korean problem.

Roh proposed that leaders of the two Koreas, the US and China hold a summit as soon as possible to issue a declaration on the scrapping of the nuclear programme and the signing of a peace pact.

After a meeting in Pyongyang in early October Roh and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il called for such a summit somewhere on the peninsula. The war, in which the US fought for the South and China for the North, ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty and left the peninsula technically in a state of war.

Local media have speculated that Roh, who has doggedly followed a "sunshine" engagement policy with the North despite its missile launches and nuclear test, wants a peace summit agreed before he leaves office next February. Roh said a four-nation summit declaration would be a milestone leading to the establishment of a peace regime.

Seoul, Tuesday, AFP