North Korea delivered a stinging rejection of the South’s proposal for a series of three presidential summits over the next year, giving a blow-by-blow account on Wednesday of a secret meeting between officials of the two countries last month. A spokesman for the National Defence Commission, the North’s supreme leadership body, said a trio of South Korean officials — from the presidential office, intelligence service and the Unification Ministry — had tried to persuade the North in a meeting in Beijing to agree to the summits to defuse tensions.
The North’s representatives “told them to go back to Seoul at once”, he said, according to state media in an embarrassing outline of the meeting which could further strain ties between the neighbours.
Seoul said it was regrettable the North had delivered such a one-sided account and that it did not help to improve Korean relations, but added it stood by its call for dialogue. The announcement came two days after the same North Korean commission said it would no longer deal with conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, and that it was cutting two of the few remaining channels of inter-Korean dialogue.
“We have made it clear there would never be a summit meeting as long as the South maintains a hostile policy and insists (North Korea) should abandon its nuclear programme and apologise over the two incidents,” KCNA state news agency quoted the commission spokesman as saying. As a precondition for bilateral talks, the South demands that the North apologise for two deadly attacks on the peninsula last year that killed 50 South Koreans.
The North denies responsibility for the first attack, the sinking of the Cheonan warship, and says it was provoked into bombarding Yeonpyeong Island after the South had test-fired shells into nearby disputed waters. In between the attacks, the North unveiled a uranium enrichment programme which opens a second route to make a nuclear bomb alongside its plutonium programme. The South proposed the first summit be held at the border village of Panmunjom in June, a second in August in the North’s capital, Pyongyang, and a third on the sidelines of an international nuclear summit in the South next year, the North’s spokesman said.
