South calls for Korean summit

Press, 13 January 1987, Page 8

South calls for Korean summit

NZPA-Reuter Seoul The South Korean President, Chun Doo Hwan, yesterday called on the North Korean President, Kim II Sung, to meet him this year. In a New Year policy speech broadcast to the nation, Mr Chun said the communist North should resume the trade, parliamentary and Red Cross talks that were suspended by Pyongyang early last year.

“I hope also that a South-North summit meeting will take place during my term of office to achieve a breakthrough toward peace, reconciliation and unification,” he said.

Mr Chun, who again pledged to step down early in 1988, said that all iqter-Korean issues, including the recent North Korean proposal to hold political and military talks, could be discussed at the summit meeting. Lam month, Mr Kim, propoEM high-level politi-

cal and military talks between North and South “to settle the first and most urgent question, of national reunification.” In a first official response to Mr Kim’s offer, a presidential spokesman said yesterday that without a summit meeting, setting up new channels for inter-Korean talks would have no significance.

Mr Chun yesterday accused Pyongyang of building a huge dam just north of the border, “out of an idle dream of communising the whole peninsula by force.” . Charging the North with planning to use the dam to flood the South’s most populous and vital region, Mr Chun said: “North Korea must, first of all, cease the construction of the Kumgangsan Dam and agree to discuss the joint development of common rivers.”

On domestic affairs, Mr Chun said South -Korea was at a critical jfflteture, balanced between! pros-

perity and disaster, as it prepared for next year’s first-ever peaceful transition of power and the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games..

The President urged ruling and opposition parties to end their polarised confrontation over how to select his successor, but hinted that he could take tough measures if there

was no compromise on constitutional reform. The two sides are still poles apart on a new national charter. The main opposition New Korea Democratic Party (N.K.D.P.) wants a direct poll to replace the present electoral college system for choosing a President. The ruling Democratic Justice Party (D.J.P.), arguing that direct polling would create extreme social unrest, says any constitutional amendment should take place within the framework of its own proposed government system. This calls for a government headed by a strong prime minister drawn from the majority party. The President’s role would be reduced < to that of a figurehead.

• Almost 400 South Korean students went on trial yesterday accused of leading a three-day campujurevolt last October in: a HlLto force Mr Hwan to

The 397 students from 24 universities across the country were among more than 1200 students held after 7000 police used tear-gas, helicopters and water cannon to crush the revolt at Konkuk University, in east Seoul.

; The defendants, who are being tried in four different courts, are charged with violating the tough National Security Law, or with illegal assembly and violence, court officials said. The Konkuk students, reviling Government policies and calling for reunification with the North, kept the police at bay for three days with rocks and petrol bombs.

State prosecutors have described radical leaders of the riot as communist revolutionaries attempting to overthrow South Korea’s “free democratic, capitalist system" by violence and .by . echoing North Korean' Propaganda. -7