Koreas Cautious On Summit

South Korea's president said Tuesday that a summit with North Korea represents a "big step forward" in peace efforts, although he warned his people not to expect too much from the meeting.

Kim Dae-jung said South Korea would broach substantive issues at the leaders summit in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on June 12-14. Vice ministers from the two Koreas will hold preparatory meetings in Beijing prior to the summit, Kwon Byong-hyon, South Korea's ambassador to China, said today.

He did not say when the meetings would take place or disclose further details.

Kim, meanwhile, said the summit would be unlikely to resolve any of the major issues dividing the sides.

"The national issues, which have been divisive for a half century, cannot be resolved overnight," Kim told a Cabinet meeting.

The June summit, announced jointly Monday by the two sides, would be the first between the two Koreas since the division of their peninsula into the communist North and the capitalist South in 1945. They share the world's most heavily armed border.

The summit, Kim said, is "one big step forward in our national history and in the move toward peace."

Kim said economic assistance and cooperation, reunions of millions of separated family members and tension-easing measures will top the agenda in his talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

The North's agreement on the summit is the most important evidence yet that the reclusive country may be shifting its long-standing policy of shunning dialogue with the Seoul government, which it officially regards as a U.S. "puppet."

Economic benefits are the lure. With its economy in tatters, North Korea has relied on outside aid since 1995 to feed its 22 million people. By the North's own admission, 220,000 people have died of hunger-related diseases in recent years.

South Korean officials have already indicated the summit could spur their country to invest billion of dollars in building roads, ports, railroads, power plants and other infrastructure in North Korea.

Other possible South Korean assistance includes shipments of fuel coal and fertilizer, they said.

But Seoul officials worry the summit could be scrapped if North Korea persists in its long-running demand for the withdrawal of the 37,000 U.S. troops from South Korea.

Another contentious issue is North Korea's insistence that the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War be replaced by a peace treaty to be signed between it and the United States, without the participation of South Korea.

"They are something we cannot accept," national security adviser Hwang Won-tak said of those possible demands.

Culture and Tourism Minister Park Jie-won, who acted as South Korean emissary in secret talks with North Korea, said that those issues were not discussed in advance.

"They were more interested in economic aid and assistanc," he said.

Meanwhile, a key adviser to Washington said Tuesday that peaceful coexistence seems like a good objective for the Koreas to pursue but that unification along the lines of East and West Germany was unlikely.

"A very reasonable goal is a reconciliation on the Korean peninsula -- the countries living together peacefully," said William J. Perry, the former U.S. defense secretary who has served as Clinton's North Korea policy coordinator.

"Their political systems are dramatically different. Their economic systems are dramatically different," Perry said while on a visit to Hong Kong. "I just have a hard time imagining it."