Korean Summit Results Exceed Low Expectations

SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 4 — Expectations for what could be achieved at the first summit meeting between the Koreas in seven years had been low. Worries that South Korea’s president, Roh Moo-hyun, a lame duck criticized for being soft on the North, would give away too much had been high.

President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea and the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, Thursday in Pyongyang, North Korea.

A portrait of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, was displayed Wednesday at a festival for the summit meeting in North Korea.

But a declaration signed Thursday by Mr. Roh and the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, contained a number of specific projects that could build closer economic and security ties between the Koreas, experts said. The North, in turn, appeared to have made some modest, though important, concessions to the South.

The more difficult step of actually carrying out the projects with the North — whose leadership, Mr. Roh said, still does not trust the South — lies ahead. But if the declaration was a confirmation of the South’s engagement with the North, a policy set in place during the first such meeting in 2000, it also laid out a road map for the next, likely conservative, administration here in Seoul after presidential elections scheduled for Dec. 19.

According to the declaration, the South will build a special economic zone in Haeju, a port town in southwestern North Korea, and establish a joint fishing area in nearby disputed waters in the Yellow Sea. The two sides will also work to establish joint use of a nearby river and shipping routes in waters that have long been the focal point of military clashes between the Koreas, most recently in 2002.

Haeju is not far from the Kaesong Industrial Complex, the economic zone already established inside the North by South Korea. Under the declaration, the South pledged to accelerate the development of Kaesong, where South Korean factories employing North Korean workers began operating in 2004.

The South will also rebuild a railway connecting Kaesong with Sinuiju, a North Korean town on China’s border, as well as a highway between Kaesong and Pyongyang, the North’s capital. In addition, the South will construct a shipbuilding complex in Nampo, a town southwest of Pyongyang.

“What South Korea needed to do this time was to demonstrate some practical achievements,” said Koh Il-dong, an economist at the Korea Development Institute in Seoul. “If we look at the joint declaration, it’s not that striking. Most of the ideas were ideas we had expected. But there are accomplishments.”

The projects are in keeping with the South’s long-term goal of reducing the economic gap between the Koreas, a necessary step toward reunification, possibly decades from now. More immediately, though, the declaration reflected the South’s strategy of trying to gain security on the peninsula by forging economic and other ties.

Under the declaration, the two sides agreed to work toward signing a formal peace treaty for the Korean War, which ended with a simple cease-fire in 1953. This point, experts said, appeared to be a concession by the North. It had long maintained that South Korea would not be involved in any peace negotiation because the signers of the 1953 armistice were North Korea, China and the United Nations force led by the United States.

In addition, the North agreed to make efforts to carry out the nuclear agreement reached in February, and reaffirmed this week, as part of separate six-nation nuclear talks. Even before Mr. Roh had departed for the North on Tuesday, he had been severely criticized in South Korea for saying initially that he would not bring up the nuclear issue during the summit meeting.

“These are the things that North Korea gave to South Korea,” said Choi Jin-wook, an expert on North Korea at the government-affiliated Korea Institute for National Unification here. “These are not big things, but they will allow the South Korean government to say it got something from North Korea.”

He added: “Many people in South Korea were worried that the president would make some grand declaration of peace, but he did not. In that sense, it’s hard to say we are satisfied with the summit, but at least we are not dissatisfied.”

For the North’s leadership, the declaration would yield the economic growth it is seeking without demanding the political change it fears.

On Wednesday, in comments to his aides, Mr. Roh said that both Mr. Kim and the North’s No 2 leader, Kim Young-nam, had reacted with “distrust and reluctance” at the mention of “reform and openness.”

The declaration sought to allay the North Korean leadership’s anxieties about the side effects of economic liberalization, stating that the two Koreas would regard each other with “mutual respect and confidence irrespective of differing ideologies and systems.”

Appearing visibly upbeat, Mr. Roh left Pyongyang on Thursday after a lunch given by Mr. Kim. At the luncheon, Mr. Kim, 65, who on the first day of the summit meeting was seen leaning to one side as he walked, addressed head-on speculation in South Korea that he was severely sick, dismissing stories that, he said, suggested he had “diabetes or even a heart disease.”

“I make a little move, and that gets huge coverage,” Mr. Kim added. “It seems like they’re fiction writers, not journalists.”

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