North Korea expressed gratitude to South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun for sending a letter of condolences over recent floods that reportedly ruined 10 percent of the communist country's cropland, a South Korean official said Saturday.
Citing massive rain-caused floods in late August thatreportedly left more than 600 people killed or missing, North Korea had postponed until early October a scheduled inter-Korean summit of leaders in its capital in late August.
In response to Roh's letter of sympathy, North Korea verbally expressed thanks through a high-level South Korean government official who returned from a visit to Pyongyang on Friday, Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung said.
Vice Unification Minister Lee Kwan-se visited the North's capital for four days as the head of a 34-member team of working government officials to prepare for the Oct. 2-4 summit.
"The North Korean side said it appreciated President Roh's letter of condolences sent on Aug. 21," the unification minister told a press briefing without providing further details.
The minister gave no further details, only saying that the North's thank-you response came from someone "who is authorized" to do so. Roh's letter was addressed to the North's leader, Kim Jong-il.
The upcoming inter-Korean summit was the first since 2000 when Roh's immediate predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, met the North Korean leaders also in Pyongyang. That helped Kim Dae-jung win the Nobel Peace Prize the same year.
Roh will make the trip to North Korea for the summit across the heavily armed inter-Korean border, accompanied by over 200 support personnel, who will include government officials and journalists.
Topping the agenda will be a peace mechanism on the divided Korean Peninsula and ongoing international efforts to persuade North Korea to denuclearize, according to South Korean officials.
The unification minister said the government has yet to decide whether to accept a North Korean request to include Arirang Festival, a massive gymnastic show, in Roh's itinerary, but indicated that it will be positively considered.
"The government believes we need to approach the issue with a more embracing attitude to help improve South-North relations and will review the issue from that point of view," he had said earlier.
Many conservative South Koreans are critical of the North's annual festival, seeing it as a communist show of propaganda. About 100,000 young North Koreans are mobilized for this year's program.
The two Koreas remain divided since 1945.
