By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
Former Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan has reiterated the need for establishing a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula to replace the armistice as the first step to resolve the nuclear deadlock with North Korea.
The United States, however, is calling for North Korea to implement denuclearizaiton before the signing of a peace treaty.
Lee, who is now on a 10-day visit to the United States, described the peace regime issue as the first task the Korean government needs to handle among four main challenges _ the maturation of democracy, strengthening of national competitiveness and social integration being the remainder.
``Faced with the North Korean nuclear crisis, we've realized what lengths we need to go to resolve the issue. But at the same time, we've got to have positive thinking that establishing a peace system will be possible in the near future,'' Lee, chairman of the pro-government Uri Party's Northeast Asian Peace Committee, said at a forum in Los Angeles on Saturday.
``The rational behind the positive prospect is that South Korea has accomplished democracy and developed a powerful economy, and the global trend is supporting our efforts for peace,'' said the former premier who serves as Roh's special adviser for political affairs.
Lee has called for the holding of a four-way summit involving the two Koreas, the United States and China this year to discuss establishing a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. The 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, not in a peace treaty.
The Uri Party is seeking to hold the multilateral summit on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Australia in September, party sources said.
Lee visited North Korea, China and Japan in early March over the same issue and plans to fly to Russia after the U.S. trip, Lee's aides said.
The U.S. government, however, made it clear that Pyonyang's sincere denuclearizaiton efforts are a precondition to signing a peace treaty.
``That is something that could possibly allow other states to look at these other issues, bring to a resolution longstanding issues like an armistice as well as addressing at some point and fashion North Korea's isolation from the rest of the world,'' State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters on Friday.
In an interview with a local newspaper last week, U.S. Ambassador to Seoul Alexander Vershbow said the peace treaty is expected to be signed next year before U.S. President George W. Bush's term ends.
Unless the North shows a sincere attitude to cooperate in resolving the nuclear issue, however, the goal would be not achievable, he said.
In a six-nation agreement signed in Beijing on Feb. 13, Pyongyang agreed to shut down and eventually disable its key nuclear facilities in exchange for a million tons of heavy fuel oil and other humanitarian aid as well as the normalization of diplomatic relations with Washington and Tokyo.
The Stalinist state, however, has yet to implement the first phase of the agreement, which was supposed to be completed by April 13, blaming the difficulty in getting previously frozen funds of about $25 million transferred from a Macau bank.