For Lee Hee-ho, widow of former President Kim Dae-jung, cross-border tensions are a source of deep frustration as the deadlocked relationship has eclipsed the inter-Korean rapprochement Kim laboriously fostered under his signature “Sunshine Policy.”

With a plan to visit the North soon, the 93-year-old former first lady hopes to restore Kim’s legacy of bilateral engagement and cooperation, which has faded amid Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear arms and provocative actions, and Seoul’s hard-line response.

“I wish (my trip to the North) could help ease (the friction in the) inter-Korean relations,” she told Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn who paid a courtesy visit to her in Seoul on Monday.

“After the June 15 inter-Korean declaration (signed in 2000), the two sides were able to meet through the tours to Mount Geumgang. I hope (the incumbent administration) would prepare for the resumption of such things.”

 

On Tuesday, five officials from the Kim Dae-jung Peace Center, including its director and former Culture Minister Kim Sung-jae, met with five North Korean officials in the North’s border city of Gaeseong to discuss the details of her trip to the North.

The two sides failed to set a date for her visit, but Kim said that his delegation delivered to the North Lee’s wish to visit the North within July if possible.

“The North’s side said it honored her wish and would deliver it to the higher authorities. The two sides decided to meet later again to discuss the time schedule of her visit to the North,” the former culture minister told reporters after the talks in Gaeseong.

Kim added that the two sides reaffirmed that Lee would visit the North via a land route across the border, stay in the Baekhwawon Guesthouse in Pyongyang and visit a child care center.

Public attention is now focused on whether Lee would be able to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, as her visit could create much-needed momentum to defrost the icy relations between the two Koreas.

Her visit has been pushed for since the North Korean leader offered a hand-written invitation to Lee late last year. The invitation was sent after she sent condolence flowers to Kim on the occasion of the third anniversary last December of the death of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Lee’s side initially proposed holding talks with Pyongyang in April to arrange her visit to the North, hopefully in May. But the North rejected the talks amid cross-border tensions that escalated due to Pyongyang’s angry response to the South Korea-U.S. military drills and other issues.

Talk of her visit to the North came as the relations continued to deteriorate.

The establishment last Tuesday of a U.N. field office in Seoul to monitor North Korea’s human rights abuses has drawn the ire of Pyongyang, which has argued that the office is designed to overthrow its regime by politicizing the issue and meddling into domestic affairs.

The inter-Korean ties were further strained after Seoul imposed financial sanctions last Friday on six Taiwanese individuals and entities and a Syrian institution over suspicions that they traded arms and gave support to the North.

Lee plans to visit the North not with a full plate of politically motivated promises, but with relief supplies and knitted caps and scarves for young children, which many hope will move the heart of the North Korean leader and forge the mood for cross-border reconciliation.

By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)