NORTH KOREA: Korea took two stunning steps away from decades of isolation yesterday, when it announced with Tokyo that Japan's prime minister would visit and agreed with South Korea to breach the world's last Cold War frontier.
The Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Junichiro Koizumi, said in Tokyo he would meet North Korean leader Mr Kim Jong-il on September 17th on a visit analysts say could improve ties, help ease regional tension and prove a catalyst for US-North Korean dialogue.
North Korea's KCNA news agency announced the visit within minutes of Tokyo.
"Through direct talks, I hope that we will be able to find some sort of opportunity to resolve various problems between our two nations," Mr Koizumi said. "Specifically, I want to seek the possibility of resumption of talks towards normalisation."
North Korea and Japan have no diplomatic ties and relations between the neighbours have been rocky for years, haunted by bitter historical memories.
The same goes for the rival Koreas, but yesterday they agreed to reconnect a railway and road through their border, the forbidding Demilitarised Zone, by the end of the year. The rivals have been divided since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
The two Koreas, at economic talks in Seoul, also pledged to build an industrial park in the North, study flood defences and supply rice to the North. The railway work will start on September 18th.
"I'm glad we were able to produce good results," South Korea's vice-finance minister and chief delegate Mr Yoon Jin-sik told reporters after three days of fraught negotiations.
Agreements involving North Korea have been made and then broken before, and too many turning points declared, so yesterday's dramatic developments could yet be overtaken or even reversed.
On the face of it, Mr Kim seems to have decided to mix a tentative cocktail of economic reform and diplomatic outreach, after abstemious years that aid workers and analysts say stunted the country's growth and starved the people.
Many, including North Korea's arch-rival, the US, are asking why.
"We have seen hopeful signs of potential change," top US arms negotiator Mr John Bolton said in a tough speech in Seoul just a day before yesterday's announcements.
"Whether all this flows from their desperation or their inspiration still is an open question," he said in a speech in which he said Washington was ready to talk to the North but also described Pyongyang as an evil regime and the world's foremost peddler of ballistic missile technology.
"Without sweeping restructuring to transform itself and its relations with the world, the North's survival is in doubt."
Mr Kim may beg to differ, but his pattern of diplomacy and policy in the past two months suggests almost tacit recognition that the status quo is no longer an option. Thousands of North Korean refugees in China, a key ally, may have sharpened his focus.
Just a week ago, Mr Kim visited Russia's Far East and met President Vladimir Putin to discuss economic co-operation, including linking an inter-Korean railway with the trans-Siberian line to provide valuable transit fees to both on cargo to Europe.
Since September 11th, Mr Putin has backed President Bush in his war on terrorism but does not share his views on categorising North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" with Iraq and Iran because of what Washington sees as their common development of weapons of mass destruction.- (Reuters)