North Korea Calls for Enactment of Investment Pact

n its first interaction with visitors from South Korea since the death of its leader, Kim Jong-il, North Korea on Tuesday called for the implementation of the inter-Korean summit agreements, which would have brought massive South Korean investments had the South Korean leader, Lee Myung-bak, not scuttled them.

Kim Yong-nam, president of the North Korean Parliament and a ceremonial head of state, expressed the wish when he met Lee Hee-ho, the widow of former President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, according to Ms. Lee’s spokesman, Yoon Cheol-gu.

Ms. Lee’s 13-member delegation returned home on Tuesday after visiting Pyongyang, where she expressed condolences to Kim Jong-un, the son and heir of Kim Jong-il. Hers and another delegation led by Hyun Jeong-eun, chairwoman of Hyundai-Asan, which has business ties with North Korea, were the first South Koreans to meet Kim Jong-un and other North Korean leaders since his father’s death on Dec. 17.

Kim Jong-il held summit meetings with President Kim in 2000 and with his successor, Roh Moo-hyun, in 2007. Both meetings produced promises of large South Korean investments. Both South Korean leaders believed that boosting economic exchanges would ease military tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula and reduce the cost of an eventual reunification of Korea.

But that approach was reversed when President Lee, a conservative, came to power in early 2008. He demanded that the North first abandon its nuclear weapons program. North Korea has since denounced Mr. Lee as a “national traitor” and demanded that the summit agreements be reinstated. Its recent military provocations against the South were seen as efforts to win concessions.

Pyongyang’s demand concerning the summit agreements provided an early sign that Kim Jong-un was not shifting the North’s basic stance on South Korea.

Both Ms. Lee and Ms. Hyun volunteered to visit Pyongyang to reciprocate the North Korean delegations that had visited their husbands’ funerals. Ms. Lee wished her husband’s biggest legacy — the “sunshine policy” of boosting economic exchanges with the North — would be revived. Ms. Hyun, too, had reasons to hope for better ties between the two Koreas; Hyundai-Asan has suffered heavy losses from its investments in the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, which has been shut down since 2008 amid frosty inter-Korean relations.

For Kim Jong-un, abruptly thrust into the leadership following his father’s sudden death, two urgent tasks loom ahead: consolidating loyalty of the party and military elites, and engineering an economic recovery, said Jonathan D. Pollack, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

In the last years of Kim Jong-il, North Korea had shown interest in attracting foreign investment. It opened a couple of special economic zones along the border with China. Despite worsening ties with the South, it did not shut down a joint industrial park on the border with South Korea. It also agreed in principle to let a pipeline pass through its territory so that Russia could sell natural gas to South Korea. But it has been never clear to outside analysts whether the isolated and paranoid regime would dare a full-scale Chinese-style market reform any time soon.

Unlike his grandfather, who was often vilified as a war criminal in the South, and his father, whom most South Koreans regarded as a terrorist, Kim Jong-un can be seen by  many in the South as the first Korean leader with a relatively “clean past,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. That could make him more willing to open up, if Washington and Seoul coax him with the right overtures, he said.

On Tuesday, North Korean TV footage showed Kim Jong-un courteously receive Ms. Lee and Ms. Hyun when they came to pay their respects to his father laying in state in a Pyongyang mausoleum on Monday. He clasped their hands with both of his hands and bowed when the visitors voiced their condolences.

“Thank you for coming a long way,” he was quoted as saying to Ms. Lee by her spokesman.

Ms. Hyun said of the young successor: “He’s just as you see him in the media.”

Meanwhile, Pyongyang kept its hostile stance toward the Lee government in Seoul on Tuesday, lambasting it for not sending an official delegation of condolences.

Kim Jong-il’s funeral is planned for Wednesday.

Since his death was announced on Dec. 19, North Korea has hailed his son as supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army and as head of the ruling Workers’ Party, signaling that he will soon officially take those top titles that his  father had held. Its news media, all state-controlled and serving as the regime’s main tool of indoctrination, started a massive campaign to build a personality cult around Kim Jong-un, glorifying the Kim family’s dynastic rule.

Kim Jong-il had effectively seized power, including the leadership of the military, before his father, the North’s founding president, Kim Il-sung, died in 1994 and did not hurry to assume his father’s top party post. But Kim Jong-un was unveiled as successor only a little more than a year ago, following his father’s 2008 stroke. The son, and those elites whose vested interest lies in keeping the Kim family in power, have no time to waste to ensure his grip on power, analysts here said.