Cherishing much hope, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun left Seoul Thursday for the United States, where he is to discuss with US President George W. Bush the unsolved nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula. 

South Korean media expressed hope that the summit, scheduled on Friday, will make tangible progress in bringing the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) back to the negotiation table of the stalled six-party talks.

The talks, aiming to peacefully resolve the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, had gathered delegates from the US, the DPRK, China, South Korea, Russia and Japan three times in Beijing.

But the multilateral talks have been stalled since last September when the scheduled fourth round talks failed to be convened.

Earlier this year, Pyongyang announced it would suspend participation in the six-party nuclear talks indefinitely. For the first time, it also declared it already had nuclear arms as deterrence of US hostile policy.

Although encountering some difficulties, parties concerned have not given up the efforts to reopen the nuclear talks.

Local media quoted sources at the South Korean Foreign Ministry as saying the coming Roh-Bush meeting is "to deliver such message to the DPRK that the principle to resolve the issue peacefully through diplomatic means is not changed," and that is where its importance lies in.

Local observers also predicted Roh and Bush will use the summit to coordinate their strategies on the nuclear issue and to strengthen the two countries' half-century-long alliance.

The summit, the fourth since Roh's inauguration in February 2003, comes amid reports that the DPRK hints at its intention to return to the multinational nuclear talks.

On Tuesday, US State Department spokesman Sea McCormack said that in a meeting held on Monday between US and DPRK diplomats in New York, the DPRK said "they would return but did not give us a time."

However, McCormack's remarks about the Monday meeting are slightly different from those of White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who also said on Tuesday the DPRK in talks with the US gave no indication that it was ready to return to the six-party talks.  

Although the US government released conflicting messages, some positive signs still can be seen.   

Bush called the DPRK "Mr. Kim Jong-il" as an apparently conciliatory gesture during a speech on May 31, and the DPRK gave positive responses.

Earlier, the DPRK had repeatedly demanded the US to retract its depiction of the country as an "outpost of tyranny" and its leader Kim Jong-il as a "tyrant" as one of the preconditions for it to rejoin negotiations.

In another gesture, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last Sunday that the US government is unlikely to make a decision in the next couple of weeks on whether to take the nuclear issue before the UN Security Council.

Her remarks, to some extent, eased the concern that the United States may quickly move to a more hard-line stance over the nuclear issue.

Roh's US trip also came before arrangements of some important inter-Korean exchanges.

Four days after the Roh-Bush summit, a South Korean delegation, to be led by Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, is scheduled to visit Pyongyang to attend a ceremony celebrating the fifth anniversary of the historic inter-Korean summit between then South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il in 2000.

Moreover, the inter-Korean ministerial talks will also be resumed on June 21-24 in Seoul after about one-year suspension, which South Korean officials hope will further boost the atmosphere for wooing the DPRK back to the broader talks.

The Roh-Bush summit, to be held at an important time, is expected to inject fresh stimulus into the process of persuading the DPRK to return to the six-party talks, observers said.

(Xinhua News Agency June 10, 2005)