Moon vows to find way for restored talks with DPRK

SEOUL－President Moon Jae-in of the Republic of Korea said on Monday that his government will seek to find a way during the remainder of his presidency to restart diplomacy with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"I will consider the remaining one year of my term to be the last opportunity to move from an incomplete peace toward one that is irreversible," Moon said in a nationally televised address to mark the fourth inauguration anniversary of his five-year tenure. He took office in May 2017.

"It is time to take action," Moon said, hailing the DPRK policy of US President Joe Biden's administration, which he said aimed to "achieve the primary goal of the Korean Peninsula's complete denuclearization via diplomacy with a flexible, gradual and practical approach by building upon the foundation of the Singapore Declaration".

The DPRK's top leader Kim Jongun and then-US president Donald Trump held their first summit in Singapore in June 2018, agreeing to the complete denuclearization of and a lasting peace settlement on the peninsula.

Denuclearization talks between Pyongyang and Washington have stalled since the second Kim-Trump summit ended without agreement in February 2019 in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.

Moon was scheduled to visit Washington for summit talks with Biden on May 21 in a bid to restore the deadlocked dialogue between the two Koreas and between the DPRK and the US.

"If there is an opportunity to restart the clock of peace and advance the peace process on the Korean Peninsula, I will do everything I can. I look forward to North Korea responding positively," he said.

"We have seen clear potential for issues to be solved diplomatically," the president said, citing the three inter-Korean summits and the two DPRK-US summits during his tenure that failed to achieve a complete success but maintained peace. "If we make a little more effort, the issue will be able to be solved through diplomacy. I found a possibility for and had confidence in the Korean Peninsula's complete denuclearization and the lasting peace settlement."

Following Biden's first Congressional speech in which the US president called the DPRK's nuclear program a "serious threat", Pyongyang warned earlier this month Washington will "face a worsening crisis" if the US holds on to the outdated hostile policy toward the DPRK.

Moon said he did not interpret the DPRK response as a refusal to dialogue. He said the prolonged dialogue deadlock will never be desirable, adding his worry was shared by the Biden administration, which rapidly established its DPRK policy through close coordination and consultations with Seoul.

Xinhua - Agencies