AFP - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter arrived Tuesday in North Korea for a visit to assess the food situation, pacify inter-Korean tensions and encourage the resumption of negotiations on denuclearization.
Jimmy Carter and three other former heads of state and government hope to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il and his son and presumed successor Kim Jong-Un, but nothing is certain yet.The official news agency of North Korea announced their arrival in a statement on a line, with no details.
The group of four "old", which includes the former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and former Irish President Mary Robinson, took off from China on Tuesday and will travel to Seoul on Thursday.
Efforts to resume the dialogue between the Koreas stalled. The South demanded an apology from Pyongyang about two serious indicents occurred in 2010 - the sinking of a corvette in March and the bombing of an island in November - but the North refused.
The six-party talks on denuclearization are also deadlocked since 2008.Pyongyang announced in November a uranium enrichment plant, which represents portentiellement a second way to obtain a nuclear bomb.
The food crisis in North Korea will also be the focus of this visit, had said Monday in Beijing the four "old".
According to the UN, more than six million people, or one quarter of the North Korean people, are in urgent need of food aid.
Jimmy Carter visited Pyongyang for the first time in 1994, to meet the founding president Kim Il-Sung, while North Korea and the United States was on the verge of declaring war because of nuclear program Pyongyang.
Former U.S. President had also visited this country in the summer of 2010, to secure the release of a U.S. citizen, but he had not met with Kim Jong-Il.
The President may also seek the release of a Korean-Americans detained in North Korea since last November because of unspecified crimes against the country. It would be a missionary, according to an anonymous source.
