North Korea Offers South Pact Debate : Pyongyang Suggests Parliaments Meet on Nonaggression Treaty

TOKYO — North Korea today proposed a meeting of all North Korean and South Korean legislators to debate a declaration of nonaggression drafted by the North.

“Neither to the South nor to the North is confrontation and war beneficial,” the letter said. “They cannot be good for the Olympic Games either and are only harmful to the World Festival of Youth and Students (in Pyongyang next year).”

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said the proposal to ease tensions on the peninsula was made in a letter today to South Korea’s National Assembly Speaker, Kim Chae Sun.

The news agency said the letter was from Chairman Yang Hyong Sop of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly. It proposed that the meeting be held in August in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, the news report monitored in Tokyo said.

No Immediate Reaction

There was no immediate reaction in Seoul to the proposal.

Both Koreas have proposed nonaggression pacts in the past.

However, this was the first time a proposal was made to debate a nonaggression pact through a joint South-North parliamentary meeting, said Radio Press, a Japanese agency that monitors Communist broadcasts.

Korea was split into the Communist North and the capitalist South at the end of World War II in 1945. The divided halves fought the three-year Korean War that ended in an armistice signed between the U.S.-backed U.N. Command and North Korea on July 27, 1953.

Alternate Locations

A full text of the letter, carried by KCNA, said the North proposes the joint parliamentary meetings be held alternately in Pyongyang and Seoul after the proposed initial session in the North Korean capital, with Yang and Kim serving as co-chairmen.

Yang would preside over the meetings in Pyongyang and Kim over the ones in Seoul, it said.

In Seoul, Kim’s aides confirmed that the National Assembly Speaker received the North Korean letter through the truce village of Panmunjom inside the Korean demilitarized zone. The officials, however, said the contents of the letter would be distributed to the various political parties in the National Assembly before it was made public.

The North Korean letter read: “All the participants will take part freely in the debate of agenda items, and as for the method of adoption, it will be good.