SEOUL - The leaders of divided Korea will share smiles this week and talk cash but skirt around Pyongyang's nuclear arms ambitions and human rights abuses in favour of fostering dreams of unification.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said he wants peace between the states, technically still at war, and may pledge billions of dollars for the North's beleaguered economy when he meets Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang for the Oct. 2-4 summit.
"South Korea's economic cooperation is aimed at reducing military tension," said Jeong Hyung-gon, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. "A peaceful peninsula has a direct impact on South Korea's economy."
South Korea has lived for decades with the North's military threat, but it fears a sudden collapse of Kim's government and worries that the hundreds of billions of dollars it would cost to absorb its impoverished neighbour would wreck its own economy.
North Korea's creaking economy has become a shambles under Kim while his neighbour's has surged. Hit hard by massive summer floods and U.N. sanctions for its October 2006 nuclear test, North Korea depends on food and oil handouts.
The summit -- only the second between the erstwhile foes since the peninsula was divided after World War Two -- will be high on symbols of unification. North Korean civilians in their finest clothes are certain to be sent out into Pyongyang's streets to cheer the leader of South Korea -- a country the North has trained its 1.2-million-man army to attack.
Roh will lead a motorcade from Seoul to Pyongyang on Tuesday, steeping out of his bullet-proof limousine to become the first leader from the South to walk across the hugely fortified border.
In the Northern capital, he is to witness an extravaganza featuring goose-stepping soldiers, dancing schoolgirls and a massive flip card animation section that promotes unification -- but under the North's communist banner.
According to some media reports, Roh plans to give film buff Kim Jong-il a huge flat panel television, despite U.N. sanctions that forbid the trade in luxury goods.
