SEOUL - South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun takes a historic step across the heavily armed border with communist North Korea on Tuesday for only their second summit, billed as a chance to bring peace to the divided peninsula.
South Korean officials have made clear that to keep the mood from turning sour in talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Roh will step lightly round the paranoid state's nuclear weapons programme and widely condemned human rights record.
Roh, with just six months left in office, has said he would use his talks to press for peace and an eventual arms cut for the states -- technically still at war -- and may pledge billions of dollars for the North's beleaguered economy.
He will lead a motorcade from Seoul on Tuesday morning that includes some 200 business leaders, bureaucrats, poets and clerics, stepping out of his bullet-proof limousine to become the first leader from the South to walk across the fortified border that has split the peninsula for over half a century.
He then drives on to Pyongyang, where the states held their first summit in June 2000.
The talks come amid the latest round of negotiations among regional powers to persuade the North to give up nuclear weapons in return for aid. South Korean officials said Roh would urge Kim to stick to his pledges to denuclearise.
Roh has said the top item on his agenda would be establishing greater peace along the Cold War's last frontier.
"It will not be an uneventful course, but once discussions on a peace regime get under way in earnest, we can take up building military confidence and a peace treaty, and furthermore the issue of arms reduction," Roh said on Monday.
