Seoul seeks China, Japan support for Kim-Moon declaration

South Korea on Thursday said it wants Japan and China to sign a statement supporting a declaration issued after the inter-Korean summit last week.

South Korea has been pushing for a special statement by the leaders supporting the Panmunjom Declaration signed by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Efe news reported quoting a Presidential office spokesperson as saying.

Seoul and Pyongyang have agreed to work towards the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

South Korea wants Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, along with Moon, to sign the document at a trilateral summit set to start on May 9 in Tokyo backing the Panmunjom Declaration.

In the declaration, Moon and Kim also pledged to sign a multilateral agreement to formally end the Korean War. Three years of hostilities ended in 1953 with an armistice, but no peace treaty was ever signed.

Moon and Li's visits to Tokyo would be the first visits by Korean and Chinese leaders to Japan in more than seven years.

The last occasion was when former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao held a summit with then Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan in April 2011, soon after an earthquake and tsunami killed over 18,000 people in Japan's northeastern coast and led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The South Korean government on Thursday released a video of preparations for the inter-Korean summit, named "A new beginning: those who made it possible".

The video showed people who worked behind the scenes to make the summit successful, including rehearsals and setting-up of the media centre which hosted almost 3,000 journalists during the declaration.

--IANS

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