Three purposes of president¡¯s visit to U.N.

President Kim Dae-Jung¡¯s participation in the United Nations Millennium Summit has three significant purposes.

The first is to secure the support of the international community for the progress in South and North Korean relations following the first inter-Korean summit held in Pyongyang in June. Top leaders from as many as 163 countries are scheduled to take part in the summit held at the proposal of U.N.

Secretary General Kofi Annan. This is the first time that so many world leaders will gather for a single international event.

Leaders of the major countries, such as President Bill Clinton of the United States, President Jiang Zemin of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori of Japan, will deliver speeches in turn. The global leaders will also adopt a 26-point joint declaration in the summit, which thus gives President Kim a good opportunity to deliver his message of peace and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula to the whole world.

In particular, the President¡¯s dinner meeting with Kim Yong-Nam, chairman of the Presidium of the North Korean Supreme People¡¯s Assembly, scheduled to take place shortly after the President¡¯s arrival in New York, is expected to be a very significant event.

The first-ever meeting between the highest figures of the South and the North on the international stage will not only attract the attention of the world, but will become a chance to declare the two Koreas` will for reconciliation and cooperation to international society.

In a bid to maximize the effect of his meeting with North Korea`s Kim Yong-Nam, chairman of the Supreme People¡¯s Assembly standing committee, President Kim will deliver a speech during a dinner hosted by the Korea Society, a Korean-American friendship group based in the U.S., and will honor former U.S. president Jimmy Carter with the Van Fleet Award, given to figures who contributed to the development of Korea-U.S. relations. The President will also have dinner with 17 experts from the U.S. academic circle well versed in Korean Peninsula issues.

At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade successfully had a stipulation supporting the inter-Korean summit inserted in the declaration of the U.N. General Assembly co-chairmen (the presidents of Finland and Namibia), which will be adopted in the opening ceremony of the assembly.

In this line, the President is expected to sound out the possibility of holding the four-party talks aimed at bringing peace and stability to the Korean peninsula in his series of summit meetings with the leaders of the U.S., China and Russia. He will meet Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori during his scheduled visit to Japan September 22.

The second purpose of the trip is to make use of his time at the U.N. to attend to Korea-U.S. relations and confirm the friendship between the two countries, which has been strained by the Maehyang-ri shooting range and the revision of the Status of Forces Agreement. The President`s scheduled meeting with U.S. Korean War veterans was arranged in this regard.

The third is to again make clear to the international community Korea`s sustained will for economic reform. By doing so, the President seeks to raise national credibility and to strengthen the basis for cooperation with the U.S. business world.

For the same purpose, President Kim plans to meet the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, the governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the chairman of Goldman Sachs Group and other leading economic figures during his stay in New York to launch "sales diplomacy."