President Kim busy preparing for ASEM

President Kim Dae-Jung is scheduled to preside over four rounds of multilateral summit conferences of the Asia-Pacific Meeting (ASEM) to be held in Seoul from Oct. 19 through 21. He is also scheduled to play host to three luncheons and dinners. The President will hold a press conference with some 1,300 Korean and 700 foreign reporters, to be held at the end of the conference on Oct. 21.

In addition, President Kim will hold separate summit talks with the leaders of the 13 countries. He will hold one-on-one meetings with Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji on Oct. 18 and with French President Jacques Chirac on Oct. 19, respectively. Following Kim's winning the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize, he received requests for separate talks from a number of the leaders of ASEM member states, but he failed to comply with all of them due to time constraint.

For the President as the chair of the Seoul conference, he will have to be fully prepared for the important process without a hitch. Since the supreme leaders of Asian and European regions with the different cultural backgrounds are to assembly at the Seoul meeting, Kim will be required to be equipped with sufficient knowledge and experiences. But he could not afford to take time for studies, due to receiving overwhelming greetings and requests for press interviews in the wake of his winning the Nobel prize.

Accordingly, the President has started intensive studies lately, while cutting short of ordinary schedules. Now he is engrossed in examining the related papers and documents with the working-level officials concerned, including Kim Dal-Joong, senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and national security.

President Kim, finishing the drafts of various speeches and studies of ASEM-related materials, is working on topics to be discussed at the bilateral summit talks, it was disclosed.

The president is expecting that the Seoul Declaration on Peace on the Korean Peninsula to be adopted at the conference will greatly contribute to advancing the buildup of a peace mechanism on the peninsula.