South Korea should seek summit talks with the North under the next government in order to keep the North's nuclear threats in check through negotiations and dialogue, a North Korea expert here said Wednesday.
South Korea will hold an election to choose its new president on May 9 following the country's top court ruling last week to unseat Park Geun-hye from office over a massive corruption scandal.
"In order to keep the North's nuclear and missile threats in check through negotiations and dialogue, it is surely necessary to hold summit talks between the two Koreas," Cheong Seong-chang, a senior research fellow at the state-run South Korean think tank Sejong Institute, said in a paper.
Chung argued that whoever becomes the next president should arrange talks with North Korea's leader within "six months" of taking office.
Through such direct talks between heads of state, he hoped that South Korea could induce the North to stop missile and nuclear provocations and seek to resume suspended inter-Korean exchanges.
South Korea banned most economic and cultural exchanges with the North in May 2010 to punish it for the torpedoing of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors.
In early 2016, the government shut down a joint industrial park in North Korea's border city of Kaesong in a move to cut off sources of hard currency for Pyongyang.
The expert cited an "extremely limited autonomy" in bureaucrats in the two Koreas as a reason to hold a summit where their leaders can produce a breakthrough on sensitive issues.
He also underlined the need for the next president to launch a taskforce as soon as possible to make relevant preparations for summit talks with the North.
South Korea held two summit talks with the North -- one in 2000 and the other in 2007 -- both under liberal presidents.
The current conservative government has pushed a sanctions-oriented approach in dealing with the North, saying that there will be no talks if the North doesn't take meaningful steps toward denuclearization. (Yonhap)
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