(LEAD) Park calls for N. Korea's positive response to her overture

SEOUL, Aug. 19 (Yonhap) -- President Park Geun-hye expressed hope Tuesday that North Korea will repond positively to a set of her overture meant to improve strained ties and eventually lay the groundwork for potential unification with Pyongyang.

Park proposed last week that the two Koreas expand cooperative projects by starting practical ones such as joint management of rivers and forests along the heavily fortified border.

She also proposed that the two Koreas excavate and preserve cultural assets and prepare cultural projects to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Korean Peninsula's independence from Japanese colonial rule that falls in August next year.

Park unveiled the offer in her Independence Day speech on Friday marking the end of Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the peninsula.

"I expect North Korea to respond positively" to the overture, Park said in a cabinet meeting earlier Tuesday, the second day of the Ulchi exercises meant to boost capabilities in managing national contingencies, according to her spokesman Min Kyung-wook.

North Korea has yet to make an official response to Park's call, but a senior North Korean official has openly denounced her speech that, among other things, called on North Korea to give up its nuclear program.

Kim Yang-gon, the North's chief policymaker on inter-Korean relations, said that there would be no improvement in cross-border ties as long as South Korea sticks to its current policy of confrontation and makes its peace proposals conditional on the North's nuclear programs, according to Park Jie-won, an opposition lawmaker, who recently met Kim in the North.

North Korea has also kept silent on South Korea's recent offer of high-level talks to discuss the reunion of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War and other bilateral issues.

The development came as North Korea stepped up its harsh rhetoric against South Korea and the United States over their ongoing annual military drills.

North Korea has condemned the Ulchi Freedom Guardian as a rehearsal for invasion. Seoul and Washington have repeatedly said such exercises are purely defensive in nature.

On Sunday, the North's military vowed to launch "the strongest, most merciless pre-emptive attacks of our own style" against the allies over their drills.

On Monday, North Korea's foreign ministry also said the country will take self-defensive counteractions and steps at a higher level in the future that "no one will be able to predict" as long as the "nuclear war maneuvers go on to stifle Pyongyang."

   entropy@yna.co.kr

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