Park’s agenda for the summit of the Asia-Europe Meeting, known as ASEM, in Milan was her ambitious Eurasia initiative that calls for binding Eurasian nations closer together through a multi-purpose logistics and transportation network.
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| President Park Geun-hye walks out of the presidential plane after landing at Seoul Airport in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province on Saturday.(Yonhap) |
She proposed a symposium next year to discuss a logistics network across Asia and Europe.
Still, her agenda was partly overshadowed by her own announcement of South Korea’s plan to dispatch medical personnel to Ebola-hit West African countries to help curb the deadly outbreak.
South Korea has so far pledged US$5.6 million for the anti-Ebola fight.
In the ASEM summit, she also pressed North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program and to sincerely come forward for talks with Seoul.
Park’s comments are the latest sign that she is pushing to keep alive momentum for inter-Korean dialogue after months of tensions over a series of missile and rocket launches by North Korea.
In Rome, she met with Pope Francis as well as held separate talks with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
Park’s meeting with the pope came just two months after Francis visited South Korea on the first papal trip to the Asian country in a quarter century.
Park and Renzi agreed to strengthen bilateral economic partnership as they called for denuclearization of North Korea.
South Korea and Italy also signed a series of memorandums of understanding to boost cooperation in a wide-range of issues, including fashion, design as well as information technology.
In Milan, she met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and held two separate talks with her Danish and French counterparts on the sidelines of the ASEM summit.
Still, Park did not sit down for talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who said in Tokyo on Wednesday that it would be good if he had a chance to talk to Park on the sidelines of the ASEM summit.
Park has shunned a summit with the Japanese leader, though they met in a trilateral summit with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit in the Netherlands in March.
It was the first summit between Seoul and Tokyo in nearly two years. (Yonhap)
