ROME (Yonhap) — South Korean President Park Geun-hye arrived in Rome on Friday for talks with Pope Francis and Italian leaders on the last day of her visit to Italy that culminated in her debut at a biennial summit of Asian and European leaders.
Park’s planned meeting with the pope comes two months after Francis visited South Korea on the first papal trip to the Asian country in a quarter century.
Park was also to hold talks with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi later in the day to discuss ways to further strengthen cooperation between the two countries, according to Park’s office.
On Thursday, Park announced South Korea’s plan to dispatch medical personnel to Ebola-hit West African countries to help curb the deadly outbreak at a summit of the Asia-Europe Meeting, known as ASEM, in Milan.
Seoul’s move came a day after U.S. President Barack Obama called for a “faster and more robust international response to the Ebola epidemic” as he spoke with his counterparts from Britain, Germany, France and Italy by video teleconference.
South Korea has so far pledged US$5.6 million for the anti-Ebola fight.
In the ASEM summit, Park also pressed North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program as she renewed her ambitious Eurasia initiative to bind Eurasian nations closer together through a multi-purpose logistics and transportation network.
She proposed a symposium next year to discuss a logistics network across Asia and Europe.
South Korea hopes to eventually link its rail network to Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway via North Korea, an ambitious project that will cut shipping times and logistics costs for South Korea’s Europe-bound exports.
Discussions on the project to connect the Trans-Siberian Railway with the potential Trans-Korean Railway have been underway for more than a decade, although no major progress has been made due to geopolitical obstacles, particularly North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.
Also Thursday, Park asked China to encourage North Korea to embrace change, saying South Korea is willing to support North Korea’s economic development once it abandons its nuclear program.
Park made the comment in bilateral talks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on the sidelines of the ASEM summit.
Li said China’s position remains unchanged that the Korean Peninsula should be denuclearized and said that China supports improvement of inter-Korean relations.
Park also held separate talks with her Danish and French counterparts.
Still, she appears unlikely to 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.
South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se told Yonhap News Agency that holding bilateral talks with Japan “won’t be easy” due to a tight schedule at the multilateral conference.
