Roh, Koizumi fail to mend history row

The two leaders, whose meeting went ahead only after reluctant and time-consuming arrangements by both governments over the past several weeks, met for two hours at Cheong Wa Dae's Sang Choon Jae house from 3pm and discussed contentious history issues and the North Korean nuclear standoff.

"We have reached an agreement at a miniscule level in regards to the history issue," Roh said at a joint news conference televised live after the summit.

He added that the consensus was a result of prior contacts between diplomatic channels rather than the summit itself.

The meeting -- the seventh between Roh and Koizumi and the third round of the shuttle summitry eagerly agreed by them last year -- took place at a time of severe hostility in Korea against several controversial Japanese moves, including its approval in April of textbooks that critics claim rationalise Japan's wartime atrocities.

The "consensus" cited by the two leaders demonstrated little progress in settling the seriously tense relations between the close neighbours over history.

Roh and Koizumi reaffirmed their governments' agreement to launch a second-phase joint committee on history and added that a special sub-committee on textbooks will be established.

South Korea has been demanding the joint committee officially take up the controversial textbooks as its agenda.

Koizumi repeated that after considering various domestic circumstances he would look into building an alternative tribute facility to replace the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which includes convicted Class A war criminals among Japanese war dead from World War II.

Koizumi, whose insistence on visiting Yasukuni has long been denounced by South Korea and China, had promised at a previous summit in 2001 to review building another tribute facility but there has been no progress on that.

During the 20-minute news conference, held in an unusually solemn mood, Roh openly expressed his displeasure regarding the outcome of the summit and used strong words of warning.

"Both Prime Minister Koizumi and I am making great efforts, but if (we) fail to prepare an epochal momentum for peace on Northeast Asia centred on South Korea, China and Japan, (we) will become leaders who have failed to fulfill the job in history and would thus face historical responsibility," Roh said, standing beside Koizumi at an outdoor podium set up on a lawn in Cheong Wa Dae.

The president said there must be more enthusiastic efforts that surpass the rhetorical emphasis on how to acquire and maintain peace between the two closest neighbours in northeast Asia which share a past complicated by Japan's colonisation of Korea from 1910 to 1945.