S. Korea Premier Crosses DMZ for Talks in North’s Capital : Asia: Few results are expected from the Pyongyang meeting, however. It follows one made to Seoul last month.

SEOUL —  Amid tentative signs of change in North Korea, South Korean Prime Minister Kang Young Hoon today crossed the Demilitarized Zone to become the first chief of a Cabinet in the south ever to visit the Communist north.

Kang, accompanied by six other officials and a staff of 33, is scheduled to arrive in Pyongyang this afternoon for a four-day visit. However, South Korean officials said they expect few results from the talks, which reciprocate a visit to Seoul on Sept. 4-7 by North Korean Prime Minister Yon Hyung Muk. Those meetings failed to produce any agreements.

Although neither prime minister exercises independent power in his own right, the exchange marks the highest level of North and South Korean officials to meet in 18 years of off-and-on attempts to ease tension between the two nations. About 43,000 U.S. troops are still stationed in South Korea, 40 years after the Korean War.

On Monday, President Roh Tae Woo gave Kang an oral message to deliver when he meets North Korean President Kim Il Sung on Thursday. In it, Roh reportedly urges the 78-year-old Stalinist leader to agree to hold the first north-south summit meeting.

Roh also reportedly will assure Kim that South Korea--which on Sept. 30 established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the north’s chief ally--has no interest in isolating the north and will propose that both Korean governments “recognize each other’s existence.”

Crossing the heavily fortified border at the truce village of Panmunjom, Kang said: “This military demarcation zone . . . is the wall of mistrust and confrontation that has caused numerous tragedies and agonies to our people in the past 40 years, including the separation of 10 million family members. We are going to Pyongyang to bring about the spring of peace and cooperation by melting down this frozen wall.”

Despite South Korean expressions of pessimism, the talks are occurring in the aftermath of a series of apparent changes in North Korean attitudes over the last month.

Only three days before Seoul and Moscow declared they were establishing relations, North Korea for the first time agreed to open talks on setting up diplomatic ties with Japan, Korea’s former colonial master.

Kang’s trip to the north also follows a series of friendly grass-roots gestures that began with Koreans from both north and south cheering jointly for their separate sports teams at the recent Asian Games in Beijing.

The first sports exchange between the two countries, a soccer game that the north won 2 to 1, was held in Pyongyang on Thursday.

And on Sunday, the first private group of South Koreans to visit North Korea, a band of 14 traditional musicians, accompanied by three reporters, received a warm welcome in Pyongyang, where they will perform concerts, some with North Korean musicians, until Oct. 24.

At the least, the prime ministers’ talks are expected to provide a reading of whether Pyongyang’s about-face in seeking diplomatic relations with Japan represents a potential opening of its closed society.

Among the agreements reached by the North Korean Workers Party and a mission of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party were calls for an opening of a direct air route between Tokyo and Pyongyang, stepped-up economic exchange and North Korean use of Japanese satellite facilities.

One highly placed South Korean source said the two governments might agree to unprecedented barter trade of South Korean rice for North Korean potatoes.

In the past, North Korea, which has portrayed the South as a poor, struggling nation in its domestic propaganda, has refused consistently to accept South Korean offers of economic assistance or direct trade.