The stage for this week’s “historic” second-ever summit between the two Koreas has been carefully set, with North Korea in charge of the stage furnishing, the lighting and the script. Roh Moo Hyun, the South Korean President, has willingly crossed the line, but even the most casual observer would recognise that Kim Jong-Il is, well, very, very strange. The concessions he has made simply to get the Dear Leader to agree to this second meeting do not inspire confidence. For starters, it is taking place in Pyongyang, not Seoul, although a much-underlined feature of the first summit in 2000 was the Dear Leader’s promise to travel south for the next such encounter. Instead, President Roh went north – and, in a gesture that the North is likely to parade as an act of submission, crossed the invisible line dividing the two Koreas on foot. In a further controversial gesture, the two leaders will attend today North Korea’s Arirang Festival, an annual spectacular devoted to idolisation of the Dear Leader and his deceased father Kim Il Sung (the Great Leader) and the all-conquering force of North Korea’s bankrupt official juche ideology.

At the level of substance, notably absent from the agenda will be North Korea’s nuclear programmes and its appalling abuses of basic human rights. The first omission can be justified on the ground that nuclear issues are a matter for the six-party talks that appear finally to be making limited headway. The second omission is impossible to reconcile with President Roh’s priority to “make peace take root” on the peninsula: the militaristic brutality of the North Korean regime mocks all talk of national reconciliation.

The focus will yet again on what South Korea can do to assist this unreconstructed tyranny. Both the South Korean and Chinese governments have been at pains to suggest that this summit could mark the beginning of something genuinely historic, a North Korean preparedness to embrace economic “reform and opening up”, Chinese-style. President Roh is reported to have $20 billion ready in his back pocket for a Mar-shall Plan to reward Kim Jong Il’s hoped-for conversion with investment in North Korea’s collapsed infrastructure. Whatever the signally opaque Mr Kim’s intentions, everything is being done to put a smile on his face – a smile that was nowhere to be seen as he grunted perfunctory greetings yesterday to his eager guest.

If reform talk is indeed making headway within the North Korean leadership – and there are signs of modest movement – it would be worth encouraging. Even then, aid must be linked to the actual, as distinct from promised, disabling of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and facilities; Pyongyang must on no account be let off that hook in the name of “Korean solidarity”.

As for peace, a summit declaration would be meaningless without concrete undertakings – such as the verified removal of the 11,000 long-range artillery weapons pointed at Seoul. In 1991 North and South signed a detailed agreement on disarmament and reconciliation. If Mr Roh, who at the close of his uninspiring presidency is a little too eager to show results for his “sunshine” policy of engagement with a vile regime, has lasting benefits in mind, he should insist on the 1991 accord as a starting point; and keep his cheques in his pocket until the North moves meaningfully. Anything less would be moonshine.