By Jeremy Laurence
SEOUL (Reuters) - Ex-U.S. President Jimmy Carter and three other former state leaders arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday, hoping to defuse tensions on the divided Korean peninsula and kick-start long-stalled nuclear talks.
The "Elders" delegation want to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his son and heir apparent Kim Jong-un to press for a resumption of dialogue between the two Koreas. They will also discuss ways to help alleviate the North's food shortages.
In a brief story, without comment, the North's KCNA state news agency said the group had arrived by chartered plane. They are scheduled to leave Pyongyang on Thursday for Seoul, where they will brief local officials.
Carter's visit comes as momentum builds towards a resumption of aid-for-disarmament talks, which the North quit in 2009 but now wants to rejoin. The six-party talks involve the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
"The outlook for the diplomatic engagement is the best it has been in two years, but the prospects for a satisfactory outcome have never looked worse," said Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Few people believe the secretive North will ever give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, saying they serve as a deterrent against attack as well as being the ultimate bargaining chip.
"All sides are now preparing propaganda campaigns to portray their stances as more reasonable than those of the other countries involved," Paal wrote on the Carnegie website.
Both Seoul and Washington are sceptical about the North's sincerity about denuclearising, and have demanded Pyongyang take concrete actions to show it is willing to ditch its nuclear weapons programme.
Experts say the North could do this by allowing international nuclear inspectors back into the country.
PRIVATE VISIT
The United States and South Korea also want the North "to show a responsible attitude" for last year's two deadly attacks on the peninsula, which spiked tensions to their highest level in years. The two Koreas are still technically at war having only signed a truce to end the 1950-53 Korean War.
The North denies responsibility for the torpedoing of a South Korean warship last year, and said it shelled Yongpyeong island after South Korea test-fired artillery into its waters.
Nobel Peace prize winner Carter brokered in 1994 a deal which pulled Washington and Pyongyang back from the brink of war over the North's nuclear programme. But he said he was not going in as anyone's envoy this week.
"The Elders are not in a position to negotiate, we're not mediators. We're going to learn what we can and share what we find with the leaders with whom we have contact in the future," he said in Beijing on Monday.
Shuttle diplomacy between the six-party envoys has increased in recent weeks, and China's representative Wu Dawei was due in Seoul on Tuesday. Experts say this signals they could be close to a breakthrough.
Carter and his team, which includes former Irish President Mary Robinson, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and ex-Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, will also be looking at the isolated state's food shortages.
More than 6 million people in North Korea urgently need food aid because of substantial falls in domestic production, food imports and international aid, the United Nations said last month.
(Editing by Jonathan Hopfner and Jonathan Thatcher)