Jimmy Carter and Other Ex- Leaders to Travel to N. Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — Former President Jimmy Carter arrived in North Korea on Tuesday, news agencies reported, for talks aimed at reducing tensions on the fractious Korean Peninsula.

The so-called six-party talks on the denuclearization of North Korea remain in limbo, and Mr. Carter said official dialogue with the North “appears to be at a standstill.” The talks have involved North and South Korea, the United States, Russia, China and Japan.

Mr. Carter and three former leaders from Europe arrived in Beijing on Sunday. Traveling with Mr. Carter were former President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway and former President Mary Robinson of Ireland. The four are members of The Elders, an independent group of world leaders founded by Nelson Mandela.

“Clearly, there is a great level of mistrust between North and South Korea,” Mr. Ahtisaari said. “But the stakes are too high to allow this standoff to continue.”

The group was hoping to meet with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, although Mr. Carter said Monday that such a meeting had not yet been arranged.

On Thursday, after meetings in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, the Elders group is scheduled to travel to Seoul.

It was also unclear whether Mr. Carter would press North Korean officials to release an American man who has been detained by North Korea on unspecified charges since November.

This month, the North Korean government said the man had already “admitted his crime.” The South Korean news agency Yonhap, citing sources in the United States that it did not name, said he was Jun Young-su, a Korean-American businessman in his 60s from Orange County, Calif.

Yonhap said Mr. Jun had been taken into custody in connection with illegal religious activities in the North.

A State Department spokesman, Mark C. Toner, confirmed that an American was being held by the North, but he and other United States officials declined to name the detainee and offered no personal details, citing privacy rules. The United States called on North Korea to release the American “on humanitarian grounds.”

The State Department has said that Mr. Carter’s trip is a private journey and that he is not acting as an American envoy.

Mr. Carter has been successful at freeing jailed Americans in the past. He made a private trip to Pyongyang last August to win the release of Aijalon Mahli Gomes, 31, of Boston, who had been convicted of illegally entering North Korea.

Mr. Gomes was sentenced in April 2010 to eight years of hard labor and was fined $700,000. The Carter Center, the organization founded by Mr. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, said Mr. Gomes was granted amnesty by Mr. Kim.