Vice Defense Minister Suh Choo-suk announces a proposal for inter-Korean military talks.[Yonhap News Photo]
South Korea made an official proposal for holding inter-Korean military and Red Cross talks despite widespread concerns at home and abroad over North Korea's unyielding push for the development of missiles and nuclear weapons.
The proposal followed South Korean President Moon Jae-in's offer during his trip to Berlin in early July to suspend all acts of hostility on the heavily armed inter-Korean border and hold family reunions on October 4. Moon also pledged a security guarantee, a peace treaty and other incentives in return for denuclearization.
Relations were strained in March 2010 when Seoul blamed a North Korean submarine for torpedoing the warship Cheonan. The incident froze cross-border exchanges and trade. In November the same year, the North shelled a front-line island, killing four South Koreans and briefly triggering concerns of a full-scale conflict. South Korea suspended almost all civilian inter-Korean exchanges since North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January 2016.
On Monday, the South's defense ministry called for inter-Korean military talks on easing tensions on Friday in the truce village of Panmunjom. The last inter-Korean military meeting was held on October 15, 2014.
In a separate proposal, Seoul offered to hold Red Cross talks on August 1 in Panmunjom to discuss a fresh round of reunions for family members separated by war. The last reunion was in October 2015.
Millions of people were displaced by the sweep of the Korean conflict, which ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas technically at war. Direct cross-border exchanges of letters or telephone calls are banned.
Pyongyang has maintained a negative over family reunions, insisting Seoul should first send home 12 waitresses at a North Korean restaurant in the Chinese city of Ningbo who arrived in Seoul in April 2016. Pyongyang accused South Korean intelligence agents of abducting them, but Seoul insisted they have come of their own volition.
There are more than 65,000 South Koreans currently on the waiting list for a reunion spot, but North Korea has rejected Seoul's repeated requests to make the reunions longer and more frequent. The reunion program began in earnest after a historic North-South summit in 2000. It was initially an annual event before strained relations interrupted their frequency. Pyongyang has long manipulated the reunion issue as a tool for extracting concessions from Seoul.
Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
임장원
cwlim34@ajunews.com
