North Korea accepted truckloads of South Korean aid through their border yesterday and agreed to hold rare high-level military talks with the South aimed at easing tensions on the world's most heavily armed frontier.
Earlier yesterday, the two Koreas had ended their three-day Cabinet-level meetings in the North's capital, Pyongyang, without agreements on increasing economic exchanges or reducing military tensions along their border.
But in a reversal after the meeting's closure, the North's People's Army agreed to hold talks "soon" with the South Korean military, dispatches from South Korean reporters in Pyongyang indicated.
PHOTO: AP
South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun expected the meeting to take place this month as his delegation has demanded. The countries made a similar agreement during their last Cabinet-level talks in February, but no date was set and the North later refused to meet.
Repeating a decades-old position, North Korea earlier insisted it would open military talks only if South Korea halted routine military exercises with the US, which it calls preparations to invade. South Korea rejected the North Korean demand.
Instead, the South called for high-level military talks later this month to discuss ways of avoiding naval clashes that sometimes occur along the poorly marked western sea border as fishing boats jostle for position during crab-catching season in May and June.
For decades, the North has shunned the South Korean military, dismissing it as a stooge of US forces.
The defense ministers of the Koreas met in September 2000, following that year's historic inter-Korean summit, but the North has since rejected the South's call for high-level talks. It has only allowed colonels to meet, limiting their talks to economic exchanges.
A brief joint statement said the next round of Cabinet-level talks will take place in Seoul between Aug. 3 and Aug. 6.
The militaries of the two Koreas, former battlefield foes still facing off across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), seldom hold talks, although their governments have expanded economic and political exchanges in recent years.
TRAIN EXPLOSION
In a rare breaching of the DMZ, North Korea yesterday opened the border to accept South Korean aid for the victims of a deadly train explosion.
A convoy of 20 South Korean trucks rumbled through military checkpoints and across the DMZ to deliver school supplies to victims of the April 22 blast.
The 8-tonne trucks and their cargo of 50 blackboards and 1,500 desk-and-chair sets are part of a US$25-million aid package South Korea promised last week to help rebuild the North Korean town of Ryongchon, where the train blast killed 169 people, injured 1,300 people and destroyed around 8,100 homes.
Nearly half of the dead were children, killed when their school was shattered.
So far South Korea has sent or pledged nearly four times the combined total of aid donations from the rest of the world. Many South Koreans complain that the North fails to reciprocate the generosity.
During the talks, Jeong urged the North Koreans to work toward resolving an international standoff over nuclear weapons development.
The US, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia plan to call a third round of six-nation talks in Beijing before July to end the nuclear crisis, after two previous rounds produced no breakthroughs. The nations are scheduled to hold low-level meetings this Wednesday in Beijing to lay the groundwork for the third round.
Although South Korea uses Cabinet-level talks to urge North Korea to ease nuclear tensions, the meetings usually discuss ways to ease tensions and promote projects such as reuniting families separated by the Korean War.
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