North Korea said yesterday it will resume cross border exchanges with South Korea and its leader Kim Jong-il promised that incidents such as the shooting of a South Korean tourist last year will not recur.
The North’s surprise announcement followed a meeting on Sunday between Kim and the chairwoman of Hyundai Group, the biggest South Korean investor in the North, who traveled to Pyongyang last week to secure the freedom of a company employee and discuss restarting joint business projects.
North Korea released the Hyundai worker on Thursday.
PHOTO: EPA
But in a sign that significant tensions remain, North Korea’s military said in a statement the army was on “special alert” because of joint military drills between South Korea and the US this week.
North Korea, via the state-run Korean Central News Agency, said it would restart Hyundai-run tours to the Diamond Mountain resort on the east coast and ancient sights in the northern city of Kaesong, as well as allow reunions of families separated by the heavily fortified border with the South.
The tours were suspended in the rising tensions that followed the inauguration of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak early last year.
PHOTO: AP
Lee angered Pyongyang by taking a tougher line than his predecessors on keeping the North accountable to its commitments on nuclear disarmament.
The suspension has been a major financial burden to Hyundai, which poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the projects aimed at promoting ties with the North. Hyundai Asan said the suspension of tours caused more than US$130 million in financial losses for the company.
Kim “told me to tell him of any difficulty this time and I told him everything and he resolved them all,” Hyun Jeong-eun said after crossing the border yesterday.
Hyun said she held four hours of talks with Kim at Myohyang Mountain, northeast of Pyongyang.
South Korean officials said Hyun was not a government envoy and the agreements made on the trip require further government-level talks between the two Koreas.
Still, the Unification Ministry said it considered the development “positive” and said the government will seek to achieve an agreement with North Korean authorities to allow the tourism trips to resume.
“Kim Jong-il clearly showed his intention to improve South-North Korean ties and he is strongly demanding that the South Korean government change its North Korea policy,” said Paik Hak-soon, an analyst at the private Sejong Institute think tank near Seoul.
The North Korean report did not give exact dates for resumption of the tours, but said it was decided the Diamond Mountain trips would start “as soon as possible.”
KCNA said the North also agreed to resume reunions of families at the Diamond Mountain resort during the annual “Chuseok” autumn harvest holiday that falls on Oct. 3 this year.
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