A convoy of trucks crossed the border with North Korea on Friday, carrying the first South Korean rice donations for North Korea in nearly three years, as officials from both Koreas huddled to discuss the reunion of families separated by the Korean War six decades ago.
The humanitarian gestures followed months of tensions set off by the sinking of a South Korean warship in March in what Seoul concluded was a North Korean torpedo attack. Forty-six sailors died in the sinking.
The nine trucks in the convoy carried 184 tonnes of rice that civic groups and opposition political parties in South Korea had donated for the victims of recent flooding in North Korea. The flooding is expected to worsen food shortages in the North, which even in a year of good harvests cannot produce enough to feed its estimated population of 23 million people properly.
The shipment, coming just before the Korean harvest festival of Chuseok next week, also seemed to symbolize a newfound South Korean good will toward the North. It followed 481 tonnes of flour that a South Korean provincial government and civic groups sent to the North on Thursday.
After South Korean President Lee Myung-bak came to power in Seoul in early 2008, South Korea had been reluctant to provide rice or any other major aid shipments to the North until its government in Pyongyang took significant steps to give up its nuclear weapons. The sinking of the warship, the Cheonan, further soured relations.
However, in the past week the South approved the civic groups’ donations, as well as a separate Red Cross plan to send 4,535 tonnes of rice. The approval followed conciliatory gestures by North Korea, including a proposal to resume a Red Cross program of arranging temporary unions of families split by the 1950-1953 Korean War.
In the North Korean border town of Kaesong, officials from both Koreas discussed the date, venue and size of the proposed reunions. The last such reunions were held a year ago.
North Korea wanted to hold the reunions at its Diamond Mountain resort late next month, said Chun Hae-sung, a government spokesman in Seoul. South Korea demanded that the two sides make reunions regular and more frequent to allow aging Koreans to come together, even briefly, with their relatives before they die.
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