South Korea yesterday proposed a fresh round of high-level talks with North Korea to discuss another possible reunion for families separated by the 1950 to 1953 Korean War.
The first round held in February had marked the highest-level official contact between the two sides for seven years and led to a family reunion later the same month.
The South Korean Ministry for Unification, which handles cross-border affairs, said it was proposing a meeting at the border truce village of Panmunjom on Tuesday next week.
“We said we would like to discuss issues of mutual interest, including the family reunion during the Chuseok holiday,” it said in a statement.
The traditional harvest festival falls on Sept. 8 this year.
The last family reunion — held at a North Korean mountain resort from Feb. 20 to Feb. 25 — was the first for more than three years.
Millions of people were separated during the conflict that sealed the division between the two Koreas.
Most died without having a chance to see or hear from their families on the other side of the border, across which all civilian communication is banned.
About 70,000 South Koreans — more than half of them older than 70 — are still wait-listed to join the rare reunion event.
Seoul had requested talks on a further reunion in March, but Pyongyang declined.
Meanwhile, North Korea yesterday said it would publish its own “rosy” human rights report, six months after a UN inquiry published a list of violations so severe as to amount to crimes against humanity.
The North’s Association for Human Rights Studies said the report would counter the “lies and fabrications” put around by unspecified “hostile forces” about the rights situation in the state.
Pyongyang is regularly listed among the world’s worst human rights offenders in indices compiled by governments, UN agencies and rights watchdogs.
In one of the most comprehensive reports to date, a UN Commission on Inquiry into the North’s rights record published its findings in February, detailing a wide range of systemic abuses including murder, enslavement and torture.
The commission concluded that many of the violations constituted crimes against humanity and suggested they could be placed before the International Criminal Court.
“The gravity, scale and nature of these violations revealed a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” it said.
North Korea rejected the report as a “sheer fabrication” invented by the US and its allies.
A spokesman from the rights association said its report would help people “do away with their prejudice and misunderstanding” about the rights situation.
“The report will show the true picture of the people of the [North] dynamically advancing toward a brighter and rosy future,” he said in an interview with the official Korean Central News Agency.
No release date was given, with the spokesman only saying the report would be published in “the near future.”
South Korea had earlier said it would provide US$13.3 million in funding for UN humanitarian projects in its neighbor, which would be Seoul’s second indirect aid package for the North in a month.
The Unification Ministry said US$7 million would go to World Food Programme projects in the North and US$6.3 million to the WHO.
The decision came a month after the ministry approved US$2.9 million in financial support for Seoul civic groups providing assistance to North Korea. It was the first time that Seoul had funded such civic projects in four years, after the government imposed tough economic sanctions on Pyongyang.
The UN estimates that nearly 2.4 million people in the North need regular food assistance and 28 percent of children under five suffer chronic malnutrition.
The country is also estimated to have 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners in its sprawling gulag system.
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