South Korea yesterday called for the first family reunion event with North Korea in three years, a day after the two nations agreed to reopen a shuttered joint industrial zone.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye, in a speech marking the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, urged Pyongyang to “open its heart” and agree to a meeting next month for families left divided by the Korean War.
The South Korean leader also welcomed Wednesday’s agreement on the Kaesong industrial park, which she said could start “inter-Korea relations anew” after months of sky-high tensions.
“I hope that the North will open its heart so that the divided families can be reunited around the Chuseok holiday,” Park said, referring to a traditional Korean harvest festival that this year falls on Sept. 19.
Millions of Koreans were left separated by the 1950-1953 war. The last round of reunions to allow ageing relatives to meet under Red Cross auspices took place in 2010, when, as in previous rounds, there were scenes of high emotion.
North Korea last month proposed to hold talks on resuming the family reunion program in conjunction with discussions about the Kaesong industrial complex. However, it retracted the offer after Seoul insisted that the two issues should be dealt with separately.
The Seoul-invested industrial zone, built just north of the border in 2004 as a rare symbol of cooperation, ground to a halt in April after remaining immune to cross-border political swings for years.
Pyongyang, angered at a joint South Korea-US army drill coming after it conducted a nuclear test in February, withdrew all its 53,000 workers from Kaesong. Seoul soon pulled out all its company managers.
Six previous rounds of talks since April had foundered on the South’s insistence that the North take full responsibility for the crisis and provide a binding guarantee that it would not close the complex again. Pyongyang had refused to do so. However, Wednesday’s agreement suggested a compromise in which the North accepted the worker pullout had closed Kaesong, while both sides promised jointly to ensure the zone remained open in the future.
However, the two sides failed to set a precise date for the resumption of operations at Kaesong, and the South Koreans sounded a note of caution after the deal was announced.
“This agreement is not an end, but only a beginning,” Seoul’s chief negotiator Kim Ki-woong told reporters.
Still, the agreement drew support from the US State Department and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and analysts said it should clear the way to cooperation in other fields, despite North Korea’s warnings against the latest set of US-South Korea drills.
DIALOGUE: US president-elect Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform confirmed that he had spoken with Xi, saying ‘the call was a very good one’ for the US and China US president-elect Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) discussed Taiwan, trade, fentanyl and TikTok in a phone call on Friday, just days before Trump heads back to the White House with vows to impose tariffs and other measures on the US’ biggest rival. Despite that, Xi congratulated Trump on his second term and pushed for improved ties, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The call came the same day that the US Supreme Court backed a law banning TikTok unless it is sold by its China-based parent company. “We both attach great importance to interaction, hope for
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
RSS