South Korea on Friday announced it would resume food aid to North Korea and the two sides agreed to restart family reunions, following their first high-level meeting since the North’s nuclear test.
The two nations also announced a series of other steps to improve relations chilled by the North’s missile launches last July and an atomic test last October.
”We plan to provide rice and fertiliser aid. The amount of the aid will be similar to that of past years. But we will do it in phases,” Seoul’s Unification Minister Lee Jae-Joung told reporters in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, where the four-day meeting was held.
Seoul was apparently successful in its attempt to use the aid, which was suspended after the missile tests, as an inducement for Pyongyang to honour last month’s multinational agreement to scrap its nuclear programme.
The two sides will meet in late April to discuss the rice aid — after the April 15 deadline for the North to shut down its reactor under the Beijing accord.
The North, which suffered famine in the 1990s and still faces acute food shortages, wanted the meeting held this month.
After the South suspended annual shipments of 500 000 tons of rice and 350 000 tons of fertiliser, the North hit back by walking out of the last ministerial talks in July 2006 and halting family reunions. The nuclear test strained ties further.
Fertiliser shipments will start before the rice aid.
”North Korea will inform us how much fertiliser it needs and we will send it,” Lee said.
”As this year’s spring comes earlier than usual, I think the [fertiliser shipment] should be made early. The rice aid issue will be discussed and fixed at an economic cooperation committee meeting in April.”
Reunions via video link for families separated since the 1950 to 1953 conflict will start again this month and family members will meet face-to-face in early May, the two sides announced earlier in a joint statement.
They will hold Red Cross talks on April 10 to 12 to discuss people the South says were kidnapped by the Pyongyang regime, as well as former prisoners who have remained in the North since the war.
Seoul says 485 of its citizens have been kidnapped since the end of the war, along with more than 500 prisoners of war who were not sent home. Pyongyang denies holding anyone against their will.
”The two sides shared the view that they should normalise inter-Korean relations as soon as possible and develop relations to a higher level …” the statement said.
The next ministerial meeting — the highest-level form of dialogue — will be in Seoul from May 29 to June 1. The economic talks will be held from April 18 to 21 in Pyongyang.
The two countries pledged joint efforts to smoothly implement the six-nation agreement reached in Beijing on February 13, under which North Korea is to disable its nuclear programme in return for economic aid and diplomatic benefits.
They agreed to conduct test runs of cross-border railways in the first half of this year and speed up construction of a joint industrial estate at Kaesong just inside North Korea.
The agreement on reunions will bring joy to tens of thousands separated by minefields and barbed wire along the world’s last Cold War frontier.
Since an historic inter-Korean summit in 2000, more than 13 600 Koreans have taken part in the programme. But Yonhap said more than 90 000 people from South Korea alone remain separated from loved ones.
There are no mail or phone services across the frontier. — AFP
