North and South Korea launched a new round of reconciliation talks on Tuesday, calling for successful negotiations despite tensions over delays in Seoul’s rice aid and Pyongyang’s nuclear disarmament.
”Let’s move forward like a train, never retreating,” said the South’s Unification Minister, Lee Jae-joung, in reference to historic cross-border railway trips this month. ”We must work together for successful dialogue.”
The North’s chief delegate, Kwon Ho-ung, chief councillor of the Cabinet, said he hoped the four-day talks would be fruitful.
While the South wants to build on the highly symbolic railway link to push for more cooperation, the North has signalled its unhappiness at Seoul linking rice aid to Pyongyang’s progress in scrapping its nuclear programme.
”The pledge to adjust the timing and pace of rice aid to the implementing of the February 13 [nuclear] accord has created a stumbling block to mutual assistance,” said Choson Sinbo, a newspaper published by pro-Pyongyang ethnic Korean residents in Japan.
The newspaper, whose comments appeared on its website on Monday, normally reflects the communist state’s official line.
The North refuses to start honouring a six-nation nuclear-disarmament accord reached on February 13 until the United States solves a dispute over Pyongyang’s $25-million in funds that had been frozen in a Macau bank.
The US said it had lifted the restrictions on the accounts in March, but the North has had problems arranging a transfer via a foreign bank since banks are unwilling to touch apparently tainted money.
In his speech to a welcome dinner, Lee described the railway test runs — the first since the 1950-1953 war on the peninsula — as ”an expression of our will to achieve reunification and prosperity”.
”If we solve all problems through dialogue and implement agreements reached by South and North Korea one by one, the Korean peninsula will turn into the land of peace. Then we will be able to deliver a message of hope and reconciliation to our nation and the world,” he said.
The four-day ministerial talks in a luxury Seoul hotel are the 21st since an inter-Korean summit in June 2000. The summit paved the way for a series of cross-border projects, but relations worsened last year with the North’s missile launches and nuclear test.
At the last ministerial round in March, the South agreed in principle to resume regular annual rice and fertiliser aid suspended after the missile tests. But it delayed the first shipment of rice, out of a yearly total of 400 000 tonnes, until the North makes a move to shut down its atomic programme.
United Nations agencies say the North, which suffered famine in the mid- to late 1990s, faces a shortfall of one million tonnes of food this year, or 20% of its needs.
Military exercises by both sides may also create friction. North Korea on Monday rebuked the South over its military drills as Seoul launched a computer-simulation war game. Last Friday, the North tested a shore-to-ship missile as the South was launching its most advanced destroyer.
At this round, the South hopes to discuss regular train services after the test runs across the heavily fortified border. The North so far refuses to give the go-ahead for regular services.
The agenda will also include South Korean prisoners-of-war and abductees believed held in the North, the Unification Ministry has said. The South says the North has abducted 485 of its people since the end of the war and failed to send home 548 prisoners-of-war. The North says no South Koreans are being held against their will. — Sapa-AFP