North Korean generals met the United States-led United Nations military command in South Korea for the first time in about seven years on Monday after Pyongyang warned at the weekend ”arrogant” acts by US troops could spark a war.
Local news reports said the North was expected to protest against joint US-South Korean military drills that will be held from next week and the activities of the about 28 000 US troops stationed in South Korea to support its 670 000 soldiers.
”North Korea requested this meeting to discuss tension reduction,” the UN Command said in a news release.
It gave no further details of the talks held at Panmunjom truce village inside the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that has divided the peninsula since the 1950 to 1953 Korean War ended in a ceasefire.
Secretive North Korea has stoked regional tensions in the past weeks by readying a test-flight of its longest-range missile, which is designed to carry a nuclear weapon as far as Alaska, but has never successfully flown, US and South Korean officials have said.
The talks were held for about three hours but no details have yet been released, according to a US Forces Korea spokesperson.
The North’s KCNA news agency on Saturday quoted a North Korean military official as saying in a note to the South Korean military: ”If the US forces keep behaving arrogantly in the area under the control of the North and the South, the [North’s] Korean People’s Army will take a resolute counteraction.”
The official said that US troops had come near the actual border several times over the past two months, warning such acts ”may touch off unpredictable military conflicts”.
The border, called the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), is at the centre of the 4km-wide DMZ — a no-man’s land buffer zone. North Korea positions most of its 1,2-million troops near the DMZ.
North Korean, South Korean and US soldiers are on their respective sides of MDL on a daily basis in the Panmunjom village, where low-level meetings can be arranged by shouting into a bullhorn to the other side.
US-led UN forces signed the armistice and the United States has kept troops in the South after the fighting formally ended to deter North Korea from attacking again.
The North at the weekend also denounced the South Korean-US military drills as a prelude to invasion. The annual drills have been held without major incident for years.
The new US government will be sending Stephen Bosworth, its special envoy for North Korea, to the region this week with stops in China, Japan and South Korea, the State Department said. — Reuters