N Korea, S Korea establish hotline
Diplomatic foes North and South Korea installed a direct phone line between their leaders on Friday as they prepare for the first summit since 2007 - and the connection was great, the South’s presidential office said.
South Korea’s presidential Blue House and North Korea’s State Affairs Commission tested the hot line for four minutes before South Korea’s Moon Jae-in and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un talk ahead of next week’s summit, the office said.
“The call quality was very good and we felt like we got a call from our next-door neighbour,” South Korea’s director for the Government Situation Room, Youn Kun-young, told reporters.
Moon will now be able to pick up his office phone to talk to Kim, instead of communicating through a hot line at the Joint Security Area in the border village of Panmunjom.
The plan was unveiled by the South’s National Security Adviser, Chung Eui-yong, after
SEOUL:
he met Kim last month in Pyongyang. Impoverished North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty and the North has been engaged in a standoff over its nuclear and missile programmes that it conducts in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.
But tensions have eased in recent months, with the North taking part in the Winter Olympics in the South in February and an exchange of threats of war with the US and other bellicose rhetoric evaporating.
Now North and South are meeting next week.