Kim sends cheer to Seoul Games
‘PEACE OLYMPICS’: TWO COUNTRIES TALK NEW TIES
IOC must approve extra slots for the North’s athletes after they missed deadlines.
Seoul
North Korea has offered to send more than 200 cheerleaders to the Winter Olympics in the South and attend the Paralympics, Seoul said as the two Koreas met yesterday to discuss athlete numbers in the latest in a flurry of cross-border talks.
Nuclear-armed Pyongyang agreed last week to send athletes, high-level officials, performers and others to next month’s Pyeongchang Games, taking place only 80km south of the Demilitarised Zone that divides the peninsula.
Seoul has long sought to proclaim the event a “peace Olympics” in the face of tensions over the North’s weapons programmes – which have seen it subjected to multiple United Nations (UN) Security Council sanctions – and the discussions represent a marked improvement.
“Inter-Korean relations have been strained for almost 10 years,” the North’s chief delegate Jon Jong-Su said as the meeting started on the southern side of the border truce village of Panmunjom. “We hope that ties can open.”
Three officials from each side took part and the results will be discussed by both Koreas with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Saturday.
The IOC must approve extra Olympic slots for the North’s athletes after they failed to qualify or missed deadlines to register.
An official at Seoul’s unification ministry said the North offered to send 230 cheerleaders to the Olympics, and made clear it also intended to take part in the Paralympics in March.
North Korea also proposed that its delegation travel by land through Kaesong, which lies on the main road from Pyongyang to Seoul.
Overland travel may be the only option for the North as the neighbours have no direct flights between them and Seoul’s unilateral sanctions against the regime ban any ship from its ports that has sailed to the North within the past 12 months.
South Korea will also need to find ways to accommodate the North Korean delegation without violating UN Security Council sanctions which block cash transfers to Pyongyang.
In another meeting on Monday the two reached an agreement over a trip by a 140-member North Korean orchestra to the South to hold concerts in the capital and in Gangneung, one of the Games venues.
The talks comes after the North’s leader, Kim Jong-Un, announced his willingness to take part in the Games, which run from February 9 to 25. –