South Korea offers to hold talks with North after Olympics olive branch

SOUTH KOREA - South Korea has proposed holding high-level talks with North Korea next week, a day after the regime’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said he was prepared to send a delegation of athletes to next month’s Winter Olympics in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang.

In a cautious indication of progress in inter-Korean relations after a year of tensions over Pyongyang’s ballistic missile program, South Korea’s unification minister, Cho Myounggyon, said the offer reiterated “our willingness to hold talks with the North at any time and place, and in any form”. Cho proposed that the two Koreas meet next Tuesday at the border village of Panmunjom, where they last held highlevel talks in December 2015. “We hope that the South and North can sit face to face and discuss the news agency reported. “We think that the suspended inter-Korean communication channels should be immediately restored. We propose that the two Koreas discuss details of talks including agenda items and the composition of delegations ... at the truce village.” North Korea has yet to respond to the offer. The Pyeongchang Games will be held 50 miles (80km) south of the heavily armed border that has separated the two Koreas since their thee-year conflict ended in a truce in 1953.

In his New Year’s address on Monday, Kim said he hoped the Olympics would be a success and offered to send a delegation to Pyeongchang. He said the Games would be “a good opportunity to display the status of the Korean participation of the North Korean delegation at the Pyeongchang Games, as well as other issues of mutual interest for the improvement of inter-Korean ties,” Cho told reporters in Seoul, according to Yonhap nation, and we sincerely wish that the event will be held with good results”, adding: “We are prepared to take various steps, including the dispatch of a delegation.”

(Theguardian.com)