South Korea seeks rare talks with North to ease tensions

SOUTH Korea offered to hold rare military talks with North Korea yesterday, aiming to ease tensions after Pyongyang tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile.

The offer of talks, the first since South Korea elected dovish president Moon Jae-in, came as the Red Cross in Seoul proposed a separate meeting to discuss reunions of families separated by the Korean War, which took place across the peninsula from 1950 until 1953.

The South’s defence ministry proposed a meeting to be held on Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom, while the Red Cross offered to hold talks on August 1 at the same venue.

If the government meeting goes ahead, it will mark the first official inter-korea talks since December 2015. Moon’s conservative predecessor Park Geun-hye had previously refused to engage in substantive dialogue with Pyongyang unless it made a firm commitment to denuclearisation.

“We make the proposal for a meeting … aimed at stopping all hostile activities that escalate military tension along the land border,” the defence ministry said in a statement.

The Red Cross said it hoped for “a positive response” from its counterpart in the North to enable family reunions in early October. If realised, they would be the first for two years.

Millions of family members were separated by the conflict that sealed the division of the two countries. Many died without getting a chance to see or hear from their families on the other side of the heavily-fortified border, across which all civilian communication is banned.

With the passage of time, the number of survivors has diminished, with around 60,000 members of divided families still left in the South.

“North Korea should respond to our sincere proposals if it really seeks peace on the Korean Peninsula,” Cho Myoung-gyon, Seoul’s unification minister in charge of North Korea affairs, told reporters.

Cho stressed that Seoul “would not seek collapse of the North or unification through absorbing the North”, and urged Pyongyang to restore cross-border communication channels including a shuttered military hotline.