North Korea to attend Olympics
Deal reached in first parley between North and South in years
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea agreed on Tuesday to send athletes to February’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, a symbolic breakthrough after months of escalating tensions over the North’s rapidly advancing nuclear and missile programs.
In talks held at the border village of Panmunjom, North Korean negotiators quickly accepted South Korea’s request for participation at the games, according to South Korean news reports. In addition to the athletes, the North will send a cheering squad and a performance-art troupe.
The event will be the first time North Korea has participated in the Winter Games in eight years. The country has competed in every Summer Olympics since 1972, except the 1984 Games in Los Angeles and the 1988 Games in Seoul, both of which it boycotted.
In fact, the North’s attendance will be a historic development in inter-Korean sports exchanges.
The North not only shunned the 1988 Seoul Olympics but also tried to disrupt them after talks on co-hosting them fell apart. Its agents planted a bomb on a Korean Air passenger plane in 1987 in a terrorist attack that the South said was aimed at sabotaging the 1988 Games. All 115 people on board were killed.
It was not immediately clear whether North Korea attached any conditions to its decision to send a high-level delegation to the Winter Olympics in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang next month.
The agreement was reached in talks between Cho Myoung-gyon, the South Korean Cabinet minister in charge of relations with the North, and his North Korean counterpart, Ri Son Kwon.
The development came after Ri opened the talks by throwing a curveball: He suggested that the talks be open to reporters. That way, he said, the people in both Koreas could witness the North’s sincerity about improving ties.
But, wary of North Korea’s mastery of propaganda, Cho agreed only to open parts of the talks to pool reporters.
The closed-circuit television footage of the talks at Panmunjom, in the middle of the world’s most dangerous border, was relayed in real time to Seoul, where officials scrutinized North Korean tactics. The North transmitted the audio of the meeting to its capital, Pyongyang.
While the focus of Tuesday’s talks was the Olympics, South Korean officials were also expected to explore whether North Korea is interested in talks with the U.S. to ease tensions over its nuclear arms programs.
In his New Year’s Day speech, Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, proposed holding the dialogue with South Korea to discuss his country’s participation in the Pyeongchang Games.
In the same speech, he also claimed to have acquired a nuclear deterrent, including intercontinental ballistic missiles he said he could unleash on the United States with his “nuclear button.”
Some analysts said Kim was hoping to use his country’s selfproclaimed status as a nuclear weapons state as leverage to win concessions from Washington, particularly the easing of increasingly crippling sanctions. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said that Kim’s decision to start dialogue with South Korea was a sign that their campaign to isolate the North was working.
The talks at Panmunjom provide an opportunity to gauge whether North Korea is willing to moderate its behavior after a year of provocative nuclear and missile tests that have raised fears of all-out war on the Korean Peninsula.
But the initial focus was on the Olympics.