North Korea reconnects military hotline with South

Monitoring Desk

SEOUL: North Korea reopened a military hotline with the South on Tuesday in a further sign of thawing ties between Seoul and Pyongyang.

According to a South Korean government official cited by local news agency Yonhap, the hotline will be fully functioning by Wednesday morning.

The move highlighted the progress made by the Koreas in their first formal meeting in over two years.

Minister-level representatives convened at the border village of Panmunjom earlier in the day to focus on the North’s offer to participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics in the South next month.

North Korea is known to have offered to send a senior delegation of officials and athletes to PyeongChang 2018, while the South asked to find ways to reduce the chance of a conflict at the border among its proposals..

A joint statement issued after the talks confirmed the North had accepted South Korea’s pitch to hold military dialogue in order to reduce tensions.

After 11 hours of talks North Korea pledged to send a large delegation to next month’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea but made a “strong complaint” after Seoul proposed talks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.

Officials from both sides said they agreed to meet again to resolve problems and avert accidental conflict, amid high tension over North Korea’s program to develop nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States, but Pyongyang said disarmament would not be part of the discussions.

“All our weapons including atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs and ballistic missiles are only aimed at the United States, not our brethren, nor China and Russia,” Pyongyang’s chief negotiator, Ri Son Gwon, said.

“This is not a matter between North and South Korea, and to bring up this issue would cause negative consequences and risks turning all of today’s good achievement into nothing,” Ri, chairman of the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, warned in closing remarks.

North Korea said after its first talks with South Korea in more than two years that it would not discuss its nuclear weapons with Seoul because they were aimed only at the United States, not its “brethren” in South Korea.

U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have exchanged threats and insults in the past year, raising tensions on the peninsula.

A spokesperson for the White House’s national Security Council said North Korean participation in the Olympics would be “an opportunity for the regime to see the value of ending its international isolation by denuclearizing.”

The White House did not comment on the United States being the only potential target of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

In spite of Ri’s remarks, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said it believed inter-Korean ties and a series of steps agreed in the talks on Tuesday could lead to discussion of a “fundamental resolution” of the nuclear issue in the future.

“We will closely coordinate with the United States, China, Japan and other neighbors in this process,” the ministry said in a statement.

The Koreas were able to arrange Tuesday’s meeting via a separate communication channel — which like the military hotline — was cut in 2016 during a downward spiral in bilateral relations.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ended months of nuclear threats against the South by suggesting the two sides meet for dialogue during his New Year’s Day speech.However, Kim remains hostile against the US, raising the prospect of renewed aggression on the peninsula when South Korea and the U.S. eventually resume joint military drills.