N Koreans agree to talks in bid to ease tensions

The two-day meeting starting tomorrow will focus on stalled co-operation projects, including the resumption of operations at a jointly-run factory park near the border in North Korea.

The factory was the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean rapprochement until Pyongyang pulled out its workers in April during heightened tensions that followed its February nuclear test.

The details of the upcoming talks were ironed out in a nearly 17-hour negotiating session by lower-level officials. Those discussions began on Sunday in the countries’ first government-level meeting on the Korean Peninsula in more than two years.

It took place at the village of Panmunjom on their heavily-armed border, where the armistice ending the three-year Korean War was signed 60 years ago next month. That truce has never been replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the Korean Peninsula technically at war.

The agreement to hold the talks was announced in a statement by South Korea’s Unification Ministry. North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, also reported the agreement.

Dialogue at any level marks an improvement in the countries’ abysmal ties. The last several years have seen North Korean nuclear tests, long-range rocket launches and attacks blamed on the North that killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.

Tomorrow’s meeting will also include discussions on resuming South Korean tours to a North Korean mountain resort, the reunion of separated families and other humanitarian issues, officials said.

The issue most crucial to Washington, however – a push to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons – is not on the agenda.

While there was broad agreement, the Unification Ministry said sticking points arose over the delegation heads and the agenda. Seoul will send its top official for inter-Korean affairs while Pyongyang said it would send a senior-level government official, without elaborating.

While it was not immediately clear who would lead the North Korea side, a minister-level summit between the Koreas has not happened since 2007.

Analysts express wariness about North Korea’s intentions, with some seeing the interest in dialogue as part of a pattern where Pyongyang follows aggressive words and provocations with diplomatic efforts to trade an easing of tension for outside concessions.

Pyongyang is trying to improve ties with Seoul because it very much wants dialogue with the United States, which could give the North aid, ease international sanctions and improve its economy in return for concessions, said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor at Dongguk University in Seoul.

Nuclear matters would not be on the table, he said, because Pyongyang wants issues related to its pursuit of atomic weapons resolved through talks with the US or in broader, now-stalled international disarmament negotiations.

After United Nations sanctions were strengthened following North Korea’s third nuclear test in February, Pyongyang threatened nuclear war and missile strikes against Seoul and Washington, pulled its workers from the jointly run factory park at the North Korean border town of Kaesong and vowed to ramp up production of nuclear bomb fuel. Seoul withdrew its last personnel from Kaesong in May.

The summit marks a political and diplomatic victory for South Korean president Park Geun-hye, who took office in February and has maintained through the heightened tensions a policy that combines vows of strong counter-action to any North Korea provocation with efforts to build trust and re-establish dialogue.

Representatives of the rival Koreas met on the peninsula in February 2011 and their nuclear envoys met in Beijing later that year, but government officials from both sides have not met since.