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## Asia Pacific

# South and North Korea Pave Way for Direct Talks

<NYT_BYLINE >

###### By CHOE SANG-HUN

</NYT_BYLINE>

###### Published: June 7, 2013

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South and North Korea restored a cross-border hot line on Friday, with the South proposing that logistical talks be held on the border on Sunday to arrange the two Koreas’ first cabinet minister-level meeting in six years.

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The development came after North Korea, in a sudden change of heart, proposed on Thursday that the two Koreas hold their first government-to-government dialogue in years. The surprise overture unleashed a rapid sequence of proposals and counterproposals that raised hopes of a thaw on the divided Korean Peninsula after months of bellicose rhetoric.

Within hours, South Korea accepted the North Korean initiative and proposed to hold a cabinet-level meeting in Seoul this coming Wednesday.

On Friday, North Korea welcomed the quick response from the South and suggested that the two sides first hold talks on Sunday in the North Korean border town of Kaesong to discuss the proposed cabinet-level meeting. Later Friday, South Korea made a counterproposal that the talks be held not in Kaesong but on the South Korean side of Panmunjom, a village on the inter-Korean border where the truce ending the 1950-53 Korean War was signed.

The counteroffer was delivered to North Korea through a Red Cross hot line. The telephone line was the first restored among several cross-border communications lines North Korea had unilaterally cut off recently in anger over joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises in March.

In their proposals for talks, both Koreas said they wanted to discuss reopening a shuttered joint industrial complex located in Kaesong. The eight-year-old complex, where 123 South Korean factories employed 53,000 North Korean workers, had been the last and best-known symbol of inter-Korean cooperation until the North suddenly pulled out all its workers a month ago, citing military tensions.

South Korea later withdrew its factory mangers. It has since indicated that it would not mind keeping the factory park — a key source of hard currency for the North Korean regime — closed unless the North took steps to convince the South that it would never again use political tensions as a pretext to close the joint economic project.

That attitude was reflected in the South’s reluctance to send a delegation to Kaesong, a move that could have been seen as a capitulation in the North, and Seoul's proposal that the two sides meet instead in the neutral border village of Panmunjom.

“Preventing the repetition of the situation of the Kaesong Industrial Zone will be a key agenda item” in inter-Korean talks, Seo Ho, a Unification Ministry official in charge of issues related to the factory park, told a forum in Seoul on Friday.

He said that South Korea hoped to attract foreign factories in the Kaesong complex when it is reopened. If the factory park is turned into an international investment zone, North Korea will become more obliged to stick to agreements and the complex will become a more sustainable tool of economic cooperation between the two Koreas, he said.

In a statement on Friday, South Korean factory owners urged the two Korean governments not to sacrifice the joint economic project again for political and diplomatic reasons and to compensate them for their losses incurred during the monthlong suspension of the factory park.

The two Koreas had held 21 rounds of cabinet-level meetings since their leaders held a summit in 2000 and agreed to economic cooperation and political reconciliation. But no cabinet-level talks have taken place since 2007 as inter-Korean relations sharply deteriorated under the former President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea. Mr. Lee was replaced in February by President Park Geun-hye, who called for dialogue with the North while remaining firm against North Korean provocations.

The last attempts to restore official government dialogue were made in February 2011, when officials from the two Koreas met unsuccessfully to arrange high-level military talks.

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