Two Koreas Hold Talks on Family Reunions

A team of South Korean delegates departed on Wednesday morning for the Mt. Kumgang resort in North Korea. There they are meeting with officials from Pyongyang to work out the details for the next round of family reunions.

Kim Young-chol leads Seoul’s delegation. He says his team will try to ensure that during the next round of reunions as many elderly South Koreans as possible will have the opportunity to meet with their separated relatives.

Thousands of divided families

According to the Korean Red Cross, the organisation which oversees the reunions, 600,000 South Koreans have relatives in the North. They’ve been divided since the Koran War ended in 1953. Contact by phone or by post is not permitted.

Since 2000, there have been 16 rounds of face to face reunions, and several via video conference. The last gathering was in 2007. That is because Pyongyang called off reunions in protest over Seoul’s halting of financial aid last year.

But after months of hostile rhetoric as well as a long range rocket and nuclear test, the Kim Jong-il regime appears to be offering an olive branch.

Re-engaging Pyongyang

Over the weekend, North Korea dispatched representatives to pay respects to the late South Korean leader Kim Dae-jung, who began the engagement strategy known as the Sunshine Policy a decade ago. Pyongyang has also offered to restart joint tourism ventures with Seoul and freed a detained South Korean engineer at a co-owned factory in the North.

Moon Chung-in is a professor in politics at Seoul’s Yonsei University. He says that South Korean president Lee Myung-bak must re-engage Pyongyang and drop his demand that North Korea ends its nuclear weapons program first.

"If denuclearization is a precondition for the resumption of the Sunshine Policy or engagement policy, then the Lee Myung-bak government is bound to fail."

Washington’s role

Moon says the time is also right for Washington to hold talks with North Korea.

"What the North Korean leadership thinks is very simple and straightforward: They believe if there are improved Washington-Pyongyang ties, then Seoul-Pyongyang ties will automatically improve."

In September, Washington’s point man to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, will visit East Asia. There is speculation that his agenda will also include a stop in Pyongyang.

Timothy Savage, deputy director of the Nautilus Institute’s Seoul branch, says South Korea needs to keep pace with the US when dealing with Pyongyang.

"If South Korea is too adamant about sticking to its guns and doesn’t rebuild some sort of relationship, some sort of ongoing project with the North, there is a good chance they could end up sidelined and that would not be in South Korea’s own interest."

For now, the Barack Obama administration says that it will not engage one on one with North Korea over its nuclear program, unless Pyongyang first returns to multilateral talks with its neighbours.

Author:Jason Strother (Seoul)
Editor: Grahame Lucas