SEOUL, South Korea — North and South Korea will meet in a village straddling their heavily armed border Sunday for the first government-level talks on the peninsula in more than two years as they try to lower tension and restore stalled projects that once symbolized their rapprochement.
The North on Saturday delivered its agreement to talk in Panmunjom through a Red Cross line restored a day earlier, Seoul’s Unification Ministry said in a text message. Pyongyang had earlier favored its border city of Kaesong, which contains the industrial park emptied in May after tensions peaked.
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. Sunday’s meeting would be clearest sign of eased tensions since Pyongyang threatened to attack South Korea and the United States with nuclear missiles earlier this year, and the South made counterthreats.
It also comes as their top allies are meeting. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met Friday and Saturday in Southern California to discuss several topics, including North Korea’s nuclear programs.
White House national security adviser Tom Donilon said Obama and Xi found “quite a bit of alignment” on the importance of keeping the communist nation from becoming a nuclear-armed state. Donilon said the common ground provides a key for enhanced U.S.-China cooperation.
The talks between the Koreas could represent a change in North Korea’s approach, analysts said, or could simply be an effort to ease international demands that it end its development of nuclear weapons, a topic crucial to Washington but initially not a part of the envisioned inter-Korean meetings.
The Unification Ministry, which handles cross-border relations, said the talks at Panmunjom are aimed at setting up higher-level talks. No other details on possible topics were released.
The mood on the Korean Peninsula has been tense since North Korean leader Kim Jong Il died in December 2011 and his son, Kim Jong Un, took over. Pyongyang, which is estimated to have a handful of crude nuclear devices, has committed a drumbeat of acts over the last year that Washington, Seoul and others deem provocative.
During the weeks-long period of animosity marked by North Korean threats of war and South Korean vows of counterstrikes, Pyongyang shut down its military hotline and Red Cross communications line used for exchanging messages on humanitarian and other issues with South Korea.
Panmunjom is where a truce ending the 1950-53 Korean War was signed. That truce has never been replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas technically at war.
