PYONGYANG, North Korea — Marathon negotiations by senior officials from the Koreas stretched into a third day on Monday as the rivals tried to pull back from the brink. South Korea’s military, meanwhile, said that unusual North Korean troop and submarine movement indicated continued battle preparation.
Officials refused to discuss the talks, which started Saturday evening and whose second session began Sunday evening and was still going Monday morning, but the diplomacy, for the time being, pushed aside previous heated warnings of imminent war.
These are the highest-level talks between the two Koreas in a year. And just the fact that senior officials from countries that have spent recent days vowing to destroy each other are sitting together at a table in Panmunjom, the border enclave where the 1953 armistice was signed ending fighting in the Korean War, is something of a victory.
The length of the first round of talks — nearly 10 hours — and the lack of immediate progress are not unusual. While the Koreas often have difficulty agreeing to talks, once they do, overlong sessions are often the rule. After decades of animosity and bloodshed, however, finding common ground is much harder.
Neither side has disclosed details about the first round of talks. The second session started Sunday afternoon and stretched into the night. The decision to hold talks came hours ahead of a Saturday deadline set by North Korea for the South to dismantle loudspeakers broadcasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda at their border. North Korea had declared that its front-line troops were in full war readiness and prepared to go to battle if Seoul did not back down. South Korea said that even as the North was pursuing dialogue, its troops were preparing for a fight.
An official from Seoul’s Defense Ministry said that about 70 percent of the North’s more than 70 submarines and undersea vehicles had left their bases and were undetectable by the South Korean military as of Saturday.
The standoff is the result of a series of events that started with the explosions of land mines on the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone between the Koreas that Seoul says were planted by North Korea. The explosions maimed two South Korean soldiers on a routine patrol. In response, the South resumed anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts for the first time in 11 years, infuriating the North, which is extremely sensitive to any criticism of its authoritarian system.
While the meeting offered a way for the rivals to avoid an immediate collision, analysts in Seoul wondered whether the countries were standing too far apart to expect a quick agreement.
South Korea likely can’t afford to walk away with a weak agreement after it had openly vowed to stem a “vicious cycle” of North Korean provocations amid public anger over the land mines, said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University.
It was highly unlikely that the North would accept the South’s expected demand for Pyongyang to take responsibility for the land mine explosions and apologize, he added.
