But he said North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong recently visited United Nations headquarters twice, and that they discussed the role of the secretary-general in promoting peace and reconciliation and in reducing tensions.
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While a 22nd minister-level meeting – the first since 2007 – had originally been planned, the two sides are now set to launch intergovernmental talks at the vice minister level according to a previous agreement reached on August 25.
Hwang Chol, the high-level official with Pyongyang’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, greeted South Korea’s Kim Ki-woong, director-general of the Unification Ministry’s Special Office for Inter-Korean Dialogue, with a customary Korean greeting and exchanged handshakes with Kim Choon-whan, a director at the South’s Ministry.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told the Parliament in an intelligence on briefing Tuesday that Choe Ryong Hae had apparently sent to a “re-education” farm in the countryside in North Korea in early November, Shin Kyung-min, a lawmaker who attended the briefing, told CNN.
Senior officials from Seoul and Pyongyang were talking late into the evening in Panmunjom, the so-called truce village within the demilitarised zone that divides the two Koreas.
Kim’s term was bookended by two major events, the first nuclear crisis with North Korea in 1994 and the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, when he accepted a $58-billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
Ban will visit Pyongyang this week for a possible meeting with leader Kim Jong Un, a South Korean news report said Sunday, Nov. 15.
If dialogue makes progress, the North is expected to seek the resumption of cross-border tours from the South to its Mount Kumgang resort, a once-lucrative source of cash for the impoverished state that was suspended in 2008.
Yonhap said South Korea might raise the issue of families separated by the division of the peninsula after the Korean War of 1950-53.
On 4 August two South Korean soldiers by the border were seriously injured by a landmine blast, which was blamed on the North. The North denied planting the landmine.
There are also worries that wider concessions on reprocessing could further complicate efforts to roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.
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“I am disappointed to learn that Russian Federation signed an extradition treaty with the DPRK last week”, Darusman said in a statement in Seoul, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
