South and North Korea reached a deal on a six-point agreement early Tuesday after 43 hours of talks, putting a halt to rising tensions on the peninsula that brought the two rivals on the brink of an armed conflict.
Advertisement
To lower tensions, chief military aides to President Park Gyun-hae and top North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met in the truce village of Panmunjom from Saturday to Tuesday.
While the Koreas have difficulty agreeing to talks, once they do, marathon sessions are often the rule.
For decades, North Korea has a track record of carrying out provocations against South Korea, including the sinking of a South Korean warship and the shelling of a South Korean border island, both in 2010 that killed 50 South Koreans.
The delegates were “continuing talks for long hours in the midst of the critical situation” on the peninsula, Min Kyung-wook, a spokesman for South Korea’s presidential Blue House, told reporters, without giving details.
Still, Kim declined to comment on whether he discussed with his North Korean counterpart on an inter-Korean summit.
Without North Korea’s apology and pledge to prevent recurrence South Korea will continue to broadcast pro-democracy messages with loudspeakers in frontline areas, said Park.
The final wording of the communique fell short of the complete apology South Korea had sought for the mine blasts, and there was no explicit acceptance of responsibility by Pyongyang, which has repeatedly denied any role in the incident.
South Korea said it would wait until North Korea had “normalized” its military deployment before lifting its own state of military readiness, the South’s Yonhap News Agency reported.
A South Korea’s unification ministry official said the country will make efforts to regularly hold talks with the DPRK.
North Korea apologized for a landmine explosion that critically wounded two South Korean soldiers.
Relations between South Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) have entered a thawing mood on the easing of military tensions that had escalated in recent weeks on landmine blasts and propaganda broadcasts entailing a war of words. Seoul responded by resuming anti-Pyongyang cross-border broadcasts for the first time in more than 10 years.
North Korea has extended their sympathy towards the South Korean soldiers who were injured in a landmine incident while Seoul has conceded to stop anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts on Tuesday morning. With regard to the agreement, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon quickly issued a statement welcoming the news of an agreement and stressing the importance of its full implementation.
Mr Kim says the two Koreas have also agreed to hold talks to improve their ties soon in either Seoul or Pyongyang.
Advertisement
“I see this is as yet another of the small cycles of the skirmishes that we see between North and South Korea that just happens in depressing regularity”. “I further hope that this hard-won momentum for inter-Korean dialogue will lead to the resumption of talks for addressing the nuclear issue”. He said that it could be unsafe to their hold.
