“Let’s make efforts to break down the barrier, fill up the cracks and make a new and wide road together”, Hwang Boo-gi told his North Korean counterpart Jon Jong-su as they shook hands at the talks venue on Friday.
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South Korean soldiers gesture to vehicles on the road leading to North Korea’s Kaesong joint industrial complex at a military checkpoint in the border city of Paju on August 21, 2015.
Ji Jae Ryong, North Korea’s ambassador to China, was seen accompanying Moranbong band members out of their hotel around midday and then seen at the Beijing airport with them, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported. An accompanying North Korean musical troupe, the State Merited Chorus, also pulled put because of the communication issues, Xinhua said.
Pyongyang has wanted the resumption of tour to the DPRK’s scenic resort of Mount Kumgang.
The North was 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. Seoul claimed that North Korea was the first to open fire and the artillery shelling was aimed at South Korea’s propaganda loudspeakers installed nearby.
More than 19,700 Koreans have met at the temporary family reunions that have been held irregularly between the rivals since 2000, including almost 1,000 at the latest meetings at Diamond Mountain in October. South Korea has referred to as for more participants and much more usual reunions, as hundreds of people in that had been on the waiting list have already died and lots of others have entered their 80s & 90s, still the North has refused to oblige.
Analysts say North Korea fears that its citizens will become influenced by the much more affluent South, which could loosen the government’s grip on power.
After the negotiations, Pyongyang blamed the South for the breakdown.
No major developments were expected from the second and presumably last day of the meetings between vice-ministerial officials in Kaesong, where the discussions stretched late into the night on Friday before the two sides chose to extend the talks for another day.
The talks focused on the resumption of cross-border tours as well as reunion gatherings of families separated by war.
The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war, because the Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
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Improving relations with Seoul is a priority for young North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who wants tangible diplomatic and economic achievements before a convention of the ruling Workers’ Party in May, said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University.
