Koreas begin rare high-level talks

“Whether North Korea can make nuclear weapons using tritium is unknown although we believe that it remains a technical problem North Korea still needs to solve”, ISIS said at the time.

The South’s delegation, led by Vice Unification Minister Hwang Boo-gi, left for the city that houses a joint factory park early in the morning to join his counterpart Jon Jong-su, a vice director of the North’s Committee for Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland in charge of cross-border affairs. The last such sit-down, with the mandate to discuss a range of inter-Korean issues, took place almost two years ago.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – North and South Korea on Friday held high-level talks at a North Korean border town, a small step meant to improve ties battered by a military standoff in August and decades of acrimony and bloodshed.

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.

According to Yonhap, around 66,000 family members remain alive in South Korea from the families separated by the division of the peninsula after the Korean War of 1950-53.

The meeting in itself was an achievement after a period of stop-start communication between the Koreas – it was the product of an agreement reached in August following a spike in hostilities.

However, skepticism abounds among South Korea’s intelligence community.

Ri and Koh had been tasked with looking after Kim Jong-un while he was studying in Switzerland as a teenager, and rather than return to North Korea they chose to defect to the United States in 1998.

“I am certain the day will come when we will see North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un stand trial at the ICC”, says Ahn Myung Chul, a former prison guard.

The elephant in the room for any North-South dialogue is Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

“There are a lot of issues to discuss between the South and North. [We] will do our best to resolve them one at a time, step by step”, Hwang said before leaving for Kaesong.

On Thursday, South Korean officials said that there was no evidence that the North had hydrogen bomb capacity.

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, told the council that the North’s abuses represented a “level of horror unrivalled in the world”.

Two North Korean defectors were also at the Security Council meeting to put a human face and voice to the horrors they suffered.

Russia, Venezuela and Angola backed China, but the United States and eight other countries voted to go forward.

UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman kicked off the meeting and said that “the worldwide community has a collective responsibility to protect the population of the DPRK and to consider the wider implications of the reported grave human rights situations for the stability of the region”.