Koreas agree to high-level dialogue

Experts expected Thursday’s talks to include a discussion of a possible request by North Korea that the South resume tours to the Mount Kumgang resort, the report said.

The agreement also called for further high-level talks between the two sides and interaction between citizens groups from North and South.

In June 2013, Pyongyang and Seoul agreed to hold what would have been the first high-level dialogue in six years.

Representatives from North and South Korea are set to meet following a turbulent period in relations between the two sides. Seoul halted tours to the area after a South Korean tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier in 2008.

“We carried out a large-scale live-fire drill in consideration of the fact that North Korea attacked South Korean land for the first time since the Korean War on this day five years ago”, noted a military official.

“The new deal is a win-win deal that will strengthen the US-South Korea alliance”, Joo Chul-Gi, South Korea’s foreign affairs and security chief, told Yonhap News Agency in April.

Kim, a towering figure in South Korea politics who led fights against a succession of dictatorships from the 1960s through the 1980s, died of a severe blood infection and acute heart failure on Sunday.

South Korea has insisted on the need to hold regular reunions as most surviving relatives are in their 80s and older.

Although the focus was on trade and other economic issues, the three declared their “firm opposition” to the development of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula.

The revised deal continues to deny South Korea that right, but opens the possibility of the country gaining the ability to enrich uranium to produce non-weapons grade nuclear fuel depending on future negotiations with the United States.

They still remain technically at war as the conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.

The two Koreas have held two summits in the past, one in 2000 and the second in 2007.