Koreas reach agreement after marathon talks

North Korean troops are eagerly awaiting an order “to inflict a shower of fire” on their foes, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said Sunday.

North Korea and South Korea have reached an agreement to de-escalate tensions between both sides, according to South Korea’s national security chief, Kim Kwan-jin.

North and South Korea resumed top-level crisis talks today for avoiding a threatened military clash, even as Seoul accused Pyongyang of undermining the process with renewed naval and land deployments.

Pyongyang is threatening a concerted military attack unless Seoul switches off banks of loudspeakers that have been blasting high-decibel propaganda messages into North Korea for the past week.

North Korea called the blaring propaganda an “act of war”, and criticized a joint military exercise between the US and South Korea.

“Kim Jong-Un’s incompetent regime is trying to deceive the world with its lame lies”, a woman’s voice was heard from one of the banks of 48 speakers set up along the South Korean side of the DMZ. The standoff exacerbated the turmoil in South Korea’s financial markets.

The North Korean government also announced the agreement Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a group of anti-North Korea protesters rallied near the border Monday, destroying North Korean flags and calling for strong retaliation for the land mine attack.

High-level talks between North and South Korea have stretched deep into the night again. Both countries said they would hold talks in either Seoul or Pyongyang “as soon as possible”. The standoff started with the explosions of land mines on the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone between the Koreas that Seoul says were planted by North Korea. Hwang is considered by outside analysts to be North Korea’s second most important official after supreme leader Kim Jong Un. The final meeting began on Sunday evening after a hiatus in the late afternoon that invited speculation of a political impasse.

While North Korea’s threat of “military action” may have been temporarily averted, it also emerged Monday that the authoritarian state had deployed amphibious landing craft to its frontline.

“They are not talking for the sake of a breakdown but for the sake of agreement”.

These have been the highest-level talks between the two Koreas in a year.

Presidential spokesman Min Kyung-wook told reporters that the two sides ended the top-level meeting at 00:55 a.m. (0355 GMT).

In response to the exchange of fire last week, the foreign ministry in Beijing said in a statement on Thursday that the “relevant parties” should remain calm and restrained.

Since then the North and South have been at loggerheads and the tensions could be about to break into conflict.