North Korea holds working-level talks with South Korea

Kim Ki-woong, head of the South Korea’s delegation, right, shakes hands with his North Korean counterpart Hwang Chol, a senior official on the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, before the start of working-level talks at the border village of Panmunjom Thursday.

N orth and South Korean officials are meeting for talks about how to hold higher-level talks that would be the first between the two countries since 2007.

KCNANorth Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks at an emergency meeting of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) Central Military Commission, in this photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang on August 21, 2015.

“The agenda will be issues that will improve relations between the South and the North”, the statement issued after the talks said.

In the meeting, the South is expected to propose holding the reunions of the families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War on a regular basis.

Around 66,000 affected family members remain alive in South Korea, and their advancing age makes the issue a pressing one, it said.

Earlier this month, the leaders of South Korea, China and Japan held their first summit for more than three years in Seoul.

North Korea, however, wanted the initial focus to be on a resumption of visits by South Korean tour groups to its scenic Mount Kumgang resort.

Negotiators from North and South Korea are due to hold talks, marking a thawing in bilateral ties.

The U.S. restricts such activities because the same technologies can be used to produce weapons-grade nuclear fuel, and because of fears that supporting South Korea’s enrichment ambitions might send the wrong signal to North Korea, which is developing its own nuclear weapons program.

“Since past year, North Koreans have been ordered to crack down on capitalist ideology and culture”, a think-tank researcher here said.