Seoul: North Korean leader Kim demotes top official

Through the ROC’s representative office in Seoul, the government has also conveyed its honest sympathy to Kim’s family and the people of South Korea on his passing, the ministry said.

Human Rights Watch is an global nongovernmental organization that investigates and reports on human rights abuses in over 90 countries, including North and South Korea.

The start of the meeting was delayed for over two hours due to a problem with network lines in the North.

After an initial round lasting about 90 minutes, both sides took a break to confer with their respective capitals, a Unification Ministry official said.

If dialogue makes progress, the North is 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.

Instead, Pyongyang appears to be interested in resuming an inter-Korean tour program that has been suspended since 2008.

In June 2013, the two Koreas had agreed to hold high-level talks in Seoul, but the meeting was called off a day before it was to be held as North Korea disputed the rank of the chief South Korean negotiator.

“The overall atmosphere for a successful conclusion of these talks is really not that favorable”, Cheong Seong-Chang, an analyst with the Sejong Institute think tank in Seoul, told Agence France-Presse.

This matter is quite urgent because according to the latest information we have, this group was last being held at Tumen, in Jilin Province, at a military garrison near the China-North Korea border.

More than 28,000 North Koreans have resettled in South Korea since the North was ravaged by starvation in the 1990s.

The agreement for the inter-government talks was reached on August 25 when top-level military advisors to South Korean President Park Geun-hye and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un met to defuse tensions that had pushed the Korean peninsula to the brink of armed conflict.

Ban cautioned that nothing had been decided but said he had discussed the proposed visit with North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su Young when he was in NY for the UN General Assembly.