Two Koreas end high-level talks with no agreement

The dialogue, which continued for two days at North Korea’s border city of Kaesong, ended without any joint press conference, Xinhua reported.

South and North Korean delegates met at the Gaeseong Industrial Complex in North Korea at around 10:40 a.m.to begin the chief delegates’ meeting.

Hwang Boogi, center, South Korea’s vice minister of unification and the head negotiator for high-level talks with North Korea, speaks to the media before leaving for Kaesong, at the office of inter-Korean Dialogue in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, Dec. 11, 2015.

Shaking hands at their first session on Friday morning, Hwang had declared it was time to “take a crucial step”, while his North Korean counterpart Jon Jong-Su underlined the opportunity to move towards a less confrontational relationship.

The cash-strapped North wanted the South to resume lucrative tours to its scenic Mount Kumgang resort, which Seoul suspended in 2008 after a female tourist was shot dead by a North Korean guard.

“The North intensively raised the issue of the Mount Kumgang tourism… demanding an agreement to restart the tourism as a priority”, Hwang was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency.

The vice-ministerial meeting over the weekend was, in part, the result of a breakthrough agreement on August 25, when both sides agreed to hold high-level talks to work on improving relations.

But Seoul refused to talk about the issue and sought instead to focus on ways to hold another round of family reunions for those separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.

The August talks ended military tensions sparked after a land mine explosion blamed on the communist North maimed two South Korean soldiers early that month.

The stand-off eased after marathon talks and an agreement on efforts to reduce animosity. Those included a resumption of talks between senior officials and a new round of reunions for war-separated families, which were held in October.

Yang Moo-Jin, professor at Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies, said the South’s refusal to discuss resumption of the tour programme – which was widely believed before the meeting to have been on the agenda – appeared to have left Pyongyang “deeply mistrustful” of Seoul. “As there are differences of opinions each other, there is the need to narrow such a gap”.

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