South, North Korea set to meet at border village

 
South and North Korea on Saturday appointed their delegations for working-level talks at the truce village of Panmunjom to arrange their first Cabinet minister-level meeting in six years, officials here said.

The upcoming meeting comes three days after Pyongyang made a surprise overture for the two countries to hold their first government-to-government dialogue in years, following months of hostile rhetoric by the communist country against Seoul and Washington.

After the two Koreas exchanged proposals and counter-proposals on the date and location of the meeting for the upcoming ministerial-level dialogue set for Wednesday, South Korea's Unification Ministry on Saturday said the North had agreed to hold the working-level meeting at the truce village of Panmunjom to arrange further details. Pyongyang had earlier favored its border city of Kaesong as a meeting venue.

Three senior officials of each side will meet at the Freedom House, an administrative building in the southern side of the joint security area that sits on the inter-Korean border, the ministry said. 

From the South, Chun Hae-sung, a senior unification ministry official who had served as its spokesman, will lead the three-member delegation, it noted.

Through a Red Cross hotline, the North on Saturday communicated the names of its three-member delegation led by Kim Sung-hye, a senior official at the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, Seoul officials said.

Kim participated in a working-level meeting between the Koreas in 2005 and escorted Lee Hee-ho, wife of the late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, when she crossed the border to pay her condolences to the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

The two leaders met in Pyongyang in 2000 in their historic summit between the two Koreas, which greatly improved diplomatic and economic relations until conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office in early 2008.

Later in the day, Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae and other high-level government officials held a meeting to set the agenda and other key procedural matters for Sunday's meeting, officials said.

The government-level talk is expected to handle a wide-range of issues, including reopening a suspended industrial complex in the North, resuming cross-border tours and allowing for reunions of separated families, raising hopes of easing tension on the Korean Peninsula.

The two Koreas technically remain at a war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.(Yonhap News)