South Korea is still anxious to reopen communication lines with North Korea, despite missile test last weekend, as the country's new president Moon Jae-in follows his dual-track policy of using sanctions to push denuclearisation while encouraging dialogue.
North Korea's latest ballistic missile launch on Sunday marked a major setback in efforts to end the threat of conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang hailed as a success the launch that was aimed at testing its missiles' ability to carry a heavy warhead, a measure it says it needs to counter US hostility.
The test was in open defiance of UN Security Council resolutions and the international community has widely condemned the launch.
“The government has kept the stance that the inter-Korean dialogue channel should be reopened. The ministry has been reviewing ways to restore it . . . But there are no specific steps in the offing,” Lee Duk-haeng, a spokesman for South Horea’s unification ministry, told reporters.
There is a hotline at a liaison office located at the truce village of Panmunjom, which was set up in 1971
North Korea has been under unrelenting pressure to rein in its nuclear programme, with the US threatening to step up military force, the UN raising the possibility of tougher sanctions and even the country’s sole ally China expressing growing frustration.
North Korea has responded by holding more missile tests and cranking up the rhetoric. After Sunday’s launch, Pyongyang gleefully hailed significant advances in developing a nuclear missile capable of reaching the US mainland.
Devastating war
Although the devastating war between the democratic, wealthy south and the communist, impoverished north ended in 1953 without a peace treaty, there are channels of communication between them.
There is a hotline at a liaison office located at the truce village of Panmunjom, which was set up in 1971. The hotline has been regularly cut off and reconnected as inter-Korean relations peak and trough.
In February last year, however, North Korea expelled the last remaining South Koreans from the Kaesong joint industrial park inside North Korea, following the South’s closure of the complex, due to fresh UN sanctions in the wake of North Korea’s last nuclear test.
North Korea has called on South Korea to honour previous inter-Korean agreements on co-operation and reconciliation, which Seoul’s unification ministry described as “not logical” given Pyongyang was testing weapons.
Talks in Washington
Separately, Mr Moon's envoy to the US is travelling to Washington for talks about North Korea with US president Donald Trump.
Although the two countries are allies, they are divided over the issue of whether South Korea has to pay for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (Thaad) anti-missile system deployed in the south of the country.
Mr Trump wants South Korea to pay for the system, but Mr Moon has said he will reconsider the deployment, because of strong domestic opposition and also because of Chinese anger that Thaad upsets the regional strategic status quo and its suspicions that it will be used to spy on it.
The Thaad deployment has already had an impact, after its TPY-2 radar component detected Sunday’s missile launch.
