North Korea eases border restrictions with South Korea.

[Qwerty 42]

N. Korea Reopens Border With South
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: September 1, 2009

SEOUL — North Korea restored regular border crossings for traffic going to South Korean factories in the North on Tuesday, while its leader, Kim Jong-il, reiterated his government’s call for a peace treaty with the United States.

North Korea had previously called for talks with Washington to replace the truce — which fell short of a formal peace treaty — that ended the Korean War in 1953.

“We can ease tensions and remove the danger of war on the peninsula when the United States abandons its hostile policy and signs a peace treaty with us,” Mr. Kim said in a commentary carried on Pyongyang Radio, which broadcasts North Korean government statements abroad.

The dispatch, which was broadcast late Monday, did not say when Mr. Kim made the statement. But the remark was the latest in a number of recent conciliatory overtures from the North.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, North Korea restored regular trucking and personnel traffic for South Korean companies that have operations in a joint industrial park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong. The North had sharply curtailed such traffic in December as cross-border tensions grew.

The border will now open 23 times a day to traffic to and from Kaesong, up from six times, said Lee Jong-joo, a spokeswoman with the Unification Ministry in Seoul. Some 110 South Korean factories employ about 40,000 North Korean workers at Kaesong.

Ian Kelly, the U.S. State Department spokesman, said Monday that Washington was “encouraged” by the North’s recent gestures toward the South, but he said he had no comment on the North’s call for a peace treaty.

Mr. Kelly urged North Korea to return to six-nation talks with regional powers about the dismantling of its nuclear weapons programs. The North, which prefers a bilateral dialogue with the United States, has said the six-party framework is dead.

Also Tuesday, a diplomatic delegation left Pyongyang for a visit to Beijing, according to KCNA, the official North Korean news agency. The group was led by Kim Yong-il, a deputy foreign minister, although KCNA gave no further details.

China is North Korea’s principal trading partner and its biggest supplier of aid. It also has been the host of the six-party talks that include the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Washington has said that negotiating a peace treaty with Pyongyang is possible only as part of a broader process that addresses the North’s nuclear disarmament. North Korea conducted its second nuclear test in May, and there is a growing suspicion among analysts in Seoul that the North is trying to win diplomatic recognition from Washington while also being accepted as a nuclear power.

The United States headed the United Nations forces that fought on South Korea’s behalf during the Korean War and afterward signed the truce. North Korea has tried for years to drag various American administrations into peace talks while arguing that it was building nuclear weapons because of Washington’s “hostile policies.”

I know not posting comments is frowned upon, but not too much to say here: hopefully tensions continue to ease, all that.

[Simplicius]

Am I missing something, or is this a bit of an about-face? Last I heard, North Korean rhetoric was getting increasingly strident as they ran their nuclear test and fired off some rockets. This comes off as a total change in tone, which seems weird.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Maybe the death of Kim Dae Jung was an excuse for some kindness....

[Solauren]

Or this is another way to try to get the US to the table.

[General Zod]

Am I missing something, or is this a bit of an about-face? Last I heard, North Korean rhetoric was getting increasingly strident as they ran their nuclear test and fired off some rockets. This comes off as a total change in tone, which seems weird.

I don't see how. It's only for traffic going to South Korea. It seems to me that going to NK is still as strict as ever. The way they're saying they want peace talks but only if the US ends its hostilities (read: the US is to blame for their conditions and needs to say so) looks pretty status quo.

[loomer]

Could be that North Korea wants to try and slip a few intelligence agents across the border in the flood of people, and then go back to the prior level of heightened tension.

[Solauren]

Am I missing something, or is this a bit of an about-face? Last I heard, North Korean rhetoric was getting increasingly strident as they ran their nuclear test and fired off some rockets. This comes off as a total change in tone, which seems weird.

I don't see how. It's only for traffic going to South Korea. It seems to me that going to NK is still as strict as ever. The way they're saying they want peace talks but only if the US ends its hostilities (read: the US is to blame for their conditions and needs to say so) looks pretty status quo.

Also, if this were to get the US to 'end hostilities' and sign a peace treaty, North Korea can then whine and bitch about the US not living up to it's promises etc (even if none were made), possibly doing something to cause the US to break the treaty.

This would give N.Korea alot of leeway (broken treaty) in it's behaviour, as it can claim to be the 'victim defending itself'.

[K. A. Pital]

North Korean economic autarky is making the nation a giant ticking time-bomb. The NK elites (according to Soviet/Russian insiders who worked in NK, like Lankov) already have fully realized it. This is why they pursue some sort of joint projects with SK, special economic zones and try to ease border restrictions. They want to get off the bomb before it explodes (or avoid the explosion alltogether).

All their manuevers - most if not absolutely every single one - is dictated by internal political needs and internal political games, pursuing a veneer of propaganda for the population and maintaining their authority inside while at the same time trying to figure out how to get out from the giant trap that their nation has become.

That may be an exaggeration, but I find this pretty plausible.

[weemadando]

And lets not forget that the Norks just killed a few South Koreans by raising a rivers level 2m without warning with an unscheduled and unannounced dam release.

[open_sketchbook]

It's unlikely at this point that North Korea would do anything like this without some kind of hidden agenda. The idea that they are trying to slip agents in is a plausible one, as is the possibility that they are gauging international response to them "playing nice" with hopes of using it to subvert their image and get a little more leeway.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

And lets not forget that the Norks just killed a few South Koreans by raising a rivers level 2m without warning with an unscheduled and unannounced dam release.

More likely to be an accident. Infrastructure in North Korea is crumbling as it is.