hankyoreh

head of the South Korean Unification Ministry’s policy office and Kim Sung-hye

By Hankyoreh English staff

North and South Korea agreed to hold a two-day meeting in Seoul between minister-level authorities on June 12 and 13.

The two sides agreed on the official name “inter-Korean authorities’ talks” at their working-level effort to arrange a ministerial meeting, which concluded early Monday morning at Panmunjeom. It was also announced that the North Korean delegation had agreed to travel overland by way of the Gyeongui railway line.

But the general meeting and eight conversations by the chief representatives, which lasted until well past midnight on Sunday, failed to produce a final agreement on the agenda or the status of the representatives appearing at the talks, prompting each side to issue a separate announcement on these terms (the third and fourth out of the statement’s six clauses).

South Korea announced that an agreement had been made to “discuss immediate issues in need of urgent resolution,” including normalization of operations at the Kaesong Industrial Complex, the resumption of tourism at Mt. Keumgang in North Korea, reunions among separated family members, and other humanitarian issues.

But the North Korean announcement said the discussions would extend beyond those issues to include “immediate and urgent issues in inter-Korean relations such as joint commemoration of the June 15 Joint Statement [of 2000] and July 4 Joint Declaration [of 1972], private traffic and contact, and the pursuit of collaborative efforts.”

A senior official with the Ministry of Unification said on condition of anonymity that the South Korean side viewed it as “more suitable to use a general expression rather than itemizing and limiting the topics on the agenda as North Korea called for. Both sides decided to give separate announcements on the results of the discussion after they failed to bridge their differences on the agenda.”

The two sides also differed on the makeup of the delegations to the talks. The South Korean side said each would consist of five people, with the senior South Korean representative being someone empowered to address, discuss, and resolve inter-Korean issues. But the North Korean statement remained vague on the issue, confirming that the delegations would each have five members but stating that the senior representative would merely be a “minister-level authority.”

With both sides agreeing to discuss additional working-level matters through their Panmunjeom liaison officers, further discussion on the senior representatives appears likely in the time remaining.

The agreements were announced at a final general meeting early Sunday morning, after one previous general meeting and eight conversations between senior representatives. The first general meeting began slightly later than expected, at 10:13 am on Sunday, and continued on until 11 am, with both sides sharing their positions on agenda topics.

The meeting began without formalities, after the North Korean representatives agreed with the position of Chun Hae-sung, head of the Unification Ministry’s policy office and chief South Korean representative to the meeting, that it would be best to start right away, the ministry reported.

“We’re here to address the issues in a substantive way, so I think it’s best to go right into the discussions,” Chun was quoted as saying in his opening remarks.

The working level meetings Sunday were held behind closed doors. Reporters at the scene were not allowed access to the discussions.

While the working level meetings got off to a good start according to the tradition of past meetings, they ran into a snag in the afternoon when the two sides were unable to reach an agreement on the issues of whether Kim Yang-gon, Director of the North Korean United Front Department, would participate in the minister-level meetings and whether to hold a joint commemorative ceremony for the June 15 Joint Statement. As a result, last minute discussions continued into the early hours of the morning, with a seventh conversation between senior representatives taking place at 2am on June 10, fifteen hours after the talks began. With representatives from the North and South making periodic reports to and receiving orders from the governments in Seoul and Pyongyang, the heads of the delegations had to convene a total of eight times.

In regard to the question of who should represent the delegations at the minister-level meeting, the South Korean delegates did not directly bring up the name of Kim Yang-gon. However, they did indirectly express their opinion that, if the issues facing the North and South are to be comprehensively addressed, Central Committee Secretary and director of the North Korean United Front Department of the (North) Korean Workers’ Party would need to be present to serve as the counterpart of the South Korean Minister of Unification. Reports also indicate that the South proposed that the North Korean delegation to the talks in Seoul should come South over land instead of by plane.

However, the North Korean side was reported to have been unhappy with this proposal, arguing that, during the previous 21 minister-level talks, the head of the North Korean delegation was not the director of the North Korean United Front Department but rather a senior cabinet councilor. As a result, the statements ultimately released by the North and South included conflicting content in their fourth clauses, the sections that deal with the scale of the delegations to the talks and the rank of the head of the delegations. During this process, in order to give North Korea a little more leeway, the name of the upcoming talks was also altered from the original “inter-Korean minister-level talks” to “inter-Korean authorities’ talks.” Considering that the North Korean statement referred to a “high-ranking official,” it does not appear very likely that Kim Yang-gon will be present at the talks.

The other point of contention was whether to explicitly include items such as the commemorative ceremony for the June 15 Joint Declaration in the agenda for the talks. South Korea suggested that the issues of normalizing operations at the Kaesong Industrial Complex, resuming tours to Mt. Keumgang, and addressing humanitarian concerns such as the reunions of families separated during the Korean War ought to be on the agenda for discussion during the talks.

For its part, North Korea stuck to the position it had expressed in a special statement that the spokesperson for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland (CPRF) released on June 6. While the North was in agreement with the South on the issues of the Kaesong Complex, Mt. Keumgang, and reunions for separated families, it insisted that the issues of commemorating the June 15 Joint Statement and the July 4 Joint Declaration and the question of allowing civilian interaction and travel and pursuing economic cooperation projects must be addressed. In the end, since the North and South were unable to settle their differences, they agreed to publish statements in which the third clauses, which address the agenda of the meeting, would not be consistent (just as with the fourth clause).

The outcome of this working-level meeting suggests that the South Korean government intends to focus on the issues of the Kaesong Complex, Mt. Keumgang, and the reunions of the separated families at the upcoming meetings. In contrast, it is understood that North Korea disclosed its intention to also place importance on the question of commemorating the June 15 Joint Declaration and the July 4 Joint Communique and the issues of permitting civilian traffic and contact and pursuing economic development projects, the latter of two are connected with alleviating the May 24 economic sanctions adopted by the Lee Myung-bak government after the sinking of the Cheonan warship.

This hints that both sides will experience a not insignificant amount of difficulty during the discussions that will take place between the Korean authorities on June 12. For this reason, we will have to wait until the minister-level authorities talks are over before we can answer whether these minister-level talks talks the first to take place since Park Geun-hye become president of South Korea will lead to a breakthrough on the pressing issues affecting both Koreas, including normalization of the Kaesong Complex.

The working-level talks that took place on Jun. 9 were the first talks between North and South to be held in two years and four months since the military working-level talks in Feb. 2011. Inter-Korean talks had not been held in Panmunjom since the preparatory contact for the summit meetings in May 2004, 13 years and two months ago.

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