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The national flags of South and North Korea are raised at a town near the Demilitarized Zone in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, on Tuesday. (Yonhap News)

South and North Korea have restored their hotlines on Tuesday, the two countries said.

It’s the first step taken since South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un began exchanging personal correspondence in which they agreed to pursue a restoration of trust, reconciliation and progress with the two sides’ relationship.

The move reopens communication 413 days after North Korea unilaterally shut down the hotlines on June 9 of last year amid objections over the scattering of propaganda leaflets. Analysts read this as signaling a strong commitment to a joint effort by the two leaders to break through their impasse and resume the Korean Peninsula peace process on the 68th anniversary of the Armistice Agreement that halted the Korean War.

Park Soo-hyun, the senior presidential secretary for public communication, said in a briefing that Moon and Kim had “been in communication on the matter of restoring inter-Korean relations, having exchanged several letters since April.”

“In the process, it was agreed that the previously disconnected hotlines would be restored as a first step,” he said.

Park also said the two leaders had “agreed on an approach of quickly restoring mutual trust between South and North and making renewed progress with their relations.”

“We look forward to the restoration of the inter-Korean communication hotlines playing a positive role in the improvement and advancement of inter-Korean relations going forward,” he added.

In North Korea, the state-run Korean Central News Agency published a “report” in which it said that the “top leaders of the north and the south agreed to make a big stride in recovering the mutual trust and promoting reconciliation by restoring the cutoff inter-Korean communication liaison lines through the several recent exchanges of personal letters.”

The report signaled Pyongyang’s anticipation of positive effects from the restoration, stating that “the whole Korean nation desires to see the north-south relations recovered from setback and stagnation as early as possible.”

“The restoration of the communication liaison lines will have positive effects on the improvement and development of the north-south relations,” it predicted.

Shortly after the announcement, the South Korean Ministry of Unification (MOU) and Ministry of National Defense (MND) confirmed the implementation of follow-up measures, including the restoration of the inter-Korean hotlines.

In a regular briefing Tuesday morning, MOU spokesperson Lee Jong-joo said, “At 10 am today, a conversation with the North took place through the inter-Korean hotline set up at Panmunjom and the inter-Korean joint liaison office [in Seoul].”

In a separate press release, the MND also confirmed that “the [inter-Korean] military hotline was restored and its functioning normalized as of 1000 hours.”

Pyongyang’s declaration that the two sides had “agreed to make a big stride in recovering the mutual trust and promoting reconciliation” seemed to signal a change in policy course toward improving inter-Korean relations, which have been strained since June 2020.

Analysts attributed the North’s “difficult first step” a year later to a combination of factors, including the Moon administration’s ongoing efforts to improve relations and the worsening of the North’s disease control and economic situations as the COVID-19 pandemic has persisted.

But more time will be needed to see if the measure leads directly to full-scale improvements in relations and a practical resumption of the Korean Peninsula peace process, including a return to dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington.

North Korea has continued to demand the “withdrawal of hostile policies,” including the discontinuation of joint South Korea-US military exercises ever since its Hanoi summit with the US, which broke down in late February 2019 without achieving results. South Korean and US authorities are currently planning to go ahead as scheduled with their exercises in early August.

Also, while Pyongyang did extend a gesture toward reconciliation, it did not mention the area that most attention is focused on — namely its plans for improving North Korea-US relations.

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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