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| Soldiers from the Korean People's Army look south while on duty in the Joint Security Area (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Catherine Putz
But talking is preferable to fighting.
Representatives from the two Koreas sat down Friday in the North Korean border town of Kaesong, the site of a jointly-operated industrial zone. Little concrete progress was expected to come from the meeting. However, the two sides did decide to extend the talks into a second day, which is as big a success as could be hoped for.
The vice-minister level talks started Friday morning with South Korea’s vice minister of unification Hwang Boo-Gi meeting with his North Korean counterpart, Jon Jong-Su.
The talks come after months of work, efforts to claw back to some level of stability after August’s flare-up. The August crisis – in which two South Korean soldiers were injured by a North Korean mine and South Korea subsequently decided to resume propaganda broadcasts — had many regional watchers worried the situation could slip further into conflict. But South Korea stopped the broadcasts and North Korea apologized after Kim Kwan-jin, South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s national security adviser, and Hwang Pyong-so, a top military aide to Kim Jong-un, held negotiations in late August.
In late November, the two sides reaffirmed their intention to continue to engage in dialogue and agreed to hold the December 11 talks.
Read the full story at The Diplomat