North Korean negotiators holding talks with the rival South agreed yesterday to discuss allowing reunions among millions of families separated since the 195053 Korean War.
Progress in the first high-level contact in four years followed a blunt message by the South that large-scale aid to its famine-stricken neighbour depended on political concessions.
Talks that began on Saturday in Beijing moved to a working level to discuss family reunions along with Southern proposals to exchange envoys and reopen liaison offices in the border truce village of Panmunjom. Also on the agenda was implementation of a 1991 Basic Agreement to pursue peaceful reunification.
The peninsula is split by minefields under a 1953 armistice, which left North and South technically at war. Time is running out for many ageing Koreans with relatives across the border.
Negotiations are to resume today. "There is still quite a distance between the two sides," the North Korean chief delegate, Mr Jon Kum-chol, said.
South Korea's chief negotiator, vice minister for national unification, Mr Jeong Se-hyun, said earlier that he was "neither optimistic nor pessimistic" about the outcome. He welcomed the working-level talks as "a sign of North Korean willingness to resolve many issues".
Meanwhile, the head of the World Food Programme said in Beijing that six out of 10 North Korean children were now born underweight and three of those six died. "All one has to do is to see skeletal children in the hospitals to know that this not only is the state of some of the children, but that they reflect the state of their families and their mothers and fathers," Ms Catherine Bertini told a news conference after visiting North Korea.
Yet, Ms Bertini said, the WFP and North Korean authorities were wrangling over monitoring of aid. She said the WFP had threatened to cut back relief deliveries after Pyongyang barred its inspectors from 50 of the country's 210 counties where it said there were sensitive military installations.
Pyongyang had now agreed to let monitors into the areas within 30 days, Ms Bertini said.
Earlier, the French humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres issued a report that said army and government officials were stealing international relief supplies, and only a bare minimum was getting through to the sick and dying.
The report, based on interviews with North Korean refugees and Chinese travellers, spoke of cannibalism among North Korea's desperate 23 million people.