Koreas start rare defence talks

* Five-nation nuclear inspection team in North Korea

SEOUL: South and North Korean defence chiefs met Tuesday for rare talks, trying to ease military tensions to clear the way for multi-billion dollar reconciliation projects including a rail service.

But differences quickly surfaced over the most intractable issue, the disputed sea border, according to pool reports from Pyongyang.

“We came here with an aspiration to reduce tensions and bring peace to the Korean peninsula,” the South’s Defence Minister Kim Jang-Soo said on arrival in the North Korean capital, according to a statement from his ministry.

The defence ministers’ meeting is only the second in the history of the two countries, which have remained technically at war since their 1950-1953 conflict ended only in an armistice. Relations have been improving since the North began shutting down its nuclear weapons programme under a six-nation accord. Experts from South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia were separately scheduled to visit the North’s nuclear complex at Yongbyon this week to check progress in disabling the plutonium-producing plants. The South and North Korean leaders at a historic summit in October agreed a variety of peace and reconciliation projects, and prime ministers from the two sides drew up more detailed plans this month. One key project is the resumption of regular cross-border rail freight services on December 11, for the first time in more than half a century. The defence ministers were to discuss military security guarantees for the services across the heavily fortified frontier.

The prime ministers also agreed to start creating a joint fishing area in the Yellow Sea in the first half of next year. This would be part of a wider “peace zone” which would encompass a joint economic zone around the North’s naval base and port of Haeju.

Nuclear inspection team: Officials from the five nations trying to end North Korea’s nuclear ambitions arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday to observe the disablement of the isolated state’s main atomic facility, officials said.

The delegation, including senior US diplomat Sung Kim, will visit the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, which is slowly being disabled in accordance with an agreement struck in February, they said. “We are pretty positive. I think we are making progress,” Kim told journalists before departing Beijing along with officials from China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

The team of officials, the first multinational delegation to travel to North Korea as part of the disarmament process, is expected to stay there for three days. agencies