South Korea on Sunday urged North Korea to stick to their plan to hold high-level talks as the communist state issued repeated warnings that the South’s flying of anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets across the border could cause the talks to fall through.
On Friday, North Korea fired anti-aircraft machine guns in an apparent attempt to shoot down dozens of balloons South Korean civic groups flew with leaflets criticizing the communist regime.
After some North Korean machine gun rounds were found to have landed south of the border, South Korea’s military fired back about
40 K-6 machine gun rounds, which was followed by another round of the North’s machine gun attack.
Though no casualties or property damage were reported, it was the first time in nearly four years that the two neighbors have exchanged gunfire across the land border.
High-powered officials from the two sides had met in South Korea’s western port city of Incheon earlier this month and agreed to meet again before early November at the latest, raising hope for a thaw in inter-Korean relations. The North’s delegation ostensibly came to Incheon to attend the closing ceremony of the Asian Games hosted by the port city.
“The second high-level contact is an issue that has already been agreed upon, so it is the government’s basic stance that it should be kept,” a South Korean Ministry of Unification official told Yonhap over the phone.
Since Saturday, North Korea’s main media outlets, including the Rodong Sinmun newspaper and the Uriminzokkiri website, have threatened to cancel the high-level talks, claiming the South Korean government is behind the leaflet campaign.
Seoul has long maintained that it has no legal basis to stop the activities of civic groups in a democratic nation.
“Had the South Korean authorities truly hoped for the improved inter-Korean relations, they should have respected their dialogue partner and taken a step for checking the leaf-scattering operation against the DPRK,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency quoted the Rodong Sinmun as saying in an English dispatch, monitored in Seoul.
DPRK is the acronym of the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“The action of the puppet group not only pushed the inter-Korean relations into a catastrophe but put the scheduled second round of the north-south high-level contact in the danger of abortion,” the paper added.
North Korea accuses the South of being a “puppet group” controlled by the United States. (Yonhap)
