North Korea made a conciliatory gesture towards the United States Friday, agreeing after a six-year hiatus to resume talks on recovering the remains of US servicemen killed during the 1950-53 Korean War.
The move followed a high-level meeting between US and North Korean officials in New York in July that prompted a flurry of diplomatic efforts to resume stalled six-party disarmament talks.
The North has previously used the issue of American soldiers killed during the war to try to entice the United States into two-way talks on improving relations between the Cold War enemies. But Washington had rebuffed Pyongyang’s earlier offers to reopen talks on the remains, saying the North must first return to six-nation talks on nuclear disarmament which the communist state abandoned in April 2009.
The US Department of Defense says 8,031 US servicemen are still unaccounted for following the war, which ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. Joint US-North Korean search teams, in 33 missions from 1996 to 2005, recovered what were likely to be the remains of 229 of them. About 80 have been identified and returned to families for burial.
But cooperation ended in 2005 when Washington voiced concerns for the safety of its personnel as relations worsened over the North’s nuclear programme. More recently, a series of cross-border flare-ups has stoked tensions with Seoul.
The North reportedly earned millions of dollars for cooperating over the recovery of remains, and its decision to resume discussions comes after Washington offered emergency aid to the flood-hit country.
