The North said the reunion programme would provide fresh momentum to improving
ties following years of high tensions.
The South’s unification ministry, in charge of inter-Korean affairs, said it
would send its own proposal later for the date and other details on family
reunions.
In early January South Korean President Park Geun-Hye had called for a family
reunion event to be held around the time of the Lunar New Year. But the
North rejected the offer, citing planned South-US military exercises as a
major barrier.
Millions of Koreans were left separated by the Korean War, which sealed the
peninsula’s division.
Most have died without having the chance to reunite with family members last
seen six decades ago. The reunion programme began in earnest in 2000
following a historic inter-Korean summit.
There are normally no opportunities for meetings or any other kind of contact
between ordinary Korean families separated by the border.
Sporadic events since then have seen around 17,000 people briefly reunited.
The last such meeting took place in late 2010, before the programme was
suspended in the wake of the North’s shelling of the South Korean border
island of Yeonpyeong.
About 72,000 South Koreans – nearly half of them aged over 80 – are still
alive and wait-listed for a chance to join the highly competitive reunion
events, which select only up to a few hundred participants each time.
The North’s offer for a family reunion event was “prompted by the single
desire to open a way of improving the relations between the North and the
South in practice as desired and wished by all Koreans at home and abroad”,
KCNA said.
The event may take place at the North’s Mount Kumgang resort, it said.
Pyongyang has sought to link the family reunions to a resumption of South
Korean tours to the resort – a source of much needed hard currency.
The South suspended the tours in 2008 after a North Korean soldier shot dead a
female tourist who strayed into a restricted zone. Seoul insists their
resumption should not be discussed alongside the family reunions.
Edited by Barney Henderson