North Korea opens border for disaster aid

North Korea accepted truckloads of South Korean aid through their border today, and agreed to hold rare high-level military talks with the South aimed at easing tensions on the world’s most heavily armed frontier.

In a rare breaching of the Demilitarised Zone separating the two countries, North Korea opened the border to accept South Korean aid for the victims of a deadly train explosion.

A convoy of 20 South Korean trucks rumbled through military checkpoints and across the DMZ to deliver school supplies to victims of the April 22 blast.

The trucks and their cargo of 50 blackboards and 1,500 desk-and-chair sets are part of a €22.3m aid package South Korea promised last week to help rebuild the North Korean town of Ryongchon, where the train blast killed 169 people, injured 1,300 people and destroyed 8,100 homes.

The militaries of the two Koreas seldom hold talks, although their governments have expanded economic and political exchanges in recent years.

Earlier today, the two Koreas ended their three-day Cabinet-level meetings in the North’s capital, Pyongyang, without agreements on increasing economic exchanges or reducing military tensions along their border.

But in a reversal after the meeting’s closure, the North’s People’s Army agreed to hold talks “soon” with the South Korean military, said pool dispatches from South Korean reporters in Pyongyang.

South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun expected the meeting to take place in May, as his delegation has demanded. The countries made a similar agreement during their last cabinet-level talks in February, but no date was set and the North later refused to meet.