North Korea backs out of train tests with South

North Korea today abruptly cancelled groundbreaking test runs of trains across its highly-guarded border with South Korea, citing an atmosphere of confrontation and war.

South Korean Vice Unification Minister Shin Eon-sang described the last-minute, unilateral delay of trial runs scheduled for tomorrow as “very regrettable” and said South Korea would take necessary steps, but didn’t elaborate.

The test runs along rebuilt railways would have been the first time that trains crossed the inter-Korean border in more than 50 years, and were a high-profile element of efforts at détente between North and South Korea since a pivotal summit of their leaders in 2000.

Train service between the Koreas was halted in June 1951.

“The responsibility for the collapse of scheduled trial runs lies in North Korea,” Shin said. “The government urges North Korea to take sincere steps to ensure that test runs of trains can be made at the earliest date.”

North Korean official Pak Jong Song informed the South earlier today that “it is impossible to conduct the trial operation” as scheduled because of the failure of the two Koreas to reach a military agreement on the trains’ operations, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported.

Pak, head of the North’s group on the rail and road issue, also criticised “pro-US ultra-right conservative forces” in the South for “pushing the situation in Korea to an extreme phase of confrontation and war,” in a message sent to his South Korean counterpart.

“We will wait for an appropriate time to come for the trial train operation between the North and the South after a military guarantee is provided by the military authorities of both sides and the situation in the South returns to normal,” KCNA quoted him as saying.

Paik Hak-soon, a research fellow at South Korea’s independent Sejong Institute, partly attributed the delay to tensions between Washington and Pyongyang, and said the North’s military slams the brake on inter-Korean relations.

“The North’s military has no choice but to flex its muscle amid growing danger,” Paik said, adding it appears to be tense over Washington’s alleged plot for a regime change in the North. Washington denies it plans to attack.

At high-level military talks between the Koreas last week, the sides failed to come to an agreement on a military protocol for cross-border travel via the reconnected rail and road links, which would be necessary to guarantee travellers’ safety.

However, South Korean news reports had said the rail test runs would go ahead under the 1953 armistice agreement that halted the Korean War and a 2003 tentative agreement on travel across the border.

Every day, some 500 people travel from the South to Kaesong, a joint industrial park just north of inter-Korean border, while about 1,000 South Koreans daily visit North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort by using two road links running parallel with the railways, according to the Unification Ministry.

Former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Il at the first-and-only summit between the two sides in June 2000, is planning to travel to North Korea next month and had pressed to travel there by train.

The South’s Shin said North Korea should still honour its commitment to allow Kim Dae-jung to make the trip, but it was unclear whether he would travel by rail.

Despite the strides in relations between the Koreas since 2000, further cooperation has been hampered by the North’s refusal to heed international calls to abandon its nuclear weapons development.