North Korea has proposed cutting down cross-border railway services at this week's military talks with South Korea, citing a lack of cargo, a South Korean military official said Saturday.
The two Koreas held one-day working-level military talks Friday, the first dialogue between the two countries this year, at the truce village of Panmunjom on the inter-Korean border.
"It is better to reduce the runs than keep the service going without cargo," Col. Pak Rim-su, head of the North Korean delegation to the meeting, was quoted as saying by the official.
The train service began on Dec. 11 as part of wide-ranging economic cooperation agreed on at the second inter-Korean summit last year in Pyongyang. Trains have been carrying goods and raw materials to and from South Korean factories operating in the North Korean borderline city of Kaesong.
The Kaesong complex, which resulted from the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, houses over 60 South Korean businesses employing 14,000 North Korean workers, who produce garments, watches, kitchen utensils and machinery parts.
According to the South Korean Defense Ministry, trains have not been carrying substantial amounts of cargo because the companies in Kaesong still rely on trucks and other vehicles.
Arguing that the service needs to stay at its present level for the sake of regularity, the South rejected the North Korean proposal and offered to bring it up at a separate inter-Korean panel on railway cooperation, the official said.
The Friday meeting largely focused on security issues related to the train service and ways to guarantee freer access for South Korean businesses and investors to the industrial complex.
But the talks ended with little progress, South Korean officials said, as North Korea's powerful military remains unsympathetic toward opening the regime to outside influences.
South and North Korea remain in a technical state of war as the Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.