Seoul seeks to reopen North Korea hotline
By Jun Ji-hye
The Moon Jae-in government will push for the reopening of an inter-Korean hotline at the truce village of Panmunjeom, a security adviser said Wednesday.
The liaison office in Panmunjeom was shuttered last February after North Korea severed the hotline in protest of former President Park Geun-hye’s closure of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, an inter-Korean joint venture in the North Korean border city. The shutdown was in response to Pyongyang’s nuclear test and missile launches.
Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies who was a key adviser to Moon on security issues during campaign, said normalizing the liaison channel will be the first step toward reopening inter-Korean dialogue.
“There will be a relevant announcement by the government soon,” Yang said in an article published by Yonhap News Agency, Wednesday.
Yang also said the previous day that it would be too passive for the government to just wait for the North to ask for reopening the hotline first.
“It would be more realistic for the new government to first make efforts to normalize the liaison channel,” he wrote in his contribution to a government website promoting its policies.
“Once inter-Korean communication through the hotline takes place, the dialogue will be able to be expanded to working-level as well as high-level talks.”
Responding to Prof. Yang’s remarks, the Ministry of Unification said that reopening the liaison office is technically possible now, but no particular decision has been made.
“The government’s basic position is that an inter-Korean communication channel should be reopened to stabilize relations between the two Koreas,” spokesman Lee Duck-hang said. “The ministry has reviewed various options in regard to this, but no decision has been made.”
Lee added that South Korean officials have gone to the liaison office at Panmunjeom every day and attempted to make a phone call, but their North Korean counterparts have not responded.
Throughout his campaign, President Moon stressed the need for holding inter-Korean dialogue to peacefully resolve various challenging issues including the North’s nuclear and missile threats.
But following the North’s test-firing of a new type of a ballistic missile Sunday, the President made comparatively tough remarks, saying, “South Korea should firmly respond to any North Korean provocations to prevent the North from misjudging situations.”
Moon noted that he still leaves open the possibility of dialogue with the Kim Jong-un regime, but added: “Dialogue will be possible only when the North shows a change in its attitude.”
The regime in Pyongyang has severed the inter-Korean hotline at Panmunjeom six times — including last year — since the communication channel was first established in 1971.
Occasions that have led to the suspension of the liaison office include a high-profile “axe murder” that took place in 1976 in which two U.S. Army officers, who were pruning a large tree in the Joint Security Area, were killed by North Korean soldiers wielding axes.
The operation of the hot-line was also halted when inter-Korean relations hit bottom in 2010 following the North’s torpedo attack on the Navy corvette Cheonan, which killed 46 South Korean sailors. In the wake of the deadly sinking of the Cheonan, then-President Lee Myung-bak slapped a package of economic penalties known as the May 24 Sanctions on Pyongyang.
The period of the suspension of the liaison channel has varied ranging from four months to four years.