Two Koreas Revisit Family Reunion Issue

North and South Korea resumed their first governmental talks in more than a year Saturday after four days of false starts and postponements by the Pyongyang regime.

Straining already tense talks, North Korea said Saturday that Seoul will have to apologize for a naval skirmish in the Yellow Sea before the North will carry out any agreements from their negotiations.

The two sides met for nearly two hours Saturday in a luxury hotel in Beijing after a first session of talks Tuesday was derailed over the issue of the June 15 naval clash.

The negotiations were supposed to deal with reuniting families separated during the nations’ bitter five-decade rivalry and providing aid for the famine-threatened North.

The North Korean delegation, however, demanded that the South assume responsibility for what it called an “armed provocation,” North Korean state media reported.

Pyongyang said that, even if an agreement is reached on family reunification, the “strained situation” will make it difficult to implement such a pact, the state media said.

Despite the North’s demands, the two sides agreed to meet again Thursday. South Korean officials were not available to comment on the North Korean report.

The first session of talks broke up when the North refused to negotiate until the South apologized for the recent exchange of gunfire at sea. But the North later agreed to continue the negotiations without preconditions.

North Korea scuttled similar high-level talks in April 1998 by refusing to discuss the family reunification issue.

An estimated 10 million Koreans were separated from their families by the partitioning of the peninsula in 1945 and then by the 1950-53 Korean War. The two nations have maintained an uneasy peace since the war ended in an armed truce.