S Korean announcement appears to indicate a ‘softer position’ as UN Security Council weighs new sanctions on Pyongyang.
South Korea says it wants to re-establish lines of communication with North Korea, as new President Moon Jae-in seeks a two-track policy involving sanctions and dialogue with its reclusive neighbour to rein in its nuclear and missile programmes.
The two countries are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. The North has ignored calls to curb its weapons programmes, defending them as necessary to counter US hostility.
Its latest ballistic missile launch, in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions, was on Sunday which it said was a test of its capability to carry a «large-size heavy nuclear warhead».
«Our most basic stance is that communication lines between South and North Korea should open, » Lee Duk-haeng, a spokesman for the South’s unification ministry, told reporters on Wednesday.
«The unification ministry has considered options on this internally but nothing has been decided yet.»
Communications were severed by the North last year, Lee said, in the wake of new sanctions following North Korea’s last nuclear test and Pyongyang’s decision to shut down a joint industrial zone operated inside the North.
There was no immediate response from Pyongyang.
Al Jazeera’s Andrew Thomas, reporting from the South’s capital, Seoul, said Lee’s statement «refers effectively to a hotline.
«There is a room on the South Korean side of the border, and a room on the North Korean side of the border, and a physical line between the two which has been there since the 1970s and is used to relay messages of emergencies, » he said.
