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Two Koreas agree to restore cross-border railway

'N Korea to consider advice to come clean on nukes

AFP, REUTERS, Seoul
North and South Korea are to complete a highly symbolic project next month to link a cross-border railway line severed for half a century, a South Korean envoy said yesterday on his return from Pyongyang.
Lim Dong-Won, a top adviser to South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung, said the agreement to complete the Seoul-Sinuiju line by the end of February was reached in meetings with Kim Yong-Sun, secretary of the North's ruling Workers Party.
The two also agreed to start overland tours from South Korea to the North's scenic Mount Kumgang through a road link up the eastern side of the peninsula in early February, as well as run tours across an existing sea route to the popular resort, Lim said.
The transportation projects are historically significant as they will run through a buffer zone that has stood as a barrier between the capitalist South and the communist North since the 1950-53 Korean War.
The two Koreas have agreed to reconnect two sets of the railway and road links -- the Gyeongui line running to China up the west side of the peninsula and the Donghae line to Russia on the eastern side.
Under an inter-Korean accord in September, the Gyeongui railway should have been completed by the end of last year but has been delayed by a row over who controls
the transportation corridors.
North Korea made a key concession Monday by agreeing to recognize the authority of the US-led United Nations Command (UNC) over the transportation routes.
The North had previously demanded the corridors be controlled by South and North Korea alone, not by the UNC, which is led by the United States.
But since the armistice agreement signed in 1953 with North Korea, the UNC has supervised the tense, mine-strewn buffer zone known as the demilitarized zone (DMZ).
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, accused by President Bush of blackmailing the world with a nuclear arms program, has agreed to consider Seoul's plea to end the crisis, a South Korean envoy said yesterday.
After a three-day visit in which the South's envoy was snubbed by the enigmatic Kim who failed to show up for expected talks in the capital, Pyongyang, Lim Dong-won said the communist leader had accepted a letter from South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.
The North's reclusive leader had relayed a verbal message through his officials promising to reply after considering the South's call to reverse moves that triggered the second Korean nuclear crisis since 1994, Lim told a news conference in Seoul shortly after returning from the North.
South Korea had hoped Lim's visit would open the way for a resolution of the three-month-old crisis, but Kim's snub of the envoy appeared to underscore the North's insistence it would talk only to the United States.
"North Korea repeated what it has said to the world: that it has not developed nuclear arms and has no intention to develop them. They said that if the US wants to conduct its own inspections, they are willing to accept that," Lim said.
Lim voiced disappointment at not meeting Kim Jong-il. But he said it was significant that the North's leader pledged to answer Kim Dae-jung's letter urging the North to give up its suspected uranium enrichment program and return to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The nuclear crisis was sparked in October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to reviving a nuclear arms program it had previously agreed to shut down under a 1994 deal.
Pyongyang later expelled UN nuclear inspectors, removed seals from a mothballed reactor and pulled out of the treaty preventing the spread of nuclear arms.
Bush, who last year branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran, used his State of the Union speech this year to accuse North Korea of deceit and blackmail, but said Washington would work with its allies for a peaceful resolution of the crisis.