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(5th LD) Koreas fail to agree on resuming border tours, North stokes tension
SEOUL, Feb. 8 (Yonhap) -- Officials from North and South Korea ended talks Monday without an agreement on steps to restart stalled cross-border tours, as Pyongyang's top security organs warned of an attack on Seoul with what they called secret weapons.
The tours to Mount Kumgang in the east and the historic border town of Kaesong in the west raised hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars for Pyongyang until they were suspended in 2008 when a South Korean tourist was shot dead by a North Korean guard at the mountain.
Chief South Korean delegate Kim Nam-sik said in a briefing after returning from the talks in Kaesong that North Korea maintained its refusal to allow a joint on-site investigation into the shooting.
He quoted his North Korean counterparts as saying they "regret the death anyway" while they spurned the South Korean request for access to a restricted zone where Park Wang-ja was shot.
"What matters is that a full account must be given" concerning the death of the 53-year-old South Korean housewife in July 2008, Kim said.
Park was killed shortly before dawn when she wandered into a fenced area at the mountain resort -- which had drawn more than 1.9 million South Korean tourists since it began operating in 1998.
While the meeting continued, two of the highest security organs in the North issued a joint statement warning of "all-out strong measures" against South Korean authorities they said were seeking to topple their communist regime.
"We have world-level ultra-modern striking force and means for protecting security which have neither yet been mentioned," the Ministry of People's Security and the Ministry of State Security said in the statement released through official media.
The statement did not indicate whether the ministries were referring to nuclear arms programs the North has been developing despite international efforts to dismantle them.
South Korea should "immediately disband all the plot-breeding machines and bodies of the authorities going against national reconciliation," it said.
Kim said the North proposed the tours be resumed over the next couple of months while the South had no timetable for restarting them. The sides failed to agree on a date for additional talks, he said.
The South Korean delegates briefly paid a silent tribute to Park Wang-ja before they started talks with their North Korean counterparts, Kim added.
The North did not balk at the gesture, Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung told reporters earlier in the day.
The South also demanded that the North first guarantee the safety of future South Korean tourists and implement measures to back its promise, the officials said. North Korea reiterated its stance that such steps were taken when its leader Kim Jong-il met in August last year with a South Korean businesswoman in charge of the tours.
"We don't see it as the problem being solved," Chun said earlier, adding Monday's meeting -- held in two separate sessions -- amounted to less than two hours.
The one-day meeting came as North Korea gave mixed signals in its approach to the outside world while under U.N. sanctions imposed on it for its nuclear and missile tests.
North Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells along its de facto maritime border with South Korea to raise tension late last month while its top political body, the National Defense Commission, vowed a "sacred battle" against the South over reported contingency plans. Monday's statement said the battle has already begun.
Analysts say the North will continue to seek dialogue with the outside world despite its menacing rhetoric because economic difficulties have prompted it to do so.
The economic plight for its 24 million people has deepened since North Korea conducted its second atomic test in May last year, which led to the toughening of the arms and trade sanctions, they say.
Monday's dialogue comes as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's special envoy is set to visit North Korea this week while a senior Chinese envoy is in Pyongyang to apparently persuade the country to return to six-nation talks on its nuclear arms programs.
Wang Jiarui, head of the Chinese Communist Party's International Department, may also be carrying an invitation for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to come to Beijing, they say. Wang has met Kim in his four previous trips to Pyongyang since 2004.
In an apparent conciliatory gesture toward the United States, North Korea on Saturday released a U.S. missionary it had held since he crossed into the Stalinist country from China in December with the goal of publicizing human rights abuses there.
North Korea says it will not return to the nuclear talks unless the international community lifts sanctions on it. Pyongyang also says Washington must launch separate negotiations on formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War, saying the truce signed at the end of the conflict feeds U.S. hostilities against it and hinders the six-party talks.
The aid-for-denuclearization talks, which began in 2003 and have not been held since December 2008, group the two Koreas, the U.S., Japan, Russia and host China.
(END)
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