The two countries have restored, on Monday, their communication channels, which had been cut unilaterally in August by Pyongyang.
The world with AFP
The gesture looks like a new thaw intercorean relations, even if the context remains tense. Pyongyang and Seoul announced, Monday, October 4, the restoration of their cross-border communications channels. Heads of both countries participated in the morning at a telephone conversation, said the South Korean Ministry of Unification in a statement.
“The government believes that has been asked, with the recovery of the South North communication line, a foundation for the recovery of intercoreal relations,” he says. “The Government hopes (…) quickly resume dialogue and start practical discussions for the restoration of interceorean relations,” adds the release.
The South Korean Ministry of Defense confirmed at the same time that military communications between the two countries also resumed.
The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-one, had “expressed his intention to restore the communication channels cut between the North and the South,” announced the official North Korean news agency KCNA a few hours earlier explaining this decision as an attempt to establish “lasting peace” in the Korean peninsula.
Pyongyang multiplies the missile fire
North Korea had unilaterally cut all its official military and political communication channels in June 2020, after denouncing the sending of anti-pyongyang propaganda leaflets by southern-based activists. A year later, on July 27, 2021, the two Korea had announced a surprise thaw of their relations, with the restoration of these cross-border communications.
This decision, unveiled the anniversary day of the end of the hostilities of the Korean War, was the first positive announcement since the series of peaks, in 2018, between the South Korean President Moon Jae-in and the North leader Korean Kim Jong-one, who had not allowed any importance diplomatic breakthrough.
Senior officials of the two countries had had a first telephone interview that day, and the two parties had revealed an exchange of letters since April between Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon, in which they felt that a recovery of A telephone line between them would be a first step of warming relations between the two countries, technically still at war. This relaxation, however, did not last, Pyongyang, irritated by joint military exercises in the United States and South Korea, ceasing to respond to calls two weeks later.
Since then, Pyongyang has announced the shot of a long-range cruise missile then a missile presented as hypersonic and, Friday, an anti-aircraft missile. North Korea lasted Sunday the United Nations Security Council Urgent Meeting to discuss missile shots, Pyongyang accusing member countries to play with a “delay bomb”.
