In a goodwill gesture on the eve of landmark four-nation talks, North Korea yesterday handed over the remains of four US soldiers killed during the 1950-1953 Korean War, witnesses said. The move was followed by a rare series of conciliatory steps on the peninsula, the last flashpoint of the Cold War.
North and South Korea linked up their public telephone lines for the first time since the country was divided at the end of the second World War, the southern Red Cross announced food supplies to the famine-threatened North and Pyongyang allowed a group of Western journalists to enter the reclusive state.
The goodwill gestures came as the two Koreas, the United States and China prepared for a meeting today in New York to set a date, venue and agenda for peace talks.
The four-party talks are aimed at forging a permanent peace mechanism on the peninsula to replace the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War, in which the United States backed the capitalist South and China the communist North.
At Panmunjom, the only crossing point in the demilitarised zone bisecting the peninsula, northern soldiers delivered metal coffins containing the remains of four US servicemen to representatives of the US-led UN command.
The remains were found by US experts who went to the North in July to search for those missing in action from the war.
Drenched by rain, US honour guards draped the coffins with United Nations flags after they were delivered to the south. "These soldiers are members of the Eighth Cavalry First Battalion, who died during fierce fighting in October of 1950," Mr Alan Liotta, deputy director of the US Defence Department, said at Panmunjom.
The remains were recovered in the North's Unsan County, where several hundred Americans are known to have been lost in battles between US and Chinese troops during the war.
The remains will be sent to the United States for identification, Mr Liotta said, adding that two other similar search operations were planned for this year.
Seoul officials said the hand-over reflected Pyongyang's desire to improve relations with Washington in order to encourage foreign investment in the impoverished North.
US and South Korean officials said the two countries would propose steps to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula once the four-party talks get under way.
Washington has pledged $52 million and Seoul $16 million in response to 1997 UN appeals to stave off famine reported to be looming in the North. The South Korean Red Cross, which has donated a further $20 million worth of aid, said it would deliver 12,000 tonnes of food, half of it corn, to the North in the next two weeks.
Meanwhile, Pyongyang agreed to link eight telephone lines to the South to allow southern workers preparing to build nuclear power plants in the North to communicate with their families and their headquarters in the South, Seoul officials said.
The severe drought in North Korea has caused the loss of 70 per cent of the maize crop, the United Nations said yesterday.
"A United Nations Interagency group warned today that the DPRK [North Korea] is suffering from a severe drought that has caused the loss of 70 per cent of the maize crop," UN spokesperson, Mr Fred Eckhard, said in New York. "It will dramatically reduce the availability of cereals for the period November 1997 to October 1998."
Mr Eckhard said a crop and food supply assessment mission will be going to North Korea next week to determine the damage.
Aid officials last week said millions of North Korean children were suffering from malnutrition and that the crisis was reaching the scale of the Somali and Ethiopian famines of the 1980s.