South Korea offers talks with North to prevent accidental armed clash at border

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea proposed talks with North Korea to clarify the rivals’ border line and ease military tensions, saying Monday that North Korean soldiers’ repeated border intrusions have raised worries about an armed clash.

South Korea’s military says it has been firing warning shots to repel North Korean troops who violated the border’s military demarcation line numerous times since they began works to boost front-line defenses last year. North Korea has denied its soldiers’ alleged border breaches and threatened unspecified responses.

Kim Hong-Cheol, South Korea’s deputy minister for national defense policy, said Monday that the country was offering military talks to prevent an accidental armed clash and lower tensions with North Korea.

He said that the North’s border intrusions were likely caused by the rivals’ different views on the border line, because many of the military demarcation line posts established at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War have been lost.

It’s unclear if North Korea would accept South Korea’s calls for talks, because it’s been shunning all forms of dialogue with South Korea and the U.S. since its leader Kim Jong Un’s high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with U.S. President Donald Trump fell apart in 2019. Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to resume diplomacy with Kim, but the North Korean leader has suggested that he could meet Trump again only if Washington withdraws the denuclearization of North Korea as a precondition for talks.

Some observers say that South Korea’s offer for talks was part of efforts by its liberal government led by President Lee Jae Myung to reopen communication channels with North Korea. In August, Kim’s sister and senior official Kim Yo Jong called the Lee government’s outreach a “sinister intention” to blame Pyongyang for strained relations.

Last year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared that his country was abandoning its long-standing goals of a peaceful unification with South Korea and ordered the rewriting of the North’s constitution to mark the South as a permanent enemy. South Korea’s military said that it has since detected North Korea adding anti-tank barriers and planting more mines at border areas.

The Koreas’ 248-kilometer-long (155-mile-long), four-kilometer-wide (2 1/2-mile-wide) border is one of the world’s most heavily armed frontiers. An estimated 2 million mines are peppered inside and near the border, which is also guarded by barbed-wire fences, tank traps and combat troops on both sides. It’s a legacy of the Korean War, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.