South Korean President Park Geun-Hye called Thursday for the first family reunions with North Korea in three years, a day after the two nations agreed to reopen a joint industrial zone.
In a speech marking the anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, Park urged Pyongyang to "open its heart" and agree to a meeting next month for families left divided for decades by the Korean War.
The South Korean leader also welcomed yesterday's agreement on the Kaesong industrial park, which she said could start "inter-Korea relations anew" after months of sky-high tensions.
"I hope that the North will open its heart so that the divided families can be reunited around the Chuseok holiday," Park said, referring to a traditional Korean harvest festival that this year falls on September 19.
Millions of Koreans were left separated by the 1950-53 war. The last round of reunions to allow ageing relatives to meet under Red Cross auspices took place in 2010, when as in previous rounds there were scenes of high emotion.
About 72,000 South Koreans -- nearly half of them aged over 80 -- are still alive and waiting for a chance to join the highly competitive family reunion events, which select only up to a few hundred participants each time.
South Koreans are allowed only in very rare circumstances to cross the heavily militarised border.
"I have so much hope this time," Song Il-Whan, a 77-year-old who was separated from his two siblings when he was 14, told Yonhap news agency.
"Look how old I am now... I really wish I could meet them this time," said Song, adding he had been applying for the family reunion programme for the past 15 years with no success.
North Korea last month proposed to hold talks on resuming the family reunion programme in conjunction with discussions about the Kaesong industrial complex. But it retracted the offer after Seoul insisted that the two issues should be dealt with separately.
The Seoul-invested industrial zone, built just north of the border in 2004 as a rare symbol of cooperation, ground to a halt in April after remaining immune to cross-border political swings for years.
Pyongyang, angered at a joint South-US army drill coming after it conducted a nuclear test in February, withdrew all its 53,000 workers from Kaesong. Seoul soon pulled out all its company managers.
Six previous rounds of talks since April had foundered on the South's insistence that the North take full responsibility for the crisis and provide a binding guarantee that it would not close the complex again. Pyongyang had refused to do so.
