Seoul, September 01: North Korea Tuesday lifted tough restrictions on cross-border traffic with South Korea, the government here said, its latest apparent goodwill gesture after months of hostility.
As of Tuesday the North was allowing 12 northbound crossings and 11 return trips a day, the unification ministry said, compared to just three daily crossings each way under curbs imposed last December.
Pyongyang, protesting at the tougher policy of Seoul’s conservative government, last December also expelled hundreds of South Korean staff from a joint industrial estate at Kaesong just north of the frontier.
They have now been allowed to return.
Later Tuesday the two sides were expected to take the first steps towards restarting a reunion programme that has been suspended since October 2007.
They were to exchange the names of 200 people seeking relatives in the North or the South from whom they have been separated since the 1950-53 war.
After the lists are narrowed down, 100 people from each side of the heavily fortified border will hold reunions with long-lost loved ones from September 26-October 1.
The North grew increasingly hostile after the South’s new government in February 2008 linked major aid to progress in denuclearisation.
Pyongyang’s rocket launch and missile test this spring heightened regional tensions and brought tougher United Nations sanctions.
In its first conciliatory move, the North in early August pardoned and freed two US reporters after a visit by former US president Bill Clinton.
In talks with a visiting Hyundai executive, whose group runs cross-border businesses, leader Kim Jong-Il expressed a willingness to restart tourist trips, ease the border controls and resume the family reunions.
The North has also freed five detained South Koreans.
And Kim sent a team to Seoul to mourn ex-president Kim Dae-Jung and hold talks with President Lee Myung-Bak.
–Agencies