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SEOUL : The two Koreas resumed top-level military talks in chilly mood Wednesday as North Korean delegates criticised their southern counterparts for arriving late for a morning session.
The two sides, holding their first military meeting for a year at general-level, have already been at odds over what they should talk about.
The North wants to discuss a disputed sea border, the scene of bloody naval clashes in recent years. It also demands that the South scrap annual military exercises with ally the United States.
In an apparent policy shift the South said Wednesday it is prepared to discuss border issues, according to media pool reports from the venue in the frontier village of Panmunjom.
But it still wants the three-day meeting to focus on plans to reopen cross-border railways after half a century.
The South's delegation appeared 30 minutes late for a working-level session of talks on Wednesday morning, Yonhap news agency reported.
"I thought that today's talks could fare well before I came here, but your being late spoiled my mood," the North's Colonel Park Lim-Soo said.
"I am so worried over how we can discuss big issues with people who don't even keep time," he added, stressing the importance of time in military actions. "I don't think today's talks will go smoothly."
In response, South Korean Colonel Moon Sung-Mook said his team needed more time to prepare for the talks.
Most sessions are closed to the media.
But the North's Korean Central Broadcasting Station said its delegates on Tuesday urged the South to halt joint military drills with the United States and other "hostile acts" such as defining the North as its enemy.
South Korea and the United States, which stations 29,500 troops in the country, hold major annual military exercises which are routinely denounced by the North.
The North also wants to redraw the Northern Limit Line, a border in the Yellow Sea drawn up by United Nations forces at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Pyongyang refuses to recognise it and there have been bloody naval clashes in recent years. Six South Koreans were killed in June 2002. In June 1999 a similar skirmish killed dozens of North Korean sailors.
The North's chief delegate Lieutenant General Kim Yong-Chol proposes talks on establishing a joint fishing area in the Yellow Sea as well as agreement on ways to prevent clashes.
Seoul has said this issue should be handled at talks between defence ministers. But Moon told reporters the South is willing this week to discuss ways to prevent clashes and a possible joint fishing zone.
The two sides agreed last month to conduct test runs of two cross-border railways on May 17, but the South wants security guarantees from the North's powerful military for their safe operation.
A set of parallel roads across the heavily fortified frontier has been in use since 2005 for South Koreans travelling to the North.
The reopening of the rail lines across the border, agreed at a historic inter-Korean summit in 2000, is seen as highly symbolic for reconciliation on the peninsula.
- AFP /ls
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