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SEOUL : Generals from North Korea and the US-led United Nations Command in South Korea held talks Monday for the first time in over six years, amid rising border tensions and Pyongyang's plans for a rocket launch.
The meeting in the border village of Panmunjom came two days after the North warned US troops to stop "provocations" in the border buffer zone or face retaliation.
The UN Command said before the meeting the North had requested the talks "to discuss tension reduction" and called this a positive move.
The meeting lasted just 32 minutes, a UN Command spokesman said later, without giving any immediate information on the outcome.
Fears of a border clash have grown in recent months after the North scrapped all peace accords with the South and warned of war. It is angry at conservative leader Lee Myung-Bak, who scrapped his predecessors' policy of offering virtually unconditional aid to Pyongyang.
The North is preparing to fire a rocket for what it calls a satellite launch, although Seoul and Washington say its purpose is to test a missile which could theoretically reach Alaska.
Stephen Bosworth, the new US envoy on North Korea, will this week visit Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul to discuss ways to dissuade the North from a missile launch and persuade it to restart stalled nuclear disarmament talks.
The South Korean and Japanese foreign ministers, Yu Myung-Hwan and Hirofumi Nakasone, held talks by telephone Monday. They agreed that a rocket launch for any reason would violate a UN resolution passed after the last missile test in 2006, Seoul's foreign ministry said.
Since the 1950-53 Korean war in which a US-led UN force fought for South Korea, the UN Command has remained officially in place to help defend the South.
The US stations 28,500 troops in the country to back up the South's 680,000-strong military against the North's 1.1 million-member armed forces.
A four-kilometre-wide (2.5 mile) buffer strip known as the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) divides the peninsula.
In a statement sent to the South's military Saturday, the North's army accused US forces of "behaving arrogantly" inside the zone and threatened an unspecified "resolute counteraction."
The North said US military personnel had approached close to the Military Demarcation Line, which marks the actual border, on 66 occasions this year.
South Korea's defence ministry said US soldiers were engaged in "legitimate" monitoring in the South's side of the zone.
The South's Unification Minister Hyun In-Taek again offered the North dialogue in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of his ministry, which handles cross-border relations.
But Pyongyang maintained its tough tone, blasting "traitor Lee Myung-Bak" for refusing to honour summit pacts between the North and his predecessors.
If Lee really wants dialogue, "he first should kneel down to the Korean people and apologise for the manoeuvres of confrontation, war and division he has carried out so far", said the official Radio Pyongyang, monitored by Seoul's Yonhap news agency.
Otherwise Lee would face "the blow of a more horrendous iron hammer and shameful destruction".
The UN Command said generals from North and South Korea and the US took part in Monday's closed-door talks.
South Korean and North Korean military officials have held talks several times in recent years at Panmunjom inside the DMZ. The last inter-Korean military meeting in October ended fruitlessly.
But the UN Command said Monday's talks were the first at the general level between its side and the North since 2002.
- AFP/vm
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