North, South Korea hold rare talks in truce village

North and South Korean officials sat down Thursday (November 26) for rare talks aimed at setting up a sustainable high-level dialogue that has constantly eluded the two rivals.

The Demilitarized Zone in Korea, the buffer zone between North and South Korea

The meeting at the border truce village of Panmunjom began shortly before 1:00pm and marked the first inter-governmental interaction since August 2015 when the two sides met to defuse a crisis that had pushed them to the brink of an armed conflict.

The North Korea Peace Museum is the only remaining building in the truce village of Panmunjom

That meeting ended with a joint agreement that included a commitment to resume high-level talks, although no precise timeline was given.

The Donghae-bukbu line on Korea's east coast. The road and rail link was built for South Koreans visiting the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region in the North

While any dialogue between the two Koreas is generally welcomed as a step in the right direction, precedent offers little hope of a successful outcome. A similar effort back in June 2013 saw both sides agree to hold what would have been the first high-level dialogue for six years -- only for Pyongyang to cancel a day before the scheduled meeting.

Lake Samilpo in Mount Kumgang Tourist Region, North Korea

Thursday's talks in Panmunjom will try to avoid a repetition of that failure by thrashing out an agenda, a venue and such protocol issues as who should attend the full-fledged dialogue.

Pyohunsa Temple in Mount Kumgang - North Korea

Likely topics for the eventual agenda include South Korea's desire for regular reunions for families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War that cemented the division of the Korean peninsula. North Korea will want to discuss the resumption of South Korean tour groups to its scenic Mount Kumgang resort. The tours, a source of badly needed hard currency for the cash-strapped North, were suspended by the South in 2008 after a female tourist was shot dead by a North Korean guard.

(All images - credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)