‘Conditional’ olive branch: North Korea restores hotline with South Korea

North Korea has restored communication with the South, following a long disconnect in the cross-border hotline. This comes after the country’s leader Kim Jong-un admitted to be willing to restore communication as a conditional olive branch. This, however, also depended on the attitude of South Korean authorities, as per Pyongyang officials. 

South Korea’s unification ministry, on Monday, said officials from both Koreas exchanged their first phone call since August.

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“Long time no talk. We’re very pleased because the communication channels have been restored like this. We hope that South-North relations will develop into a new level,” a Seoul official said during a phone conversation with his North Korean counterpart. 

“With the restoration of the South-North communication line, the government evaluates that a foundation for recovering inter-Korean relations has been provided,” the ministry said in a statement.

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According to experts, this is one of the attempts of North Korea to use South Korea’s desire to improve ties in a bid to pressure it to convince the United States to relax punishing economic sanctions. 

“The South Korean authorities should make positive efforts to put the North-South ties on a right track and settle the important tasks which must be prioritized to open up the bright prospect in the future, bearing deep in mind the meaning of the restoration of communication lines,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said in the lead up to the restoration.

This is not the first time that communication hotlines between the two sides have been cut and restored. A failed summit between the two Koreas in 2020 resulted in PyongyanF blowing up an inter-Korean border office that was established to improve communications. 

In August, the hotline was briefly restored but severed again after South Korea participated in joint military exercises with the US. The two countries never signed a peace agreement after the end of the Korean War in 1953.