South's Red Cross to contact North over family reunions: official

SEOUL, Aug. 19 (Yonhap) -- The South Korean Red Cross plans to contact its Northern counterpart within days to follow up on a pledge by Pyongyang to arrange family reunions in October, according to a senior government official said Wednesday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and South's Hyundai Group Chairwoman Hyun
Jeong-eun on Sunday agreed to a series of steps which, if officially endorsed by
Seoul, will resuscitate stalled tourism projects and restart the reunion of
families separated by the 1950-1953 Korean War. Hyundai Group is the main South
Korean counterpart in cross-border business ventures.
Kim suggested arranging the reunion event on Chuseok, a traditional harvest
holiday celebrated in both North and South Korea that falls on Oct. 3 this year.
The Korea National Red Cross in Seoul plans to contact its North Korean
counterpart regarding the issue on Thursday or Friday at the latest, the official
said.
"I believe the meeting will take place in the near future," he said, adding that
there will be no preconditions regarding the reunions as it is a humanitarian
issue.
The family reunions, set up after the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, have
been suspended after brief mail exchanges in February last year.
The North has since cut off government-level talks to protest South Korean
President Lee Myung-bak's hard-line stance against Pyongyang, linking South
Korea's free flow of aid to the communist state to progress in its
denuclearization efforts.
The Koreas have held 16 rounds of face-to-face family reunions since the first
summit between their leaders in June 2000.
Some 16,000 Koreans have been able to meet with family and kin separated since
the Korean War, while close to 3,750 others, mostly too old and weak to travel,
have been reunited through real-time video links under a program launched in
August 2005.
More than 90,000 South Koreans are on a waiting list for their turn at the reunions.