Communist North Korea's defense minister arrives in the rival South on Sunday to prepare for the most important talks between the two since their leaders' historic summit in June.
South Korea's Defense Minister Cho Sung-Tae will meet North Korea's Armed Forces Minister Vice Marshall Kim Il-Chol on the island of Cheju on Monday with mounting international calls for the North to make a peace gesture.
But it will be the first time defense ministers from the two sides have met since the 1950-53 Korean War. And the two are expected to only tackle the easier parts of moves toward easing military tensions on the heavily fortified Korean frontier.
"It is already significant that top military officials of the two Koreas sit down together for talks, putting behind decades of hostility," Lee Chung-Hee, a professor of political science at Hankuk University for Foreign Studies said.
"They will start with soft issues before moving on to heavier subjects including arms reduction in the future," he said, predicting that the inter-Korean military talks would continue, even at a snail's pace.
The two days of talks have an agreed agenda of military cooperation to clear landmines along the line of a railway track and a four-lane road through the border.
The two Koreas have agreed to reconnect the severed railway between Seoul and the North's northern city of Shinuiju near the border with China and to build a road between Seoul and the North's southern city of Kaesong.
But South Korea has said it would also repeat its proposal for measures to build military confidence at the talks.
The communist North Korea and the capitalist South are still technically at war as they have yet to sign a peace treaty to replace an armistice agreement signed at the end of the Korean War of 1950-53.
South Korea says it wants to raise issues of setting up a military hotline and other confidence-building measures, including the notification of military drills and sending observers to each other's military training exercises.
It will also push for routine defense ministers' talks.
But the North is expected to insist that the talks are limited to the railway and road construction.
"As far as the military talks are concerned, North Korea has little reason to go further at this moment," said Bae Chin-Soo of the state-funded Korea Institute for Military Studies.
Military tension has helped the Stalinist state to maintain its grip on the highly regimented society, he said.
William Cohen, defense secretary of the United States which has 37,000 troops reinforcing the South Korean army, said the inter-Korean defense ministers' talks should handle ways on how to build inter-Korean military trust.
The talks also have to discuss measures to bolster trust between North Korea and the United States, the secretary said last week.
He urged North Korea to withdraw its forces from the demilitarized zone and give up its chemical and biological arsenal.
Analysts cautioned, however, that the South should tread carefully to avoid alarming the North which is wary of exposing its military weak points as it has relied on bluffing for much of its defense.
"Big issues such as signing a peace treaty might be raised when (the North's leader) Kim Jong-Il visits here," Lee of Hankuk University for Foreign Studies said.
Kim Jong-Il is likely to visit here in March or April, South Korea's President Kim Dae-Jung said -- SEOUL(AFP)
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