By DPA
Seoul : North and South Korea said Friday that they are planning to resume freight train service next month over their common border for the first time in more than a half-century.
The two countries that once faced one another across the battlefield in the 1950-53 Korean War also agreed to establish a joint fishing zone on their disputed border in the Yellow Sea in the first half of 2008. The area had been the site of naval skirmishes between the two Koreas.
The decisions came at the end of three days of talks in Seoul between North Korean Prime Minister Kim Yong Il and South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck Soo, the first meeting between the two countries’ premiers in 15 years.
South Korea also pledged to help its impoverished totalitarian neighbour modernize its roads and railways.
Kim and Han held talks with the aim of implementing decisions made last month at the countries’ second summit in their history when South Korean President Roh Moo Hyan and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il met in Pyongyang and agreed to reconciliation and cooperation measures.
The freight traffic is to move over a stretch of track that runs to Kaesong, the border town in North Korea where South Korean companies are allowed to operate in a Seoul-funded industrial park and take advantage of inexpensive North Korean labour.
The decision on the freight traffic was taken after the two countries – which are still technically at war after a ceasefire, and not a peace treaty, ended the Korean War – ran trains across their border in May for the first time since that war when they conducted a one-time test of two stretches of reconnected rail lines, one of them being the one that runs to Kaesong.