Nuke threat makes little difference for them

South Korean delegates cross the border into the North's village of Kaesong yesterday. More than 1000 South Koreans arrived in Pyongyang to attend the opening ceremony of a jointly- built gymnasium. Photo: AFP

No other event, coming just days after North Korea said it was reprocessing spent fuel rods to make nuclear bombs, could better symbolise South Korea's commitment to boosting ties with its communist neighbour.

Seoul has often shuddered at Pyongyang's belligerent rhetoric and nuclear brinkmanship but has never looked back on its three-year crusade to coax Pyongyang out of its international isolation.

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It was the biggest single group of South Koreans to travel to North Korea and was also historic because they used a new land route across the heavily fortified border, said Kim Yoon-Kyu, president of Hyundai Asan, a South Korean firm that runs loss-making tourism ventures to North Korea.

"It's an epoch-making incident in our 50-year-long national division that more than 1,000 South Korean people crossed the military demarcation line (MDL) by land to reach Pyongyang," he was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency.

The MDL bisects the demilitarised zone that has divided the two-Koreas since the 1950-53 Korean war.

Lee Su-hyok, vice chairman of North Korea's Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, said Pyongyang hoped the symbolic event would "provide momentum for the persistent development of inter-Korean relations."

The nuclear crisis that erupted one year ago has resulted in delays in inter-Korean cooperation projects agreed at a landmark inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in 2000.

But South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun and his top aides have never questioned the wisdom of continuing the engagement policy he inherited from his predecessor, Nobel laureate Kim Dae-Jung, who stepped down in February.

At the same time ties between Seoul and Washington have been strained over how to handle the North Korean nuclear crisis and rising anti-American sentiment.

North Korea's longstanding goal has been to drive a wedge between South Korea and United States, and the eventuial withdrawal of US troops from South Korea.

"National cooperation is the way of checking and frustrating the US imperialists' moves for aggression and war and achieve peace of the country and independent national reunification," North Korea's ruling Worker's Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary Monday.

Seoul has forged ahead with exchanges regardless, and cabinet level talks are scheduled for next week, as well as more working level negotiations on economic exchange projects.

The 56 million dollar gymnasium was constructed by Hyundai using North Korean labour and named after the South Korean business group's late founder Chung Ju-Yung, a pioneer of inter-Korean economic changes.

The South Koreans travelled in a caravan of 28 buses over the new land route across the western end of the inter-Korean border. They were accompanied by 100 heads of cattle, trucked to Pyongyang as a gift from Hyundai to mark the opening ceremony.