S. Korea says North ready to accept flood aid

AsiaOne News, AFP, Monday, Sep 10, 2012

SEOUL - North Korea has said it is ready to accept flood relief from South Korea for the first time in two years, but wants more details of the aid on offer, a government official in Seoul said Monday.

A spokesman for the South's Unification Ministry said the North had responded to Seoul's aid proposal in a message sent through the Red Cross at the Panmunjom truce village on their heavily-militarised border.

"It said it was ready to accept aid, but asked us to present a detailed plan about items our side plans to send," the spokesman said, adding that Pyongyang wanted the information exchanged in document form.

"However, our side hopes there will be face-to-face contacts. We will send a reply after discussions our side," he said.

South Korea had made its proposal last week - the first such aid offer since ties with Pyongyang sank into a deep freeze following the death of the North's leader Kim Jong-Il last December.

Tensions were further fuelled by a joint US-South Korea military exercise last month that the North denounced as a provocative rehearsal for war.

The impoverished North is grappling with the after-effects of floods in June and July that killed 569 people and inundated 65,280 hectares (161,310 acres) of crop-bearing land, according to official figures from Pyongyang.

The South's government stopped its own annual major food and fertiliser shipments to the North after President Lee Myung-Bak's conservative administration took office in early 2008.

But it has been allowing humanitarian aid by civic groups, although modest in scale.

Official cross-border aid usually goes through the Red Cross.

North Korea suffers chronic food shortages, with the situation exacerbated by floods, droughts and mismanagement. Hundreds of thousands died during a famine in the mid to late-1990s.

The North's request for details of the South's new aid proposal is significant.

Last year, Pyongyang spurned an offer of emergency supplies and demanded rice and cement instead. South Korea refused, citing suspicions that it would be diverted to the military.