Koreas Ready To Talk?

The first talks between North and South Korea in 14 months will go on despite a naval clash between the two rivals this week that sank one northern gunboat, South Korean officials said Saturday.

The North Korean government on Saturday assured southern officials in a message that it would send a delegation to Monday's meeting in Beijing, the South's Ministry of Unification said. The message was sent through South Korea's Red Cross office in Panmunjom, inside the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, the ministry said.

The talks originally were expected to focus on food aid for the hunger-stricken North and the reunion of millions of separated family members in the divided Korean peninsula. But the meeting could take another direction if the North raises the issue of the naval clash in a contested area in the Yellow Sea.

The ships exchanged fire Tuesday when South Korean boats tried to ram and nudge North Korean ships out of a buffer zone that has served as a practical maritime border between the two sides since the end of the three-year Korean War in 1953. The area is a rich crab fishing ground.

South Korea said northern vessels opened fire first and southern warships returned fire, sinking one northern vessel and heavily damaging several others. A U.S. official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said 30 northern sailors may have been killed.

Since then, tensions have greatly subsided. Saturday, North Korean fishing boats and warships kept to their side of the border and showed no southward movement, the South Korean Defense Ministry said.

The North repeated an earlier claim that South Korean navy vessels opened fire first in Tuesday's clash.

In a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency Saturday, an unidentified army spokesman claimed the South was covering up a defeat in the battle. He said more than 10 South Korean warships were heavily damaged and many of the South's soldiers were killed in the clash.

South Korea, which has said two of its ships were lightly damaged and nine sailors were slightly hurt, denied the claim.

The Korean peninsula was divided into communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea in 1945. They are technically still at war because their 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

An estimated 10 million people are believed to have been separated from their families as a result of mass migrations, mostly from North to South Korea, during the war.