Mines Cleared To Reconnect Korea
South and North Korea began work on Wednesday to relink railways and roads, a landmark event symbolically piercing a Cold War frontier.
South and North Korean troops marched into the Demilitarized Zone separating their countries on Thursday to clear a path through minefields for rail and road links.
Reporters and dignitaries watched as 100 South Korean troops filed through a gap in the fence marking the southern limit of the border zone. Mine-clearing vehicles followed. South Korean officials said a similar event was taking place in the North.
"Today we are standing at the start of a new era during which the South and the North will move forward hand in hand toward the future," said South Korean Acting Prime Minister Kim Suk-soo in a speech at Dorasan Station on Wednesday. "We are burying a history marked by the scars of war and the pain of division."
The DMZ has divided the Korean peninsula since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, and there has been just one crossing point and meeting place at Panmunjom truce village near the west coast.
A similar ceremony was held on the east coast at Kosung in the South. South Korean officials said North Korea had agreed to conduct ceremonies simultaneously on the northern side of the DMZ, a broad strip of no man's land that bisects the peninsula and is packed with mines and razor wire.
The aim of the rail and road projects - agreed two years ago when South Korean President Kim Dae-jung held talks with Kim Jong-il - is to promote cross-border exchanges and trade.
"Tensions on the peninsula will be relieved a great deal," Kim Dae-jung told his cabinet on Tuesday.
"Part of the barbed wire that has been draped in the middle of the peninsula for more than half a century will now be opened," he said of the railway, a core project of his Nobel Prize-wining quest for North-South reconciliation.
Some railway and road routes could be opened by December -- a crucial first leg of what Seoul hopes will become an "Iron Silk Road" linking the 70 million people on the Korean peninsula with Europe across the railways of China and Russia.
The people of the mountainous region on the coast of the Sea of Japan are more familiar with stealth breaches of the DMZ by North Korean commandos, raids that at the peak of hostilities in the late 1960s killed hundreds of South Koreans.
As recently as 1996, a submarine full of North Korean agents landed on a nearby coast, sparking weeks of firefights that killed 24 of the 25 intruders and nine South Koreans.
Barbed wire along Kosung's pristine beaches and signs warning locals to report suspicious people are reminders that North and South Korea are still technically at war.
Lee Jung-hoon, a professor of international relations at Yonsei Unversity in Seoul, said the railway was so far mostly "symbolic," but would lead to further North-South interaction.
"In that sense, it's important, But I don't think we should be going ahead to think that this is somehow going to be a major breakthrough in inter-Korean relations. That we'll have to see."