North Korea Threatens South

North Korea threatened military retaliation against South Korea on Sunday, one day after bilateral meetings to reunite separated families in the two Koreas ended without resolution.

"There is a limit to our patience and self-restraint," said North Korea's Central News Agency. "Unlimited is our merciless retaliation against provacateurs and aggressors."

North Korea insisted Saturday that South Korea apologize for a naval skirmish in the Yellow Sea before it will carry out any agreements coming from their highest level negotiations in 14 months.

The two sides met Saturday for nearly two hours in a luxury hotel in Beijing, four days after a first session of talks was derailed over the issue of the clash.

The negotiations were supposed to deal with reuniting families separated in the two Koreas' bitter 54-year rivalry and providing aid for the famine-threatened North.

The North Korean delegation, however, demanded that the South assume responsibility for what it called an "armed provocation," North Korean state media reported.

Pyongyang said that even if an agreement was reached on family reunification, the "strained situation" would make it difficult to implement, the state media said.

Despite the North's demands, the two sides agreed to meet again Thursday. South Korean officials were not immediately available to comment on the North Korean report.

The first session of talks Tuesday broke up when North Korea refused to hold any negotiations until the South apologized over the June 15 exchange of gunfire between the two navies, in which a northern ship was sunk.

But the North later agreed to continue the negotiations without preconditions.

Saturday's talks got off to a friendly start, boosted by North Korea's release Friday of a South Korean tourist detained for six days. She was accused of urging a tour guide to defect to the South.

"It was regrettable about the arrest of the tourist. I welcome her safe return to South Korea," Vice Unification Minister Yang Young-shik told the North Korean negotiators at the start of Saturday's session. "I hope that such incidents will not be repeated."

During the session, South Korea presented a plan for family reunions and North Korea said it would consider it, Yang told reporters afterwards.

The plan offered that each side exchange delegations of 50 to 100 separated family members to each other's capital on a regular basis beginning this coming fall, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.

North Korea and South Korea have strong reasons to overcome their antagonism and reach an accommodation in Beijing.

Communist Pyongyang desperately needs the money the capitalist South can provide to rebuild an economy ruined by four years of famine. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung needs a breakthrough to parry domestic critics of his more open policy toward the North, especially after the navl clash and the tourist's arrest.

North Korea scuttled similar high-level talks in April 1998 by refusing to discuss the family reunification issue. The South coaxed it back to the table by promising to deliver 200,000 tons of fertilizer in return for putting reunions on the agenda.

An estimated 10 million Koreans were separated from their families from the partition of the peninsula in 1945 and then by the Korean War, fought to a stalemate from 1950-53.