By
The Associated Press
SEOUL, South Korea - After agreeing to temporarily reunite 200 more family members, North and South Korea failed Tuesday to narrow differences on the next pressing issue: where to set up a permanent meeting place for hundreds of thousands of other separated relatives.
In a second day of Red Cross talks, South Korean delegates proposed building the permanent meeting station at the neutral border village of Panmunjom, where long-lost relatives can meet regularly and spend time together after half a century of separation.
North Korea insisted on building it in its territory. It recommended as a site the scenic Diamond Mountain on its east coast where Red Cross talks were being held, said pool reports filed by South Korean journalists covering the talks.
Family reunions are the most emotional issue on the divided Korean Peninsula because many of those separated relatives are elderly and may die before they have the chance to meet their loved ones for the first time since the 1950-53 Korean War.
Since the two Koreas held a historic summit in June and agreed to work toward reconciliation, they have staged two reunions for 400 family members.
But the reunions were all held in each other's capitals and required weeks of preparations and security checks.
On Monday, North Korea quickly accepted a South Korean proposal to hold another round of such reunions involving 100 separated family members from each side on Feb. 26-28.
The North also agreed to allow the first-ever correspondence between 300 separated families on each side beginning on March 15.
To make it possible, both sides began locating the whereabouts of separated families.
Last September, the South Korean Red Cross gave the North a list of 506 names sought by 100 relatives in the South. On Tuesday, the North said only 153 of them were confirmed alive.
Similarly, 100 North Koreans looked for 483 relatives in the South. On Tuesday, the South told the North that it could confirm 324 of them alive.
Hundreds of thousands of Koreans are believed to have been separated from their close relatives during the chaos of the Korean War, which ended without a peace treaty. The Korean border remains sealed and there is no mail, telephone or other direct means of communications between ordinary citizens.
