A first batch of North Korean athletes arrived in South Korea Thursday for this month’s Asian Games after taking a rare flight across the sensitive maritime border.
Security was tight as an Air Koryo plane carrying 94 athletes and officials from Pyongyang landed in the South’s main international airport in the western port city of Incheon, close to Seoul.
Some 20 South Koreans with a placard reading “Welcome North Korean athletes!” waved “one Korea” flags showing the unified Korean peninsula in the waiting hall of the airport.
They chanted “We are from one nation!” as the North Koreans, wearing white jackets and badges bearing the image of late leaders Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, walked into buses outside the airport.
The North Koreans, escorted by South Korean police, left for the Asiad athletes’ village, without commenting.
Some 150 North Korean athletes and almost an equal number of coaches and officials will attend the Asiad, arriving on six special flights across the Yellow Sea maritime border, a flashpoint area and scene of bloody clashes in the past.
The delegation will be headed by Sports Minister Kim Yong-Hun, who will be the highest-ranking North Korean official to step on South Korean soil for five years.
The North’s participation in the Asiad was only confirmed after months of heated negotiations that coincided with a spike in cross-border military tensions over a series of missile and rocket launches by the nuclear-armed communist country.
Arguments over the size of the North Korean flag and Seoul’s refusal to foot the entire bill for the North’s delegation saw Pyongyang threaten a boycott over the South’s “arrogance”.
In the end, the North agreed to send its athletes but withdrew the proposed participation of female cheerleaders, who had taken part in three previous international sporting events in the South and proved a major ticket draw each time.
Direct contact of any sort between the two Koreas has been extremely limited since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.