"North Korea made concessions today and signed a tentative accord on cross-border passages," a South Korean defense ministry spokesman told AFP after four hours of inter-Korean military talks.
Transport routes between the two Koreas have been cut off for half a century and plans to open road and rail links up the east and west sides of the peninsula have been held up by North Korea's refusal to recognise the authority of the United Nations Command (UNC).
The North had previously demanded that the cross-border transportation corridors should be under the control of South and North Korea alone, not the UNC commanded by US generals.
But the UNC, under the armistice agreement signed with North Korea at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, has supervised the tense mine-strewn buffer zone between the two Korea's known as the demilitarized zone (DMZ).
"We have insisted that the armistice agreement be observed in those inter-Korean joint management areas, parts of the demilitarized zone," the South Korean ministry official said following talks at the DMZ truce village of Panmunjom. "North Korea has accepted it." The North's surprise decision coincided with a trip to Pyongyang by South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung's special envoy, Lim Dong-Won, to ease tensions over the communist state's nuclear ambitions.
In the face of US-led pressure to dismantle its suspected nuclear weapons program, Pyongyang has stressed the cooperation between South and North Korea.
Troops on both sides completed demining the two sets of cross-border transportation corridors last month.
The North's rejection of the UNC jurisdiction over the transportation corridors delayed further progress.
A defense ministry official told AFP that the new accord applied specifically to one road linking North and South Korea through the east coast transportation corridor.
"It applies only to a temporary cross-border road in the DMZ.
But it is significant because North Korea made a concession today to recognize the UNC's supervisory role in it for the first time since talks began last year," the official said.
He said that a separate full accord would be needed if the two sides were to officially open railway and road links in DMZ transportation corridors.
The two Koreas have agreed to reconnect two sets of the railway and road links -- the Gyeongui line running to China up the west side of the peninsula and the Donghae line to Russia on the eastern side.
Under an inter-Korean accord in September, the Gyeongui railway should have been completed by the end of last year.
During talks held in Pyongyang last week, both sides failed to reschedule the dates for completing their cross-border railway and road links against the backdrop of the US-North Korean nuclear stand-off - Sapa-AFP.
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